2-1/2 hours in 2-1/2 minutes

Recently, many of you joined us in helping our local Christian church repair some severe storm damage their building incurred about 5 years ago. This was a completely unofficial effort on our part—not a Peace Corps thing, and last week we finished up our part of it. Those involved should have just received an email detailing what you helped do, but for everyone else I’ll summarize: (USD)$1255 was raised and, as a result, The church now has the building supplies needed to repair their roof (beams and corrugated sheets and screws and nails) and to rebuild the damaged sections of their concrete-brick walls. It’s not enough money to build a brand new church building, but it should be enough to make the existing one structurally sound.

Since we’re leaving next week, we won’t be around to see the final result of this effort. But with the materials now in-hand, their repair work can begin.

Anyway, I made a little video from some footage I took at one of the Sunday services (which are held in the damaged building, as you’ll see) so now you can all have a glimpse of this congregation in action.

Final Garden Project Update

Well, our work on the community garden’s water system has finished, and I just turned in the final reports and paperwork to the Peace Corps office (it was a PC Partnership Project). So I thought I’d give you all a little summary report as well—after all, you helped fund it.

First of all, some numbers for you. I surveyed garden members recently, asking them about their homesteads, their garden usage and how this dry season compares to last year’s dry season—which was prior to our project. And as you’d expect, having a reliable source of water in the garden has changed things for the better. Nearly everyone I talked with reported having a better food harvest and planting more seedlings this dry season. And right now, about 80% of the garden’s land has been cleared and/or plowed, compared to about 35% utilization last year. Garden membership has already doubled (from 10 active homesteads to 20, and from about 25 active gardeners to over 50), and it continues to grow. What's most encouraging is, all this growth is happening during the dry season.

And here are some water system specs:

• 1 concrete streamside reservoir
• 730 meters of new 110mm underground piping (and about 1km of total underground piping)
• 1 big steel filter placed over the beginning of our pipeline
• 5 shut-off valves located at various spots along the pipeline
• 32 standpipes and self-locking garden spigot heads (20 of them brand new)
• 4 big concrete water tanks inside the garden
• 3 pipeline flush-out locations
• 1 new maintenance wing of the Garden Committee
• 1 new water system maintenance manual (in siSwati)
• 1 big bag of spare parts, tools and repair accessories for the Garden Committee

Now for some pictures of the new water system’s main components...

Here’s one of the standpipes and garden spigots. There are 32 of them in the garden (16 on 2 different pipe rows), and we replaced 20 of them.

Here’s the water reservoir. It’s where our pipeline begins.

Here’s the main flush-out pipe and valve. This streambed is the low-point of our pipeline, so it's the best place to drain (and clean out) the system.

Here’s one of the garden water tanks. We built 4 of these in selected spots in the garden. Together they hold about 3700 gallons of water in reserve, especially useful when the pipeline needs to be shut off for maintenance or repairs.

Here is one of two lower flush-out spots. We installed these removable caps onto the end of the 2 rows of piping in the garden. Now they can flush out any debris or build-up from the spigot lines, which should considerably extend the life of the system.

Here’s the cover of our garden water system maintenance manual. It’s a 20-page guide to the system components, routine maintenance schedules, and replacement parts. And it’s in siSwati, thanks to the translation assistance of a few local friends. I distributed it to all the Garden Committee members as well as their 4 maintenance assistants/experts.

Much of our recent work on this project has been aimed at enhancing the long-term sustainability of this water system. And in this case, sustainability really hinges upon maintenance: will the garden members continue to maintain their water system, will they make future repairs properly and protect its components from vandals and cows… all of this remains to be seen. We’ve equipped them with all the tools and skills we could think of for them to do these things, and now it’s time for us to let go and step away. After being an active part of that garden for almost 2 years now, letting go isn’t an easy thing to do.

But when you’re done, you’re done. And we’re satisfied with the fruits of this labor, satisfied that it provides a good opportunity for these local gardeners to bring more food into their kitchens and to earn some income selling their surplus crop (right now in the garden, the going rate for a head of cabbage is E5, or about 65 cents). So we thank all of you who contributed to this project. You really did help improve the daily lives of people in Zombodze, and we hope this little report makes that truth a bit more tangible to you.

Primary School Library Grand Opening

The other week, Ngwane Central Primary School held a Grand Opening ceremony for its brand new (and first ever) library. In all, the project has been a great success, bridging old book donations with new ones from 3 different sources: Darien Book Aid, Books for Africa (which many of you personally donated through via the Peace Corps Partnership Program), and from the teachers and Penpal students in Cottonwood Arizona. In all, there are now over 2000 books on the shelves. A new Library Committee has been formed, a card catalogue has been created, books have been color-coded and organized by subjects and the lending can begin.

