Week 13

Good evening from a warm South Africa! Thursday marked me being in SA for three months, which is totally crazy as I feel like I've been hear ages yet I know I've got over 8 months left.

Monday saw the staff braai to mark the ending of another year at OB. We also had a secret santa! I had picked out Scott's name from the hat so I gave him a super cool (eco friendly!!) camping cutlery/plate kit. Wrapped up in wrapping paper stuck together with blue tac. I was given a book by Trevor Noah (a famous South African) titled 'Born a Crime'. It's definitely worth the read if you come across it!

The rest of the week was spent doing odd jobs around base including safety checks. Us three volunteers also helped out the landowner (a British guy named Tom) to unpack and decorate a house he built just up the road from us. As a thank you, he and the interior designer took us out for drinks at pilli pilli (the coolest beach bar around).

On Thursday five of us headed out to do some community service near the abseil site here. We spent a few hours pulling out invasive plants that take so much water from other plants. While we were up at the abseil site we went to check that the student path was still usable after all the heavy rain and wind last week. It was my first time up at the abseil site and the view was amazing - I hope I get the chance to abseil it soon! After following the trail down from the base of the abseil we came out at the river and after a brief encounter with a baby boomslang snake, me, Scott and Talitha decided to go for a dip. The water was the perfect temperature for an afternoon swim and there was even a small waterfall to sit under. A perfect last day at work for 2018.

Even though we're now on leave (stay tuned for next week's blog and the start of our road trip!) there is still a final course currently happening here at OB. The course running is for a group of teenagers from DSD (department of social development). OB runs several DSD courses throughout the year, with roughly ten participants each course. These courses can be mentally and sometimes emotionally challenging for instructors as the participants are all young offenders and can cause a bit of trouble while here on course. Each person has different backgrounds on these courses, it could be that they stole something from a shop or something more serious such as stabbing someone. As these young people have criminal backgrounds, us volunteers aren't allowed to support the course as it's just too dangerous for us. So its only really male instructors that support the DSD groups.

In some other news around base, there has been load shedding going on so we've been having power cuts randomly happen throughout the week. I've seen so many frogs the past week, we got a bigger, better and brighter SA flag for the flagpole and as to date, my advent calendar hasn't melted yet!

The photos I've included this week are of the view from the abseil site and the river at the bottom where we swam. There's also one of the Christmas chocolates someone hung outside our (and everyone else's) door early Thursday morning and another of Talitha and her drawing she did of one of the instructors. Then also some random photos from the past few days.

Rachel :)