bethanie,braais, beanut butter, bed, bfrustrations?

well hello all. first of all, let me say that i am sorry i do not update this beautiful blog often enough. i will try to do better by you all.

****PLEASE DO NOT SEND ME ANYTHING UNTIL AFTER JANUARY 1ST. THERE IS A GOOD CHANCE IT WILL NOT GET TO ME BECAUSE OF THE UNRELIABILITY OF THE POST OFFICE DURING THE ENTIRE MONTH OF DECEMBER.***

i know i've spoken to many of you about this, but i just want to reiterate it. it's pretty sad when i don't get packages/letters. you will sad, i will be sad. this combo is no good.

moving on.

i have now been at site almost a month. it's pretty great in fact. the learners are spectacular. i think my learners are the smartest of all of the learners of peace corps volunteers in namibia. i'm just saying. sometimes they tell me things i would have never ever thought of, or their stories are so amazing it makes me want to cry with joy. needless to say, i think i will enjoy teaching english to them much more than i had initially thought. there is a lot less confusion over grammar and a lot more fun with creative writing. this is all good stuff.

i just found out that i will be on the volunteer support network (vsn) committee with the peace corps. esentially i'll be one of the people other volunteers will turn to with their issues or concerns or emotional problems. so i'll be providing "support" and also helping out with the training for the incoming pc namibia groups. the most exciting thing (at this point) is that my bf julie is ALSO vsn, which means we get to see each other in windhoek in about 3 weeks. brilliant.

i've been doing a lot of teaching. mostly co-teaching with the girl i'm replacing. her name is grace and she's from kentucky and she's super awesome. she's a great teacher so the fact that i get to be here observing her and how she does things is a great benefit. i'll also get to have her lesson plans and resources when she leaves to use for the next two years. i've also been doing a lot of t.v. watching (sadly) and not enough reading, and waaay too much sleeping. or shockingly little sleeping, depending on the day. i've had only a couple semi-depressed days, mostly because of a series of very scary/sad dreams and the general boredom that sometimes accompanies life in the namib desert aka the middle of nowhere.

last night grace put together a super amazing braai for the grade seven learners down by the "riverbed" (all rivers are dry) with our principal and his wife. it was SO NICE. before we left i played ball with some of the boys, which was awesome and made me realize how much happier i will be when i can just be around the learners, and we danced and ate great good and played soccer in the dry riverbed. it was a great night in general.

okay, now i'm going to do something weird: i just remembered i had saved a blog i meant to update with last week, so i'll just post it and let you have it. needless to say, this is a little outdated and may therefore be slightly confusing.

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well hello long-distance friends and family,
sorry for the lack of updating. i'm just waaaaaaaaay too busy. okay, i'm kidding. i think it has more to do with laziness. but that'll be between you and me. (*see, i was even sorry then !)
i'm not really sure what to say on this thing. i've been at site now for 3 weeks. it's going well i'd say. the ultimate purpose of this first 2-3 months is for us to have a chance to "observe" classes and become integrated intoour communities. we're living with a host family again (i now have two pseudo families in namibia) so that we canbetter adjust and have an "in". my host family is pretty great, although it will be nice to move into my own placein january. i mean, i like living on my own!
anyways, school is pretty good. i've been doing some co-teaching with the current volunteer, grace, who will be leaving in december and heading back home to kentucky. things go brilliantly when she's here because the kids are used to her and she's got the whole discipline thing down. however, she had to go to windhoek this week so i was on myown and....yikes. the grade seven kids were great, but the grade six kids? i definitey had to hide in the libraryand cry after wednesday's classes. i even yell at them and try to be mean and then they laugh at me. boy oh boy. i know this is all part of the adjustment period and they are just testing me and things will get better, but for nowi'm all "when is grace getting back again?" it's crazy though because she's back for this next week and then whenthis coming week is over it's time for exams! blows my mind.
after exams are over and school gets out i'll hang around here for maybe 2 weeks tops and follow my family around, but then i'll be going to luderitz around the 20th of december for christmas. bethanie is going to be a ghost townbecause all of the learners will be gone and so will the teachers and i'm almost positive everyone else will be attheir farms. so i definitely don't want to be hanging out alone in a ghost town during the holidays. i might go crazy. so, luderitz is a pretty fancy place (there are two volunteers there, kevin and brad) and a bunch of the othervolunteers from the south of namibia will be heading there as well. it's a coastal town and i'm thinking there willbe a good amount of fun to be had.
so, right after the new year i will head up north for peace corps reconnect, a two week seminar type situation wherewe meet back together to talk about what we learned the first two months and talk about good teaching methods and how to handle classroom management issues. it will be so nice to see everyone, especially since most of my friendsare up north and i won't have a chance to see them before then. then reconnect is over and it's back to bethaniewhere i will immediately start teaching! exciting stuff, this is.
i'm trying to think if there are any great things i want to tell you. i forget all the good stuff when it comes timeto send messages back to the states. sorry. my learners stories are so great and i'm toying with the idea of turningmy blog into a forum for posting and discussing some of the great things they write about in class, but i'm thinking this might violate some sort of learner/teacher agreement. do they have those??
i guess i will also write down some things on here that i would like to receive should you ever feel generous enough to send me a small package. i'll say it again, those padded envelopes seem to work the best and will costyou less money. see what you can get in there.
hey, write to me and tell me what's going on back home. i live for the details: it's the little things i feel likei'm really missing out on. you know, the stuff you might not feel is important enough to tell me. tell me the bigstuff too though.
miss you.

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okay, this is way too long! i'll quickly explain the title. i'm weird, so that mostly explains it. but i've been eating a lot of peanut butter, spending a fair amount of time in bed, and life in the pc comes with its fair share of frustrations. love you!