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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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Winter sunsets here aren't as vividly spectacular as the summer ones, but they have their own subdued beauty.  The shortest day of the year in the southern hemisphere is just about to pass with it these cold 17h30 sunsets.

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Know your burnt remains 101: The South Africa Edition. Biking past the tavern on the corner near my house this morning I passed this pile of burnt debris.  I've seen enough piles like this to know exactly what it was but I realized many people back home wouldn't.  This is what a tire looks like after it's been burned.  I never realized how much metal wire was in a tire.

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I usually do my laundry in the large concert tubs on the side of the house.  But today they were all being used by other people, so I had to use my wash basin and the bathtub.  Try doing that when all the washing machines in the laundromat are full!

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I was over a kilometer away but I knew something unusual had to be up. I was biking down the main tar road past the back of the township and there so many kids running up and down the street that it felt like a small side road in the township not the busy main road.  Passing the soccer grounds next to the center I worked at I saw a large huddle of kids off to one corner.  My first guess was that someone was hurt, but that have to have been hurt really bad to cause this kind of commotion - so I went to investigate.  In the center of this large mass of kids was a guy silently packing up a paraglider.

For the last three days Barberton has been hosting a paragliding competition and it turns out one of the paragliders had landed in this soccer field.  It was the coolest things these kids had seen all week and I'm sure they'll be talking about it for weeks to come.  Talking the the guy later he said that he had to make is landing faster than usual because he could see kids streaming in from all over and didn't want to hit any of them on landing. 

Paragliders are seriously some of the coolest people that come through Barberton.

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June 16th is Youth Day in South Africa.  A national holiday commemorating the Soweto student uprising in 1976.  It was a gorgeous day here and many of the kids on my street welcomed the warmer weather and no school by putting on shorts and playing outside.  I went to a youth day event at a local church where a group of young actors dramatized the events of the day 35 years ago.  Their show ended with a reenactment of 12 year old Hector Pieterson's death.

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Science in action once again.  One light bulb, an inflatable globe and a giant tennis ball make a great reenactment of the lunar eclipse going on right above our heads.  By the end at least Gogo was saying she understood how that could be the Earth's shadow up there.

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After a long conversation the educator and I developed procedures that investigated rate of reaction using acetic acid and sodium bicarbonate - vinegar and baking soda - both of which I had plenty of back at home.  And since I hate how learners here are told to develop their own investigation with out ever having seen a controlled experiment being preformed I made lab hand outs with fill in the blank style answers.  After school today we conducted the experiment and here are a few pictures.  

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True township dogs live off samp and pap like everyone else.

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For R17 (a little over $2) you can buy a giant bag of giant fruit loop like things at the 'we sell everything' eclectic shops in town.  Biking them back to my house might garner a few weird looks and laughs but it's well worth it since I have snacks for the kids for two weeks.

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