So, barring miraculous Zambian internet, you won't hear from me for three weeks. While I'm gone you can marvel at this brief summary of what I'm going to do
We're headed up to the North early tomorrow morning where we spend 6 days with host families. In the mornings we'll do programming--speakers, lectures, etc, and then spend the afternoons and nights with our families, doing whatever they do--farming, building things, taking the cattle to watering holes. Good old African stuff. From there we're spending a few days camping in a nomadic tribal area and learning about their culture, and then over to Etosha, the game park. It's then fall break, when myself and 5 other people will be heading directly from the North to Livingstone, Zambia to hang out at Victoria Falls and be generally touristy for a few days. I'll be back on the morning of October 25.
Here's a little bit more detailed information for those of you who are interested:
The homestays will be near the town of Outapi, just south of the Angolan border, roughly center on the east-west axis, there we'll be until Saturday afternoon. I know a little bit about my family. There's a mom (maybe a dad too?) and 5 children. 4 boys 7-22 and a 13 year old girl. They have a lot of livestock including cattle, goats, chickens, and pigs.
On Saturday we head out for Opuwo, which is where the tribal people will be (they're from the Himba tribe, if you wanna look that up). That will take us through Tuesday the 12th. The next two days we're in Etosha.
I'm taking the 10pm bus out of Otjiwarango to Livingstone on Friday the 15th, and the bus back from Livingstone to Windhoek overnight on the 24-25 October.
For all of this, but especially the home stay, I'm very excited but also really nervous. It's going to be just unlike anything I've ever experienced before, and that's nerve-wracking. I'm especially concerned about the language barrier. But it will also be an excellent thing to have experienced, and I'm sure will be a very very educational experience.
I'll try not to get Malaria, mauled by a lion, or fall off the edge of the waterfall. Otherwise this blog would get very boring very quickly, and we can't have that.
So yeah, if I can get on the Web in Livingstone, I might post. But I don't know how likely that will be.
I hope you all have a good three weeks!
Thanks. I caught back up if you want to go back and see what I said. Your earlier laziness made me lazy. But I'm back.
ReplyDeleteQuick update on me:
Graph Theory is not a breeze, but is really interesting. The other classes that involve teaching me to teach more effectively have been useful. Even though large portions of these classes deal with common sense, and at times seem too formulaic (see Curriculum & Instruction 401 last Wednesday)I constantly find details in my mental future classroom I need to update. So they are beneficial.
Frisbee is good, not enough people show up to practice, but it's still very enjoyable. We have the potential to be so much better, its just disappointing others are not as concerned with improving. Frisbee is probably the number 1 stress reliever in my book.
My apartment is good. We go through so much food, it's ridiculous. One of my roommates, Palmer, you probably haven't heard me mention his name much, but his girlfriend is living with us too. So I actually live in a place with 5 total. Charlie and I laugh at the shit she says and does all the time.