Thank you to all who contributed to this project. It's been a lot of fun for us, and really rewarding for everyone involved (hopefully you too).

Here's a very short video about the Grand Opening day...

And here are a few pics of the book check-in process, which we helped the kids do over a 2 or 3 week period.

This was early on, when the shelves were still mostly bare. In all, more than 30 kids helped us and a handful of teachers in the book check-in process. Many of them had never before known how to identify an author, publisher, or even title. So this was quite a crash-course for them.

Here's the book check-in assembly line. 5 stations, all in a long row... Henry Ford would be so proud.

We received enough dictionaries to keep one in every single classroom, plus have a few left in the library. this made the English teachers very, very happy.

We received lots of beginner/young kids' books as well as young-adult books. a good mix.

our Zombodze church needs help

Over the past 20 months we've established a relationship with a small Christian church in our Swaziland chiefdom of Zombodze, and they have a pressing need that we thought perhaps some of you might want to consider as a charity/outreach opportunity. So if you and/or your church group are interested in helping to fund the construction of a new church building for this congregation, now is the time to contact us and donate.

This is an unofficial fundraising effort. No Peace Corps program affiliations, just us two trying to help our adopted church. Anyway, $5,600 (USD) is what's needed to make this happen-- $5,600 builds a church structure here!-- and we're inviting you to be part of it.

Here are the basics: some years back a storm severely damaged the church's one and only structure, collapsing half of their one-room concrete block building. There are about 60 church members, and they're quite poor-- can't raise enough money to fix the damage. They still meet there every Sunday, holding service under what remains of the roof, yet the building is just not safe. It suffered major structural damage (I inspected it), and all but the concrete slab needs to

be completely replaced.

So I had the pastor make a listing of the building materials needed to build a new structure (same size/dimensions as the existing one), and we've now received competitive price quotes from two local hardware stores for the purchase of that material.

The cost of materials comes to about US$4,300 at the current exchange rate, and the cost of labor is about US$1,300. So for about $5,600 USD we could build this congregation a brand new church building.

Here's how it'll work. No cash will be given directly to the church leaders; instead, we'll collect donations personally and then purchase the building materials ourselves (in conjunction with the pastor, of course) which will be delivered to the building site. Contact us for more info.

We're leaving Swaziland in August, so we need to set a tight fundraising timeline on this project: please contact us no later than July 15th. That's about 2 weeks away. Any donation amount is gratefully accepted-- and please consider asking your church group to participate.

Thanks! email us: cooktimothy@hotmail.com and we'll tell you how to donate.

What happens after Swaziland?

We’re now in the final 12 weeks of our Peace Corps service here in Swaziland, so I think it’s high-time to brief everyone on the details surrounding our departure. If you don’t feel like reading the below stuff and just want it in a nutshell, here it is: Our Peace Corps service ends on August 7^th, after which we’ll be traveling for a while through Africa, India, and SE Asia before coming home.

First of all, our official “Close of Service” date is August 7^th. Some people in our group are leaving earlier while others are extending their service or are otherwise staying here in Swaziland for longer than that… but we’re outta here after the first week of August. This date is certain.

And we won’t exactly be coming straight back to the U.S. We’ll be taking a more… circuitous… route back home. Without getting into too much detail, we feel it’s important to give you all back home a sense of what we’re endeavoring to do. Maybe you have travel plans that intersect with ours— maybe you’ll even want to make some. Or maybe you’re just wondering when we’re planning to get home. Either way, I hope the following info helps. But since these plans will likely change a bit, we’re not yet ready to give an exact date of return to the US.

After leaving Swaziland we’ll go to Mozambique and travel northward through that country with our friends (also married PCVs serving here in Swaziland) up into Tanzania. Could take as long as 3 weeks in Moz.

Then we plan to go to Zanzibar, an island off the Tanzanian coast. Once back on the mainland we’ll travel northward through Tanzania and Kenya, and then we’ll pause in Ethiopia to spend some time that country. Maybe 2 or 3 weeks in Ethiopia. Then we’ll continue north through Sudan (or perhaps fly over it entirely) and spend a little time in Egypt. This might be sometime in late September.

From Egypt we plan to head east into Jordan (and perhaps even Israel), and fly from Amman (Jordan) to New Delhi, India. This might be in October. We’d like to spend a number of weeks in both the north and south of India. Then we’ll fly east from India to Thailand, which will be a launching point for travels in Southeast Asia—especially Cambodia and Thailand, but also hopefully Vietnam, Indonesia and/or Malaysia. This would all be around December.

