Library Award and Prize

The school library is fully functional for all grades.

For those of you that are paying attention, you will remember my ranting about the library review process that the school underwent at the beginning of August. A group from the district came in and told us that we were doing everything wrong. Well, not long after that, a group from the province came and said we were doing a decent enough job and left us some notes on how we could improve. The visit was part of the School Library Excellence Awards pilot program. I’m not entirely sure how we got involved, but it was nice to receive the visit.

When I arrived at school this past Monday morning, my principal greeted me and told me that she had received a call over the weekend that we were being invited to Durban the next day to receive an award for our overall score in the process. I was a bit surprised. We hadn’t heard anything since they came in mid-August, and it seemed rather odd to get the news via a phone call on the weekend. But then again, this is South Africa – not sure why I am surprised at anything at this point.

Unfortunately, I was told that I was not allowed to attend. When my principal phoned the district to let them know who would be coming with her, the district manager said that he expected a full-time teacher to come, not the volunteer. I said nothing. I just couldn’t. I know my principal. I know she wanted me to go with her. But I also know that she will never argue with the district manager and there was nothing to be done. I surprised even myself with how well I handled it. I shrugged it off, saying it was fine. Since I had missed school nearly the whole week before for a visit to the dentist, it was better not to miss any more days of school anyway. Funny enough, the teacher the principal asked to go instead begged not to, but in the end, she had no choice, and she and the principal were on their way to Durban at 5am the next day.

Our award sits center shelf.

When the principal came to school on Wednesday with the framed certificate (I cannot tell you how many teachers commented on how impressive it was that it was framed) she immediately asked where in the library we could put our important award. I said I was sure there was a shelf somewhere that could be cleared for its display. To be honest, I recognized at once that it was simply a “certificate of participation.” There was nothing about it that said we were any better than any other school. But I didn’t care. The school was so happy and so proud of it. I think that it is so rare that they get any sort of positive feedback from the DOE that something like this made them feel really good and that their school and their work are not invisible.

A plethora of new non-fiction books was the prize!

Much to my surprise, this award had another unforeseen positive consequences. The “prize” that came with it was two huge boxes of brand new books for the library. Really good books, in fact. Non-fiction children’s books; something I scarcely thought I would ever get my hands on. The Natural Science shelf is practically full! Overall, I think that we received about 175 new books, nearly all of which were fantastic. I pulled a few out to give to the grade R and grade 1 teachers because it seemed like they would be better served in their hands. And I found a book about aliens that was sort of creepy and I questioned how well it would go over if kids took it home. So yes, I did a little censoring. Otherwise though, the books were amazing, and I was excited to get them recorded in the accession register and on the shelves. All it took was a piece of paper in a frame to get them!

In the library with our Library Excellence Award.

Home Redecorating

The new covers for the tables and chairs
in my "sitting area."

After a quick trip to Pretoria this week to get some cavities filled, I was feeling good and looking forward to having the whole weekend at home. I decided it was time to do a little cleaning and redecorating in the hut. A few weeks back I purchased some traditional Zulu fabric to make new covers for the cushions that sit on my two chairs, as well as table clothes to cover the two water buckets I use as side tables. The setup has been around for a while, but it needed a little updating. One of the grade R teachers at school happens to be my neighbor, and also happens to be a bit of a seamstress. My family recommended that if I wanted things sewn, I should take them to her. I dropped off the fabric, cushions and buckets a couple of weeks ago, so on Saturday I decided it was worth a visit to see if my order was complete. It was! I brought everything home, made a few adjustments (because that is just how I am) and invited my family to see the new “sitting area.” I must say it looks quite nice. If Home and Garden magazine ever does a “deep, rural” edition, I should really make the cover.

The kitchen area as viewed from the front doorway.

My wardrobe and work area as viewed from the front doorway.

Here is what I see when I look up!

Some of my new card and photo collages.

I was so inspired by the new décor that arrived on Saturday, that on Sunday I decided it was time to do something about the what was hanging on the walls. Since I first arrived, I have hung all the cards, pictures and letters that people have posted to me around the hut. There was no rhyme or reason to where they were put, and there was also a distinct lack of pictures of anything I had done since I arrived here in South Africa. I had time to remedy that second issue, as I was able to visit the local CNA (like a CVS) to print out 20 or so 4x6 pictures of things I have done since I arrived. After carefully considering all the new and old memorabilia I had to work with, I decided to create seven different themed posters to display the different types of cards and pictures I

Cards and pictures I have received from back home.

had. One poster is Christmas / Holiday cards from last year; one is birthday cards from April; one is a poster of pictures and cards family members have sent; there are actually two posters of pictures and cards friends from America have sent; one is cards celebrating miscellaneous holidays – a few Halloween, Thanksgiving, Easter, Valentine’s Day, etc; and the last is the poster of all the pictures I printed of my time as a Peace Corp volunteer. There are pictures of me with the family I stayed with during training, as well as my current host family, pictures of random things I have done at school, hiking adventures I have gone on in my village, my trips around South Africa, Lesotho, and Namibia, and the recent Mid-Service Training we had in Pretoria a few weeks back.

When I brought in my family to see the new decorations, they were overjoyed, especially with the collage of pictures from my time as a volunteer. They kept asking if they could keep things after I left. I said of course, but they pointed to nearly every single item and asked individually if it was something that they could keep. I told them that there were one or two cards from family and friends that I wanted to take home, but otherwise, they could keep all the pictures and most every card. I mean, I am a pretty sentimental person, but even I have limits. I don’t think the card from my sister that says Happy Easter is going to go anywhere but the dustbin when I unpack, so it may as well stay with people that seem to enjoy its existence a little more. At the end of the weekend, the house felt like new place; and in some ways, the homiest place I have ever lived.

