bug sweeping, squatting and hut swapping

so i have found a new place to live! hooray! after the earwig incident i was left homeless, squatting in the homes of friends. that was a week ago. i still have another week before i can move...

last saturday my australian friend jenny and i went out to clean the earwigs from my hut. when we opened the door, everything was covered in earwig bodies. there were thousands that had been killed by the four bug bombs that i had set off. it was the most bugs i had ever seen in one place in my entire life! we had to sweep a path to walk through so we wouldn't crush them into the cement floor. we took everything out of my hut and put it in the front yard and then started sweeping. by the end, we had a pile of earwigs that resembled a large mound of grossness. my host mom wanted to keep them to show her husband when he got home, so she swept him into a box. it nearly filled the box. jen and my host mom mopped and re-polished the floor with the shoe polish that rubs off on everything and i went through all of my things in the yard, shaking bugs out of it all. since they have pinchers, they sometimes stick to things when they die, so i had to pick off a lot of bug bodies from sheets and clothes. it rocked. after we cleaned, we started to move the furniture back in and i realized that the earwigs were still falling from the ceiling, this time still alive. instantly there were 15 more crawling on my floor. i started stomping in attempt to kill them, and then i swept them out, only to find more had replaced them. it was a game i couldn't win. so i gave up, i moved my stuff back inside, and i left with jen to go get pizza, our reward for the cleaning. i haven't been back since because i don't want to stay there in the dark with the bugs falling from the ceiling. i am afraid.

since then i have had a series of ups and downs as i have been trying to find a new place to stay. i cannot stay in town because peace corps wants us in the community, so some of my coworkers have been helping me to look. i saw some ok places but all of them are much smaller than where i currently stay and none of them are in as beautiful an area. such is life i suppose. yesterday i went to look at a place that my manager joseph used to stay before he got married. it is a small cement room with a tin roof right outside the main home. the room is a normal bedroom size, and there is where i will sleep, cook, bathe, do dishes, laundry, etc. it is much smaller than where i am staying now, so i might have to get rid of some of my furniture, but i am pretty sure that i will not have to deal with it raining earwigs. the room is painted bright blue and has two windows to let in good light. there is a pit toilet in the yard and they also have a water tap in their yard, which makes me life so much easier! and the nicest thing of all is that it has electricity. right now there is only a light that they ran into the hut, but they are going to have someone come and run another extension cord that will have a plug on it so i can plug in things if i need to. i don't have any money left to buy electric things, so i will continue to cook and heat my room with gel and paraffin, but i am going to buy a water kettle to heat water, so that bathing will be much easier. a pensioning couple live in the house and their children are all grown and living elsewhere. they have chickens running around the yard and 4 cows that they keep in a pen. they also grow maize. i think it will be a decent place to stay, and i know my life will be at least a bit easier. it is also half the distance out of town, so now i will only have to travel 10-15km to get to and from work.

in work news, i am currently trying to get a computer lab up and running at our office for the community to use. we are having a guy come in to build customer counters and shelves since the room is quite small and once he is finished we are going to order 10 desktop computers. i have been contacting different people and running around visiting different places to try and get this thing moving and i must admit, it has been quite fun. i am also trying to register OADP for nonprofit status, which is a huge pain in the ass. i just recently found out that we have problems with our constitution but i cannot get the office in pretoria to send me the letter that states all the problems. it will be amazing if this ever gets done!

and that has been my life. the last week and a half have been really hard and i have often thought about going home. my bestest friend dana is getting married this weekend and me being here doing this seems like a really stupid reason to miss that. plus i don't feel super happy and i always feel extremely alone. here's to the last month of lockdown and the future of spending every weekend traveling to see a different friend.

When it rains it pours…

Monday night was just like any night in my hut. I got home around 6pm, I started cooking cauliflower for dinner, and I sat down to superglue my plates back together since 3 of them fell on the ground and broke into pieces (I don’t have money to buy new plates!) I had purchased more bug killer spray and so I casually sprayed around the two rooms of my hut. I noticed that more earwigs than normal started crawling out of the wood work to die, and I quickly started to kill them with TP. Some crawled under my spare mattress on the ground, so I lifted it up to spray under there and noticed through a whole in the carpet that there was mold. UGH! So I halted the attack on the earwigs and heaved the mattress into my kitchen and pulled the rug up to mop up the mold with bleach water. I was trying to decide if I should pull the whole carpet out cause there was some mold on the bottom when I noticed a noise from my kitchen room. The earwigs, which are infesting my thatched roof, started dying, which caused them to fall from my roof to the ground. It was only a few at first, and then the numbers increased and it sounded like rain as the bugs hit the cement floor. It was by far the most disgusting thing I have ever had to deal with. I quickly gave up fighting off the mold and cooking dinner, and crawled into my bed, which has a mosquito net over it. It was the only place I could avoid the rain of earwigs. I did my best to make sure I was protected at went to sleep… kind of.

