Cato Manor

Hello everyone!

I'm finally settling into a routine, and I'm so glad I have! Every day, we wake up pretty early (6:30-6:45) to catch the van by 7:30 to head off to the SIT house. There, we have a few minutes of internet time before 2 hours of Zulu. After, we have a short break before either having our Community Health Seminar class or our Field Study Seminar class. Luckily, we have a nice long lunch break (1-1.5 hours) to catch up on emails and such... which is how I'm writing now! After lunch, we have another 2 hours of class, then have a little time before we get driven back to our families. Definitely more class time than I'm used to at Syracuse!

At home, I usually spend a little time outside (for the runners in my family- I attempted a run yesterday... not too bad! We'll see if it keeps going...) before the sun goes down around 6. It is still late winter here in SA, so the days are much shorter right now than they are in the US. When I go inside, I usually try to get my reading done for the next day, work on a little Zulu, and hang out in living room with my homestay family. I sometimes attempt a "bath", which involves boiling a few kettles of water, mixing it with the cold water from the tap in a bucket, and washing with just a wash cloth. No hot water or full american baths here! It's not bad at all though, and I've almost mastered washing my hair already.

Every night at 8 we watch Generations, which I'm slowly picking up the story too. My family has a TV package that has random American channels, like the Style Network and the Home network, so I've watched lots and lots of makeover and home improvement shows. We have dinner (rice with some kind of meat) and around 9 or so I usually head into my room to read a little and get to sleep pretty early. I think I've gotten more sleep in the past few nights than I got all summer at camp, even with waking up at 6:30 everyday.

I don't have too much time now, but next post I'll let you know what I'm planning to do for my independent study project!