care package bliss

Hi all-

We’ve been spoiled by all the care packages you’ve sent us over the months, and we want to sincerely thank you for your kindness and generosity. We have good coffee and drink mixes, pain pills and daily vitamins galore, beef jerky and sausage and all kinds of tasty treats, great music and movies (getting movies/DVDs are cause for major celebration), yarn and crosswords, Splenda, magazines and newspapers, pictures, lots of seeds for the garden, socks and undies… it’s like year-round Christmas. And many packages have included things for people in our community too—which is really fun to give away. We once received a packet of Halloween stickers and the local kids loved them. We’re always excited to go to the post office… thanks to your thoughtfulness, we don’t feel particularly deprived of anything.

Well, maybe a few things.

After all these months, we still get quite excited about receiving any and all of the stuff on our long-standing care package wish list, but there are a couple of new items we’d like to add.

Duct Tape. Even here in Swaziland, not a week goes by that I don’t long for a roll of the greatest tape on earth.

Pens and pencils. For some reason, basic black-ink writing pens are kind of expensive and hard to find in Nhlangano-- and I’ve yet to find my pencil of choice, the Dixon Ticonderoga #2. go ahead and laugh if you want, but the DT2 is a beautifully crafted piece of hand-held goodness. Ever the cutting-edge futurist, Jamie-girl loves her mechanical pencils, but they don’t do it for me. One cannot chew on the mechanical variety-- I’m a Ticonderoga man.

Highlighters, and maybe a few Sharpies. We do a lot of flip-chart stuff for various events and displays. And we’d like to hand out highlighters to some of our students as prizes (instead of candy).

More pictures. I know pics are already on the list and we’ve been getting them, but we want more of YOU hanging from our walls. And we lost a bunch of ours (long story). So even CDs full of digital pics would be (and have been) great.

Rechargeable batteries—AA and AAA. Our headlamps and reading lamps take AAA and we don’t have rechargeables in that size.

Podcasts (on CD). We recently got a CD full of NPR/PRI podcasts, and it’s been great listening to them. Here are some podcasts we really like: This American Life, Radio Lab, KEXP Live Performances, surf video podcasts (like Fuel TV, DVS, Rip Curl or Shralp), Bill Moyers Journal, NOW, 60 minutes, Democracy Now… whatever you think we’d enjoy. We’re able to download some shorter podcasts when at the internet café, but the larger ones (esp. video) remain out of our reach.

Video of an NBA game: the Cavs’ first home-court loss to the Lakers last month. But I’m not picky—any good Cavs game will do… I just want to see LeBron James play. If you can figure out how to get it and put it on a DVD, I’ll be forever indebted.

Same goes for the Super Bowl. Heard all about it… love to actually see it.

GU or GOO… not sure how it’s spelled. It’s high-energy “food” sold in little squeezable packets that runners use during long runs and races. We want to have some for our upcoming 1/2 marathon in April.

Little things we can give to kids in our community—small toys or stickers or kid-size toothbrushes or small bars of soap or crayons or… whatever you might think of; we have fun giving and they have fun receiving.

As much as we love getting them, we’d like to offer you an alternative to sending care packages. Instead of spending all that money on postage, consider donating a similar amount to one of our projects-- or tell us what charitable idea you’d like your “care package” money to go toward. You wouldn’t believe how far $50 goes in Swaziland (as a reference, we’re currently living on a stipend of around $250 US dollars per month—which covers both of us). So for example, instead of sending us 2 care packages in 2009, just send us one—and donate the postage cost of the other one to a project we’re doing here in Zombodze. Or maybe make one of the packages a “charity pack” full of things we can provide to our community.

We still want to get your packages, believe me, but we don’t want their cost to cut into anyone’s charity budget.
Again, thanks everyone for your generosity, friendship and support!