The next morning I woke up and there were hundreds and hundreds of dead earwigs all over everything. Some were still living, and crawled around fighting for life. They covered everything in my home- floor, cabinets, food, desk, table, etc. I decided to rip the carpet out of my bedroom, so I spent the first 20 mins of the morning trying to pull it out from under my furniture. It too was covered in bugs. Then I packed up my kitten and my stuff for the day and lit two smoking bug bombs that I had purchased the day before. Realizing that I had a huge problem on my hand, I had a coworker go with me to many different stores in town to find out what to do about this whole thing. I was told to buy a fogger, which is like a normal American bug bomb that you set off. I bought two, one for each room, and was told that I had to stay out of the home for 3 days. When I went back to my home around 3pm to get clothes and set off the bomb, the bug problem hit a whole new level! There were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dead bugs all over EVERYTHING! I have never seen this many dead bugs before. It is easily going to take me an entire day to clean the two small rooms of my hut. I was so disgusted that I started crying. Everything was dirty and smelled like bug bomb smoke. It was the final straw.

I have since found out that this is common from thatch in the winter. You can’t really get rid of the earwigs so you just have to wait until it gets warm again. And it is better not to spray anything because they start to die and fall from the roof, which I found out the hard way. Just live with the bugs, that is what I was told. Shit.

I don’t know if I will be staying at my rondeval in Moyeni. My supervisor asked the staff to start looking for a new place for me to stay, still in a village, but maybe in an area with electricity. I don’t want to live with the bugs but I don’t want to move. It is beautiful where I stay, and my host family is nice. I have a nice home and I am getting used to not have electricity. I don’t know what to do. Just wait I guess. This is Africa, afterall.

i live in the mountains and i hate hiking. that is kind of ironic, isn't it? well you all will be happy to know that i finally went on a hike. my australian friend jenny and i went to royal natal national park, which is about 25 mins from my village of moyeni. it is in the northern drakensberg mountains and contains come of the peaks that i can see from where i stay. neither jenny or i really like to hike (or are in shape enough to do anything too extreme) so we decided to go for an easier hike along a gorge in the park. it was a beautiful sunny saturday, perfect for walking in the mountains and enjoying the area we get to live in. we set off around noon and walked along a relatively easy path down the gorge, which offered amazing views of the mountains and the valley around them. of course, about 10 mins into the hike my camera batteries died and i could no longer take photos. great! for some reason i also thought the path we were taking was paved, so i wore flip flops at foot attire. when we got there i quickly realized how that was a bad decision. although the path was by no means difficult, it was not really flip flop terrain. luckily, i made it in and out without any sprained ankles or broken bones. the two of us walked for about an hour and a half down the path and then decided that it was a good time to turn around and walk back. the whole hike is about 8km in and then 8km back. we didn't do the whole thing (clearly) but we made a decision to come back one day and do the whole thing. we shall see if that actually happens. either way, we had a lovely time just wandering around in nature, enjoying the warmth of the sun that is sure to leave us soon.

when we finished our hike, we decided that we absolutely needed to get pizza and beer (obviously we are real hardcore hikers). we went to the best pizza restaurant around bergville, which is way out of town on this random road. the place was super cute with chairs made of shovels and candle holders that were dancing african women. we split a pizza and had a couple beers and then decided to call it a night. jenny drove me home, stopping along the way at the water pump so i could fill my 6 liter bag of water to use that night on laundry.

the next day i decided to have a relaxing day in my hut. i woke up late (around 7:30) and made french toast. as i was getting back into bed to read for some hours, the children visiting my home decided to start harassing me. they were peaking in my windows and banging on my door and they absolutely would not leave me alone, even after i gave them a toy to play with. finally i gave up and had them come in to color a coloring book i was sent from america. they colored the whole book, using one color to scribble the entire page, not caring about the lines or the shapes. they also broke all of the crayons i had given them. this is why i love children. after an hour or so of this, i asked them to leave so i could do laundry and they went about their business. i spent the rest of the day relaxing and cleaning and playing with my kitten. i made pizza for dinner using a technique my dad told me about. i took two cake pans and placed one on top of the other so it would act like an oven. the pizza turned out ok although i burnt the shit out of the crust. such is life with no electricity i suppose. i made another pizza and took it to my host family so they could have some as well. all in all it was a good weekend. i try and appreciate them when they happen cause they don't occur all the frequently these days. one day at a time...

