I have tried to keep a lot of the negative experiences of South Africa for the most part out of our blog. I have tried to keep my posts pretty upbeat for the most part to give readers a positive view of our lives here. But not today.

I am so tired of being made fun of, stared at, laughed at, talked about, sexually harassed, being told I am fat, that I need to sweep the floor, that I am a lazy wife, etc. I am tired of being sick. I am so tired of people (at some organizations) treating each other like dirt. Yelling at each other, not listening to what the other is saying. I am tired of doing a job which I have very little training or experience in. I am tired of blatant corruption, discrimination, poverty, racism, sexism. I do realize that these things happen all over the world and that I am lucky enough to be able to see and live in another culture, but today...I am just plain tired.

I feel like I am such a different person here. More frazzled,brittle, more unsure of myself. Somedays it takes all of my willpower to leave the house. I know I am growing and learning so much, I just hope that it does not leave me bitter and broken.

Today I meditated for the first time in my life and it was wonderful. I have been doing yoga for a few years but have always been intimidated by meditation. I have a hard time stopping my thoughts in a regular setting, but while meditating it has seemed impossible. Today was a good experience, and meditating is a powerful tool that I will continue to use.

I am working on one of the most important lessons that I will encounter in social work-learning how to set emotional boundaries. I am so affected by the pain that I see here that sometimes I am less able to function. It simply makes me so sad. I am learning how to be effective in the lives of the people around me without making their pain my own. If I carry everyones pain around all of the time, I will lose myself and ability to empathize with others. As my friend Ronda says "this is boot camp." The aspects of life that I thought would be difficult (not having running water, etc.) really bear little weight in my thoughts and days. The aspects that are the most difficult for me by far is to see so much pain and not even know where to begin.

There are still many wonderful aspects of being in South Africa. I have been given such an amazing opportunity to live and work in another world and I have met people who will stay in my heart forever.

Lots of love.
Jennie

Books

Hello Friends and Family!
If anyone is interested in sending a book to us at our site, we would be very grateful. If you have an old book lying around the house that you think that we might enjoy, we would be very excited to receive it. We will also pass the books along to others in our village as well as to other volunteers.

Our address:
Jennie and Ben Bleckley
PO Box 870
Nebo
1059
South Africa

Thank you for your support!

Community Libraries Project

I've been working with three organizations in my village to create libraries that meet their needs. My lower primary school (grades K-4) has some books and we're working on organizing them in the computer room so some students can read while others use the computers and then swap half way through the period. The Phokwane Improvement League Rural Education Trust (PILRET) has a fairly large collection that our friend Katie and I recently finished organizing with the project manager Shocky. (By finished, I mean we finished with the hundreds place for dewey decimal and the Fiction section. We still need to do the tens and ones.) Shocky and I have sat down and planned our next moves for creating a library committee and making note cards for all the books. If everything goes according to plan, the community library will open in June. My other primary school (grades K-7) wants to get their learners reading more, but the only books they have are about 30 National Geographic photo journals of North America.

Luckily, fellow volunteer Rose Zulliger has been working on getting libraries for her schools and received a donation from Books for Africa of 35,000 books. She's sharing this bounty with me and 16 other volunteers. My primary school with the National Geographics is going to receive 1,100 books!

But we need your help. Each school is raising R1,500 (about $225) to help transport the books in a crate across the ocean. We need to raise another $5,000 to get it there. Rose has put together a Peace Corps Partnership Program grant to get that money. The grant is supported by individuals in the United States who can donate to projects of their choice on the Peace Corps website.

Please consider supporting this project. Thirty schools are receiving over 1,000 books each and all have Peace Corps volunteers to help the schools impliment and utilize the books. All schools had to submit a grant proposal in order to receive the books. The website for making a donation is here: https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=resources.donors.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=674-045. Any amount helps, because we have the resources of 17 volunteers, so small donations will go a long way.

When all three libraries are operating, we hope to create an interlibrary loan system so members of any library can use all three with only one library card. We're very excited about this project!

Longtom Marathon

A big thank you to everyone who sponsored Jennie and I in the Longtom Marathon. Together, KLM raised $20,350 to send needy learners to a great private school in Mpumalanga province. We had a lot of fun running it with our friends and having an excuse to get together with them for a good cause.

I ran about half of the half marathon before my knee started really hurting and then spent some time both walking and running for the rest of the race. I was able to sprint into the finish line with a very ugly face.

I finished in 400th place with a time of 2:18:43.

Jennie walked the half marathon with our friend Katie and had a great time, though her feet were understandably tired.

Our own Adam Bohach ran the ultra marathon of 56km and came in 11th overall out of at least 467 runners - it was his first marathon. Good grief!

Plodding along

The sky is almost
               endless
just like the pain
               of children
the loss of hope

The bird of poverty sits on their necks
   tighter, tighter

but it too will soar
                  eventually
into the almost
               endless
               sky

   "Are you happy there?"
          "no,
                not really"

  But
I now feel I have a
    purpose

  dangling,
          dancing
beside me

I run in circles
  to entertain

I just want to make
    a difference

  But
now I have met people I
       cannot
walk away from

I have met hearts
that will always be a part
of mine

I have experienced a
     life
that will sway
   me forever.

a boy

He has become a
      man
   before his feet
                      reach
        the ground.

