GOOD MORNING! HOW. ARE. YEW?

Several weeks ago, we completed plans for a trip to Cape Town, RSA, at the end of April. For reasons I won’t go into here, we will be more than ready to take a break from our Very Important Work, take off our Peace Corps hats, and be tourists. Everyone tells us Cape Town is a great place to visit and we look forward to new scenery, good food and wine, pastries and cheese; Debbie says she will have seafood at every meal. Our ‘excuse’ for this trip is a run for me on April 23 and an international fun run on the 22th we’ve each entered. The fun run is only 5k, is not chipped, and entrants wear their national colors (i.e. ‘colours’, here) and carry flags, etc. A couple other PCVs are entered in my race. The trip might not be affordable to a PCV, but when I enter my bank card to the ATM, it greets me with, “Good morning, Gary Johnson”. How easy to draw funds from over 10,000 miles away.
I didn’t run at all during Pre-service training. But soon after moving to Siteki, I began looking for good running routes. The first thing I learned was how much I stood out in both actions and appearance. Even though I got the usual Swazi greetings, I got a lot of quizzical stares and I was never totally comfortable and wanted a longer route.
I soon began using a road we had wanted to explore half way to the hospital. It is a rough, dirt road that has three or four challenging hills and a good distance. It runs behind the Good Shepherd schools so I was frequently challenged for short distances by laughing students going home and I felt like the Pied Piper. It was a different experience for me, though, because these kids could hear. There are many homesteads along this route and every time I pass one, little voices call out in English, “How. Are. Yeww?” This is occasionally preceded by, “Good morning” in clear and precise English, even though I run in the late afternoon. I’m never sure whether to answer in English or siSwati. When I answer in siSwati, sometimes I get the same “How. Are. Yew?” until I answer in English. The interesting part of this route is a neighborhood center where local maidens would gather to practice native dances wearing the (lack of) native costumes. I was always greeted with waves, big smiles, and shouts, and on a couple of occasions, proposals. I would reply in my limited siSwati that I was a tired, old, white grandpa which got a lot of laughs. I gave up this route during the rainy season (recently ended) when the creek over-flowed and the mud became too much for me, even though the locals still waded through it, dispersed the herds of goats and the occasional cow, to collect water from the pools.
So I transferred my efforts to the “tar road” that climbs the hill behind Good Shepherd Hospital. The “tar” ends at the hospital but the dirt road continues to climb for an elevation gain of over 500 feet, I estimate. It is too steep to run and I end up walking too much. But I crest in about 27 minutes and continue over the top so I can make my turn-about at the 30 minute mark and return in a total of about 55 minutes. A very rough estimation would make it about 10k and that’s the best I can do without an odometer. I get views of the hillside where we live, Mabuda Farm, and New Market.
Now, with an invitation from acquaintances at Mabuda Farm, I have begun using cow trails through the bush that allow longer distances without such severe inclines. My last run was 45 minutes down to a point overlooking the valley in a field of brown sandstone boulders almost the size of Volkswagens. The uphill return took me to a total of 96 minutes. I’ll continue stretching the distance, perhaps eventually adding on ‘hospital hill’. With the rainy season behind us, the slippery clay has baked to powdery kaolin and each footfall is in over an inch of dust. It remains hot but the days are becoming noticeably shorter. Eventually I’ll need to adjust my schedule. The good news is, my speed seems to be about the same as it was when I ran “Peachtree”, 40 years ago. The bad news is, shouldn’t I have improved in all that time?
Finally, Katie has been mentioned in this blog before; you’ve even seen pictures of her. She is a Frequent Visitor to our palace which has won her a “K” on the door (cut out from a Kellog cereal box). Katie knows how to write a blog without using parentheses; (how she does that, I don’t know, although I only see a couple of parentheticals in this post). So if you have some time and would like to see a viewpoint from a different PCV, I’ve added a link to her blog at the bottom of the left hand column.
Good running.