Now, what we do after Southeast Asia has not yet been planned. We’d like to be back in the States for Christmas… but we’d also like find an opportunity to travel eastward across the Pacific. So we just don’t know yet. But as always, it’ll depend upon at least 4 powerful and interrelated forces of travel: money, opportunities for further travel, things pressing back home, and the potent force called “what we feel like doing.”

We’ve been given the very unique opportunity of being able to start a trip already halfway around the world, and we really want to make the most of it. So often in life, one either has plenty of time and no money, or plenty of money and no time. It makes big trips really hard to plan. But we have been given the rare gift of having, for a brief window in time, both time and money, and for those of us who love traveling that’s just not an opportunity to pass up. So while we dearly miss all our friends and family back in the States, we’re going to make a few stops before coming home. Hope you’ll understand.

We do not currently have a day or week in mind for an eventual homecoming, but as soon as we do we’ll let everyone know. Until then, let me share what we’re currently thinking. We’d love to be home for Christmas 2010. That said, we’re not prepared to set that as a “deadline” on our travels. At least, that’s our current mindset.

What we are fairly certain of is this: given our chosen path of travel, we plan on making our US landfall in Seattle. And after an initial round of long-awaited reunions in the NW, we’ll travel east to the Quad Cities for the same. From there, our next destination will depend on job/employment developments.

Of course, we’ll keep you posted as all these plans take further shape. Thank you all for your thoughts and prayers and support during this rather unique transition. And if you have any travel plans coinciding with ours, or if you want to make some, please do get in touch with us! We’d love to meet up, and we’re flexible.

Animals!

What I’ll most remember about April 2010 is all the wildlife we encountered. We visited South Africa’s Kruger National Park, and in 3 days saw more wild animals than all the rest of our time in Africa combined. We also paid a brief visit to Botswana’s Chobe National Park and spent time canoeing and camping in the Okavango Delta (also in Botswana), both areas teeming with animals. I’ve never been much of a wildlife tourist, but seeing so many unique wild animals in their natural environment has been pretty cool. So… what did we see? Here’s a run-down of the highlights.

Lions: various glimpses, from a male sitting in the grass at night in Kruger to an adolescent lounging on a dead tree in Chobe. I tend to mistake lions for rocks when looking for them in grassy fields, even with the help of binoculars. So the only lions I’ve seen had to be pointed out to me (repeatedly) by others. Who knows how many I’ve missed—certainly more than I’ve managed to see. Guess I wouldn’t survive for very long in the African wilds… and I’d be exhausted, running away from all those rocks.

Crocodile: our best sighting had to be Sunset Lake in Kruger—by far the most frightening lake I’ve ever laid eyes on. Ask Mandy or Alisha about it. They’ll back me up on this.

Hippopotamus: All over Kruger (including the scary lake noted above). But perhaps our most memorable encounter with these massive and temperamental beasts was in the Okavango Delta, where we bobbed in a Mokoro (traditional dugout canoe) and watched them go about their hippo-business from an unnervingly close distance. Their grunts and snorts are startling. And one night, while camping on one of the Delta’s islands, a troupe of them stomped right past our tent.

Elephants: too many to count. From close range encounters to distant sightings and road crossings, it’s always fun to watch them. My favorite sighting was probably in the Okavango Delta, where on the first day out we glided silently around a tall patch of grass to see what all the splashing was about: 2 adult elephants wading through the shallow waters, eating and drinking and enjoying themselves.

Wildebeest: they’re common in numbers, but not in appearances. Strange looking things—like a mash-up of buffalo and antelope and cow.

Giraffe: talk about strange looking… giraffes are really plentiful in Kruger, and we had plenty of up-close encounters with them. In fact, at one point, spotting a giraffe wasn’t even grounds for our stopping the car. The babies are especially cute—we always stopped for the babies.

Zebra: throngs of ‘em. They like to hang out with impala and giraffe and warthogs, and they’re quite social. And after careful inspection, I am confident in saying that they’re clearly white with black stripes, not black with white stripes.

Impala: the most plentiful of all animals listed here. Big packs of them. Best encounter with them was in Chobe, where two males were locked in a very long fight (a mating/dominance thing) while other males stood around and watched the action.

