A tale of despair and hope

Never had I fully appreciated the coaching prowess of Joe Thompson until this week. There's something about struggling to teach ten-year-olds proper dribbling technique that sparks a sense of kinship with the man who, a decade ago, did just that for me. Man, they just don't listen! And how is it possible for something so little to have such limitless energy? An unmotivated man might back away from the prospect of attempting to shed some knowledge on such spirited youths, but I know that I can't give up the fight. Keeping in mind the example of the man who cemented my foundation in basketball, I undertake my goal of doing the same for my own enthusiastic pupils. However, I also have a deeper, darker reason for such dogged pursuit of imparting on these kids a love for the game. My friends, I am at war.

Upon my arrival here, I discovered that there exists a sport called netball, which is the worst thing ever. Worse than our senior prank, worse than the Chicago Cubs, worse than eating peanuts.  It strikes me as basically basketball for people who hate basketball. Two main rules particularly pissed me off.

First, you aren't allowed to jump. What? This is actually a sport that forbids you from using natural talent.

Second, you aren't allowed to steal the ball. You can intercept passes, but being within a three feet of the ballhandler is illegal. Touching the ball when someone else has it is illegal. In fact, touching is illegal period if it gets in the way.

Just kidding.
There's no way I'm stopping at two.
Each position has a certain zone they are not allowed to leave. It's as if someone wanted to make a sport requiring as little effort as possible. I've seen people sweat more playing bocce ball.

Also, people don't dribble. Seriously, this is ridiculous. Watching it is kind of like watching Michael Scott, if The Office wasn't funny. Painful, embarrassing, and a waste of time.

They big tragedy is that while basketball is already not very big here, it is also regarded as a "guy thing". If girls want to play, they're often stuck with netball. If basketball ever plans on usurping its inbred counterpart's place atop South African hoops, people have got to get girls involved too!

Oh, and backboards don't exist. People rarely shoot from more than about 8 feet out. It would be called a layup... but you still can't jump.

This is why getting people in Mamelodi interested in basketball matters. I cannot morally let them live their lives knowing only netball.

Fortunately, the people here are really into basketball. After watching NBA games on tv (I was thrilled to find that the main channels here broadcast the good games), they are all excited about learning the sport, but don't even know what traveling is. When I brought a ball into Viva, they were too excited to actually be holding a basketball to listen to something as trivial as rules.

Still, I can't help but grin when, as soon as I arrive in the morning, a couple of kids run up and ask for the ball to play with. The way I see it, as long as they keep having fun they'll catch on to the specifics eventually. For now, all I hope is that they evade the tempting simplicity of netball before they wake up in 10 years in an existential crisis, cursing that fateful day when all meaning was sapped from their life by a sport which I can only assume was created by a man with the moral caliber of Dick Cheney.

In which I visit a kingdom

Tim had a four-day weekend beginning last Friday, so we decided to take a few days off from the city to check out The Kingdom of Lesotho. Lesotho, I was surprised to find out, is completely mountainous. While the area where I live is relatively flat (think Missouri), this was nothing like I had ever seen in the Southern Hemisphere. Upon our arrival, we were immediately confronted with mountain upon mountain upon mountain, a veritable smorgasbord of rock and dirt. After navigating a pothole-riddled dirt road for a few miles, we arrived in the village of Malealea, in the west of the Kingdom.

We spent the night in a lodge there and set out the next morning on a Pony Trek. Tim and I each got a horse to ride, while Mom and Dad walked alongside us (since she is allergic). Our guide, Pakane, led us along a dirt road, passing through multiple villages (at which a group of little kids would run after us asking Mom and Dad questions), until we arrived six hours later at our destination, the tiny village of Ha Lebona. From there, we hiked on foot to a waterfall about three miles away before eating and going to sleep in a local hut. I was unconscious by 7:30 that evening.

After a wonderful night of slumber, I woke up at 4:30 in time for sunrise. After going for a jog, I discovered that Pakane had also gotten up so he could prepare the horses. Tim stumbled blearily from the hut, and we were given a quick lesson on saddling horses. We set out for Malealea as early as possible, but within a half hour we were caught in a wet chaos of hail and thunder. We sought shelter under a ledge, where we stayed for another half hour until the onslaught had subsided.

