NEW BEGINNINGS

After 2 ½ days in mBabane, the 35 of us of Group 8 were dispersed about the kingdom to our permanent sites. PC regulations prevent me from saying exactly where we are so I feel quite restricted and unable to describe some of the character of our new location. However, I’ll describe our new home.

We’ve really lucked out this time. I have been placed in a school for special needs kids, so we will be living in teachers’ quarters. We have 500 square feet including two bedrooms, sitting room, kitchen, and bathroom with running hot water (shower) and an inside flush toilet. With a little more space, this would be palatial. For comparison, none of our surrounding PCVs have running water and our nearest PCV couple lacks both running water and electricity. We expect we’ll be seeing lots of company so they all can get a good shower.

We are located in the Lubombo district not far from Mozambique. North of us, in the mid-veld, lie acres and acres (make that hectares and hectares) of sugar cane fields. We are on a higher plateau and south of us leads down to low-veld where the summer temperatures are the hottest. Sugar is the leading crop here—forestry is second. (Forestry was found south of Piggs Peak. North of Piggs Peak, where we trained in our beautiful valley, we were in the midst of orange groves.)

Now for the negatives: Our place has been vacant for a while so we have spent a full week cleaning it up. Within the next week we will paint all of the walls and ceilings. It took us nearly a week to get the electricity turned on (I ultimately had to attach a passport photo to the application) but we still don’t have hot water--but then, summer is coming. We will send photos when it is presentable enough. When finished, it will look like the first apartment after college, or if Debbie gets her way and is able to get the school to let her throw out some very used furniture and buy a little new, perhaps a step up.

We are between terms right now, so the campus is very quiet. The next term is from Sep 8 to Dec 10. I am literally a few steps away from my assignment. Debbie has many NGOs w/in the community (downtown is only a 20 minute walk away) and has another opportunity 20 minutes in the other direction. One of her first assignments will be identifying the multiple NGOs to determine what they do and how they overlap, if at all. But for now, we are in a period of integration when we are to determine the character of our community and we won’t be working on any assignments (although we’re told we represent PC 24/7).