another birthday in south africa

two years ago yesterday, i was celebrating my 21st birthday in cape town, surrounded by friends and alcohol at the wonderful madame zingara's. that was an amazing day. i never thought then that i would be back here so soon, celebrating yet another birthday. yesterday i turned 23. the whole day i had this sad feeling in my stomach, not only because i was getting older, but because birthdays don't seem to be as big of a deal anymore. people celebrated with me, baked me cakes, bought me presents, and genuinely acted like they cared (cause they did), but something was still not the same. maybe this is how it is getting older...

i started my day driving back from pietermaritzburg, where i had gone for the weekend to buy a heater. i found a sweet one that runs on paraffin, and by sweet i mean it is probably going to gas me out of my hut. i got to see my best friend who is a peace corps volunteer living outside of pmb, which totally made my weekend. she made me this amazing cake that was delicious. it did, however, look like it had been blown up and stuck back together again. i left pmb in the afternoon, driving back with an australian friend that i met in bergville. she is allowed to drive a car here (imagine that!) we picked up another pcv who lives in bergville and the 3 of us headed north to our mountain town. once we arrived home, we picked up a few more people and went out to a bush camp to have a birthday braai. we were there for hours eating and drinking a bit of beer and wine, and just having fun talking with one another. after the feast, the girls brought out another cake that looked about as good as the first one i had but tasted great. we packed up all of our stuff and headed home around 11pm, the latest i have stayed up in months!

as you can see, i had a really nice day overall. i wasn't alone like i thought i would be. i wasn't in my hut feeling sorry for myself, like i thought i might be. i had new friends around me, showing me that my time here has not been a waste, no matter what i might think from time to time.

it still made me really miss home and my old friends though...

Birds, bugs, and a tiny new kitten

I have recently found out that I share my rondeval with a lot of birds. They like to build their nests in my thatch roof. I can sometimes here them at night, rustling around, shifting to get comfortable. It creeps me out so I put my headphones in a pretend it doesn’t exist. It the morning I usually hear them chirping and flapping around. So far, I have been ok with sharing my hut because the birds have stayed on the outside and I have stayed on the inside. However, last week when I got home from work, I found myself under attack. I opened my hut and walked into my first room which is my kitchen. I heard a commotion in my bedroom, so I pushed back the curtain and walked in. I instantly heard very loud chirping. All of a sudden I had a bird flying at my head, squawking and flapping, trying desperately to escape. I, of course, ran out of my hut screaming, unsure of what to do next. I went to get my host father, who started laughing when I told him. He walked back to my hut with me and as we were approaching the door, the bird dive bombed at us, finally finding his freedom. We ducked, and then my host dad told me everything was better and walked away. I spent the next 10 minutes making sure there were no other birds that had infiltrated the thatch. I am paranoid that there is a hole that they can get through now, so every time I hear them making noise, I look around and make loud noises hoping it will scare them. I am not so sure that it actually works. I also recently found out that something called bird lice exists and that I have to be careful not to get it. I was told that I will need to bug bomb at least every 6 months so that their lice doesn’t bother me. GREAT!

Along with the birds, I have found that I share my home with these sweet little bugs with pinchers. They are gross, but a lot smaller than the cockroaches that I shared my room with in Limpopo, so I try to just put up with them. We had a rather hard rain a few nights ago (which is uncommon because it is winter, which is the dry season) and I found that these bugs multiple when it rains. Either that or they fall out of my thatch (damn thatch is the cause of all my problems). I was walking around killing them left and right! They were on the walls, on the floor, crawling out of my stove top, crawling around my dishes, etc. It was AWESOME! Finally, I busted out my Doom bug killer and sprayed my whole hut, feeling satisfied that I had done my best to exterminate them. The next morning, I woke up to find the dead bug bodies all over the ground in both rooms of my hut. It was a joy to walk around picking them all up at 6am. And sadly, this only deterred their attack because the bugs have now reappeared, there solely to make my life miserable. Hopefully, when I bomb for the bird lice, these little bitches will also die!