Problems with Communication

I’m not sure if I have mentioned this before, but I never had a smartphone in the United States. My Motorola Razr lasted many years, and when I accidentally put it in the washing machine, I was able to find a used one on Amazon to replace it. When I got to South Africa, though, all the cool kids in the Peace Corps had a Blackberry so I figured I better buy one too. Bad move; mostly because it is a piece of junk. Well, at least the one that I bought was a piece of junk. It was fine at the beginning, and admittedly, it suffered a bit of abuse here and there, but it didn’t take long to start running slowly and freezing up randomly. Not long after I returned from Namibia it started to get a lot worse; the screen would go white and then just shut off completely. Also, the button in the center that serves as the mouse took a minute or two to respond or it simply did not work at all without restarting the whole device. By the time I came back from Mid-Service Training it was all but a paperweight. Another volunteer lent me a Nokia he bought when his Blackberry was on the fritz, so at least I had something that allowed me to check my email, check the weather on the internet, and communicate with other volunteers using Whatsapp (which, by the way, is a handy way to text back and forth with me, should you be interested. It uses data, but I don’t think too much.)

At one point, my Blackberry was up and running
it the remote deserts of Namibia. Those were the days.

The Blackberry was handy for a lot of things, though, so I didn’t want to just give up on it. BBM is nice, but not that important. The bigger thing was being able to download and upload documents and other files much more easily via email. And the Google Maps app was useful, as was the Twitter app. So not long after I got back from Pretoria, I took it to my shopping town, to a local “electronics shop,” and had it looked at. It seemed like the main problem at this point was the center button, which had completely stopped working. The guy at the shop agreed and replaced the button while I waited for about 15 minutes for the equivalent of $10. When he turned it back on, it appeared to be as good as new. How exciting! Not for long, sadly. The Blackberry was back to its old tricks after a few days, so it seemed the problem ran deeper than the hardware. I switched my SIM card back to the Nokia and figured I would give the Blackberry a rest until I had a chance to take it to Pretoria and try to “get it sorted” as they say here.

Unfortunately, that did not work either. When I took a trip back to Pretoria for a visit to the dentist, I made a stop at another “electronics shop” for a software update that I really thought would do the trick. No such luck. Boo! This guy suggested that maybe I get a new battery; another volunteer suggested maybe I get a new SIM card. But I was done at that point. I tried my best to fix things up; it didn’t work; time to move on. Let me say that I am not the least bit sorry that the company is looking at financial ruin. I look forward to getting an iPhone when I get back to America.

Battling Insomnia

It is frustrating when you can’t fall asleep. It is equally frustrating when you wake up in the middle of the night and can’t fall back to sleep. By the end of September, it seemed like one or both of these things were happening to me on a nightly basis. Even though I would be tired (read: exhausted) at the end of the day, I would toss and turn to no avail. On the nights that I did fall asleep, very often I would wake up between 3:00 and 3:30am and not be able to fall back to sleep again. It was like my body got itself into a bad routine and could not shake itself out of it.

As much as I tried, I didn’t seem to be able to solve the problem on my own. So I was grateful when the PC Medical Officer agreed to give me some medication to assist in getting me back on track. I took only half a pill starting the day after our September training, as well as changed a few things about my nightly routine, and it made all the difference. For starters, I made myself go to bed at the same time every night: 9:00pm. There was a time that I would have said that was impossible; I couldn’t possibly stay awake past 8:00pm or even 7:30pm. Now, the goal was to keep myself completely awake until nine, in the hopes that I would then be tired enough to fall asleep. Reading and writing tended to put me to sleep quickly, so I started to watch a TV episode or two. I had resisted having any media on my computer for the first year of Peace Corps, for a variety of reasons. Not having electricity meant watching anything would drain the battery all the faster. And given my slightly obsessive nature, I thought it might be difficult for me to watch just one episode of anything. I wanted to avoid becoming one of those volunteers that hid in their room after school and on the weekends and watched episode after episode of whatever they had. But at our Mid-Service Training, I finally broke down and “borrowed” two television shows from other volunteers: Parks and Rec (which I loved in America) and The Newsroom (which I never saw until I arrived here, but find highly entertaining). So I had a few things to help keep me awake at night, and my lack of electricity kept me from being too obsessed.

The other major change to my routine was that I no longer kept my phone next to my bed at night. Too often when I would wake up in the middle of the night I would check my email or twitter or look up something on the internet, that sort of thing. It really did nothing to put me back to sleep, and usually made me feel even more awake. So before I went to bed, I would turn off the phone and put it on the other side of the room to keep me from reaching over half-consciously and using it.

The real key to my battle, though, was the Ambien. Within ten minutes of taking just half a pill I was out like a light. The couple of times that I was with other people when I took the medication, I was told I was quite hilarious to speak to. I would answer questions basically in gibberish and more or less fall asleep in the middle of a sentence. Neither of which, I remember. But by the end of the first week of October, I was back on track. I was sleeping through the night and not waking up until 5am or 5:30am. That first weekend of October, I was brave enough to go to sleep without taking anything to help. I woke up around 4:30am, which was not necessarily ideal, but certainly better than 3am. A few days later I was sleeping until 5am without a problem. If I did wake up in the middle of the night, I was also able to fall back to sleep. Battle won, and I am happy to say that there haven’t been any problems since. It’s funny how helpful our body clock can be when it is working but how frustrating it can be when it is not. Glad mine is back on track.