Oops, I still have a blog...

I had grand plans to post a few times this week. Ultimately, I didn't feel like/didn't have time to write anything, and suddenly it's Friday night and tomorrow I'm starting a journey to Mozambique. Obviously since it's Friday night I have much more exciting things to do than write blog posts, such as wash my dishes and sweep, and besides this week though busy was disappointing so I don't have a lot to report. But here is what I've been doing lately, encapsulated in a list, because I like lists. This should not come as a surprise to anyone.

1. I discovered that it is very frustrating to make changes in a language manual when you don't speak the language and all of the edits come from margin notes, made by people whose contact information you don't have.

2. I was supposed to do site visits today and yesterday but they were canceled at the last minute. By canceled I mean my counterpart pretended to forget that we were supposed to do them and totally never admitted that we had ever scheduled them at all. She also ignored me every time I suggested we schedule new ones. (Site visits to drop-in centres taking the training class.)

3. I spent nearly two days solid doing data entry on the fifty drop-in centres that have in some way or another produced paperwork at our organization. My back hurts but I am very pleased with the state of my spreadsheets now. They are beautiful and it is easy to find data!

4. I made a vow never, ever to have anything to do with ordering customized clothing emblazoned with a logo for a large group again. Unless maybe it comes from cafepress.

5. I went to a Peace Corps workshop to work on the next pre-service training and learned an enormous quantity of Setswana grammar over the course of two days while pretending to be an eager American trainee with lots of clueless questions. I only know about ten words, though, if you don't count noun concords (which I can recite, by the way).

6. Our kitchen is looking really good. No roof or door or window panes or indeed floor yet, but the basic shell is done. I would post a picture but I keep forgetting when it's daylight.

7. I realized that rounding up, I have been here 17 months. 9 more to go! That's kind of scary.

All right. That's all for today, folks.

Nutrients

Oops, somehow an entire month went by without any blog posts...and let's face it, the one saying I was going to MST doesn't really count...sorry, guys. By guys I mean the handful of relatives who actually care how often I update. I've done some sort of interesting stuff that I'll try to start posting about, but writing just never seemed that appealing. I'll work on being better.

We started a two-day training session on nutrition today. Today's class covered the basics of food groups and healthy cooking, and tomorrow we'll be working on applying that knowledge to the drop-in centre menus.

Food groups in South Africa are pretty widely known. Unlike in the US, where we are taught four basic food groups, South Africa teaches three: energy (carbohydrates and fat), body-building (protein), and protective (fruit and vegetables). You can see a poster for them on every clinic, school, or creche wall. We've tasked the drop-in centres with making their own, using magazine pictures to illustrate different examples of food. Khanimamba is sort of in love with projects that help centres create educational wall posters.

However, basically none of the drop-in centres I've visited so far actually applies that knowledge to their menus. Most serve vuswa (pap, or maize porridge) with some sort of protein source, no vegetables. Some centres have a vuswa and cabbage day. I went to one that was serving vuswa and potatoes. It was a carbohydrate orgy. It was also my lunch. Tomorrow, therefore, they will be revising their menus and writing up budgets for them.

Remember that many of the kids who attend these centres are HIV positive and/or have other illnesses, making basic nutrition and a healthy diet even more important than for the general population.

On to my fun anecdotes from today.

I blew the minds of my trainees not once but twice today. It's so much fun when I blow their minds. They think I'm lying to them. Here are the facts I imparted:

1. Bicarbonate of soda (baking soda) is bad for vegetables. (I'd never heard of putting baking soda in vegetables before moving to SA. Do other people do this?)

2. You can eat potato peels. In fact, potato peels contain half of a potato's nutritional value (NOT as some Americans have tried to tell me its entire nutritional value).

It took a lot of convincing, including Elisa's very vocal support (and I'm pretty sure the potato peel thing was new information for her too...), but I'm reasonably sure that some people believed me. Of course, I also believe that deep-frying my potatoes is bad for me and I do so anyway on a somewhat regular basis, so we will see if anything changes.

I also bonded with the trainers today about how much we hate the colored chalk the administrators bought. My hands are still yellow, and despite sponging down I don't think the blackboard will ever be the same--the blue chalk isn't even visible. And the box they got was enormous.