Happy (Almost) Holidays From Cape Town!

Well, it doesn't look like December, and somehow I have already made it through a third of my GRS internship. What is going on!?!

It has been far far too long since my last blog post, I  know. But the last few months have pushed me in ways that makes Colby finals weeks look like a leisurely stroll. Currently, I am on my 9th straight day of work, and I will continue to go just about full throttle until Friday when we close for the holidays.

I know I won't be able to cover all that I want to, but here are some snapshots from the last couple months...and what a couple months it has been!

Cape Town in December! Looking at Lion's Head from the Contour Path of Table Mountain

Our GRS crew for the Cape Times Big Walk on November 10

The first 2013 FFHC Site Staff vs HQ Staff Soccer Match in November

GRS Coach Lucky Facilitating an Under-13 Life Skillz Session in our November Community League Tournament

Lucky Facilitating "Risk Field" with Under-19's During the Same Three-Week Tournament

Welcome to Jankershoek, Ladies and Gentlemen! Looking down from the top of Stellenbosch Mountain

My Partner in Crime

Riding on the Back of a Crocodile (or a rock that looked like one) on our way up Stellenbosch Mountain

Coach Mr. Kuna addressing the Community League Under-13 All Star Team at a Tournament in Cape Town on December 6

Coaches and Participants after our Decmeber Holiday Programme at Bosasa, a Juvenile Prison in Khayelitsha

GRS Coach KK and I looking so stylish at the HIV Counseling and Testing Tournament (HCT) on December 7 

Another Amazing Cape Town Sunset :)

 Stay tuned in early January for pictures of my holiday adventures! The line-up includes: Victoria Falls, Kilimanjaro (Summiting on Christmas Day!), and the Okavango Delta in Botswana...not too shabby.

October Photo Album

I'm once again reverting to the photo essay for this post, but there are some good ones!

The AMAZING GRS Site in Soweto: the Nike Training Center

Focus Group Discussion with GRS coaches and interns at Soweto

A handful of us Cape-terns with some GRS coaches from Soweto after a great day on site
(Photo Courtesy to Katie Pelo)

All the intern Kaiser Chief fans (with a few random additions) after watching the Soweto Derby, the biggest soccer game in South Africa between the two best club teams in the country. Amakosi for Life!

Energizer before Preschool graduation :)

How many preschoolers can you fit in the multi-purposr room at the FFH Khayelitsha? 383. I still can't believe we were able to fit them all in there.

FFHC Community League Graduation!

Vuyo, our Program Coordinator and all-around best guy ever, greeting the audience

Jones, a member of the community who chairs the Social League (over-30) Commitee, giving a motivational speech to the young participants

Nothing like a trophy to make you smile! Coach Raymond and his captain with the U15 winners' trophy.

Winners of the U13 Division with their winners' trophy and new set of bibs

Eric's hard work in material form...participation certificates for all 300 Community League players!

Vuvuzela Times Article

The following is an article that is yet to be published in this-coming months version of GRS South Africa's quarterly newsletter. My readers are very important to me, so I will treat you all to a sneak peak...Enjoy! I apologize for the strangle format, blogger is being mysterious and temperamental for no reason and the only way I can make it somewhat readable is do format ithe post this way.

Holidays Galore in Khayelitsha

By Eric Barthold

Football for Hope Center has seen many changes this quarter, most notably the exchanging of the intern guard, as fellow intern Anna Rayne and I have begun our time as the next generation of FFHC Khayelitsha programs interns. All of the Cape Argus pundits predicted the center’s downfall when they saw who was to replace Jessi and Leah, but FFHC Khay has continued to thrive despite our best efforts and numerous faults.

After an August that positively sped by, September saw the Khayelitsha team working on two holiday programs: one SKILLZ Street Holiday Programme at Sosabenza Primary School, and a freshly molded Holiday Tournament at the Football for Hope Center. Earlier that month, a taskforce comprised of Vuyolwethi Kayi, Nokuzula “Poppy” Mathiso, Gcina Mondi, Jeff Devereux and myself sat down to restructure the center’s community league and build a holiday program for the center. To that end, we appointed four Community League Coordinator positions to oversee the league as well as run the holiday tournament in late September, which included daily soccer technical sessions, tournament games, and extended Take a Stand discussions. Ten under-15 teams and eight under-11 teams from the Community League attended, and local club Bafana United claimed the winners’ trophies for both age groups. Overall, the staff thought that the week “went really well,” so much so that it “got teams more excited for the [remainder of the Community] League, even [including] the teams that were not part of the tournament.”