Rhinoceros: in Kruger we came upon three white rhino and watched from a distance of 10-20 meters as they munched on grass. Jeez they’re big. I wouldn’t have gotten out of our rental car for anything. It felt like Jurassic Park. Swaziland has lost its wild population of rhinos to poaching. In fact, in just 4 years (between 1988 and 1992) Swaziland lost 80% of its remaining rhinos to poachers. Anyway, if you’ve ever felt self-conscious about having beady little eyes and a disproportionately large nose, take heart and think of the poor rhino: they’ve got it much, much worse than you, proportionally speaking, and plus, they’ve got poachers to worry about. There’s no one hunting you for your big nose, is there? So cheer up.

Wild dogs: Perhaps my favorite wildlife encounter of all. Our first day in Kruger, at sunset, a big pack of them came trotting down the shoulder of the road we were on. They weren’t in a hurry, and neither were we. It was an exceedingly rare close-up look at this endangered animal. Then, the very next night along the same road, it happened again! Here they came, 20 strong, along the roadside. We could not believe our good fortune. Probably the same pack, out on their hunting rounds. They’re among the most skilled and efficient hunters in all of Africa, averaging one kill per day. They’re also among the rarest predators in Kruger (and apparently the whole continent). Anyway, they’re big dogs—not like a scrawny dingo or coyote—and their muzzles are thicker than a pit-bull’s… it was another “stay in the car” moment.

Kudu: of all the varieties of antelope in Southern Africa (and there are a lot), the kudu is my personal favorite. The males are enormous (think horse), their antlers are really long and spiraled, and they have great markings on their fur.

Warthogs: these ornery guys are everywhere. So common, in fact, I almost didn’t mention them here (sorry Mandy)… but I really like them. I like the way they trot around with their tail sprouted into the air and their monstrous head held high and proud. They’re face is exceedingly ugly, but what great posture. Once in Botswana we saw a family of them hanging out in the parking lot of the bus station. Commuters, I guess.

Water Buffalo: the males are big and scary. They always seemed to give me the evil eye-- and what have I ever done to them? They seem to relish standing in the middle of roadways, daring vehicles to get too close. Their strange, flat horns sit atop their heads like “little George Washington wigs,” as my wife puts it. Funny looking, and yet they don’t seem to have much of a sense of humor. They too offered a few “stay in the car” moments for me.

Hyena: just a peek at 3 of them, lying together on top of a big rock near the road just before sunset in Kruger. Great camouflage. Still, in the ancient blood-feud between lions and hyenas, I side with the lions. Sorry hyenas, but you just seem a bit too… villainous.

Baboons: absolute pests. The only reason I include them here is because in the Okavango Delta they’re actually living “wild” lives (as opposed to living off of human trash and roadkill), and once we even saw a baboon swimming from one little island to another. Swimming baboons? Crazy. Also, once in Chobe a one-armed baboon endeared himself to me. I was enjoying a cold beer on a shady patio and he came scampering down from the trees to ask for a sip. Poor little one-armed baboon, climbing around with all his two-armed peers, just trying to get by in this hard-luck world…

Vervet monkeys: also a bit too plentiful in human-rich areas, but not quite the pests that baboons are. They have a little black stripe across their forehead. Looks like a mono-brow. Hard not to smile when watching them.

Jackal: We only saw one, foraging along the edge of the Chobe River at sunrise while silhouetted storks kept their cautious eyes on him. Looks like a cross between a fox and a dog.

Birds: we’ve learned to identify lots of birds, either by sight or by song. Favorites include the fish eagle (which looks a lot like a bald eagle), the lilac-breasted roller (beautiful—and the national bird of Botswana, we’re told), the hornbill, different kinds of kingfishers and weavers, the corrie bustard (the funniest bird name), ostrich, honey-finder, the “go away” bird (cool Mohawk), various storks, jacana… that’s enough, I guess. In Botswana we hitched a ride with a couple from San Diego who had thus far identified 199 different bird species in their month of travel. Pretty impressive. They were anxious to get to 200 and debated whether or not to count a chicken that had crossed the road in front of us. They decided against counting it because, “it wasn’t in their book I concurred, and so, much to the chagrin of chickens everywhere, the San Diegans’ count remained at 199.

And of course there are all the lizards and snakes and frogs of all sizes, the crazy spiders and creepy-crawlies encountered in various campground showers, the bizarre assortment of flying insects (I especially liked all the colorful varieties of dragonfly in the Okavango) and the bats that feast on them (one whizzed so close to my head that I heard its wings whistle past my ear), the little biting ants and the beetles… my favorite of these is the dung beetle, which I finally saw up close in Botswana’s Tsodilo Hills (the Kalahari); such an industrious, mild-mannered little guy, not afraid to get his hands dirty.

