my week with food poisoning and the last couple months

hi everyone. hope you are well. as i haven't written in a couple months i figured i'd give you an update on my life since swazi. i went to Semonkong for New Year's. i have pics up on flickr. or at least i have most of them. the computers here are having some problems with the flash drive, which is preventing me from being able to upload my photos. hopefully i'll be able to put the rest of them up in the next couple months.
anyways. semonkong was beautiful. it's higher up in the mountains than where i live, and it was very green. hills all over. one of the tallest waterfalls in the world is near semonkong, so i hiked up to see it one day. as it had been raining recently the waterfall was pretty nice. i wanted to walk down to the base of the waterfall, but my friend didn't know how to get down. maybe next time i visit. semonkong is one of the tourist areas of lesotho, so there's a lodge there, and that's where i went, with a few other volunteers, for new year's. we had dinner there, and then hung out, drank, danced, etc., until about 4 in the morning. there were some german dudes there, one of whom was interested in my and pretty persistant. he hung out with us until we went to bed. i did literaly just say goodnight about 4 in the morning and walk into the volunteers' room. the owners of the lodge had given us a room for free for the night so we wouldn't have to walk home late, in the dark, where there's no electricity. that was nice of them. and i managed to hitch a free ride back down to maseru the next day, off some south african guys who'd come for the holidays and were returning home.
after new year's, i went back to site and basically hung out for a few weeks. i went to a support group meeting, and am trying to get my support group into making crafts as a fund-raising activity. they are, or have been - for unknown reasons they haven't met in in 3 weeks - making braided seshweshwe necklaces. i have some pics of them on flickr actually. one of the 'm'e in the group is very enthusiastic and keeps coming up with new ideas of things she can sew, like hats and decorative flowers, which is great. i just hope the group can start meeting regularly because nothing's going to happen otherwise. i really want them to get off the ground.
school started jan. 21. classes weren't scheduled until the middle of the next week, so things were basically chaos the first 1-1/2 weeks. some teaching, registering new students, but lots of chaos. i'm teaching biology and english. the students just got their literature books last week, so maybe next week i'll be able to start with their books. after school a few times a week i play with the preschoolers and primary school kids that live near me. we work puzzles, draw, i practice english and math with them, whatever. they can be a little stressful, but are generally cute. i have some pics, but can't put them on flickr because the flash drive on the computer isn't working.
oh, i might be moving. my house is in the middle of the village, so village meetings take place right on my doorstep. the preschool is beside my house, so in the mornings when i'm not teaching, but working in the village i have 30+ preschoolers screaming outside. and even when i'm sick and tell the kids that i don't feel well, they still come to my door asking to play. so i might be moving to a house in my supervisor's family compound. same village, just a little move privacy (hooray!). the house just needs a few repairs, and i would need a pit latrine there, but it is in a family compound, and there is some privacy. there's also only one child on the compound, my supervisor's grandson. my supervisor is caring for him because her son empregnated a woman who abandoned him and went to south africa and my supervisor's son refused to care for him. this really angers me, but i am glad that the little boy is with a family who will care for and love him.
back to me being sick. i got food poisoning. i think it was from a bad piece of cheese i ate last wednesday. food poisoning is not fun. i spent thursday through saturday with diarrhea, and on friday i threw up on my local taxi. so now i'm not only the white girl on the taxi, i'm the white gril who through up. hooray. and to top it off, i think i threw up partially on one of the other volunteers' students, who happened to be the unlucky person sitting next to me. after that, i gave up on trying to do anything for a few days. from friday until tuesday i was nauseated, i guess because i'd flushed a lot of my good bacteria out of my system, which was consequently inhibited my ability to intake food and fluid. so i spent a few days not eating or drinking much. i felt much better this wednesday, and even woke up hungry on thursday! sometimes it's wonderful to be hungry. anyways, i think i'm pretty well back to normal, but after over a week of lying in bed doing nothing, running was rough this morning. but it's nice to feel well again, and i'm looking forward to returning to school on monday. hope all is well with everyone back home. tata.
ann