GLOW was great. Generous donations from my family and friends, hours of planning, stress, problem solving, and more than a few tears contributed to the success. I don’t think the four of us (Me, Melissa, Ellen and Marie) realized how big of an undertaking it was going to be. We encountered some problems but luckily they all happened during the planning stage and not at the actual camp. The biggest problem occurred a month before our set date when I randomly decided to call the venue we’d booked back in November to ask a few questions about kitchen supplies we needed to bring. The white Afrikaner woman who owned the place instantly got all flustered and told me that “a big group wanted to book up the entire place for a month and I have to cancel your reservation because I have bills to pay and my business is dying and don’t you understand and I’m sorry and blah blah blah.” My head started to spin somewhere in there as I realized what she was trying to tell me. It was a good thing I called her when I did, she wasn’t even polite enough to call and tell me first. So unprofessional, so Africa, so annoying. This was one of the moments where I realized yet again for the hundred millionth time that the same rules don’t apply here as in the States, that people can do whatever they want and I just have to deal. We gave ourselves a couple days to find a new place that could accommodate seventy people on short notice and tried not to freak out too much. A week and lots of phone calls and emails and estimates later, we found a place near Vryburg available the weekend before the date we had planned. They were in our price range which had quickly become the only determining factor so we booked it and went into hyper planning mode.

We met up in town for a weekend to knock out as much as we could. One morning was spent negotiating the supermarket at month’s end, aka the worse time to shop. I wish I had a video of the experience- it was packed to the max because the government pension money had just been distributed. We were jumping over aisle displays and broken bags of flour, squeezing between women with asses just a tiny bit bigger than mine (and by that I mean..), making hand signals to communicate with each other, throwing items from feet away into the shopping carts, double checking that we had everything as we waited in line for 3 hours to check out. Suzette, the woman who owns the guesthouse we stay at in our shopping town, was kind enough to let us store all the non-perishable food in her storage space so we didn’t have to haul it all back to our villages. Marie organized the school bus we rented and went to their headquarters in a nearby township with boatloads of cash so we didn’t have to transfer the deposit into a random account and run the risk of getting scammed. Other things went wrong with our budgets, with buying t-shirts, with transport, but we solved each problem as it came. We split up the lessons we wanted to have, made lesson plans and posters and powerpoints (my google history was super incriminating the day I made the Sexually Transmitted Infections powerpoint haha), discussed teaching methods and logistics. By the time the actual camp came around I was honestly ready for it to be over. I knew in the back of my mind that it was going to be worth the effort but somewhere along the way I lost sight of the reasons I was doing it in the first place.

Those reasons are: South Africa has the highest number of individuals living with HIV/AIDS in the world, over 5 million people. One in five adults is HIV positive. SA has the largest number of children under fifteen living with HIV/AIDS, about 300,000 children. Women’s groups and the SA police estimate that a woman is raped every 26 seconds in this country.  According to the UN Office on Crimes and Drugs, South Africa is ranked first for rapes per capita. Educating women is the most efficient way to affect change within a community, which I’m calling a fact from personal experience.

Luckily it took ten minutes to remember these reasons once the actual camp started. It turned out great! I can confidently say, now that I’m safely on the other side, that it was absolutely 400% totally completely worth it. Me, Melissa, Ellen and Marie worked together really well. Our friends Andrew and Asha came to help too, they cooked ten delicious meals for seventy people! Melissa and Ellen are experienced and talented teachers who took charge of the most important lessons dealing with HIV, contraception, puberty, sex and sexuality and positive decision making. Marie covered self-esteem, hygiene, and gender roles. I covered topics like nutrition and healthy diets, STIs and sexual violence. I did a self-defense activity where I demonstrated some key moves for getting away from someone trying to attack them, which they embraced with lots of energy. It was an awesome girl power moment to see sixty girls yelling fiercely as they kicked an invisible attacker in the crotch as hard as they could. We made tie dye t-shirts, taught them how to swim, painted nails, held a talent show and a movie night and gave out certificates.

It was nice to watch the girls come out of their shells and make new friends. They taught each other songs and dances (The eighteen girls that went from my class have gone on to teach the whole school these songs and I hear them everyday around the village) and to really enjoy themselves. We had the girls answer surveys on the last day and one of the questions was, “What did you learn at Camp GLOW?” The answers were great to read: “I learned I can say no to sex if a man wants it,” “I learned I am beautiful,” “I learned how to protect myself” etc etc. Really cool stuff that showed some of what we were trying to get across stuck with them. They can’t stop talking about it and ask me if they can go back to camp like five times a day. I’ve seen small changes in my girls since we came back, especially in the four girls who I think have the best chance of getting out of the village someday. It was honestly one of the greatest things I’ve ever been a part of and I want to say thank you again to everyone who made it possible.

