Survivor ✌️

Survivor, the cat

Survivor in Carissa’s lap

Track and field competitions!

Helping out with track and field, wearing our school jerseys

An example of a school kitchen where the food is cooked by fire. Some (many / most??) have gas stoves and countertops and things though.

School food is served in dishes like these.

-| From Jonathan |-

Hi, everyone! Thanks for giving me some time to write this update. I had ambitions to write a post documenting a day in the life here, but after putting it off and putting it off some more, I had to realize that I don't really enjoy documenting my life like that, and I never found the energy to do it.

So, instead of never writing to you again, I chose to pivot, and in this post, I'll just give a brief description of daily life here, and then I will give you updates on anything interesting or maybe even uninteresting.

Daily life on the weekday:

• Wake up at 5:00 to exercise or 5:25 if we are not gonna exercise

• Make oatmeal, prepare a PB sandwich for lunch, say hi to the cat and dogs, and do standard getting-ready-for-the-day things involving buckets.

• Throw a treat to the dogs as we open and close the gate behind us so the dogs can’t follow us to school.

• Walk to school together, 15 minutes to Carissa's school, an extra 5 for Jonathan. Greet anyone we see along the way with a smile. Arrive to school around 7:00 or at least before 7:30.

• Greet staff and kids, and sign in to the register book.

• Carissa spends the day in the grade 1 classroom and tries to spend some time with kids in the library.

• Jonathan does not spend the day in the classroom. He spends the day helping kids with their science project, doing a quick phonics lesson with the grade 1 kids, and responds to miscellaneous requests from teachers.

• Break is 10:00-10:50, but neither of us really take a break at that time. The teachers eat the same thing as the kids which is something like bogobe (staple food) and beans and cabbage, or rice and fish, or samp (another staple) and beans, or bogobe and milk, or rice and soya and pumpkin.

• We "knock off" at 3:00. Jonathan walks to Carissa's school, and then we walk together back home.

• Once we get home, the most regular routine is that as soon as we open the door, Survivor, the cat walks in and wants all the love and attention she can get. (Our host family named her Survivor because she fell down the pit toilet, and we rescued her by typing a rope around a bucket, putting meat in the bucket, and then we managed to get her into the bucket, and we pulled her out. So, yeah, we saved her from a really shi*$y death.) Anyways, after we get home, that's when things really vary day-to-day. We might spend time with kids, or clean, or cook, or chill and talk, or spend a little time with the host family, or kill a small army of flies, or visit someone at their house, or we practice a line dance, or Carissa bakes something, etc.

• Eventually we eat dinner.

• After the sun sets, we close our windows and door, and we do our nightly routine which involves some amount of decompression one way or another.

That’s it.

Alrighty, updates...

Trump stopped funding and assistance specifically to South Africa, siting a few things he disagrees with South Africa about. So we’re keeping an eye on that. Fun fact: Elon Musk is originally from South Africa.

The roof on Carissa’s school has been fixed. They even repainted the building. It looks nice.

We are soooo thankful that this summer has been much more mild than last year. We've gotten lots of clouds and some rain, so it's been great, and it’s almost autumn!

We are going on a vacation soon. We're gonna backpack the Drakensberg mountains for a few days. It's time to get our fill of nature again, and these mountains will definitely do the trick.

Thanks for keeping in touch. It helps us a lot.

>> Jonathan