After another couple hours of frigid, soggy riding we came into the sunlight and stopped to let the saddles dry. Dad wanted to give riding a try and Pakane wanted to walk a bit, so they traded positions and Pakane put me in charge or leading the packhorse. He said that he always enjoys having interested boys on the trip, because he loves teaching them about working with horses. After a few minutes of learning the hard way that  controlling two horses is a LOT different from just riding one, I settled into my new role (Pakane also appointed me guide, since he was on foot behind us) and had a lot of fun being in charge of the pace. The pinnacle of my reign as leader occurred when we had to descend into a canyon with steep drop-offs that the horses loved to put their heads over (much to the dismay of Dad, who hadn't had the pleasure of experiencing that on the way to Ha Lebona). As if leading two horses down the rocky trail wasn't nerve-wracking enough, we discovered halfway down that there was another group trying to get up! It being their first day on the trail, they were really bad at handling the horses and were stopped in the dead center of the trail. Without Pakane to help us navigate, I was quite flustered until I saw the helpless British kid in front of me asking "Am I far enough over?", while both of us knew that he was powerless to change his mount's position. Seeing his concern gave me confidence, so I plowed forward, trusting the horses to keep their balance. They did, of course, and were soon rewarded with a lunch break to graze on a grassy spot by the river.

I had given up on a fun day when the thunderstorm came, but it was all forgotten by lunchtime. We found a spot next to the river, where we could swim and climb rocks. Pakane warned that the water might be cold, but after spending time in Yosemite I was pretty sure I'd experienced colder, and waded in with abandon (a bit of an oxymoron, I suppose, but I didn't want to swim with jeans, so I was stuck with wading and head-dunking). After laying out on a big rock to dry, we set off on the final two hours of our trip, during which Tim led the packhorse (and quite adequately, I might add!).

It was incredible to find such an isolated area of the connected world we live in today, and refreshing as well. We met some awesome people (mainly Pakane, but also some Canadian students and a security guy who protects merchant ships from pirates) and saw mountains and waterfalls I had no idea existed! The food at Malealea Lodge was also exquisite, making it pretty ideal as a whole. If any of you ever visit South Africa, I highly recommend taking a trip to Lesotho, if not Malealea specifically. I'm starting to think of it as South Africa's best-kept secret.

Some pictures from the trip--enjoy!

Eating lunch with Pakane on the way to Ha Lebona

Ha Lebona had about 4 families living in it. Ours was the second hut from the left.

If you feel like tilting your monitor sideways, the waterfall was amazing--especially framed by the cliffs and sky like this.

Sunset from outside our hut.

Pre-sunrise picture from my morning run. I don;t think I would've been quite to admiring of the clouds had I known what was going to come out of them in two hours.

Gettin' my guide on!

Home, home on the range...

Took some time after the swim to be lord of all that I surveyed.

View of the river from partway up the canyon. They put in a bridge for people to cross, but the horses are afraid of it so they wade.

There was sign by the entrance to the valley saying "Wayfarer pause and look upon a gateway to paradise". This was the view. Ha Lebona was at the base of the tallest mountain (middle-left of this picture).

The Bane of my Existence

Without a doubt, my biggest problem with life in South Africa is the time difference. Being seven hours ahead of everyone back in C-U obviously makes it hard to communicate with everyone back home (nothing like the dead hours on twitter/facebook when everyone's asleep), but my real struggle has been fighting the temptation to stay up late and watch American sports. I call it my real struggle because so far, I've given in to the urge and delayed slumber way too much. I stayed up until 5 or so to watch Peyton's Broncos debut, and haven't made it to bed by 2 since the MLB postseason began.

Of course, I can live with this as long as things are going well. But when all I get for my troubles is a walk-off win for the bad guys, I seriously reconsider my decision to follow games live (and reach the conclusion that if anything changes, it'll be the fact that I have to be at work by 8:00).

With basketball season rapidly approaching, I fear that my addicion will only get worse. Maybe if South Africa cared about basketball and football, I could curb my enthusiasm by actually engaging in the sport. But it is not to be. Instead, I have doomed myself... doomed my self to a semester of pain. A semester of misery. A semester of  tooth-gnashing and torment. In short, a semester of parents nagging me to go to sleep.

At least I got to watch the Olympics in real time.

Safari Pictures

Allow me to present some scintillating wildlife pictures!

Before all that, I thought I'd show off my bedroom. Tim's has a carpet, sunlight, and a bathroom. Mine has a bookshelf and no door. The glass wall in back opens up completely though, so that's cool.

Awesome bird I found in Kruger. I think it's called a Lilac-breasted roller.