His eyes glaze from all of the
   pain
he has
       endured
in his
     five
          long
               years


barely a
    sound
  does he
          leak
scooping rice
fistful by fistful

this may be the last
     meal
        today

The ride home

We have been in South Africa for a little over 8 months! In seems that the weeks fly by, but sometimes the hours and days drag on. It is interesting to look back to how we felt in July compared to how were are doing now. I can really see a growth in both of us.


I would like to share a story about a semi-recent event:
I went to a near-by city to visit one of my good friends last month. At the end of the day,in my excitement, I decided that I would like to stop in the Pick N Pay in hopes of finding some goodies that we cannot find near our village. I certainly found some goodies, but I ended up staying in the store a little too long. The next thing I knew, the speakers were calling all shoppers to the front as it was closing time (it was 5p). After I picked up some soy sauce, I headed up to the cashier to wait in a very long line. After I was checked out, I left the convenience of the mall to the harsh, noisy, dirty taxi rank across the street. As I walked out the door, I realized that the sun was about to start setting. I would not have thought anything of it, but I had to pass into a township where I would catch the next taxi going to our village. The township was not one that I liked in the daytime, much less felt comfortable navigating in the darkness.

I found the taxi I needed to go on and only saw one other woman waiting inside at which point I started to get a little nervous as this guaranteed that I would arrive in the township after dark. As I had no other option, I found a seat in the taxi and waited. After a few minutes, more people started to take their seats in the taxi. One of these people was a woman who sat next to me and started to chat. She asked me what I was doing in South Africa and I told her that I was a volunteer. And she said "are you a Peace Corps Volunteer?" I was shocked. People rarely understand my garbled explanation of what I am doing in South Africa. She said that she knew a Peace Corps Volunteer from 6 years ago who worked at the school she where she is currently teaching. She told me that he held a workshop for the teachers where she learned a lot of good information. She was able to tell me about his character and it was clear that he had an impact on her life. This really made me think about our jobs here because sometimes it does not feel like we are really making as much of an impact as we would hope. The truth is that every single person impacts more people than they will ever know. We may never know the impact we have on others.

After our conversation, she asked me where I was going and when I told her she spoke with the driver to make sure that he would drive me straight to the next taxi that I would need to catch. She also asked around on the taxi and we found out that three other women were also going to the same area. We all decided to look out for each other and make sure we were safe. Sometimes my independent side comes out and I do not feel like I need to be looked after every second, but at this moment, I realized that I have not felt so cared for and accepted by perfect strangers.


Love,
Jennie

How to Eat a Mango

Back home in the US, Jennie and I once tried a mango. We used a knife to cut it in quarters around the flat pit and then skinned it.

Friends, there are better ways to eat a mango, and you don't even need a knife.

The video is poor quality because we're uploading on a dial-up connection. The good news is, those of you still living in 20th century America (mom, dad, aunt Stevie) will be able to view the video on your slow dial up connections as well.

Our New Home

Four weeks ago, we bade farewell to our home with the Nchabeleng's.
While we loved the family and the neighborhood we were living in, we found it too difficult to acclimate to cooking, sleeping, and living in a single room. Though our basic needs were exceptionally addressed, we have realized the necessity of having a place where we can feel at home and comfortable with some privacy.

We now live on the other end of town in a more rural area. We no longer enjoy the comforts of a bathtub and flush toilet, or a washing machine. We pump our water by hand, are again taking bucket baths and hand washing clothing. We are loving it. While the Peace Corps has always told us "don't have any expectations," these were things we expected to experience while living in South Africa.

The small house we now live in is about 100 sq ft more than the room we were in before, but there are two rooms and a thatch roof. The kitchen windows look out over the family corn field and each night we can watch the sun set on the village.

One of my principals was a great help in assisting us to find new housing. She and Jennie walked through this part of the village while I was away at an in-service training (IST) in Zeerust. They found a few houses, but they were similar to our situation at the time - one smaller room close to the main house. My principal asked a woman at work on her mealie crop if she knew of any accommodations available in the area. She pointed across the landscape, saying "the retired policeman on the hill, he has rooms available." The old man didn't hesitate when asked, he understood our purpose in the village and immediately showed Jennie and Ms. Thamaga the two rooms.

When I returned from IST, I went to introduce myself and see the rooms. My principal also suggested I sweep it out so it looked nice when my supervisor from Peace Corps came to check it out. When I arrived, they had already swept it out, someone was hanging curtains, and they had called an electrician to fix the lights and outlets. Our supervisor approved our move the following week.

Our family has been very welcoming but also allowed us a great deal of privacy. The grandfather is a retired police officer and the grandmother is originally from Botswana. She speaks a little English,but most of our conversations are in the native language which we sometimes understand and other times eventually figure out. To complicate our communication, she speaks seTswana, the language of Botswana and North West Province in South Africa. It is very similar to Sepedi, spoken here in Limpopo, but as we are still learning the language, to hear the seTwana adds a twist.

Grandfather's grandfather was the khoši (chief) who founded our village, and his father founded a nearby "suburb" of the village. He gets a kick out of the fact that two of his biological grandchildren have the names Monare and Bontle, the same African names we were given.