Still Alive

Whew, sorry for not writing at all recently. Everything has been really busy and, ironically, I'm too busy to fully bring you up to speed about all the business. Let me give you a bullet point-style breakdown of what's been going on in this neck of the woods, though, so you at least have some idea:

- End of February: Drove from Mtubatuba to Richmond (~13 hrs) to check in on the site and hang out with Anna. Sadly, had to return Chandler, our awesome pickup truck, to the farmer who owns it. Took a bus down to Cape Town for meetings with GRS bigwigs to bring everybody up to speed about progress on the Mtuba project and then rented a new car, packed it full of donated Nike soccer gear to use in KZN, and drove the ~20 hours back out to Mtubatuba. Long haul driving but pretty awesome way to see the country.

- Early March: A couple weeks of pretty unbroken time in Mtubatuba. Kept launching the GRS curriculum in our partner schools and checking in on our coaches. Remember, we just trained these coaches in our curriculum a month ago and many of them just graduated from high school and have zero teaching experience. A big part of what I can offer to this project is basically to make sure they are facilitating well and offer advice about connecting with kids, making the curriculum more fun, and so on. I can't understand a word of isiZulu so content-wise I'm pretty useless, but in any language you can definitely identify whether a coach is facilitating the curriculum well or not. Began coaching for the Mtuba Football Academy, which has been awesome. I really look forward to Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays when I help out the head coach of this rural soccer academy coach the 100 kids who participate. I'm in charge of the Under-10 age group...coaching soccer for little kids has to be one of the most rewarding experiences there is. Mtuba Rugby Club pre-season began, initiating what will surely be a long schedule of me getting pulverized by huge Afrikaner farmboys.

- Super recently: A week ago movie star actress Charlize Theron was in town to check out Mpilonhle's programs, which included her touring some of our Grassroot Soccer activities. I guess people probably say this most of the time after meeting celebrities, but she struck me as very normal and friendly. Got to eat lunch with Charlize. Pretty sure the relationship will end there, but will update you guys if anything happens re: a wedding date. Last weekend visited Anna in Richmond to help her with a huge VCT (Voluntary Counseling and Testing) soccer tournament she had organized. I was just a pair of hands on the day and had a blast. Anna did an amazing job organizing the whole thing: had a great soccer tournament, brought the community together, and we tested 179 people (7 of whom were HIV positive). Really cool to be there for that.

- Now: All kinds of stuff to organize with Mpilonhle: supporting 50 coaches, organizing GRS soccer camps during the World Cup, high school soccer leagues, and so on. Going to Johannesburg this weekend for a GRS training with a few colleagues from Mpilonhle. On the schedule: GRS training, hanging out with Soweto intern Karti, and trying not to get stabbed. Next week might go to a big music concert close to Durban with a bunch of the interns. After that the Zululand rugby season is starting and I should have some good war stories to share.

Need to get into town and get to work but will try to write a little more frequently once things settled into more of a routine and I'm not driving thousands of miles.

Chris

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Zulu Names Of Interest

Just an image-heavy post about some great Zulu names. They're drawn from the kids living in rural areas surrounding Mtubatuba who appear on our GRS Skillz attendance sheets. They range from...

...The Sweet:









...To the Career-oriented







...To the Nearly-American:





...To the Prophetic (and, above Thabani Wiseman, to the Unfortunately Mis-Spelled):






...To the Hyperbole-Laden:






...and, finally, to the Hilariously Ironic:




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Security in South Africa: Inyala Headquarters

At about 11:30 PM last night, after meeting up with a few Mtuba Rugby friends at the literally-20-feet-from-the-sideline-of-the-rugby-pitch bar called The Rugby Club and watching the Blue Bulls play the Free State Cheetahs, one of the guys named Vernon and I drove over to the headquarters of a company called Inyala Security. Vernon, a thick, 6-foot-4 Afrikaaner farm boy and literally one of the largest human beings I have ever seen, is a manager at Inyala Security, a security company here in Mtubatuba, which offers services including V.I.P. security, physical cash transfers, alarms with armed response, guards, and "farmwatch."

A few examples: when Charlize Theron comes to visit Mpilonhle here in Mtubatuba (Charlize is a big supporter...), Inyala picks her up at the nearby Richards Bay airport. When I look out the window at night and see a guy patroling the perimeter of our property, he's Inyala. Banks have 4 or 5 Inyala guys out front (Wild West-style bank robberies still happen out here in rural Zululand).

Now its time for a digression about security in South Africa. You really can't imagine how thoughts of safety and security control people's lives here. I mean, just imagine if every (okay, not every...but what if a huge percentage of...) middle class (and up) household in the States were locked down with windows criss-crossed by burglar bars, surrounded by electric fencing, patrolled by machine gun-armed guards. And don't just imagine the physical impact it might have on you (your ability to see out your windows), but imagine the psychological effect. To generalize horrifically, white people in this country, in my limited experience, are living in a constant state of fear. Some (maybe more than some) of that fear is absolutely justified: South Africa, is after all, a place with a lot of crime, violent crime, prime crime, crime-y crime, and all the other kinds of crime out there. It's just interesting to be immersed in a culture and a place where crime is a reality and fear is widespread. Which brings us back to Inyala.

