Okay. I'm a little overwhelmed with the task of enveloping all of this past month into one blog entry, so I will start from the top and see how far I get...

I left Kelowna first thing in the morning on December 29 and arrived in Washington, D.C. 3 flights and 16 hours later. I spent the night, as I was to meet the WorldTeach group at the airport the following morning. There were over 20 of us that flew together on the brutally long 14-hour flight to Johannesburg. The flight was fine, aside from not being able to sleep a wink, being uncomfortable, and having to pick through the food (chicken, or beef?). We stayed overnight in Johannesburg and counted down to the new year together in the hotel bar. It was a great way for us all to get to know eachother and start building amazing friendships. It's hard to believe, but every single person in this group is fantastic and brings so much to the table; I feel so lucky to be among them!
The morning of January 1st we flew from J-burg into Windhoek, the capital of Namibia, and were transported by bus to the hostel that would be our home for the next few weeks. Our assigned bus driver, Mr. Ksinga was kind enough to blare Enrique Iglesias for the entire drive into the city from the airport (did you know that there are THREE different versions of Hero?).
The hostel was fantastic, and run by really great people. We stayed in dorm-style rooms of 6-10, so there really was no chance for privacy at any point of our stay. We all got very close, very quickly. Our days were filled with training, lessons, and orientation into the culture and we went at a fairly gruelling pace, with up to 8 different lessons a day. We went into Windhoek only a handful of times for free time and in order to run necessary errands, and with everyone here running on "Africa Time" (take the slowest service you have ever received...and then think exponentially slower than that) it was difficult to get much done.
A week into our stay we packed our things for a week of 'practicum' teaching up in northern Namibia at Eengidjo Secondary School. It was a 10-hour busride with no air conditioning, and few bathroom stops. We were to be staying in the school hostel, where learners live during the school year, and it was a definite shock. The rooms looked like prisons, stuffed with as many metal bunkbeds as possible and nothing else and many of the mattresses were infested with bedbugs (and some of the volunteers were littered with the bites to prove it). The walls were dirty and in some places falling apart and were decorated only with the odd shard of mirrors, no larger than your thumb. The bathrooms were..a horror show by North American standards. Toilets didn't flush (2/10 did in our block) the toilets, showers and sinks were filthy and had bugs, dead and alive, and god knows what else. Some stalls had cinderblocks where a toilet should be. The showers were what I called 'flip-flop mandatory' and you were lucky if you were only sharing with one or two cockroaches. There were no curtains for privacy- your shower is everyone's business. Also, the water went off frequently, so there was no showering, face-washing, toilet-flushing etc for hours, potentially even for days. We struggled for 5 days to make this arrangement work for 30 volunteers, I don't want to even think about how 150+ learners live in those conditions all year. In reality though, it seemed harsh at first but we quickly got used to it, and it even became comical to us. Perspective is everything here. Perspective.
At our school we continued having orientation training, but we also held classes for learners who came for extra 'summer school'. Together with my friend James, a kindergarten teacher from Texas, I taught a group of grade 8 boys 2 classes a day for 4 days. It didn't take long for me to fall in love with the kids here. I taught them, learned from them, played games and laughed with them, and had a fantastic time. The highlight of my stay was playing soccer in my bare feet with about 40 kids on a dirt field littered with rocks and cow poop. I can't even begin to explain the rush that I felt running around in the blazing heat, dodging cow poo with these kids.
When our week was over we drove back towards Windhoek through Etosha National Park (where the majority of the major 'wildlife' is in Namibia) and saw hundreds of zebra and wildebeests and antelopes. An elephant walked right across the road in front of our bus, and we saw a male lion, just relaxing in the shade, about 50 feet from our bus. It was unbelievable.
We stayed briefly in Tsumeb, one of the 'major towns' in northern Namibia, where we were ecstatic to have beautiful amenities at our hostel that actually worked and were clean and bug-free. We were actually giddy...jump-in-the-air-and-clap-your-hands giddy about it. Perspective.
We finished the rest of our training in Windhoek, and had a braii (bbq) on our last night together with live music and dancing and fun as our send-off to our sites! We were all sad to leave the comfort of one-another but also so ready for some alone time. We had spent the last 3 weeks getting psyched up about our sites and we were ready to get there! The next morning we loaded different vans going in different directions, and off we went!

*Please excuse this super-condensed version for the time being. I will try and fill in the gaps more as I go along, but this should give everyone a general idea of my whirlwind first month in Africa!

I love you and miss you all!
xoxoxox
- Jen