Happy Holidays

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving back home and is enjoying the holiday season!

 

The days fly by in KZN.  Right now Mpilonhle is in the middle of 2 weeks worth of clinics with an organization called OneSight, which provides free eye examinations, glasses, and sunglasses to people in need all over the world.  For this particular set of clinics, Mpilonhle takes care of logistics at the rural sites and OneSight provides the equipment, expertise, and volunteers.  Almost all of the Mpilonhle team participates in these clinics, which make for long, hot, and ultimately rewarding days.  Last week we stayed at the Jozini Tiger Lodge, a comfortable spot with beautiful views of the Jozini River Dam.

Two girls after receiving new shades at OneSight.

View of Jozini Dam from Tiger Lodge

Nathi by the infinity pool at Tiger Lodge

TK's first time in a boat

Yours truly, armed and dangerous

People lined up for the OneSight clinic.

The previous week I spent a lot of hours writing my two first grant proposals, both for Mpilonhle.  One proposed adding an additional mobile computer lab to Mpilonhle’s existing mobile forces, so that the organization would be able to provide computer training to teachers specifically in addition to students.  With many teachers lacking basic computer skills, student computer literacy ends up suffering and existing technology goes underutilized.  

The other grant, which I would help implement, involves setting up demonstration vegetable gardens in our partner schools so that students and community members would be able to learn more effective methods for achieving food security and, thus, battling the malnutrition and hunger that are, aside from being major problems in and of themselves, closely linked with HIV/AIDS and poverty.  My model calls for accountable leadership, environmentally suitable and cost-effective methodology, and replicability.  In the past, similar gardening programs have been lead by volunteers from abroad, full-time staff taking gardening on as a side project, or unpaid interns, making sustainability very difficult.  By hiring a full-time, paid, and locally hired coordinator and appointing heads of each garden, people would take ownership and responsibility of the program.  These individuals would receive intensive training on bio-intensive permaculture designed specifically for dryland conditions where limited water supply is so often a deal breaker.  Unlike many existing community gardens with expensive tunnels or other design features, the demo gardens in the schools would be as simple and cheap as possible so that others would be able to learn how to establish very similar gardens in their homes in order to supplement their diets and or earn extra income.  A couple others and I recently prepared and planted a trial garden at the Mpilonhle office, so we’ll give some care, do some dances for Mother Earth, and hope for the best.

Mpilonhle, having not yet received subgrant money from GRS (which has not yet received grant money from US government), decided to hire some local Zulu mercenaries to kidnap their GRS intern.

Despite it being a crazy week, I had time to squeeze in a big Thanksgiving feast at Mike and Christine’s place with about 15 Americans, mostly Peace Corps volunteers, from all over Northern KZN.  I also got to visit Johannesburg (and fellow interns Clint, AJ, Tizzy, and Doug) in early November and Cape Town later on in the month, where I watched the US-South Africa friendly match and hung out with my old housemates.

Cheers!

Some wintry scenes from the yard at La Colline.