Tick Bite Fever! - by John

Well, it as been an interesting week, and has led to our first encounter with the South African health system. Last Sunday night, Charlene notices a large red boil on my back, which was unsightly to be sure, but not painful and so I didn’t think anything of it. Monday I traveled to Jo’burg with Chuck for a meeting, and one the way their I noticed that one of my lymph nodes under my arm was hard, and as the day progressed it was getting bigger and painful to touch. Not only that, but I was feeling lousy, lightheaded, nauseous, tired, what was going on? I got back home late Tuesday, my lymph node was big and red and extremely tender, and so we consulted our home medical reference, which said “go to see a doctor immediately”(!). Oh oh!

Wednesday morning I called the doctors office, and much to my surprise I was given an appointment almost immediately. Co-incidentally, Danica was feeling under the weather too, so we both got appointments for the same time. We got to the clinic on time, but the receptionist told us that there had been a big emergency earlier that morning, and that things were running late, and, terribly sorry, we would have to wait. Which we did, for all of five minutes.

When we sat down with the Doctor (Dr. Reinike) and I started to describe my symptoms, she almost immediately said “TICK BITE FEVER”. Of course, it all sounded very…African, and my mind raced forward, seeing nasty parasites crawling out of orifices, gallons of blood, etc etc. Dr Reinike calmy explained that it was a bacteria that gets into your blood after a tick bite, that a short course of antibiotics would clear things up right away, and that this was a common disease that even “a village policeman could diagnose”. After she wrote us a prescription, we went back out to the receptionist to pay (MCC is self insured, so you pay cash for all your medical care), and found out that the appointment had cost us about $30 each.

Next stop the pharmacy, where I promptly got 10 antibiotic pills, for the grand sum of $1.25. All in all, our first experience with the South African health care system was great, and the "system" seems both inexpensive and responsive. However, I know that there are people in our community that cannot afford the doctors visits or even the pills, and I wonder about how even relatively trivial issues like Tick Bite Fever affect them, not to mention the ever present shadow of AIDS.

This is a picture of Mavis Shongwe and myself. Mavis coordinates the hospitality functions at C4L. If you look closely, you can see a tick biting me. My eyes are closed because I am flinching from the tick bite. The ticks around here are a little bigger than at home.

Wieler's English Dictionary by Charlene

There may not have been any language training required for our position but we’ve had plenty of South African words translated for us and some we figured out on our own. Here they are:

South African English	Canadian English
Tackies	Runners
Pinch	Steal
Robot	Traffic light
Just now	Later
Now now	Now
Bakkie	Pick-up truck
Lever arch file	Binder
Braai	Barbeque (charcoal)
Lapa	Patio
Boot	Trunk (of a vehicle)
Fetch	Pick up
Grade Naught	Kindergarten

Previous to Grade Naught, children often attend Grade Naught Naught which is pre-school and if they have working parents, they will likely have attended Grade Naught Naught Naught (seriously) which I believe is Day Care. We'll keep you posted on other learnings/misunderstandings as they happen!

First Week of School - By John

This is the week that the girls went back to school, for the first time since October. The beginning of school is always and exciting time, and sometimes it’s a little scary, especially when you are entering a school in a new country. School actually started on Wednesday, and so we dropped the girls off at 7:30, which is when school starts. We met both teachers and made sure the girls were in the right classroom. We are fortunate that our next door neighbours children, Ndzalama and Nsuku and in the same classes as Danica and Erin respectively, so the girls knew someone before entering the classroom. The girls have already started making friends, including another Canadian girl called Dakota, and we think they are starting to fit in and enjoy school.

The school is relatively formal, and they value and teach polite and respectful behaviour. For instance, when any of the learners (which is what they call students here) see an unfamiliar adult, they greet them with “Good Morning, Sir” (or Ma’am). Also, discipline is quite strict. If you forget your hat, you get a black mark in a special book. If you get three marks, you get a detention and have to work in the garden instead of playing sports. On a more serious note, if you get sent to the office, you get your name written down in a special book, and if you get your name recorded three times, you get expelled. Whoa! We had a long talk with the girls about not getting their names in ANY books. One of the rules is that the kids have to cover their notebooks first with paper, then decorate them (somewhat optional) and then cover them with plastic and so we (as in Charlene and the girls) have been diligently covering all the notebooks and binders for hours on end.

The school has excellent academic standards, having a 100% pass rate for the grade 12 exams, which is called Matriculation here. Danica is studying both Afrikaans and SiSwati, which will be a challenge since the other kids have already been studying those languages for at least a year, and probably speak one or the other at home.

