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.