Lack of Posting

Hey hey –

A thousand apologies for abandoning you all for one week… Procrastination, the first pillar of IB, took hold this past week. Or rather, I procrastinated on my blog to make room for schoolwork, CAS, etc (so there’s no need to freak out, mom :)

There have been two main highlights of these past two weeks: getting a care package in the mail, and UWC day. So let me start with the former…

Man, I wish you guys could have seen my face as I tore into that package. I was beaming. Everything was perfect, all the way down to the newspaper articles and cartoons. And yes Grandma, you did get the right kind of jellybeans :) And Girl Scout cookies! When I saw the box my train of thought went something like this:

I’m only going to get a package every once in a blue moon. I should savor these cookies. I’ll only eat one a day.

15 minutes later…

Man, I miss those Girl Scout cookies.

(I shared… reluctantly)

Thank you to everyone involved in constructing the package – everything was absolutely perfect, down to the bandana with the American flag.

And speaking of this…

The timing for the package could not have been better, because the day after I received the aforementioned patriotic bandana was UWC day. Basically, UWC day is a chance for everyone in the school to express their home culture by making food, dressing up, dancing, singing, reading poetry, etc. And it’s really fun, because we have about fifty countries represented at Waterford – that’s a lot of great food and awesome outfits. We started the day off with an assembly where people from each nation came out in front of the school, paraded their outfits, and told everyone their home country. Anne Caroline and I were reppin’ the US as cowboys (ye haw?). My outfit was over-the-top patriotic… most people got the joke, but for some I just looked like an asshole. Oops.

After assembly everyone went to set up their country stalls – basically, all around the school people set up booths where they sold food characteristic of their home country. The Norwegians made some killer waffles, the Germans had meatballs and pretzels, I’m pretty sure I saw the Swazi’s grilling up some intestines... the U.S. had chocolate chip cookies and lemonade (although we had a lot of requests for corn dogs… perhaps next year). I spent a good portion of the day running the stall for Young Heroes, a fundraising community service I’m a member of, although I still got the chance to stuff my face with some delish food.

Anyways, UWC day was really awesome. I know it sounds really cheesy, but it was great to see everyone expressing and embracing their own culture. Folks were really super proud to be… themselves. Which is always a pleasant sight.

What else. There was recently a strike in Swaziland – teachers, shop workers, nurses, and pretty much everyone else refused to work last Friday (although we still had school, rats). I wasn’t really that inconvenienced, sheltered here on the hill.

HOWEVER, the strike did have one huge impact on me – the nurses at Ward 8 decided to take off on the day that we had community service there. So I arrive at the hospital with my group on Wednesday and there’s nobody there with the children. One is on the floor and the other is in his stroller. Neither has been changed. It was… really stunning. The fact that Ward 8 is supposed to be a facility that cares for abandoned children, but instead it was like they had been re-abandoned. I asked my supervisor – surely somebody must be staying with them at night? She said they were probably staying alone. That hit me really hard. More than anything, it made me realize the importance of our commserve. Even if we’re just taking the kids outside and around the town, at least they’re getting some fresh air and, moreover, some attention. Being touched, talked to, cared for… these are all extremely important things that we take for granted. So we talk to the kids and rub their backs, sometimes I sing to them (perhaps a little goopy, but imagine a life where your parents never sang to you). It may not be much, but I’m beginning to think more and more of it.

Today at Waterford we celebrated Human Rights Day with an early day out, followed by an assembly and various workshops around campus. A representative from UNICEF and the High Commissioner of South Africa came to our school and spoke about human rights in relation to the history of South Africa – in particular, the High Commissioner said something that I found very interesting. It was something like this:

Many of you are from different nations around the world where violations of human rights are not at the forefront of your problems. But human rights violations have been very significant in the development of conflict in South Africa over the last half-century.

Maybe I’m quoting it wrong because I look back and it doesn’t look like it does her justice, but the gist was that I’m now in a place where human rights violations are of much more pivotal importance. I mean, they’re important everywhere… but it seems to be a very omnipresent issue here. But perhaps I’m just not paying enough attention in the states, eh?

