Little talks or playing memory

As the South African embassy still didn’t get in touch with me because of my visa, I made new plans for the time that I’ll have to spend waiting: I’ll try to learn isiZulu. Along with English, Afrikaans, isiNdebele, isiXhosa, Sepedi, Sesotho, SiSwati, Setswana, Tshivenda and Xitsonga, isiZulu is one of the eleven official languages of South Africa and home language to 24% of the population. Also in Johannesburg and in my project there will be many people speaking Zulu. Even though I guess that I could get along quite well speaking English, I think that it’s more fun to learn a new language – especially if it’s one with click consonants! Of course the clicks – there are three different ones, a dental, an alveolar and a lateral click - make it much more difficult for me, because I’m just not used to making these sounds while speaking and it sounds really funny when I try to. But anyway, I’ll try to do my best!

To let you participate in my attempt to learn isiZulu I created a Zulu-memory to learn some names for South African animals. Each of the ten pairs consists of the English and the Zulu name of an animal. Just click at the cards to open them. Check it out and have fun!

My Zulu-memory

play again	score tries wrong

Sitting, Waiting, Wishing

20th of August - the big day of departure and the day that I longingly expected for about half a year now. But unfortunately the worst imaginable case for all of us volunteers came true for me: My visa application wasn't accepted yet and this - at least for me - without any comprehensible reason. So this is the day of saying goodbye and wishing good luck to the 14 fortunate ones that got their visas and now sit in the plane to Johannesburg. Besides me there are three other volunteers that couldn't leave yet, including Stella, my project partner, who will be working for Cotlands with me. All of us are hoping now, that we get our visas as soon as possible, but this can still need up to seven weeks and in the meantime for us it means: Sitting, Waiting, Wishing!

But there wasn't only bad news in the last few weeks. I already had my first two five-day preparing seminars and I have to say that they were really great! It was amazing how many interesting and nice people I got to know so well in such little time. Our team included all of the volunteers of AFS that go to South Africa and Ghana plus our six teamers, who are former volunteers. We all learned a lot but also had enough time to have a great deal of fun and to do a lot of activities together, like playing basketball and soccer, going to an Ethiopian restaurant, swimming and much more. Thank you all for these great days! I'm so much looking forward to see you again in South Africa!

My project placement came about two months ago and I have to say that I am really comfortable with it. Together with an other AFS-volunteer I am going to work and live in an orphanage in Johannesburg (here you can read more and of course I will supplement the information as soon as I arrived).

I'm also almost done with my last preparations. I endured many - it seemed like at least 100 - vaccinations, bought some equipment, already said goodbye to some friends and started writing my first blog post. So everything that's missing now is the visa and then it can go off.

So that's about all for now. Thanks to all of my sponsors and everybody else who is supporting me, you will hear from me as soon as there are any interesting news!

Bye for now!

Frederike