Thursday Things

· I grated my finger. No really. With a cheese grater. It was obviously an accident and it just nicked me in a couple of spots, but luckily I recently received an AMAZING birthday box with Disney princess band-aids and hot wheels band-aids. I also gave each of the sickies/itchies one to make them feel better. Some of the kids put them on their foreheads.
· If you are ever going to be in Africa for 4 months, invest in an inflatable globe, it’s good for perspective
· I’m awesome at the ukulele. No really. Tally brought one with her and I finally learned how to play it yesterday. I can’t play any real songs but I’m awesome at that thing.
· Our original itchy kids are healed, but we have about 4 others with different rashes. One of them is scabies. Which is not good.
· My dad and brother are currently somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean and should be in the country at about 3 pm. Then I will get to see them at around 9 pm : )
· We had a ‘talk’ with the girls yesterday, complete with visual aids and M&Ms. It was great. I love them. Also I feel totally qualified to be a mother by now.
· I have been a baking CRAZY. I made tortillas over the weekend, followed by banana bread, then banana chocolate chip muffins and last but not least a very yummy rhubarb cobbler with fresh rhubarb from the garden. In Tally’s words, I “would be a good wife”. So. There.
· We (the volunteers and Rita) have spent the last two nights out on the town! Before you jump to any conclusions: The owners of two of the stores in town have totally adopted us and we love them. They are the ones who took us out to that game farm for my birthday, in case you didn’t make the connection. Anyway there is a…I don’t know what to call it…bar(?) or club maybe, called Thunderstruck really close to the end of our road and this family is buying it. I think that is true. Anyway we never knew about it and they told us and we went! It was fun. We were there ‘early’ so there were only…3ish other people there. We are never in town after dark, so it felt like an adventure. Then yesterday we were planning on going into town to get some supper (the kids were having some fish stuff that I generally do not appreciate or consume) and this same family laughed at us because we were going to their store to buy these little pie things that are kind of like potpies and instead they brought us Chinese food from East London! It was amazing. Also they are amazing.
· Tally is leaving early early tomorrow and Yui is leaving on Saturday. Sad : (
· Granny Pearl is our newest driver. She is hilarious. Also super intense. She decided that I needed to clean my room today and that she was going to help me. Wow. All I can say is that it is clean. And that it was an intense experience. Actual conversation from today: Tally: You made Granny Pearl clean your room?! Me: No, Granny Pearl made me let her clean my room. True. Story. (Also- Aunt MA- I am very sad to inform you that the picture of my room that I put up was from my first day here. My room was essentially a huge disaster up until about an hour ago. Thank you for loving me enough to compensate for my flaws. I love and miss you!)
· It is closer to Christmas and I am happy! My Dad is bringing my pink Santa hat and I am getting verrry excited.
· Things you can *hopefully* (cross your fingers) look forward to reading about in the coming monthish…me being in charge for like 10 days while Rita goes to Europe, taking the kids to some sort of theme park in East London (for FREE), cookie making, tree finding, stocking filling, a dairy farm visit, hopefully Robin Hood at a local theater, feeding lambs with bottles, baking, maybe some High School Musical 3 action, and the insanity that will come with having all 30 kids home everyday, all day for one month. Oh it’s going to be good.

LOVE!
kb

p.s. Shout love to a world so desperately in need of a whisper.
p.p.s. I am going to be trying to defeat East London with my Dad and brother tomorrow, so that should be interesting. Then we are heading back here and then leaving for Cape Town on Saturday : )

Why do all kids, everywhere, get up at 6 am on Saturdays?

