Hello from Mpumalanga, en route to Limpopo

Hello all! I know it's been a long time since my last post (nearly four months, actually), but I should now be able to post more regularly as training is nearly over.

For the last five and a half weeks, I've been living in a large village of about 17,000 people in the northwestern corner of Mpumalanga Province, South Africa (see map from last post). Tomorrow, I'll be heading to Rustenburg in the Northwest Province to a workshop where I'll be meeting the person who will be my 'counterpart' here in South Africa for the next two years. As I learned Friday afternoon, I will soon be moving from my training village here in Mpumalanga to Ga-Mathabatha in Limpopo Province, the northernmost province of South Africa. Limpopo is home to most of the country's Sepedi-speaking (also known as 'Nothern Sotho') population. I've spent much of the last five weeks learning and practicing Sepedi despite living in a predominantly Setswana-speaking area, but the languages are so closely related that I have been able to practice speaking Sepedi with my Setswana-speaking host family (of which I'll write more later).

My next two weeks are likely to be quite busy. After a two-day training workshop in Rustenburg, I'll be traveling with my counterpart for a four-day site visit to Ga-Mathabatha, where I'll get to meet the people that will be my coworkers for the next two years. I'll be in a fairly unique circumstance of working in a fairly large organization that is already hosting a Peace Corps Volunteer, who arrived nearly a year-and-a-half ago and will be departing back to the States in July. Following in the footsteps of another volunteer should prove to have a number of benefits as well as challenges. I'm also hoping for a chance to visit a few of the local schools, the local chief, and other key figures and institutions in my village.

After my four days in Ga-Mathabatha, I'll be returning to my training site for nearly a week, where I'll be concentrating on refining my language skills ahead of my Language Proficiency Interview, which is the test that will ascribe a label to my ability to speak Sepedi and determine whether I'll need to hire a language tutor in Ga-Mathabatha and retest in three months. Following the test, on April 2nd, will be our swearing-in ceremony, where my training group will officially become Peace Corps Volunteers (as opposed to the current appellation - Peace Corps Trainee).

Well, I have to get to training, but please feel free to post comments about things you'd like me to write about in future posts.