Two big cats top our list of animals we’ve yet to see but really want to: leopard and cheetah. I don’t think we’ll go out of our way to see them, but with plenty of travel plans left on the African continent, I’m sure we’ll have opportunities.

Third big fun thing: Victoria Falls and Botswana

Right after the COS conference (see "Seconf big fun thing") we set out for another few weeks of traveling. We hopped a plane from J-burg and landed in Livingstone, which is the Zambian side of Victoria Falls. April is when Vic Falls is flowing at its maximum capacity, and this year is an exceptionally “full” year. You’d think that’d be a good thing for sightseers like us, but in fact it’s actually too much water. The mist cloud rising up from the base of the falls is so enormous (over 1000 feet into the sky at times) that much of the falls is shrouded behind it. So most of the time we walked around in giant curtains of water, getting peeks of the actual falls here and there while the earth rumbled beneath our feet. Pretty exhilarating—certainly the largest, most imposing waterfall I’ll ever witness—but not much to take pictures of, and not that much to do in the way of activities. Rafting? Out of the question, as the river below was a raging torrent. Walking out on the rocks and islands above the falls? No way, as one slip would kill you.

So we cut our time in Vic Falls short by a day and went down to Botswana’s Chobe National Park, which is full of elephants and lions and pasty tourists packed into overpriced safari jeep tours. It was a beautiful place, but the freedom of movement within this park is very limited. If you don’t have your own reliable 4WD you need to sign up for a “game drive” or a “river cruise.” So we signed up and spent some time gawking at the wildlife and talking to other Westerners… and you know what? It was fun. I’m not too proud to admit it. Plus, it’s not everyday that you see warthogs roaming the grocery store parking lot or warthogs hanging around the town’s central bus station. And it’s not often that you watch the sunset from the banks of the fabled Chobe River.

Then it was on to some real adventure traveling. For the next week or so, our route took us through parts of Namibia and Botswana where there are no (or very few) public transportation options. So (and this is the adventure part) we did what the locals do: we hitch-hiked. It sounds crazy, but out there it’s quite common and safe and relatively easy to do, and it worked out well for us. We got lifts from long-haul truckers and locals and international tourists, from preachers and atheists and surly government officials… and every ride was its own little adventure. At one point we were in a tiny village looking for a ride to an exceedingly remote place in the northwest Kalahari called Tsodilo Hills, and we found a white South African ex-pat preacher cleaning out his church in preparation for a visiting group. So we spent a few hours helping him clean and in exchange he gassed up his land-cruiser and drove us out to the Hills—a drive that included 40km of really rough dirt road. All through the Kalahari and around the Okavango Delta area we rode on ferries, in backs of pickups, in cabs of semi trucks, and even in the leather seats of a fancy new Hummer.

But the highlight of Botswana was the Mokoro (canoe) trip we took in the Okavango Delta: 3 days and 2 nights of quiet gliding through some amazing stretches of flooded land in its northwest corner (around the village of Seronga). The Delta is an environmental treasure, and we’re thankful to have seen it.

After the Delta we made our way south and east across Botswana, stopping in the Kalahari town of Ghanzi (where I spent my birthday), and that’s where our hitching ceased: public transport was once again a viable option. The next few days were spent either waiting for kombis and busses or else riding inside them, traveling through the Botswana border town of Lobatse, then on to J-burg and then finally back to good ol’ Swaziland.

So, all 3 big fun things combined, that’s what we’ve been up to this past 5 weeks or so. In general, we found the people of Botswana to be exceedingly friendly and helpful and warm-hearted (much more so than some other Southern African areas). In fact, we found that we had to really adjust our “trust with caution and keep your guard up” attitude while in Botswana, because it just wasn’t appropriate there. No one hassled us (not even little kids asking for candy!), and no one was dishonest toward us. It was kind of amazing. We actually felt safer there than here in Swaziland. And though we spent very little time in Zambia (and only in the very touristy area of Livingstone/Vic Falls), we found the locals there to be kind and friendly and genuinely helpful. Not your typical jaded tourist town. I wish we had more time to travel all around Zambia. Like Botswana, it’s peaceful and stable and friendly, and yet its lush, river-rich landscape is very different from the semi-arid Kalahari terrain.

Anyone coming to Southern Africa that wants a unique and diverse travel experience would do well to look at routes through Zambia, Botswana and Namibia.

Anyway, it’s nice to be back in Zombodze, nice to be staying put for 12 straight weeks. Just enough time for us to finalize our ongoing projects and bid this latest home of ours a proper farewell. I’ll be posting pics, videos and accounts of these latest travels as soon as I can.