I’ve written a lot previously about the water issue my school has. The issue is a relatively big one because it has no water access at all. I’ve tried to find a solution to this since the beginning of my service because I still have trouble believing that the 300 plus kids at my school don’t have a tap to drink out of or wash their hands with on the school grounds. I wrote about the possibility of a South African NGO called PlayPump fixing the situation last year, but when they came to test the water in the ground at school it missed their minimum cleanliness standards by a mile and I had to accept that it wasn’t going to happen with them. Wellll something awesome happened a little while ago: A mining company from Johannesburg called Scorpion Mining has agreed to pay for and install a water pump and filter, providing clean water access to the school and the soon to be built orphanage. WoOHOO! Only took two years. A sterling example of African time but I’m just happy it’s happeninggg : ) The NGO that has done a lot of work at my school and in the area, the Kalahari Education Experience (KEE), locked down Scorpion Mining last year to help fund the orphanage they are building in my village. SA companies get tax breaks for providing monetary support to projects in rural villages so it was in the company’s interest to get on board. You need water to construct a building like the orphanage (quite amazing all the things you need water for..) so a couple months ago the KEE representatives started actively helping search for companies that could pay for a pump and filter. They were feeling the pressure to find a solution to the water problem so they could stay on track with their building schedule, which had already been delayed for other reasons. Long story short, they got the mining company to agree to pay for it! I did mental back flips when I found out. I exchanged emails with the company to discuss the situation and give them the test results from PlayPump with the flow rate and sanitation results so they could figure out how to design a filtration system for this spot.

Reps from Scorpion came out to my school two weeks ago to take measurements and finalize plans. This is what they’ve come up with: A pump will be placed down in the borehole to move water from the ground into a 5,000 liter holding tank. From the tank the water will go through a treatment container at the rate of 600 liters per hour. Once the water has been treated it goes into a 10,000 liter holding tank that will be connected to taps at the orphanage and the school. The water will come out of the ground at a rate of 580 liters per hour which means it takes about two days to fill the 10,000 liter tank with treated and clean water ready to be used. The construction of the orphanage starts next week and the pump and filter will be installed mid-May. These two things are what I’ve wanted to see happen the most before the end of my service and I’m really glad I get to. My time is winding down and finding a source was starting to seem impossible, without the KEE it wouldn’t be happening. Lucky for me, our priorities aligned. Lucky for the school, it’s getting some water !!!

In February and March graduate school admissions decisions came rolling in and I’m happy to say I got into six of the seven programs I applied to. I may have a grownup future after all. Tufts, Denver, Johns Hopkins, George Washington, American, and Georgetown said yes. I applied to a second program at Georgetown for an MS in Foreign Service that said no, which is probably for the best since I have no business getting a degree with the words “Master of Science” in it. I got the rejection last and it made the acceptances more meaningful because I know the others could all have easily gone the other way. I got the acceptance email about the other program I applied to at Georgetown, MA in Conflict Resolution, at 6AM one morning before school in February. Most effective alarm clock ever. I jumped out of bed so excited, re-read the email over and over to make sure it was saying what I thought it was saying. I texted my parents who called immediately and we got to flip out together for a minute, it was really nice. Reminded me of getting into UF in Germany and sharing another happy phone call with them six years ago. I’ve been into this MA program for a long time, it was my first choice. I even met with the director and a current student from it when I was in DC for a Model European Union competition my senior year of college.

The fact that everything worked out how I wanted it to is something I’m still trying to wrap my brain around. Some schools gave me more money than Georgetown did but I know this program is the best one for me. I’m so interested by every aspect of the curriculum, I literally want to take every class they offer. I think I’ll end up taking the Foreign Service Officer Test (FSOT) sometime in the future and see where that takes me, so this feels like a good next step for the professional direction I want to move in. I’m coming to terms with the ginormous amount of debt I’m about to take on… YOLO ya know? (haha seee I haven’t missed every pop culture reference). All my previous leaps of faith have worked out so I can’t justify not giving this a shot. I’m starting to freak out a little, it’s all going to come at me real fast and I wish I had more time to readjust before classes start, but as problems go that’s a pretty good one to have.

So there was this mountain right. I climbed it. The end.

