Dive In.

Y’all. Culture shock is not joking around with us this time. Since I last wrote I have:

• Taken 2 bucket baths
• Taken 2 days off of bathing (if you know me, you know this is a big deal. I like clean.)
• Met at least 50 community members of Clare, South Africa—I think there are only 100 or so more. Not really. Maybe.
• Talked about Mandela’s “Long Walk to Freedom” with my bachelor-degree-holding host sister over a mouse fight in the roof beams of her ceiling-less (roof, no ceiling) house.
• Fallen asleep to cows, chickens, goats, dogs, and a variety of other noises that I’d rather not have identified.
• Seen the Milky Way. Every. Night.
• Warmed my icy toes with the genius boiling water in the waterbottle in the bed method.
• Set up and got stood up for at least 7 meetings.
• Learned a passable amount of Xiangan [I should know how to spell this, but I’ve only heard it spoken, not written]
• Gotten laughed at for even speaking Xiangan.
• Gotten a drumming and dancing lesson. Again, got laughed at.
• Asked many awkward “how do I…use the restroom, bathe, eat this, clean this?” questions.
• Befriended two precious 3 year olds. One of which at first thought I was going to kill her because I was white. Apparently she’s over that now.
• Learned how to make mealie pap (a sort of corn meal porridge).
• Brought a group of 10 Northwestern and 1 Stanford students to a quite rural village of South Africa to learn about social enterprises and asset based community development. Which they are now trying to explain to their host families in the simplest English they know how.
• Gotten freaked out that I’m not cut out for the next 3+ years of my newly made life plan.
• Decided that freaking out was lame and diving in to the completely awkward and awesome first few days of life here was much more fun.

Now let’s just hope I can get all of my students to that last one.

Thanks to an excellent friend’s encouraging phone call and another excellent friend’s encouraging blog post, I think I’m set. Let’s do this thing. And let’s love the heck out of some people on the way. After all, I’m pretty sure that love is pretty much the same in every country.