My body just stopped being sore from the run on Saturday. Longtom 2009, held in a small town called Sabie in Mpumelanga, was a good time. I finished my first half-marathon in a little under  two hours after a few months of training for it and I am happy about how it went. It was a lot of fun running in the crisp mountain air of beautiful Mpumelanga and this race was the goal of regular exercise over the last four months.

Many congratulations to my friend and fellow PCV Oliver Borzo, who ran the entire 38 mile ultra marathon (his first marathon ultra or otherwise) on his birthday and qualified for South Africa’s most well-known marathon, the Comrades Marathon. I think over 50 serving volunteers were able to make it to the run, most doing the half-marathon. It was great to see my friends from my own training group SA17 as well as South Africa’s most veteran volunteers SA16, and to meet for the first time members of the still green SA18,  sort of a picture of  “before, during, after.” To be with volunteers working in a very wide variety of situations helps to give me a sense of perspective on my contributions and experiences in South Africa and a chance to simply be an American among Americans in a foreign country.

Traveling this weekend was a challenge. Predicting public transport in South Africa can be a bit like reading tea leaves: largely relying on bizarre, esoteric knowledge about the habits and routes of minibus taxi drivers, intuition, and a lot of luck to get to anywhere outside of one’s site within a decent period of time. For example, this weekend I had to get to Sabie, which in a car would  be about two and a half hours from my site, luck was against me and I spent roughly ten hours in taxis to get to Sabie, mostly waiting for them to fill as most drivers won’t leave until a taxi is full. Mpumelanga is beautiful but I am not sure if I will be visiting again without a rental car. (Which of course, for any alert staff members reading this entry, I will need to take leave in order to drive.)

More than 14,000 USD (roughly 140,000 SAR) was raised by Peace Corps Volunteers for the KLM Foundation, which sends exceptional underprivileged students to a private school that is outside their price range. Many thanks to my brother, my parents, and my grandparents for sending in donations for my run. It is a sad truth that the current situation of South African education is so bad that only private schools and an all too small number of well-run public schools provide students with an education adequate for sending them to a decent college and on the path towards a successful career, which is a tragedy because there are some very bright kids here, this money will ensure that some of them will get the opportunities at an advanced career that they should have. The KLM Foundation was started by Peace Corps volunteers a few years ago and I had the opportunity to get a ride back to my site (see above for how fortunate this is) from one of its founders, who is now a professional in international aid. It was an interesting ride, learning about Peace Corps past and the challenges of working for current international NGOs, which is one of the career fields I am looking at for after Peace Corps a life that will begin roughly a year from today.

  I think its high time that rather than go over what I do and my life I would touch on some of the many exotic things about living in South Africa and the people here.

The first question for many people I guess would be: what is the food like?

Personally, I cook for myself and the food that I can buy at the supermarket is not very much different than what I can get in the U.S. just with lower variety. On the other hand “exotic” fruit here is cheap and plentiful: guava, avocado, mangoes, papaya, litchis, marula, prickly pear, kwiwis, as well as plenty of apples, oranges and peaches. The one thing you cannot get is berries, forget blueberries, strawberries, and cherries. But  despite the fact that “American food” is invading, people here do have a different diet and there is definitely a South African cuisine. The different groups all have their own foods, Afrikaaners (white South Africans that speak Afrikaans as a first language) love to braai (what we call barbeque) and a specialty for them is boervors a spicy, fatty sausage that one must cook forever and a day to cook through, another specialty is their dried meat or biltong which is extremely popular here, ostritch biltong is fantastic. Indian South Africans have their own cuisine of curries and other Indian foods like naan unfortunately for my stomach (but fortunately for my wallet) there is no Indian restaurant in my area, but when I travel I almost invariably get Indian if I eat out.

Black South Africans meanwhile, have a diet that I have decidedly mixed feelings about, its largely shaped by the poverty of the area, people often cannot afford to eat healthy food. The big “staple” is mealie cob which is cheap corn that is either grown in the villages or bought ground at the supermarket. It is used to make a hard porridge, called pap in Afrikaans and vuswa in Xitsonga. One eats pap with chicken, stewed greens (not good I am afraid), squash, and/or beans, generally with one's right hand (washed before eating of course) using pieces of the porridge as a sort of edible utensil to absorb gravy or pick up meat. The pap  itself has no real taste, nor nutritional value, it’s pure empty carbs, but it fills the stomach and its cheap or free; corn needs little water and rain is not plentiful. It’s such a big part of people’s diets here that they have a very hard time understanding that I never ate it in America, and when I cook I eat potatoes, rice, or bread. They will eat all those things but cannot imagine a day without eating pap, even for those people who can afford more expensive foods. The lack of nutrients from the pap diet causes many health issues here and diabetes is rampant with older people. Still it is not bad and when you are at someone’s house, an event, or with coworkers it is what will be on the plate. Compensating for that is that a lot of times you’ll get fresh chicken. Chicken that’s just been killed is extremely savory and much better than beef that’s just been killed, or fresh pork, which most people consider treats for special occassions. Also pap mixed with squash is sweet and quite decent, I would make it occasionally if pap didn’t require constant pounding and stirring to prepare. Beans and peanuts are a big part of the diet and are a definite plus. Poaching is illegal here but there is a wink-wink attitude towards it if you don’t kill animals in the nature reserves, there’s no shortage of duikers, just like in America there’s no shortage of deer, rabbit, is gamy but tasty. There are also foods that are alien to an American, grasshoppers and termites are considered food in the villages. I personally rather like mopani worms which are little caterpillars that are found in large numbers around Christmas on Mopani trees. They can be pretty succulent little beasties, good with salt or a decent sauce once one gets past the unavoidable fact that one is eating an insect (thinking about their high protein value can help reassure the faint of heart.) Kind of an acquired taste but I rather like them. Maybe something about music next time I write an entry like this.