I guess the push-up lizard wasn't completely blue after all.

Giraffes, I have learned, have zero respect for cars. We got held up by them appearing in the road numerous times. Still fun to look at though, especially up close!

It doesn't get much cuter than baby baboons! When the moms walk/climb, the babies will latch on to their stomachs, kinda of like a reverse piggy-back ride.

As giraffes get older, they also get darker. We saw one that was so dark its spots had begun to run together.

I snapped this picture as we were escaping from this overprotective elephant. The older animals would usually respect cars coming through, but the adolescents were often jumpy and impulsive, so we had to give them extra room.

Baby crocodile looking particularly menacing.

Yawn. I was amazed at the camouflage lions possess. I'm sure we drove blindly past dozens of them over the course of the trip.

"Hey Sarabi! What did the knee say to the face?"
"I don't know, Nala. What?"
"SLAP!!!"

The cutest baboon-baby in existence begins to walk...

...steps on its tail...

...and decides that piggy-back rides are better. The tail incident was my favorite, especially when the baby grabbed its tail with both hands and tried to pull it out from under its foot.

The rhino turning to face us got a particularly loud gasp from mom.

Tiniest baby elephant we saw. It's so little it looks more like a baboon when it walks.

I liked when it tried to push its mom towards the water hole where all the others were.

Saw a Kingfisher catch a fish and flail it back and forth for 10 minutes in an attempt to fit the fish in its mouth. It finally did in the end, and I still have no idea how something that big fits inside the bird.

We took over 500 pictures in all, so if you guys have any requests just let me know and I'll put them up.

Pictures, parte numero uno

I figure a picture is worth, if not a thousand, a few dozen words at least, so allow me to present a few assorted visuals from Europe! Africa will come next.

Before Europe of course, we had to pack our wordly belongings into the basement so the renter people could  move in. Guess who carried everything downstairs?

From left: Claire (14), Julia (16), and their mom Maria hosted us while we were in Paris.

Notre Dame was cool. 

La famille et Le Tour Eiffel

There were a few of these "Lock Bridges" around Paris. People would put a lock on the  bridge with their  lover's name on it, the police would do the occasional purging, and it would start over. We saw a few wannabe bridges in Bavaria, but none were nearly as successful as their Parisian counterparts.

Maxim the very cool tour guide! I think the weird face is a result of his accent.

Along The Chemin, there were sporadic crosses that people have been putting up for centuries to guide them before there was a path. Now people put prayer stones by each cross if they stop there. I don't think we every saw two crosses that were the same. They were made of wood... unless they were made of iron, steel, grass, stone, wire, or some other material. We came across some that were over 20 feet tall, and others that were only a few inches.

Fog rolling into Gschnitz in the morning. I wanted to stay and hike through it but we had to get to Salzburg.

The Alps were fantastic. What's crazy is how different they are from the Rockies and Sierras.

From Salzburg, we took a 25 mile bike "ride" up a mountain (read: hill). Took 30 times longer getting up than down.

Funny part is, Tim didn't even like it that much.

Safari Time!

One thing I neglected to mention in my last post was that a couple weeks ago we went to Kruger National Park for a few days! It was too awesome to include in the summary post, so I'll attempt to do the trip justice here.

Day 1: We set off on the 6 hour drive to Kruger. This is nothing compared to the drive to California every year, so it's all good. We made one stop at  a pancake house where our renter holds the record for eating 21 pancakes (or something like that). We got to the park entrance around 5, drove around seeing some impalas and distant elephants, and got to our camp. We were staying in the Pretoriuskop Camp, which was overrun with baboons who would eat whatever scraps you dropped on the ground. I actually saw one youngster make off with an entire orange that was bigger that it's head!

