Schools

Last Saturday morning I went to school in the morning to help the 12th graders prepare for the second part of their life sciences exam

It's time to plant!

On my walk to school the other day I stopped to see my sister and mom planting maize for the upcoming season

Isandlwana!

So this is the namesake geographical feature of the area. It is at the
base of this that the British made camp and were then decimated by Zulus
before retreating to Rorke's Drift. Now, it's just a rocky protuberance
that is fun to climb up. Actually, at the base of the other side is
Katie's village. Last Sunday I hiked to the top along with two other
PCVs, Chad and Katie. It was a gorgeous day and the view was pretty
cool from the top too. This is only 8km away from where my village is
for reference.

Bucket Brewing!

Some of you may be wondering how I have been keeping myself busy. One
project I began when I first arrived was to brew my own wine. Now
obviously I do not have access to all the fancy equipment that one would
use back home so I improvised a little. I decided the simplest (and
cheapest) set up would be a bucket with a blanket tied on top to vent
the resultant CO2 from fermentation. So I boiled together a bunch of
orange peels, 2 bananas, 1 pineapple, and 750 grams of raisins with 20
liters of water and a couple kilos of brown sugar. I let that cool down
in the bucket then added about 12 packets of bakers yeast the next day.
8 weeks later and you can see me here siphoning out the finished wine.
I ended up with about 12 liters of wine that really tastes pretty good
for coming out of a bucket! I will be entering a sample into the
homebrew competition at In-Service Training coming up in December.

Mangeni Falls!

Braai Time on top of Mangeni Falls, about 30k from Isandlwana