Friday I will be leaving my site to go to Sabie Backpackers where I'll meet up with a whole bunch of volunteers. We are all walking or running in the Xstrata Longtom Half & Ultra Marathon.
The race is between Sabie and Lydenberg in Mpumalanga and traverses through the mountains so it is supposed to be beautiful. Since I'm only running the half marathon it is mostly downhill so it should be fairly relaxing. The race benefits the KLM Foundation which assists in sending disadvantaged children to private secondary schools. The Peace Corps has been running the race for several years now and it has become part of the Peace Corps South Africa experience. On Saturday we run the race and then follow it up with a brai. Most of the volunteers from my training group will be there as well as some from other groups; it will be nice to see them again and hang out.
On Sunday, several volunteers and I will leave for a hike on the Giant's Cup Hiking Trail through the Drakensberg Mountains. This is one of the most popular hiking areas in South Africa. I will also have time to do a few other things but I'm not sure what I'm going to do yet.
Although I am excited about this trip I will be leaving my site for 10 days and at a time when there is so much going on. Yesterday I started my community sports club and we had a showing of about 12 people even though we had one volleyball and no net. They will meet 3 times before I get back again but I am confident that they will do fine without me. We are focusing on volleyball as the new sport this school term and I have recruited several adults and students who are passionate about volleyball that could keep it running even if I didn't return. I have been making progress with my other projects and am also developing some others.
I am planning a community resource center that will help connect people to the resources available to them from the government and other organizations. I intend to have it help people who want to take the initiative to improve themselves and the community. It will also be a place to host outside organizations who want to do work in the community. I am writing the proposal and I already have a person who is going to help me locate funding.
I have been consulting with a woman who wants to build a new facility for her old age home. She has been granted a piece of land by the tribal authority and just needs to build it. I will be helping her design the building and landscape the property then find support for the construction of it.
I've been walking up and down my road to get to the main road since September and until this past Sunday, I never noticed that there was an abandoned building that was used for a sewing project sponsored by one of the government departments. I called the number on the board outside the building and arranged to meet with the woman this morning.
She and the woman who worked on it before met me and we discussed reopening it. The reason it had closed was corruption, which causes many things to fail here. One of the women who was working there stole the sewing machines and was skimming the profits. The building needs a little bit of repair but it is in fairly good condition.
There are three rooms: one has a garage door entrance; another has a regular door; and there is a storage room in between. We are going to reopen the facility using the garage as a sewing room and place to display the dresses, curtains, and uniforms that they create; the other room with a door will be turned into a bakery. I will also be helping them get 4 sewing machines and two ovens. The women are going to help train local girls how to sew and bake which will support a girls' club that another community member is starting. I asked them to prepare a list of the things that they will make in both shops along with the costs of production and prices of each item. This will make writing a proposal easier if we can show that it will be profitable and self-supporting.
It seems like I'm doing quite a few projects but since getting responses from people often takes a long time they get put on hold. I don't see it as much different from holding an office job when you are responsible for several clients who you help with different things at different times; only this is way more fun!
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