Transitions

This is my last post on this blog. Or perhaps penultimate post as I may be seized by the need to elaborate on some details once I recover from the pure surprise of finding myself back in the states. To put it concisely: last weekend I ended my stint as a Peace Corps Volunteer and […]

Brief Notes on my Vacation

Just 50km from my site rise the Naukluft mountains which boast zebra, springbokke, leopards, baboons and a 120 km seven-to-eight day hiking trail. I won’t say much about this other than to highly recommend it to your average African-adventurer-masochistic-tourist because it was essentially an endurance suffer-fest crossed with a safari. On the fourth day, the […]

The 4 Types of Peace Corps Volunteer

So I was accused the other day of writing rather selfishly about only my Peace Corps assignment and neglecting the experience of other volunteers. The obvious rebuttal that ”aren’t all blogs/tweets/facebook status updates at their core self-centered calls for attention” aside, I can stop talking about Rietoog for one week and discuss my colleagues. Here […]

Vocabulary

It occurs to me that many of my posts are jargon-heavy. So if a sentence like “I took a hike in a bakkie with my learners to the combie rink after the braai” makes no sense to you, please check out the new vocabulary page on the right.

Easter Egg Hunt

I know it has been a long time since I have used this blog, but here is another one of those Somehow-everything-always-works-out-even-if-in-unexpected-ways stories that are so common in Peace Corps. When school let out on Thursday for the long weekend, my colleagues rushed to Rehoboth to spend the 4 days in town. Easter here merits […]

Sorry World Challenge…

A few years ago a group of British Volunteers from the group ”World Challenge” came to WJD Cloete and painted the school seal on the side of the office. Today, inexplicably, a building appeared covering the wall. After some investigation (read: shameless gossip hunting) on my part I was able to determine that Mr. Cloete […]

Off the Grid

On Wednesday, the cell network in Rietoog went out during a thunderstorm. Outages like this always worry me, because I remember how the electricity went out for two weeks last rainy season and we were all reduced to eating peanut sandwiches and hanging around the Cloete’s whenever we could see that they were cooking outdoors. […]

I am a Foot Model

In a small Eastern Sierra online magazine wearing large boots to hide my necrotic toes. But, still. The article is at http://www.mammothtimes.com, go to special sections and then Mammoth Sierra Magazine. The article is on page 21. It’s an interesting history of crampons.

Peace Corps Intermission

I have been hesitant to write blog entries during my “Peace Corps Intermission” in the United States. Partially because I think that the US is less interesting than Namibia, and partially because most of what I was doing was related to med school admissions. One of my questions during an MD/PhD committee interview was “will […]

We’re on the map!

So the Grade 6 class, after much coaxing and cajoling, produced something this week that passed for a wikipedia article. Here it is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rietoog The words are theirs (well most of them. In the few hours that is has been up it has been edited, as is typical for wikipedia), the pictures are theirs, and […]