I sang in assembly with the choir and ran a workshop for Amnesty International, another commserve I’m doing. Basically we brought students into a room that was very dimly lit (it was supposed to be really dark but that didn’t really pan out) with a few candles in the middle and asked them about their perceptions of human rights. Then we read out loud a story about the violation of human rights somewhere in the world; the death penalty by stoning in Iran, the abuse of migrant workers in Malaysia, acts of sexual violence against Nicaraguan girls. Then we asked them more questions about human rights – how have their perceptions changed (if at all), what can we do to protect human rights, do we see any examples of these violations in our own nations? The whole thing was done with a lot of silence, reminiscent of Quaker meeting almost. However, because the students we had were a little younger (about freshman age), we had to coax them a bit into discussion… but on the whole the workshop went really well. Students in all three workshops said the best way to work towards protecting human rights is to talk about it and make people’s stories heard… and that’s exactly what we did. So I’m guessing the world will be cured within the next few days ;)

Like I mentioned before, I’ve been getting increasing amounts of schoolwork lately. I’m not really that stressed (yet; you’re not allowed to be stressed in IB1), but I think this coming week will be kind of… inconvenient. I just turned in today a poetry anthology for English, containing commentaries on five poems and one song (I analyze schemes and tropes, including anaphora, climax, triple construction, repetition, and hyperbole, in Fergie’s “Fergalicious”) – the anthology came out to about nineteen pages. Tomorrow I have a maths test, plus a biology lab, biology test, English commentary, and SiSwati test on Friday. Woo!

As a treat for taking so long to update the blog, I wanna throw some photos of UWC day up on the blog. I’ll get them as soon as possible and show you all my excessive cowboyness (if the internet gods here see it fit).

Until then, stay well friends. Hope all is well, wherever you may be. Know that things are awesome here in S-Deezy.

Lots of love,

Eli

Waterval Boven

Hey folks –

Wow, it feels like I was just updating this. Time sure flies here – I’m pretty sure the Swazi days are at least a couple hours shorter. Every day seems to finish before it’s supposed to. Perhaps it’s a good sign – shows that I’m doing a lot of stuff… right?

The highlight of this past week has definitely been my weekend trip with the climbing team to Waterval Boven, South Africa. Boven is the second largest sport-climbing venue in the world, and it regularly attracts prominent climbers from all over. There’s something like 600 bolted routes throughout the area... so yeah, it’s like the Disneyland of climbing. And it’s only two hours from school. Win.

We woke up early Saturday morning and packed up a combi (big bus-van thing) and hit the road pretty quickly, since we only had one weekend to climb. We arrived at around ten, set up camp (man, I forgot how much I love camping), and set out to climb.

Oi, the place was gorgeous. It reminded me a lot of the Grand Canyon, in many ways – it’s pretty much flat all around, but when you get closer to the climbing area you just see a huge lush canyon that looks like it’s been scooped out of the ground with an ice cream scooper. Twas just super beautiful. The canyon is hours from Joburg or any other big city, so it’s really isolated and quiet. It was all just so very… natural.

Sorry, I’m not doing it justice with my writing. It was great.

We wasted no time, and hiked down into the canyon at around eleven to start climbing. We all started with a lead climb on an easy route to get warmed up, and even though it was easy it was still kind of frightening to lead climb – it’s really something that takes some getting used to. How I used to bring myself to free climb on hikes, I’ll never know.

We all then broke up into smaller groups and tackled different climbs. There’s so many good climbs at Boven that, of course, we couldn’t even scratch the surface of the vast number we wanted to approach. But we all essentially climbed until our arms felt like they were going to fall off, and then climbed more. We met a group of climbers from Canada who where familiar with the UWC in British Columbia and who had spent time in Tucson before (small world). Awesome. We made our way back to camp, cooked burgers over the fire, laughed about the Danish accent (sorry, Lykkfry :) , and went to bed, super content.

The next day was essentially the same, plus one added encounter with a snake that almost ended REALLY badly, an incident with a stolen bathtub, and my co-year from Bangladesh getting stopped at the border because his name rhymed with a suspected terrorist’s name. All in a day’s work!

Monday I was hit with a bollock’s load of schoolwork, plus some outside application essays and junk. I get the feeling this week will be busy... but this is something I’m going to have to get used to fairly rapidly, I suppose. I’m standing here on the internet right now taking a break from my schoolwork, as a cat (hopefully non-rabid) rubs against my legs and purrs contentedly.

Shoutout to Nick (and Amory) for the letters and CD – thank you so very much :) I’m working on responses right now, amidst errthang else. Considering the speed of post, expect them sometime in June… 2012.

Missing folks tremendously, hope all is well in tuc-town (or wherever you may be). I’d expand on how much I miss you all, but I’ve got to go snag the cat, who just jumped on my desk and is now knocking over my speakers and putting its mouth on my toothbrush. Yum.

Cheers,

Eli

Mozambique

Heyy peeps -

Sincerest apologies for updating this late, I get back from Moz on Sunday night and was pooped beyond belief. I've pretty much been procrastinating on the update till now... but y'all can deal.

Let me tell you all about my weekend...