Meanwhile in Site B at Sosabenza Primary, a much more established Skillz Street program began to show exactly why the UN Trust Fund for Women approved GRS’s $515,000 grant for gender programming (huge kilo to the business development team!). Our coaches and all 90 graduates opened up to each other more than they ever expected and engaged in conversations about HIV/AIDS, sexual health, gender based violence, and personal challenges in their day-to-day lives. One participant even confessed during the Heritage Day themed graduation that the holiday camp was "the first time that she felt proud to be a girl." She wasn’t the only person moved by her SKILLZ Street Holiday experience, either. Ondela Mbambo, one of our first year coaches, said that "seeing the participants love the camp so much was extremely rewarding and made me feel proud that I am making a change in my community.” Sending out another kilo to all the coaches involved and particularly to Mphaki Molele and Anna for putting together a truly special and exemplary SKILLZ Street Holiday!

We look forward to finishing 2013 on a high note, with plans in the works for a variety of programs: a MAC AIDS documentary featuring coach Lucky Mfundisi, multiple SKILLZ graduations, a World AIDS Day HCT, as well as more holiday programs this December!

Box Scores:

32- GRS coaches who have now received with Sports Science Institute of South Africa accreditation as facilitators.

209 – People tested in the Women’s Day HCT on 9 August.

2 – Victories for the Site Staff during our first two Post Coach-Development Session Staff vs. Coaches soccer games of 2013.  

HHS Soccer Alumni in Cape Town!

Guess who showed up in Cape Town this weekend? Ian Strohbehn and I on the Kloof Roof after a great day of showing Ian what GRS is all about. Here we go Marauders!

Super September

For this post, I'm just going to let my pictures tell the story...

What's that white stuff? Our turf after a hail storm...
About as close to snow as I will see here

All the Cape-terns after the Cape Town Marathon 10K

A BEAUTIFUL sunrise from the Kloof Roof

RV United, a women's team from Khayelitsha coached by the FFHC's program coordinator Vuyo, celebrating after beating University of Cape Town the final game of their season. This is team I coached in the early in my time in Kheyelitsha, and it was truly special to watch from the sidelines as RV clinched promotion to the South African women's professional league. One team made up of players who grew in the townships and have never been outside of Cape Town, another of players from a 14,000 student university who come from all over the world, and the former comes out victorious. Simply amazing

FFHC Holiday Tournament 

(aka Eric's biggest project so far) 

Coach Lucky leading the Undr-11 age group in an energizer before their life skills session

Well attended tournament games

Soccer technical station run by yours truly

Lucky Leading a Fact/Nonsense exercise with the Under-11's

U15 Tournament game between Real Future and Harare Stars

Take a Stand: the central exercise for our life skills sessions

The Champions: Bafana United Sweeps U11 and U15 Tournaments

September Week 2: Episode 2

Two-fer Thursday

After such a monumental day on Weds, Thursday night found me in classic Barthold form. I had spent the previous couple weeks trying without success to play for a local men's club team from Camp's Bay, which lies just on the other side of Signal Hill from our apartment, and I received a call from one of the players at 4:15 asking if I could play in a 6:30 game. I was feeling the urge to have a nice and relaxed evening, but this was my chance to debut for Camps Bay FC! I worked it out in my head...it would be perfect. I could leave Khayelitsha at 5, drop the second GRS car off at HQ by 5:40 so that someone else could use it the following day, run up the hill to Kloof and get there a little after 6, grab my soccer stuff and a peanut butter and honey sandwich before taking a taxi to Camps Bay, and arrive at the field at 6:20. And then the game would end right around 8:30, and I could take another taxi so that I could make it to our GRS team's 5v5 game at 9:00 back in Cape Town proper!

Camp's Bay FC's Field

Yes, it was a little nuts, but I'm so glad I did. The evening was so perfect, Camp's Bay FC's field sits right on the ocean, and I made a great debut for the whole second half (at left back, of all places) in a tough 1-0 loss to their main rivals Green Point. I was a little late to the 5v5 game but I made it for the second half - much to my teammates delight, for they only had one substitute until I arrived. One of the former interns who plays with us turned to me at one point to say, "Thank you so much for coming even after you already played" as if I had sacrificed something to make sure they had enough numbers. Looking back at the craziness of my last 5 hours, I laughed and replied, "Are you kidding me? Two games in one night? I would do this every day if I could!"

