Des pays et des gares...

Traditional Hut Thatching a Roof with Grass On Monday, we attended a large Heritage Day celebration event at the Mgobodi Tribal Center in Mgobodi. We caught a taxi to the event with a group of students from Madadene who were performing at the festival. We arrived very early (about 9AM) at the tribal center and weren't exactly clear about what was happening or going to happen, so we wandered around and stopped to watch a group of married women practicing a dance (I'll post a movie this weekend when we have free wifi at the Bed and Breakfast). I (Elizabeth) admired the attire of the women and said so to a woman passing by. Next thing I knew, I was being driven to someone's house where the chief's wife and another woman dressed me in the same clothing they were wearing. They tried to dress Perry up in the men's attire, but it required him to go shirtless -- not a good idea with his pale skin and the African sun. So they draped a traditional cloth ove

Greetings readers,   Here are some photos we've taken around site. When we arrived, we experienced about a week of rain (of biblical proportions). The rains swelled the stream down the street from us…now the water's gone and we've been hiking down and exploring the dry stream bed. One of our neighbors has a large bougainvillea that was in full bloom when we arrived…. One morning I found this lizard in one of our bathing buckets. I love lizards, and they are frequently spotted here! One of the family's chickens hatched chicks last week. We were able to pick them up -- baby chicks are so soft and fluffy! Njabulo took lots of photos, here's a good one: Lastly, here's a teaser photo to introduce an upcoming blog post. Last Monday we attended the Heritage Day Celebrations at the Mgobodi Tribal Center. We were treated like royalty and we had a blast! The chief's wife decked me out in traditional married woman&

Anyone wishing to write to us or send us packages can now use this address: Perry and Elizabeth Atterberry c/o NJ Mahlangu Secondary School PO Box 5402 Kwalugedlani 1341 South Africa This is our school's address and should work much better than the Peace Corps address (I believe all mail sent there is processed with the "Federal Deluxe Treatment" -- ie opened, checked for anthrax, heat treated, etc.) which can take months to get to us. 

They told us it was lucky we brought rain and, oh boy, did we ever bring rain! As Pooh sang: "The rain, rain, rain came down, down, down…in rushing, rising riv'lets!" It rained for three days straight. Torrentially, with spectacular lightning and deep rolling thunder. I don't think our host family was expecting rain -- in fact, on day three we were told it was "unprecedented" -- and they hadn't yet fixed our leaking rondovel roof. Needless to say, we spent the first few days soaked. We couldn't manage to find four or five square feet of dry space in our bedroom rondovel and we slept quite wet! Finally, on the third day, our hosts put a giant tarp over the roof. The sun came out. We feel OK now, but we were quite depressed and demoralized the first couple of days, being damp and cold all the time stinks! Now that we're dry, we feel much better. In fact, we really like our little rondovels. One rondovel acts as our bedroom, and has a bathing room

Since we haven't had internet for a couple months, we're kind of behind with our blog posts. To avoid an overwhelming amount of writing, I (Elizabeth) am skipping to the end of our training and starting from there. Suffice it to say, training was long and intense -- comprised of 10 hour days, 6 days a week -- and we were ready to have it over and get to our sites! Before we were set to graduate, we had a host family braai at our training college -- here's a shot of me stirring a giant pot of pap/umbraata/lipalishi. Shortly after that event, as many of you know, Perry got sick -- just a few days before we were supposed to swear in. He spent a couple of days in the hospital recuperating and then we both spent a few more days at Khayalethu backpacker's (a guest house that Peace Corps uses a lot) waiting for his medical hold to be lifted. It was very nice, though sleeping in bunk beds took some getting used to. They served a delicious hot breakfast everyday

The Matshika family patiently taught us the ins and outs of living in South Africa - from taking bucket baths to greeting people properly. We also did a little exploring of our new hometown, Waterval, but it was such a vast township we couldn't begin to scratch the surface.  Perry, Gogo, Sofie, Nolwazi, Elizabeth Tholi, Samkelo Another milestone in our training was getting assigned our languages. Most of the volunteers got Zulu, by far the most widely spoken of the Nguni languages. Others got Ndebele, and six of us, Libby and I included, were assigned siSwati.   Warning! Nerd content ahead. Feel free to skip this section. siSwati is a dialect of Zulu, which is a member of the Nguni family of Bantu languages. Like Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian and Turkish in Europe, siSwati is an agglutinating language, where affixes are attached to a root morpheme. This means whole sentences can be expressed in a single word. For instance, Ngiyahamba ("I am going") is ma

Well, it has been a while since we've had internet access and much has happened. The beginning: From staging, we all boarded a plane for a 16 hour flight from Atlanta to Johannesburg. Everyone got some sleep except me (Perry). On the bright side, I did manage to catch up on my movie watching.  Welcoming Ceremony We arrived and were whisked off via bus to Ndebele College in Siyabuswa, about an hour and a half from Pretoria. When we got there we were all pretty tired and smelly, but the staff greeted us with traditional welcoming songs, which buoyed our spirits a great deal. We were assigned dorm rooms and fell asleep as soon as our heads touched the pillows. The following week was filled with introductory Peace Corps sessions, language lessons (We learned to say "Hello, how are you?" in 5 of the 11 official languages of South Africa) and finally were assigned our host families. We were somewhat apprehensive at this point ( I was excited :) -- Elizabeth ), going