And furthermore, why do they find it necessary to make sure that everyone else on the planet is also up at 6 am on Saturdays?
Things that make good days….
· Going to the clinic with a 5 month old baby the doctor was almost sure was HIV positive and getting the negative test back
· Taking 6 kids to the clinic for HIV tests last week and getting 6 negatives
· Getting an amazing package from my beautiful school friends!
· Going to a middle/high school youth group for kids in the area and having lots of fun, but realizing that I am very much not in high school anymore
· The fact that I learned how to make tortillas in Africa
· Making tortillas from scratch for 40 of my favorite people on the planet, even though it took 3 hours. (also if you eat a lot of tortillas and you buy them at the store, you shouldn’t. they are so easy to make and fun and full of love)
· Finally getting to watch Enchanted (LOVE!)
· Tally and I made these things called Russian Bars that were awesome and a recipe from our South African Oma, Rina, who we have tea with almost every week.
Things that make interesting days:
· Trying to figure out what locals think of foreigners coming into their country and taking care of their orphans
· Having all of the school kids sent home early because of some mysterious rash at school. Of course 8 of our 10 kids came home with it.
· The clinic is out of meds and calamine because of the outbreak. Luckily we kind of horde those things, so we have a stash.
· The 8 kids are quarantined because the only thing worse than 8 kids with a rash? 30 kids with a rash.
· I feel qualified to have children now, because I already feel like I have 30 of them
Sad things:
· All of the kids standing at the door of their quarantined house with their goofy looking, white, calamine covered bodies, asking if they could come out and if they were going to be able to watch a movie (for the record they are being fed and tended to, they are just not allowed to touch anyone who goes into their house and they are eating all of their meals there and they didn’t get to watch a movie but they did get to play outside while all of the little kids were napping)
· Siphamandla is being treated for TB (the not contagious kind) because the doctor is pretty sure he has it. This is not actually that sad of a thing because the meds will make him stronger and the TB has probably been stunting his growth, but I just remembered it right now when I was writing sad things.
· Realizing that the world doesn’t look much like a lot of people think it does and trying to figure out what to do about that.

The Barbees take on South Africa in T-minus 5 days : )

kb

This is going to make your brain explode

Real. Life. Actual. Pictures.
After over 2 months in Africa, I was finally able to load a decent amount of photos online! Be excited, be very excited.
Here are the links:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2184285&l=f4e95&id=5619188
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2180066&l=4e380&id=5619188

ENJOY : )

kb

lizards, toads, 21!

Wow! It has been a while, sorry to all 3 of you who faithfully read my blog : )
Things to mention from the last weeks:

There is a little guard thing at the bottom of my door to keep critters out because my door leads directly outside. Well, that thing is broken. I’m not sure if I mentioned it before, but a toad crawled under my door one night a while ago and just last weekend a lizard came in. The lizard was fast and one of the drivers came in and destroyed my room trying to catch that thing. I was just standing at the door like the pansy girl that I am with some of the kids screaming every time it ran. I’ve started stuffing newspaper under my door every night.

The whole time I have been here I have been responsible for making turkeys. As a thank you to our donors we have been cutting out little turkeys made out of Asekhona’s hand. We finally reached our goal (580, I think). It only took 2 months and made me hate Thanksgiving for liiiife.

We have another volunteer! He is only here for 3 weeks and a friend of Rita’s, it’s fun having so many people here!

I tried driving in town the other day. It did not go well.

I am SO excited for Christmas!

Sive is WALKING! He is one month younger than Endi. The two of them are hilarious together.

Melissa sent me a little kid Cinderella costume for my birthday. She is the best!

I have been able to upload two whole pictures! Here are the links for them:
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=36222786&l=2a859&id=5619188
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=36222786&l=2a859&id=5619188
I’m pretty sure the first one is a picture of Endi and the second one is a picture of me and Phelisa from a very long time ago (the time we went to the beach, like the end of September maybe?) We have literally tried every way we can think of to get pictures online and have had no success. We have another thing to try in the next couple of days, cross your fingers!

I am 21! I celebrated my birthday with the kids on Saturday (Asekhona made a killer cake). And then the church people sang to me at church and made me an amazing cake and made me go stand awkwardly in the front and talk. And then it’s hard to explain but basically the lady who owns the store where we buy milk came to visit last weekend with her two daughters (who are 20! Ah! People my age!) and we told them that my birthday was this weekend and they are just too nice. They took us (me, Rita, Tally, Yui) out to a hunting game farm and we had a South African BBQ, which is called something that I cannot remember at this BEAUTIFUL farm. They have 4 rhinos and two of them were up near the house the entire time we were there. They are really goofy looking animals, but it was awesome to see them so close. These people are obsessed with hunting and they have all of their trophies in two rooms and that creeped me out a little bit. Anyway lunch was fabulous and I only had a few sips of what I think was beer mixed with Sprite because 1. I am on a lot of medication and 2. I left to look at the rhinos and when I got back there was a fly drowning in my drink. After lunch the owner of the game farm took us for a drive and we saw ostriches and all kinds of buck and some impala and giraffes! We also looked for the zebras but we could not find them. Their property is HUGE and the animals that we saw were amazing. It was definitely not a shabby way to spend a birthday : )

THANK YOU times infinity for all of the cards, packages, e-mails and messages that helped make my birthday very special. Y’all are the best.
LOVE!
kb