Misc food and other thoughts

Here we are!

Miscellaneous things I've been thinking about.

There are few street lights and signs on the highways so one never knows where the next gas station is...and there are no rest stops. It is common for guys to be going to the bathroom by the side of the road - and they do not necessarily turn their backs to cars zooming by.

Many people - especially children - go barefoot. In the grocery store today there was a 50+ year old man with bare feet. Kids are even barefoot in the schools.

Cars use diesel, unleaded or even leaded gas still. We are paying about $4.50 a gallon. You cannot pump your own gas at the station.

Mealie pap - which is corn meal porridge - is eaten for many meals. We are getting used to it for breakfast with milk and sugar.

There is no high fructose corn syrup here. Sugar is used as the sweetner.

I have found my "happy place". It is a store called Fruit and Veg. They sell fruits like papaya, granidilla, guava, etc....the dried guava is amazing and I can get a big bag for about $1.50. The kids can down a bag in one sitting so I am glad it is cheap.

A loaf of sandwich bread is about $1.20. AND they have good bakeries with nice breads for dinner. Chocolate chips are very difficult to find and to buy a boxed cake mix or brownies is over $6.

Deb

Pretoria LEGO clinic

We are in Pretoria for 3 days conducting a robotics clinic for 11 coaches and their 60+ team members. Yesterday afternoon I worked with the coaches who ranged from 1st-3rd year coaches. Today Hans, Annika, Laurie, Zac, Mark and I spent a whole day with the kids. We did beginning and advanced programming, team building activities, public speaking and project planning, board strategy and building techniques. The kids enjoyed seeing the Techno Travelers robot perform on last year's board as well. Tomorrow morning I have a strategic planning and brainstorming meeting with a combination of coaches, operational partners and the head FLL person here in South Africa.

The kids are enjoying free internet in the hotel, the big breakfasts and hanging out together.

Friends arrived

My friend, Michele, and her 4 kids arrived from Ohio on Thursday. Zac is 15, Sebo is 13, Elle is 10 and Lorenzo is 6. It is great to see friends and hear American voices. We are working together with the LEGO robotics program here and spent the afternoon at a school with 5 new teams today. We taught them basic building techniques and how to start a new program in NXT-G. It is the basics but still fun to see their enthusiasm and questions.

Getting internet today on the farm...we hope.

Deb

Miscellaneous items from the week

Annika is explaining the FLL challenge board to kids at a school. Hans, Laurie and Annika pose by the banana bunch we cut. And here we are playing on the raft.

Here is where we live with the Theron family.

BIGGEST news...we are getting internet at the farm!

Deb

Basketball

In five weeks of being here and traveling extensively throughout the country I did not see a basketball hoop. Soccer and rugby are the popular sports and get the funding. However, through, C4L, the organization I have been working with while here they found some rural township kids who play basketball. So we (Donald from C4L and I) set out to a rural township to do a basketball clinic.

We were supposed to leave the center at 1:30, but I found out about something called “Africa time”. It happens when it happens. We ended up leaving at 2:15 and met with the “team.” After arriving and looking around I still had not seen a basketball hoop. As it turns out, the team does play, but they play on a “net ball” court. Net ball looks similar to basketball hoop, but doesn’t have a backboard. And it is played mostly by girls.

So I met with these guys and talked to them for an hour and a half about basketball; rules, violations, fouls, shot clocks and anything else that they would ask about. I demonstrated with a can of back beans since they didn’t have a basketball. The soccer ball they used went flat.

They are interested in learning so I will continue to go out there to work with them. Pieter and I are working to make a basketball hoop. Pieter welds, so we are working on it in the back yard. We’ll see how it goes and see if they can come up with a post to put it on.

I also got to peek in on choir practice and got to listen to the best music I have heard here.