Following this trend of creatures living in my house, I am happy to announce that I am now the owner of a tiny kitten! It is a seven week old male tabby cat and it is so damn cute! I had asked my neighbor to look out for a kitten for me, thinking that she would tell me when she knew of someone with a kitten and I could go and check it out and decide if I really want one. Just kidding! I came home from work the other day when it was dark and muddy and two boys were waiting there for me- with a kitten! My neighbor had sent them over once she had seen me walking home from work. I was excited, but not prepared at all for a new kitten. I had nothing to feed it, no place for it to go to the bathroom, and nowhere for it to sleep. And the thing looked scared to death and wouldn’t stop meowing!! Things have settled a bit now, I went to the vet and bought de-wormer and flea powder, I got a litter box and some cat food, and the kitten seems to be warming to me. I decided to name it unoshobishobi, which means tadpole in Zulu, which everyone here thinks is ridiculous. He sleeps with me most nights, curled up on my chest. Recently, he has started to wake up at 3 am and bat at my face. It is really annoying but I can’t kick it out of bed because he is too damn cute. I am totally in love and glad that I have someone to keep me company in my hut. Now I have to figure out how to get it back in the US, if the little thing actually lives that long!

bye bye heather, hello gugu

that is right folks, my new name is gugu, short for gugulethu which means precious or treasure or something like that? i hear different things every time. one thing that everyone does do when they hear my name is laugh. i take this to be a welcoming thing, like you are one of us cause you have a name we can understand. i am probably wrong.

so i have been in bergville now for 10 days. 10 long, interesting, confusing days. i am still alive and i haven't burnt my hut down with my candles yet, so i consider this a victory. it has definitely been interesting! i had a breakdown my first night in my hut because it was so dark and nothing was unpacked. i cried like a baby and then went to bed at 8pm without making dinner. since then, i can honestly say that things have gotten much better. everything is put away and i have kind of gotten the hang of things. my bedroom is pretty cozy and cute, with pictures up everywhere. my kitchen is functioning and will hopefully become more welcoming once i have spent some more time decorating it. i use tons of candles and paraffin lamps as my source of light and i cook (sometimes) on my two burner stove top that burns the green gel. i have a SWEET collection of buckets that i am proud of. i have buckets for dishes, buckets for laundry (which i haven't braved yet), buckets for water, a big ass bucket for bathing, and another one for mopping/throwing out my dirty water. oh i also have a bucket for peeing. it is pretty sweet. i have fetched water once since living there and it is a pain in the ass. the pump is a 10 minute walk away and i cannot carry the water back without the help of my 17 year old host sister, who throws the bucket on her head and walks back without using her hands to hold it. she totally puts me to shame. i have a whole new appreciation for how much water i use, and i have learned to bathe in a very small amount of water. i think hut life will be ok, if a little boring. the nights get lonely and i would kill to be able to watch a movie on my computer. i am considering buying a car battery and running my laptop from that. i will let you know how it goes.

i have absolutely no idea what i am doing at my ngo, but the people are very nice and i think i will like it. i have spent the last week and a half just following around joseph, my direct supervisor. most of it has been meetings or trainings that are all done in zulu, so i understand very little. what i gather is that the trainings are important and interesting, and it makes me angry that i cannot speak a lick of zulu. this also makes me wonder how i am going to help the hiv/aids sector when most of their work is done in the community or with community members and it is all done in zulu. i promise you all, i will never be fluent in zulu. guess i will just have to see how these first 3 months go.

in a couple weeks my whole office is gone because they take vacation days. normally, i would use this time to travel, but since i am on lock down and cannot leave the bergville area, i am stuck. the thought of staying at my hut for a whole week without coming to the office makes me nervous, but i am trying to come up with ideas for how to spend my time in a productive way. i just met a teacher who teaches at the primary school in my village (moyeni) and i have asked her if i can attend classes at her school one of those days. she is now very excited and already asking me for my input on things she is doing. the risk you run in asking to OBSERVE something. she has also invited me to some womens prayer retreat as well, which i will have to find a way out of. ha ha. i will let you all know how it goes.

ok i have to go catch my work taxi home. time for some more pasta for din din. maybe i will knit tonight. or maybe just go to bed at 9pm. i am officially a grandma!

my rondavel in the middle of nowhere.

sanibonani all! sorry for my extreme lack of posting but i hardly ever have access to the internet these days (and will probably have very limited access for the next 2 years!) i have lots to tell, so this may be a long post!