It's 11:30 PM and Vernon and I are hanging out around Inyala. Vernon's telling me stories about Inyala subordinates and friends who have been killed and paralyzed in shootouts with criminals (Wild West...) while the cops were cowering behind their cars. Sometimes, it seems, these private security companies actually do a lot of the work that would clearly fall under the expectations of police back home. After taking ten minutes to find a key he had lost, Vernon gives me a tour not of Inyala's arsenal (which I'm sure is impressive), but of Vernon's personal arsenal, housed at Inyala. No less than three modern shotguns, a sniper rifle, four pistols and a late 1800s rifle which still works handed down through the generations to Vernon from a Voortrekker Dutch ancestor, we finally took off for our respective homes. I was raised to fear guns and, even though they weren't loaded, just being around this small stash was enough to make me feel more than a little uncomfortable.

But it's life for a lot of people here. Vernon has guns at his house, and he's trained to use them. Vernon's girlfriend has advanced pistol training. A lot of this is obviously somewhat specific to Vernon, a security professional whose job revolves around armed response. But my point is that in the States Vernon would be seen as somewhat "out there." Here in Mtubatuba he fits right in.

Normal Routine Begins

Hey everybody. Just finished a grueling two weeks of back-to-back trainings: this past Friday we graduated an additional 23 Skillz Coaches (on top of last week's graduating class of 21), now trained to implement Grassroot Soccer's HIV/AIDS curriculum in their communities. Here they are.



Last weekend was sandwiched between the two Trainings of Coaches so we took it pretty easy. We did get a chance to go to the nearby Mfolozi-Hluhluwe Game Reserve, which is an awesome game park located basically in our backyard. Most game park tourists, in my experience, plan their game-seeing trips like military operations: getting up at 5 AM to maximize the chance of seeing certain animals coming in from night hunting (mostly lions), hiring guides knowledgeable in the local wildlife and safety precuations, renting pimped-out Land Rovers with viewing platforms, and so on. We, on the other hand, went a more budget route - we slept in late, stumbling into the park around noon, and one of the Mpilonhle employees drove us out there in her SUV. We just sort of mosied around the park's roads, getting lost repeatedly, not even opting for the cheap-o game park map purchase. But, as my Lobsterman Uncle's good friend Henley would say, the price was right.

And, despite our poor preparations, we ended up seeing a bunch of awesome stuff. This place was packed full of cool animals...for our our laziness, we ended up seeing FOUR of the "Big 5" (the 5 most sought-after animals on game excursions: lion, leopard, buffalo, rhino, elephant). Here are a few pictures:

The game park was beautiful:





Buffaloes grabbing a bath:




"Excuse me, sir, have you been drinking tonight?"




Lion walking down the middle of the road:




Real work starts on Monday, and I'm just getting a chance to catch my breath from all the crazy trainings. Excited to get the ball rolling here, though. Playing on the town rugby team, and training with a great semi-pro soccer team, but only because the coach likes me. Expect updates soon.

Mtuba TOC

Mtubatuba Training of Coaches (TOC) #1 just finished, and 21 new coaches trained. Our partner organization here is Mpilonhle (in Zulu, "A Good Life") and 3 of the coaches are full-time health counselors at Mpilonhle offices here in Mtuba; those 3 will manage the other 18 (plus the ones we are going to train this week), spread throughout surrounding rural communities up to about 1.5 hrs drive away. Next week is TOC #2, where we're training 24 additional coaches. TOCs take a lot out of you, but "training the trainers" is always really fun. When the dust settles this Friday, we'll have 52 new Grassroot Soccer Skillz Coaches spread throughout 12 rural communities, aiming to work with several thousand kids before the World Cup starts. Exciting!

Briefly, Zulu is an awesome language which requires clicks and pops and squelches and all kinds of crazy noises that I have no chance of ever correctly creating (how would you pronounce Hluhluwe? I'll give you a hint: it requires puffing your cheeks out and shooting saliva everywhere). My forays into Zulu pronunciation, at least, give the coaches some entertainment.

TOC Graduate Group:

Mtubatuba

Big changes, and life is a bit too hectic to fully explain right now. GRS needed somebody to head out to rural KwaZulu-Natal to help with a project, so I've actually moved away from Richmond temporarily and am living in Mtubatuba, KZN. The environment (jungles, rivers, close to the ocean) is sweet, the GRS work is amazing, the Zulus are a crazy group to be working with, and life is great.

Will be writing about life here soon.

In the meantime, here's a map of where I am:

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=109669459514615678848.00047e38ff8dcdb6e8376&ll=-28.414352,32.199383&spn=0.07383,0.154324&z=13



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Don't worry, I am alive...

But just barely, for a variety of reasons but - most recently - after somehow emerging unscathed from ramming into an enormous baboon that decided to launch a surprise attack from the roadside bushes outside East London, sprint across a lane of highway traffic, and pulverize the front of my smallest-car-possible-allowed-by-law rental vehicle. I do, at least, have the cool license plate as a souvenir.

Sorry for not writing; it has been a hectic 3 weeks of African backpacking and travel. I decided not to go home for Christmas and, instead, gallivanted around South Africa and Mozambique from the end of work on 18 December and arriving home only at 6 AM the day work started again, 11 January.

Impending updates to include:
- Richmond Community Center Christmas Party (Santa on a Donkey Cart)
- Port Elizabeth - Durban "Surf" (read: belly-board) Trip, Christmas on the beach
- The 30-hour bus/taxi/shuttle journey from hell from Durban to northern Mozambique
- New Year's in Mozambican Paradise
- Durban - Port Elizabeth reverse Wild Coast Road Trip

Will put ink to paper on these stories and adventures as soon as I'm able. In the meantime, hope you all are doing well!

Chris