Trevor's Photo Journal

Looking back through these photos I'm amazed at everything that I captured in here - and to think that if each picture represents just one second it is barely 0.003% of my waking hours for the year.  I would love to know what some of your favorite photos so I can feature some of the more popular days in the side bar.  So if you have some favorites please let me know in the comments.

The 365th day! A full year of posting a picture a day - and what a great year it has been.  One third of my Peace Corps service captured in small glimpses which I hope you have enjoyed. This photo journal started out as a way for me to document my last year in Peace Corps.  Peace Corps is such a unique experience. Unique, not just as an institution, but as a personal journey and cultural experience.  Because personal relationships and cultural immersion are so fundamental to the design of Peace Corps each site and volunteer create their own unique story.  A story that can't be captured or retold, only lived.  However, by sharing these photos with you over the past year I hope to have passed along some of that story so that you could, at least briefly, see South Africa and the township I live in not as lines and names drawn on a map, but as real live people. That people throughout the world come in all forms and may all dealt a different deck of cards - but in the end we share so much in common.

Originally the 365th post was supposed to be my last, and up until about a month and a half ago I had intended to be leaving South Africa tomorrow.  As it is, I am leaving South Africa tomorrow - but will be back to be a Peace Corps Volunteer for three more months to finish up National Science Week and help prepare one more group of 12th graders in my area to take the maths and physics matric exam.  Staying because there is more to do is bad - because there is always more to do, and although I probably would - if I could - be a Peace Coups Volunteer for ever, I shouldn't.  I need to move on, not just for my self, but for my host community as well. Having them become dependent on this free source of labor is a crutch not a ladder. At the same time, after much deliberation - seriously, I wanted to be home for my 25th birthday since I was 21 the last time I was in America - I decided that I couldn't leave in the middle of so many projects and needed one more term to finalize my service.

So, what's going to happen to this photo journal now that the year is up? While I've enjoyed the challenge of finding so many subjects and pictures to post I also think this blog has served its purpose and given you a fairly comprehensive view of what my life is like here.  I'm going to take the rest of my time here to do a more traditional Peace Corps blog posting once a week a longer entry about one subject, with pictures of course.  This will hopefully be a nice reflective exercises for me as well as an interesting read for you.

 Since I'm traveling right now so much happens in one day that I'll end with three pictures.

As we boarded the bus to leave my PST site this morning I thought it was weird that no on was sitting in the front two seats, but my brother and I sat there anyways.  As the bus started I noticed that it was a little windier then usual.  And then, about 20min down the road the bus stopped and the drive told everyone to get off.  Turns out that just before we boarded the front windshield had broken and due to regulations the bus couldn't go any further. We ended up having to wait three hours for a new bus to come.  Provided a nice lesson in patience and plenty of time to read my book.

We're spending the night with the Cramer's, a couple in SA20 who met in Peace Corps Chad before being evacuated from there.  They are from the education group right after me and are leaving in a few weeks to teach at an American school in the DRC. I've come out to their site before to help with a camp - and actually came out to their site to visit the SA16's that were here before them - and they're some of the most amazing people I know.  It was great to have some time to hang out before they go on to there next adventure and I go onto mine.  It is also great that they get to meet my brother since some of my parents close friends - from their time in West Africa before I was born - also happen to be fairly good friends of the Cramer's - from there time in Chad: Peace Corps, making the world a smaller place since 1961.

Because I have a light up frisbee and my brother has a Nikon D3100 - why wouldn't we do this?

This is local store right next to my PST host families house.  It's pretty typical for shop a rural South African: run by people who hail from the Indian sub-continent; you can't by anything in bulk except 80KG bags of maize meal; everything in the store is about 15% more than what you'd pay for in Jo'burg or Pretoria; and they're sponsored by Coke with the usual glass bottle return policy.

That Tasty box on the ground in front is from KFC which is the real reason I took this picture.  While KFC is probably one of the most popular fast food chains in South Africa, the closest one to this spot is at least 90km away over at least 10km of dirt roads and if you were doing it on public transport would take you three hours to get to.

This is a Sphathlo - french fries, hot dogs, and sauce on bread -  shop that opened up right next to the store above since my last visit to the village back in October.  I talked with the young owner, the man in the wheel chair, and he's quite enterpriser. A great asset for the village, since one of the biggest problems in rural areas is the lack of any sort of economic development and bootstrapping that development one of the biggest challenges any development work faces.

Out of the shop was coming a nice mix of house music and looking in I saw it was coming from a desktop computer and speaker system. It's probably the least thing you would expect to see in a tin sided shop like this out in basically the middle of nowhere South Africa, but a great testament to the proliferation technology though out the world. I'm pretty sure this whole set up is taken out of the shop and moved to the owners home each and ever day.

I took my brother out to visit my PST (pre-service training) host family. This is the family I spent my first three months in South Africa with back in July 2008 through September 2008.  They live in a really rural village with such a different pace of life from the township I've called home ever since and I'm glad I got to show my brother around.  The mind works in strange ways and I can remember parts of my first weekend there like it was yesterday - in Peace Corps the years go by like seconds and before you know it your time is up.

Penji, Thomas, and me.
Kids playing with a tire - who said toys had to be fancy and made of breakable plastic, that tire is pretty much indestructible.

Thomas playing with the opposite of a tire - the kindle I my brother brought out for me. As an avid reader I'm ecstatic about the potential of this device and in my few brief interactions with it and kids here I'm convinced that it can be a great educational tool for schools in both the developed and developing world. While the OLPC might have more functionality and be designed better for a rugged environment I think the Kindle could easily compete with it in the classroom if specific applications were developed for it.  I've already started looking into the KDK and how to start making an arithmetic teaching tool on the kindle. 

This was the fourth time I've met people at the international arrivals section of OR Tambo Airport.  This time it was my brother who will be staying for just about a month as we travel through South Africa, Botswana, and Namibia visiting other Peace Corps Volunteers and seeing what we see.

A Helping Hand: It was a gorgeous Sunday afternoon so the kids at their large Sunday meal outside.

This house is in the middle of some minor growing pains.  Inside the cinder-block shell you can see the base of a government issue four room RDP house on to which it looks like they are adding a garage, living room and extra bedroom.

My old street, just three streets away from my current street, is getting a makeover.  They are replacing all the water pipes on it changing it from dirt to tar.  A tar road will change the level of callouses on all the children's feet come mid-summer next year, but it will also make it much easier to drive on since the summer rains won't wash giant holes out of it. Two other streets in the area are getting the same thing done to them and because of that we haven't had water from 8am - 8pm all week and it's projected to be that way for the next month.  Though I'm leaving on vacation soon so might not have to be here for the majority of that.

They call these giant flood lights Apollos.  My host uncle tells me its after those "sputnic rocket things" but I'm more inclined to think it's after the Greek god Apollo who carried the sun through the sky each day, because at night these giant lights make the four blocks around them feel almost like day.  I know one volunteer who has one of these right outside their house and their Gogo will do the gardening at night during the summer when its much cooler.

Cell models of the stages in mitosis that I found sitting in the back of a science lab.