Day 2: We left camp at around 6:30 and started driving south to the Berg-en-Dal Camp. Not long after departing, we drove into a herd of Cape Buffalo. It started when we saw about a hundred of them right next to the road. We drove right alongside to get some good pictures, but before we knew it they were on all sides of us! Despite Mom's occasional gasps of fear whenever one looked at us, it was awesome! We kept driving to Berg-en-Dal and saw three rhinos walking along next to the road, so we followed them for a while. Going further, we witnessed an elephant uprooting a tree to find bugs, a bright blue lizard doing pushups, and a few warthogs (PUMBAAA!). On the way back, though, is where it got really interesting. We decided to take a dirt road along the river instead of the main road back, hoping to find hippos, crocs, and other water-loving fauna. What we got was much, much better. We were driving along when, suddenly, an elephant appeared in the road! We looked around, and saw more on both sides of us, including a baby hiding behind its mother. It was too good to be true, until one of them got nervous around us and started waving its trunk around. We sped off, only to encounter another group of elephants, with another baby, and another over-protective adolescent anxious to get us out of there. Perhaps my rendition of "Colonel Hathi's March" from the Jungle Book didn't help to calm the beast, but it was worth it to see my mom's face when I trumpeted.
We kept driving until we saw a group of cars near the side of the road. After stopping, we found out that there were sleeping lions about 40 feet away. Problem was, we couldn't see them! Other cars had the best view and we weren't allowed to leave the car (since there are lions and stuff, naturally). Luckily, the guy in the car next to us came to the rescue. I swear this guy is Ron Swanson's brother or something, because he just stepped outside, picked up a rock, and threw it at the lions. One of the males stood up as we applauded  our savior. He looked at us blankly for a couple minutes before crumpling to the ground comically. Still, my first lion sighting is definitely one I'll remember.

Day 3: On the third day, we left Pretoriuskop for a hotel outside the Crocodile Bridge entrance to Kruger. Along the way we would pass through the popular camp of Skukuza and the Lower Sabie Camp. On the way to Skukuza, we were driving along the river when an elephant materialized in front of us (this was becoming a habit). Dad braked violently, and narrowly avoided hitting it. Sensibly, he then wanted to back away from it a bit. After a few meters in reverse, I yelled out for him to stop, but it was too late. The elephant he had nearly hit stumbled back, reared up its head, and blared loudly its war cry. I've never experienced such fast acceleration in my life. After making it to Skukuza, we continued along the main river, seeing hippos galore, as well as one lioness. At one point we saw a waterbuck carcass that a leopard had dragged onto a branch 12 feet off the ground.  We waited a few minutes to see if the predator would come back for its meal, but didn't want to waste too much time so we left without a sighting. The drive from there to Crocodile Bridge was uneventful apart from oodles of zebra, giraffes, elephants, hippos, wildebeest, and thousands of impala.

Day 4: We left Crocodile Bridge at 5 to go on a guided bush walk. The only was we were allowed out of the was was with an armed guide, so we jumped at the opportunity to walk around the Savannah safely. We didn't see many animals apart from some distant elephants, a few kudu (deer-thingies with 4 foot, twisted horns), and an up close giraffe, but we made up for the lack of wildlife with a lesson on reading footprints and dung. Tim, who had been excitedly identifying spoor for the past 2 days, was enthralled as he soaked in the difference between giraffe and kudu poop, and why white and black rhinos don't have the same spoor.
Afterwards, we drove back north in hopes of a cheetah or leopard sighting, since those were the only two major animals we had yet to find. The only notable finding then was when we found 5 lions walking by the side of the road, and followed them for about a kilometer before they decided it was naptime. The male lion was the biggest I'd seen yet, with a head the size of my body. The best lion-sighting yet was made infinitely better by the fact that for once, there was no traffic jam as other people jockeyed for position.

SO! To recap the highlights for those of you who skimmed!
1: Dad almost hitting several elephants.
2: Getting trapped inside a herd of cape buffalo
3: We saw a hippo doing barrel rolls in the water, and others play fighting
4: Followed a group of lions
5: Did a walking safari and got really close to a giraffe
6: Lots of animals in the road, including giraffes, elephants, and lots of Ungulates
7: Pushup-Lizard!
8: Lots of cute baby animals. My favorite was the baby baboon that was so little it didn't know how to walk with a tail and kept tripping over its rear appendage.
9: We didn't ever see a leopard, but there was a traffic jam around what was a clump of dirt that looked remarkably like a leopard until we was baboons playing on it.

Africa, so far.

We got into the airport at Johannesburg around 8 in the morning, apparently only 2 hours or so after the South African National Swim Team got home from London (damn). We drove to Pretoria, where I'm staying, and got settled in our house. Highlights of the living spaces include the big painting of Marlon Brando next to the TV and the fact that there are 4 glass walls than slide open completely to form 15 foot doors. Pretty cool stuff.

After a few weeks of reading, watching TV, and learning to do headstands I finally took the initiative and found some productive stuff to do. I started by working for my dad doing date coding and entry at the University, which I still do on Thursdays. I also am taking a class on Thursday at the University's Centre for the Study of AIDS, and will likely volunteer there once the course is over.