Justtt kidding, lemme tell you a story. I’ve gotten to do some pretty cool stuff on this continent like go to world cup games, ride an elephant, surf the Indian Ocean, snorkel with whale sharks, bungee jump (I’m not trying to brag I swear… ok yes I am) but Kilimanjaro was the coolest. Seven of us, five PCVs and two American friends did a 6 day hike. Day 1 we hiked a leisurely 8km through the rainforest. It was beautiful and green, we were psyched and ready to start after so much build-up. The tour guides and porters who went with us were amazing, it took a crew of 17 people to make sure we had a smooth time. If I ever felt like a badass, all I had to do was watch a porter carrying food and water and supplies and our big backpacks, everything on their backs and heads going twice our pace with about sixty extra pounds on them… and I was sufficiently put in my place. We had one head guide and two assistant guides. All three were very competent, I felt safe and secure in their care. They were attentive to our conditions, checking if our finger nails were blue or if under our eyes was bulging or for other signs of altitude sickness. I had a great time talking with them as we hiked. We talked about their lives and mine, Tanzanian politics (I can never miss a chance to ask taxi drivers and guides and random strangers about the political situation in their country.. it’s a problem), specifics of the mountain and other routes, just everything. All of us talked and joked and played 20 questions and gave each other riddles to solve that usually had to do with midgets (?? haha). We had a great group. No one complained or held us back, we were a good team in it together. At base camp 1 the first afternoon I started to feel nauseous. That began two days of diarrhea and sickness probably caused by food or the water. I wasn’t able to eat or drink much and at night I was drained, my legs could barely hold me steady over the holes in the ground meant to be toilets. I didn’t have an appetite but managed to keep it together, luckily the next two days weren’t too taxing. Day 2 was 11km from base camp 1 to base camp 2. Day 3 was an acclimatizing day, 5km up and back to base camp 2. That’s the PG version of events, I left out some gross and embarrassing details that I’m more than willing to tell you in person. (Also I apologize if you don’t like the word diarrhea… PCVs say it about once a day.) Even though I felt bad I still had a pretty positive attitude, looking at the most incredible views can have that effect. The guides said something to me like “don’t think about tomorrow or the summit, focus on this step right now” which helped me to take it easy and not stress about not being strong enough when the intense stuff came.

Every night we met interesting hikers from all over, played a bunch of cards, heard stories about hiking the Himalayas and the Andes and learned some Swahili words. (My new favorite phrase in response to the question how are you: Poa kichizi kama ndizi which means “I’m crazy cool like a banana” ; ))  Day 4 I woke up after 10 hours of sleep feeling like a million bucks. I woofed down five eggs, tons of toast and peanut butter, everything finally looked delicious and I knew I needed the energy for what was coming. We passed an Australian couple on their way down and asked them if they enjoyed the summit hike. The man paused for a long moment and said, “In Retrospect” and then turned on his way. All of us were like … uhhh.. hope we know what we got ourselves into. I felt better just in time, the morning of Day 4 started the most insane 36 hours of my life. We hiked 11 km from the 2^nd to the 3^rd base camp, called Kibu. That hike was through a vast expanse of tundra, the space between Mawenzi and Kili mountains. The whole time I felt like Frodo on my way to Mordor, it was even more beautiful than Lord of the Rings. The end of the trek was steep, rainy and cold. We arrived around 3PM. Kibu is a stone building with a bunch of bunk beds, basically the most uncomfortable and cold place you can imagine. There’s no water access there, only what the porters had carried. It felt like we had arrived at the end of the world. We were starting the summit hike at 11PM that same night so we tried to get a couple hours sleep in between.

At 11PM it was pitch black and snowing. We went in a single file line, heads down focusing on the person’s feet in front of us. We hiked up for eight hours, slowly moving up and up following the switchback trail in the snow left by the group before us. It was extremely tough, I can’t convey.. every step took so much more energy at that altitude. The summit is 19,340 feet and that night alone we climbed 5,000 feet. I was straining for air feeling light headed and drugged. I had it about as good as you can have it though, got my serious sickness out of the way early in the trip. Andrew woke up with intestinal issues that night but managed to make it to the top despite it. Kevin and Rachel got hit hard by altitude sickness. Kevin said the only way to describe it was to imagine climbing a mountain with the worst hangover you’ve ever had in your life. He was behind me and I was totally prepared to get hit with his projectile vomit. The snow was stained in places where other people had done just that. It was brutal. The snow, the climb, the rocks at the top before the first peak, the lack of air. I felt so heavy. The sunrise began around 6AM, I watched it progress from a hint of color in the sky to the most beautiful full blown sunrise. It was like a kingdom of light and clouds, I’m not going to forget that view for a long time.