Another interesting thing that happened this week is that the dogs started running with me. On Monday I started my run, and suddenly Lady was running along beside me. I shortened my route considerably, but nonetheless, Lady kept up, her short little legs churning away. Then on Friday, both Lady and Klaus started running with me, and this time Lady decided to quit when she saw the neighbour’s dogs, but Klaus kept going with me. I went a little further than with Lady, but had to walk the last bit because Klaus was not keeping up. Still, very impressive for a seven week old dog. Coincidentally, the man we bought Klaus from is a distance runner, who once entered Klaus’ father in a half marathon, which they ran together and both finished. The dog got the same medal as the human participants. I have high hopes of Klaus! I am also now thinking of joining the local running club, so we will have to see how things go.

Danica's New Puppy

Our family is finally complete with the arrival of baby Klaus (named by Danica after a character from the Series of Unfortunate Events). We are anticipating a series of unfortunate events on our kitchen floor so the naming seems appropriate! He is a pure bred Danish Wolf Hound and he is six weeks old. We were given the phone number of the owner by two different people within about 15 minutes this morning so we took it to be divine intervention that we were meant for this dog – or at least our kids took it to mean that. His parents look like White Alsatians and they are approximately the size of a German Shepherd. Hopefully he’ll look a little more intimidating than Lady does!

Ready to go!

The first day of school is still one week away on January 18^th but we are nearly set to go. The girls have all of their school supplies bought and labeled – not such an easy job when we had to translate words like khoki’s (markers), pritt stick (glue stick), lever arch files (binders) and swimming costume (bathing suit) and we now own an English/Afrikaans dictionary. The uniforms have been purchased for every occasion: winter, summer, athletics (track & field), house league sports and swimming (complete with a bathing cap) and special school hair accessories.

Erin is in the final year of primary school (going into Grade 3) and her daily uniform is a pair of long shorts and she will graduate to a skirt like Danica’s next year. Erin’s grade will be taking an overnight trip to Kruger Park in the third term and Danica’s grade 5 class will be taking a four-day field trip in the last term. Danica’s curriculum includes Natural Science, Social Science and Economic Management Sciences – good thing she likes science!

The girls are starting to admit that they are excited for school to begin and they are looking forward to meeting some new kids. We’ll keep you posted!

Into the Swing of Things - by John

It’s the first week of the new year, and it feels that after Orchard Camp and the holidays, we have finally started our “real work” with the center. Chuck and Heather have gone to talk to various embassies this week, and we are in charge of things, although it should be pretty quiet. Our first group of the year has just arrived (about six hours late due to car trouble).

Mennonite Cultural Hegemony

While MCC has tried to train us to be culturally sensitive, to learn and adopt our new culture and so on, we have resisted the trend, and have tried to push our culture onto others around us. We have done this by making a big batch of Portzelchen and forcing them onto our neighbours and friends. For those of you who have not capitulated to the Mennonite culture (yet), Portelchen, or New Years Cookies, are kind of like donuts with raisins, without the hole, and covered with icing sugar. Our neighbours pronounced them good, and wanted to know more about becoming cultural Mennonites, admitting that their own New Years Cake and Pastry traditions pale in comparison. Next, we plan to win them over with Borscht.

For Geeks Only

WARNING The following is intended only for those peculiar people familiar with the Unix command line. If you are not one of these, you will be bored!

One of the fun parts of my first week of ’06 was trying to get my Mac working, and plumbing the depths of Apples OSX operating system. I inherited an old eMac at C4L that I have been using as my office computer. It has worked well for me, and I had all my documents on it, until last Tuesday when it decided to stop booting up. Much research led me to uncover the “verbose” and “single user” boot options. It turns out it was getting stuck because rc.cleanup would never exit cleanly because there was something seriously wrong with the hard drive. What to do, I wanted to rescue my files! In the end, I had to run fsck –y from single user boot a bunch of times, mount the drive, to fire up vi, go into rc.cleanup and comment out a bunch of lines where it was cleaning up /private/_tmp_ where the problem area was, and do a shutdown –h. At that point the box was able to boot multiuser, but would end up at a command prompt instead of the GUI (because something else was busted and it wouldn’t run SystemStartup). That was good enough for me, I put in my USB memory stick, did a mount_msdos so I could see the memory stick from the command line, did a cp * and copied all of my files onto the memory stick. Success! Then I reinstalled OSX, and I’m back in business, more or less. Just goes to show you, old Unix admins never die. Good thing I came all the way to Africa so I could get out my (metaphorical) screwdriver. What’s next, holding my glasses together with tape? Actually, what’s next is that I am installing a small network in the C4L offices. If you are deeply interested, send me and email and I will keep you posted. I think it might be a little too technical for the blog.

It is now safe to continue reading the blog...

We wish all our readers a happy and prosperous new year, wherever you are. It was only a year ago that the first small thoughts of doing something different entered our minds, what a difference a year can make. It should be an interesting year for us, our immediate goal is to learn all about how the center operates, and start taking responsibilities for various functions. We already know there will be a lot to do. We are also looking forward to getting into a bit of a routine once school starts, as it feels like we have had no routine at all for the last six months.