Homestays

Sawubona!
Wednesday evening we moved into our homestays! We were all really really nervous beforehand… the van ride there we were all freaking out. We drove up the huge hill to Sandgate Rd of Cato Manor. Cato Manor is a large township of Zulu, black South Africans just northwest of the Durban city center. It has a long history that we learned about today in class… but I’ll save that for another time 
When we got off the van, our new families all came to meet us. My new mama was still at work so my brother, Sandiya, and his friend Kwenza (nicknamed Buwa) came to pick me up and help carry my stuff to the house. Sandiya is 19 and just finished high school a few months ago. We walked just a little bit down the road and he showed me to my new house! It’s very nice, and I even have my own room with a double bed and wardrobe. Sandiya and some of the neighborhood kids took myself and my SIT friends Leah and Meredith for a tour of the small section of Cato Manor we live in. There were tonnnnns of people that we met and we stopped by quite a few houses. When we came back, my other brother, Andile, age 15 was there. Sandiya, Buwa, Andile and I hung out, watched TV (which is ALWAYS on in the house) and talked about the differences between South Africa and America. I learned so much in just the first few hours of my homestay!
We had a delicious dinner of chicken and rice around 7:30, then sat down to watch Generations, an EXTREMELY popular soap opera here in SA. When I say extremely popular, I mean that almost every single Zulu family watches it every night at 8. It was very entertaining (and luckily had English subtitles for the parts that were in Zulu) and I’m excited to watch it every night! Soon after, my mama, Nokuthula, and her sister, Penny, came home from work at the Pavilion (the large mall that you can see from my house). We chatted a little while I unpacked and got ready for bed.
I fell asleep fast, which was good because we have to wake up at 6:30 everyday to catch the van to the SIT house at 7:30. I’m quickly discovering that everyday from here on out is going to be veryyyyy long. We have class essentially straight through from 8 until 4 every day, with just an hour or so break for lunch in the middle. Today we had 2 hours of Zulu, finished up the last bits of orientation, had lunch, then had a lecture about the history of Durban and Cato Manor.
I finally got my cell phone in working order! We “topped up” our minutes during our lunch break (first adventure with a pay-as-you-go phone). A few days ago, my friend Alexa told me about a service Skype offers where you can call abroad using a mobile phone at local rates. For just $7 a month, I get unlimited minutes to the US! The only problem is that I still have to pay local rates, which could get quite expensive, so I just have to keep an eye out for that. I’m still very excited to be able to call back the states for very very cheap (I was looking into the service going the other way too… for a person in the US to call South Africa, it would be $25 a month for only 120 minutes).
Right now, I’m hanging out in my bedroom about to go to sleep. No, I don’t have wireless in Cato Manor, but I’ll be posting this as soon as I get to the house tomorrow. I’m really excited to be in a routine now, and to have an actual house and family to go home to every night. If I knew how to say goodnight in Zulu I would, but I still have a relatively limited vocab… so instead I’ll just say sala kahle, stay well!