It took another hour and a half to get to the highest peak once we’d gotten over the side of the mountain. That part was gorgeous, a glacier on the left, blue sky by that time, views as far as I could see. It felt damn good to make it to Uhuru Peak, sweet success. You can’t stay long at the top cause of the air and the cold so it’d barely sunk in that we’d made it before we had to turn around. On the way down Jill and I were flying ahead, skiing in our hiking shoes down the snow and dirt. We’d run out of water and just wanted to get down. The guides joked that me and Jill were the real guides. They said to us, “In the beginning we thought you were too small, but now we know you are strong.” Heck yeah! That made us laugh. We made it to Kibu at 11:30 AM, almost 12 hours after we started. We rested for an hour and then headed out again to make the 11km back to base camp 2 before dark. Hence the ridiculous 36 hours. My body has never done anything like that before. The last day we hiked the 19k down from base camp 2 to the gate, the whole time in rain and mud. By the end we were singing Disney songs and when we saw the gate we burst out yelling and laughing.

Long description of an incredible experience. There was a great motto etched into the walls of the huts-- “Climb til you puke !!! and then climb a little more” which about sums it up haha. The week after we finished my lips were swollen, my face was peeling from sunburn, my eyes were bloodshot red like a legit vampire and I’m probably gonna lose a toenail from coming down. But I wouldn’t change a thing, intestinal issues and all. Not getting bad altitude sickness was lucky. The mountain decides who finishes and doesn’t, it was out of our control. I’m so glad I did it, I learned a lot about Tanzania and hiking and myself.

Last week was wild. Between the marathon bombings, the MIT officer shooting, the manhunt, the Texas explosion, the suspicious letters sent to the capital and the voting down of the new gun law measures, I almost felt safer here than in the States. Almost. It was strange to watch everything unfold on my phone so far from all the incidents. It’s an interesting perspective, disconnected and yet connected, which made me think a lot about how the news cycle has changed in the past couple of years and where it’s heading. It’s not Peter Jennings at his desk telling you what happened at 6 o’clock anymore, it’s Twitter and Facebook and a constant stream of articles that allows anyone to participate in the distribution and creation of information. I never expected to be this involved with the world’s happenings (that was actually one of my biggest worries about joining Peace Corps) but I’m so grateful that it’s the case, even when really sad things happen. Reading the news in real time helps me to feel connected to home and the world in general. I deal with the helplessness I feel about big news stories by reading way too many articles about them, as if knowing every detail will make whatever happened somehow more understandable. There’s always more to read, always one more article that looks interesting, one more news site to refresh and check.. I have to tell myself to put down my phone and step away slowly when my mind starts to turn to mush. PC life affects a person in different ways. I have plenty of time to psychoanalyze the crap out of myself and I know my news addiction is one of the manifestations of my isolated life. I guess it’s better than becoming an alcoholic though right ??

 

The stuff I wrote about GLOW and the water and Kili and grad school is all overwhelmingly positive and it was awesome to experience each one of those things, but it took until the end of March and vacation to actually see the light at the end of the tunnel. I’d been at site for two and a half months after Christmas of GLOW stress and unbearable heat, which made it impossible to take a step back and get some perspective. Not sleeping well was the toughest part. I couldn’t see past the camp which meant I didn’t mentally prepare much for Kili either. I’d lived here for so long, I felt like the hard stuff should have been behind me. Getting into grad school was great but I couldn’t even picture what my life will be like in September because I was so consumed by my immediate environment. It was hard to imagine fall at Georgetown when I wanted to lay down and die over summer in Africa. Only over break away from site could I realize how lucky I am that things worked out the way they did. As I write this I’m wearing a sweatshirt feeling cozy and comfy, fall has finally come. I feel such relief to have made it through the summer, through my fifth and final season change. I take great comfort in knowing I’ll never have to be that hot for that long again.

Since I got back from vacation things at site have been surprisingly good. Usually the transition back is tough but this time was smooth. I keep treading lightly waiting for shit to hit the fan, but then I remember shit hit the fan from January to March and maybeee I should just relax and enjoy this final leg of my service. School has been as good as it has ever been this term. I’m starting to worry about leaving my kids and what their futures will bring them. I know I have no control over it but they deserve a lot more than they’re going to get. I have some final projects to wrap up before I leave for good at the end of June: last soccer game, last picture day, filling out forms with receipts and logs to finally close the GLOW grant (I have left over money from the grant so I’m taking every student’s picture and giving them a copy, best use of the money I could think of.) I’m also waiting to receive 150 teddy bears in the mail made by the “Mother Bear Project,” an American NGO that makes teddy bears for underprivileged children and sends them abroad for free. All I had to do was send an email and now every kid in Kindergarden,1^st and 2^nd grade is going to get their own teddy bear. It’s a wonderful NGO. Other than that, no new projects or activities to begin. I want to focus on wrapping up the things already in place. I want to end my service on my own terms and leave having finished the things I started. I’m aware that this is a huge wish, but with two months left I feel like it’s starting to come together.

If you read this whole post you basically just accomplished the equivalent of running the Boston Marathon. Thanks for caring : ) stay safe! and I’ll do the same. Lotz of Love.