For a full-time job, I started volunteering at the Viva Foundation of South Africa. Viva has several branches, but I volunteer primarily at the Viva Village in Mamelodi, a suburb of Pretoria. Mamelodi is basically the hardest place ever to live. Dirt roads. One room, aluminum houses. No trash collectors, so people dump garbage by the lone stream through town. What Viva has there is a small complex consisting of offices, a preschool with a playground, a kitchen, church, and mini-mart. Behind the church (which is really just a space with a makeshift pulpit) is a safe house for orphans and at-risk kids and young adults. 

What I do at Viva consists of odd jobs like building a sandbox for the preschoolers, planting a garden, and helping haul stuff, as well as a long-term mission to get local youth involved with a basketball team. A lot of young boys here have too much free time and get in trouble. The justice system here isn't fair to them (a few weeks in jail before people take a look at who they are and decide that breaking a window doesn't merit 6 months), so keeping people my age occupied is a big priority for Viva. I'll go into more detail about my work at Viva soon.

The European Month

I really should have started this sooner, but alas! I'll just have to quickly summarize what I've been up to since leaving Illinois.

Our flight to Johannesburg took us through Paris, so my parents decided it would be a good idea to stay for a month in Europe. Tim and I had never been farther than Mexico, so we decided to do a complete(ish) tour of the western part of the continent. The first stop was Paris--our base camp, so to speak. We have some family friends who live in St. Germain-en-Laye (a nearby suburb), and we lived in their apartment for a few days while we saw the Parisian sights. Things of note:
1: Crepes and baguettes are so much better in France! Croissants are about the same.
2: I can legally drink wine in France! It's a good thing I like it, because people instantly are nicer to me once they see I drink wine.
3: My French is passable! Shout out to Madame Lopez!!! Whenever my mom wasn't around, I was the go-to communicator. And I spent the entire week trying to teach Tim how to pronounce "Je ne parle pas francais." Or as he says, "Je papa francais."
4: The Louvre is ginormous. I swear I walked 5 miles in there. It's also awesome though.
5: French people are barbarians who don't eat cereal.

But seriously, the wine culture here is hilarious-- as is the urge people have  to praise you. We took a bike tour of the city one day. which ended with a boat ride and wine. The guide (Maxim, who was awesome) offered me some wine, so I accepted. "Good Man!" he stated. Later, when asked for a refill, he exclaimed "Excellent!" When he offered me a third glass and I declined? "Sensible!" He proudly announced. Or take, for example, the guy at Chipotle (yes, I sought out the one Chipotle in France) who told everyone "good choice" when they ordered. Parisians are still pretty snobby, but not when you give them money!

Anyways, we left our bags in Paris and took a train south to Le Puy. We set out from there on a weeklong, 100 mile backpacking trip on Le Chemin de St. Jacques. The Chemin is a centuries-old pilgrimage ending in Spain, but we just hiked through part of France. Each night we would stay in a hostel made for pilgrims. We slept in a barn at one point thanks to M. Pic (or Pique, nor sure which). That was cool. Another night our host looked just like Karl Radnitzer. His wife was the best cook ever.

When we finished our hike, we rented a car and drove through Italy to Austria and Deutschland. More things of note:
1: Our car got randomly upgraded to an Alfa Romeo! So my dad was basically beaming with happiness the entire trip.
2: The tour book said that traffic laws are seen as optional to Italians, and they weren't lying. The Autostrada was filled with "strattlers"-- drivers who would drive in both lanes at ones so they would have the option of passing the car in front of them at a moment's notice.
3: It feels like half the people in Europe had a Benz or BMW. And Dad successfully out-accelerated a Ferrari coming out from toll booth.
4: Bathroom cleaners in Europe wait outside the bathroom for a tip after you relieve yourself. Weird.

So we got to Austria, spent a night in the town of Gschnitz (best name ever), and drove to Salzburg, where we spent a few days doing more tourist stuff. From there, we went to Munich for a few days. Highlight of Germany? Beer Gardens. We went to the Englischer Gardens twice, and it was awesome. There were Oompah bands, lots of beer, and lots of drunk people in line for the bathroom. The beer was good, but the french fries and rotisserie chicken was much, much better than I expected from a place catering to drunks.
Also, beer gardens are apparently a popular place to get married-- we saw two weddings in one evening there.

From Munich we drove back to Paris, ate crepes, got our stuff, and boarded a plane to Africa.