so i have officially become a Peace Corps volunteer. we had a swearing-in service on april 3, 2008 which means that my 2 years of service started from that exact date. it was a fairly simple process of taking an oath, but it meant it a lot to me, seeing as how training was not the most fun time of my life. since i have finished training and become a volunteer, i have left the village of bakenberg and the province of limpopo for my permanent site of bergville, kwazulu natal. this is where i will be living for the next 2 years of my life (if i make it that long).

bergville is a tiny town in the drakensberg mountains. it has one grocery store, a couple banks and a post office. there are no internet cafes or movie theaters. the whole town is made up of only 5 or 6 blocks as far as i can tell. the ngo that i will be working for is called world vision and it is located in bergville. world vision is an international organization that has its headquarters in seattle. i am not really sure what they do, but i know that their main focus is children and that they are very christian (you will find that christianity is attacking me here in rsa). as far as what i will be doing at world vision, i am not sure. my first day is tomorrow and i am supposed to spend the first 3 months just observing so i can find a place where my skills will be most useful. i want to do something with hiv/aids, so hopefully that will end up working out. i am excited to work there but at the same time nervous because a) i am not religious and b) both people i am supposed to be working under are very very very busy and i am not sure if they will have time for me. at this point i don't want to be left on my own to figure shit out but i get the feeling that that is what i will end up doing.

i am not personally living in bergville, but will instead be living in a village called moyeni which is about a 25-30 drive outside of bergville in a pretty rural area. i will be getting to and from work via khumbi or minibus taxi, which takes a bit longer and is the main method of transportation for black south africans (you will probably never see a white person on a khumbi!) i am staying in a double rondavel (a round hut with a thatch roof) that doesn't have electricity or running water. my rondavel is located on a family compound, so they have a house next door to where i will be living in the same fenced in area. the family is very nice, although i am nervous about the 17 year old host sister for reasons i will not write here. there is a father, mother, young son, the 17 year old and a dying brother-in-law. their home is quite small but very cute. they have a jojo tank outside their house (it collects rainwater to use for water) and there is a pump about a 10-15 min walk away where i will also have to get water from. the village of moyeni is very cute but very rural. the houses are very spead apart and i am still not sure how i will get from house to house to get to know my community. a bike is out of the question because the roads are so bad that even a normal car can't get to my house; it needs to be a truck to get through the mud. the mountains are off in the distance and are what i see every morning and there is also a lake nearby, although nobody swims in it. i am scared as shit to live without electricity but i am going to give it a go. i am the only volunteer out of my group of 30 that doesn't have electricity. i will cook using a two burner stove that has a gel i pour in and burn. i bought a gas lamp and a ton of candles and i am hoping this will do. i have no refrideration so that should be interesting and i might see if i can get a gas fridge, although i am doubting that i can pay for that. i will continue to bathe in a bucket and do my laundry/dishes in a bucket. oh joy!

there are two volunteers from the group two before mine that also work in bergville. one of them works at world vision with me. they have a different living situation because they stay in an apartment in town (and no, i cannot do that. i have already asked!) they will be leaving in september but at least they will be around to help me for the first 5 months. antoher volunteer from my group was supposed to work in bergville with me, and in fact when we came to visit for a week in march she came with me. the rondavel that i am living in was supposed to be her home and she was supposed to work for world viison. she decided after visiting here that she wanted to work someplace else, so she did not return with me and my living situation and ngo were switched. needless to say, it has been a stressful few weeks for me being moved from one place to another and finding out that i was no going to have to rough it on my own.

i have access to the internet on my cell phone but it is slow and i cannot send emails from it. i can, however, check my emails and post facebook messages (go figure!) so you can send me stuff from time to time that way. i am in the process of trying to hook my phone to my laptop so it can serve as a modem but it isnt working and i dont think i will be able to get it to work on my own. plus, i dont have electricity so i will probably just leave my laptop at work and will thus hardly use it anyways. if you do want to stay in touch, please send me mail. i love writing letters and love love love receiving them. my new address is:

heahter o'neil c/o OADP
po box 37
bergville 3350
kwazulu natal
south africa

you can also try texting me, cause i am able to text america and europe. my cell number is +27838639307. if you text (or call!! it is free for me!!) from america, you would dial 01127838639307. anyways, it is an option for you all.

ok i think that is the pretty much all i have to say. i must admit that right now i am having a really hard time here and kind of want to come home at least once a day. i hope that things will get better once i have been here awhile, but i still have doubts as to whether peace corps is right for me. i guess we will see how it goes ;-)