Thursday, August 12, 2010

booty poppin

soo now that i'm in zambia, i've learned a few more things....

* little kids here are much, much better at booty poppin dancing than i will ever be. i was seriously put to shame. multiple times.
* when driving on the other side of the road....cars may seem closer than they appear....and it is not advised to run into them.....but if it does happen, it's also ok to just leave the scene of the crime (this is not from personal experience...i was just a passenger)
* it is much colder here than i thought it would be....i've been wearing 6 layers every day....basically all the clothes i brought with me at once
* our cat is evil....it peed on my bed (similar to chance for whoever knows of my old cat)
* zambians are really good at soccer....i got schooled in a pickup game. pretty rough

alright, all i got for now. i can't wait to see what else i'm going to learn....

Sunday, August 8, 2010

yebo!

"yebo" means "yes" in zulu....little tid bit

anyways, i leave for zambia today!!! im actually in the airport right now. hyping myself up for a long, fun flight to lusaka, zambia... eeh, not so much. i believe its around a total of 30 hours of travel

we just had orientation the last 4 days in hanover, nh. it was great meeting the other interns -- there are 26 of us in total spread throughout zambia, south africa, malawi, and lesotho. we also got a better understanding of how grassroot soccer works and uses their "skillz curriculum" for the coaches to teach and educate the youth about hiv prevention. it truly is an amazing program and the more i learn about it, the more im impressed and excited for this year to be a part of it.

a few statistics and facts about grs i learned this weekend....
* grs has graduated more than 320,000 kids from its skillz programs
* grs hopes to graduate 1 million kids by 2014
* grs is located in 18 countries throughout sub saharan africa
* the lusaka site, where i am stationed, as trained over 200 coaches and graduated over 26,000 kids

that's just a little bit of information about the organization, but when you see the numbers it's amazing to see how far grs reaches and how many kids and people is affects.

alright, well time to board the plane!! next time i write i'll be in zambia!!