Mark

Sports for Social Change

Mark is working with the Desmond Tutu Center for Leadership using sports for social change. Tomorrow he will go to a school in a township (generally a poor black area) and teach some basketball. Afterwards the kids will listen to their youth coordinator talk about child trafficking. He is also working on a big soccer and track event that will involve about 250-300 kids on an upcoming weekend. The hardest part about making connections with people is that we live 45 minutes away from the town. There is definitely no hopping on your bike to quick run an errand.

Deb

LEGO robotics teams

We have met with two of our schools involved in LEGO robotics. We are helping 16 teams in total. The coaches and kids are all bright-eyed and excited. The kids range in age from 9-16 and most have no experience. We are at the initial teaching stage and there is much to do...all fun.

Deb

Kruger Day 2

We woke up early this morning to try to find Lions, as they are most active in the morning and at night when it is cool. We were rewarded when we found a family, called a pride, of at least ten lions resting in the sun. They stayed around for a while and we got more than 70 pictures of them.

We also spotted a Yellow Hornbill, numerous Giraffes, an ugly black bird called a Ground Hornbill and three hippos.

To finish off the day, we went on a night Safari. We were lucky enough to see three Leopards together, which is very rare as you are lucky to see one! We also spotted a Spotted Genet Cat, a Black Genet Cat, a White Tailed Mongoose and a Marabou Stork, a member of the Ugly 5.

7536 Video of Leopards

Hans

Internet

We are struggling with internet access! When we do find it, it is expensive and slow. This is probably the hardest thing about being in South Africa for us. Connection to family and friends and information in general is something I guess we take for granted. Hans will need access each Thursday for two online classes he takes through The Potter School...we are not sure how this will happen. Because of this we are not able to post the pictures we are referencing in our blog. As soon as we have decent internet speed we will try to update the photos.

Deb

Kruger Day 1

Hippopotamus family We got to see a family of hippos swimming in a large watering hole.

6890- Giraffe We saw an abundance of Giraffes including some babies.

Leopard We saw many cars parked along the road and we looked around to see what they were looking at and we spotted (pun intended) a leopard lying in the tree. We even got to see it climb down!

In our camp ground we saw vervet monkeys grooming each other.

We saw many zebras in small herds(3-5). Each zebra is unique in their stripes. Some thick, some thin, some dark, and some light.

Annika

Friday, September 3rd

We had plans to go to Mozambique for the weekend to see Mark’s brother, Todd. Due to political unrest in the country it is not currently safe to travel there so we have changed plans. Evidently the people were protesting due to the increase in gas and bread prices. The police were “managing” the situation with rubber bullets. Sixteen people were killed when they switched over to live ammunition. Now there are riots. So we’ll spend three days fishing and traveling into the big game reserve Kruger National Park where we hope to see lions and leopard. And more elephants.

Mark catching rainbow trout in the Sabie River. He was pleasantly surprised to catch 9 fish on his fancy new fly rod.

Wednesday, September 1st

Today is the first day of spring and we are happy to be back “home” with our host family. Here are Francois , age 9(called Pukkie – short u sound) and Franzel, age 12, building legos with Hans and Annika. Teammates Laurie, age 14, and Dominique, age 14, help Hans clean out the rondavel to make a place for their LEGO robotics team to practice. I will be coaching this team called Jinx-Jinx (it means computer wizard in Afrikaans). Our other team members will be Zac, Hans’s friend from Florida, and Annika who has recently been switched over to this team.

Johannesburg - Tuesday, August 31st

We toured Soccer City stadium in Johannesburg with 5 other people and our friendly guide named Efram. The locker rooms were very unimpressive but the stadium and field were pretty cool. The kids would liked to have kicked the ball around but we were not allowed on the grass. Its capacity is 90,000 people.

Apartheid Museum

We were not allowed to take any photos inside of the museum. We read about the history of apartheid for over 3 ½ hours and then came to a sign saying we were at the half way point of the tour…as we were heading back to our host family that evening and wanted to minimize the time we traveled in the dark we cut our tour short (it gets dark about 6:15 PM). There are not words to describe the emotions of this experience.