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1 week to go
Vaccinations against every bug real or imagined roaming the earth: $250. Visas to enter 3 countries no one has ever heard of: $300. Plane ticket to the other side of the world for a wikkidly fun trip: $1,400. That knot in your stomach in the days leading up to your departure for fear of forgetting…
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Land of Great Stone Houses
The word “Zimbabwe” in old Shona means “great stone houses”, an appropriate description for one of the sites I saw here in my short visit to this country. Zimbabweans are a friendly lot, they are progressive, they don’t have the racial problems that South Africa is plagued with. I get the feeling that when the…
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Relaxing by One of the Seven Wonders of the World
LAND OF SMOKE THAT THUNDERS David Livingstone was the first European to see the falls in the 1850s (though the Arab traders probably saw them 500 to 800 years before him. Livingstone named them for Queen Victoria, but the locals know them as the Smoke that Thunders. Our team arrived here mid-afternoon a week ago …
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A la prochaine
Living in a village with no lights in a part of the world where the sun sets at 6:00 pm has a great effect on the body. Dinner is eaten by candlelight and any reading or journal writing is done with the help of a flashlight or headlamp. More importantly, it means that you are…
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First Day of Work
A word about our lodgings. We are staying in 2 Habitat houses about 36 square metres in size each. In that space, there are 2 bedrooms, a living/dining room, a kitchen, pantry closet and a space that could be used for storage or as a shower stall (latrine is behind the house). Normally, rural African…
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Hello from Tiyende Pamodzi, Zambia
Well I’ve been here for a couple of full days now and have been able to get a good sense of the village where we’re living and working. I met up with my Habitat group at Heathrow airport on Wednesday evening. We were supposed to fly out at 7:15 in the evening local time, but…
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2006 – A little sojourn in London before Africa
At risk of abusing a Beatles song title to start out my first journal entry, while Canadians were celebrating Canada day Saturday, here’s a sample of what was on this city’s agenda that day: England vs. Portugal football match Europride Roger Waters (Pink Floyd) concert Wimbleton Not that any of these is overly remarkable, but…
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Fin
I have been back home now since last Tuesday night trying to revert back to my old life. It hasn’t been an easy transition, which is not surprising, and it has kept me from writing the final journal entry. Nonetheless, I thought I better get on this before the immediacy and clarity of my thoughts…
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Farewell Lesotho. And now back to South Africa.
I’ve been a little negligent on sending updates, mostly because I have been on the move a lot lately since I left Maseru. Today is my last full day in Jo’burg before returning home. The past week has flown by so quickly yet it seems I am a world away from Lesotho where I spent…
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A weekend break and a night on the town
A friend of mine told me before leaving on this trip of an article he had read predicting that Lesotho could be the first country to “disappear” because of disease, particularly AIDS. Lesotho’s prolonged drought and, as the world renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs would point out, its economic isolation as a landlocked country with limited…
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sedativegunk 