The trip to Mozambique was a trip filled with up’s and down’s. We got to Moz in the evening Thursday thinking that we were going to stay at a hotel a friend had booked for us. However, the booking kind of fell through, so we had to find a place to crash for the night so we could move into the hotel the next day. So we crashed at a place downtown that was kind of expensive. We figured, though, that it would only be one pricey night, and then we would move into the other hotels, which were supposed to be cheap and fairly nice. We went out for dinner (it was great to have proper food again), and what I found most immediately striking was that I had to be afraid of the dark again. I mean, perhaps ‘afraid’ isn’t the best word, but when we were walking outside in the dark there was a certain tenseness and heightened alertness. There were stories from other groups (later in the week) of getting stopped by policemen with AK-47s, having to bribe themselves out of situations, being very close to getting arrested. It wasn’t hyperbole, either. The police will arrest anybody walking around at night without a passport, and are much more likely to ambush people who look like tourists. For the whole trip, I have to say that I was pretty lucky to not have any police encounters.

But I digress.

We got to bed at a reasonable time the first night, and I was looking forward to getting a good night’s sleep. However, at about five in the morning the next day, Leo (Germany) woke me up and told me he was having chest pain and needed to go to the hospital. So we went out on the street in search of the hospital – luckily, it was within walking distance of where we were staying. Walking through Mozambique reminded me a lot of Mexico – in addition to the signs everywhere in Portuguese (official language), the infrastructure and environment just gave off much of a Mexico vibe. Actually sort of nice, because it made me feel closer to home... ish. We were able to walk to the hospital, but then encountered our next problem – the language barrier. Fortunately, Leo’s knowledge of Spanish and my (very limited) knowledge of SiSwati (our nurse was Swazi) helped us get through the hospital with considerable speed. Leo got an x-ray and some blood drawn, and eventually the doctor concluded that he had a virus and gave him antibiotics. I saw this all as very fitting with the "Moz experience" - crazy stuff happens, and you never really know. Woo!

We spent the day touring around the city, driving along the ocean and such. I had quite a shock, actually, when someone looked out the window and said “Look, the Indian Ocean!” I dunno why it didn’t register before, but I had never really thought about how Moz is on the side of the Indian Ocean. My mind then started WTFing for about ten minutes as I realized how far away from home I was.  When I used to play with the globe as a kid, I would look at the Indian Ocean and practically think it was on another planet, it was so far away. And yet there I was, on a bus driving along it. After I get over this shock, though, I began to really appreciate the ocean and the beach. The Norwegians all laughed at me because I was having a mindgasm about being at the ocean, and everyone was shocked when I told them it had been YEARS since I’d been on the beach. I love it on the beach though – I feel like I’m on the edge of the world, and I can almost feel myself being on the border of a continent. Which may sound weird but… whatever. 

Eventually we got to our accommodation -  a timeshare-esque place across the street from the beach. All of us were sooo excited to staying in this amazing village place for super cheap.. yeah, until we were told that it was going to be more expensive than we were originally told. And then we found out we weren’t actually staying in the timeshare area, but in a house in the super sketch area BEHIND the nice place. Should have known it was too good to be true, we said. The house was pretty nice but we were really pissed for a while about the price that we would have to pay. Eventually we got over it and realized that, considering the location and the nature of the accommodation, we were actually getting a pretty good deal. Nevertheless, it added to the emotional fluctuation that had been so omnipresent throughout the day.  

We got up the next morning for continental breakfast (one of the pluses of a more expensive place), and then went swimming at the pool. I wanted to swim in the ocean, but conventional Mozambican wisdom dictates that it’s a bad idea, and the water is fairly… brown. Boooo pollution. The pool was nice though, and afterwords we went to the beach to walk around and just hang out. Being on the beach was THE BEST. We got ice cream at a place with an ocean view (this was what I pictured when I thought of Moz) and had a generally relaxing and fun day. 

That night we went out and stayed out until the sunrise (watched from the beach - AWESOME), and then crashed super hard for the bus ride home. As folks can imagine, I was totally trashed (relax, I mean exhausted) by the time I got back to Swaziland, so these past few days have been focused on catching up on sleep. Yay!

Monday morning at breakfast I saw a sign in the cafeteria that said something like -
All climbers, be sure to be at the gym today to discuss a trip this weekend to climb in South Africa. 

So this is my next adventure? You all are probably wondering if I even go to school. (I do, just to clarify)

I saw today that I got a package, and I'm going to pick it up tomorrow. I'm super stoked (I danced around for about five minutes when I saw) and many thanks to the sender(s). 

Missing you all tons (of course), I'll be posting pictures soon enough. 

Sala kahle,

Eli