Until the next installment...and if you find yourself bored before then, do a google map search of "Camp's Bay FC, the Meadway, Camp's Bay South Africa." It's definitely not the worst location for a football pitch!

September Week 2: Episode 1

I can't remember what I did before Wednesday. I remember the sad Tuesday afternoon departure of our fearless leader, Jeff Devereux, who was in the previous class of interns but stayed on for an extra month and quickly became a mentor and friend for all of us new Cape-terns. Other than that, it's hard for me to recall anything else. The tail end of the week brought with it enough tasks, adventures and special moments to last me a month. I will try to bring my readers into some of those moments, but it may take more than one post. And unfortunately (at least for you all), I'm not sure things will be slowing down anytime in the next two weeks. If you all promise to be patient, I promise to do my best to keep up.

Jeff Dev's Departure Dinner Celebration with interns, former interns, and friends

What a Wednesday:
I mentioned in my last post that we are revamping an after-school soccer league called Community League, and said that this league may be the forum into which I can best develop my masculinity discussions into GRS and Football for Hope programming. The Community League is a well-funded project in which 6 person teams play in league games and then participate in GRS life skills programs when their team is not on the field (the latter of which is where I should be able to pilot the Man Box). There are close to 700 participants, with each day of the week dedicated to a different age group. Members of the community also volunteer to referee the games. Despite the massive amount of potential that this Community League has, however, it has previously been a very informal project run by just a couple people and the money dedicated to the program often is only spent on trophies, soccer balls, etc at the termination of the grant cycle just to use it. So, with the guidance and motivation of Jeff Dev, I have taken the Community League project on as my baby, and Wednesday was a complete "crunch time" day.

Having drawn up a budget for the remaining grant funds with Jeff Dev and having met with Poppy (a site staff member who currently runs Community League) to outline the league's schedule from next week until the grant's end in February, I had a great discussion with Vuyo (our site's program coordinator) to create job descriptions for four new Community League positions early Wednesday morning. We decided to have four league coordinators under Poppy, each of whom will be in charge of a separate age group and have one of the following responsibilities: Matches and Results Coordinator, Life Skills Coordinator, and Two Referee Coordinators. I left feeling ready to take on the world, with my efforts finally looking like they were going to materialize into something new and exciting.

My excitement only increased after I met with Bukeka (or Bukie for short), a GRS coach, for my first 1on1 "Eric and Anna's Employability and Computer Restaurant" session immediately following the discussion with Vuyo. It was so great to see how excited and appreciative Bukie was to  have the chance to set up her own email, but more so to simply talk with someone about the future. We connected so well, and so many of her views about facilitating, teaching, and even general thoughts about the job searching process aligned with mine. The smile I wore after leaving Vuyo's office grew another few centimeters...

Our 1on1 came to an abrupt end when I had to drive Bukie and a bunch of the other female coaches to a school for Skillz Street, GRS's female specific program. Both the departing and returning car rides were full of laughter (often at my expense), and the session in school was my favorite practice to watch. Both coaches and participants were so fired up all session, and it was amazing to see how the students took charge of the session and just let loose. Cindy, they were most definitely on your wavelength

After Skillz Street and the long trek back to Kloof in the Avanza, I still didn't find a time to breathe. I had to ran up the hill to look over into Camps Bay (remember that name, because you will see it again) to get my blood pumping, then there was the issue of dinner before I had to sit down at our kitchen table to actually write up the job descriptions that Vuyo and I had outlined earlier that morning. Jordin Sparks and Kelly Clarkson music took me all the way to 11pm, when I had four polished job descriptions and an additional goals for Poppy as director. I left the house at 8 in the morning and didn't stop until 11 - my kind of a day :) May there be many more like it!

1 Month In

I apologize to my blog viewers for failing to complete my usual Sunday post last week. As often happens, time ran away from me…sigh. Speaking of which, I've already been here for a month!?! That can't be...

Before I get too far into the main content of the post, I have to give a huge shout-out to Colby Men’s Soccer, who open their season today in Waterville. If anyone wants to tune in, the game will be streamed on the Colby website at 1:30 EST. Williams is going to have no idea what hit them.

Turning back to the southern hemisphere, I had possibly the best day yet in South Africa last Saturday. All the interns headed up to Stellenbosch for the weekend, with wine tour of a various vineyards serving as the main attraction. For Scott Sanderson and me, however, there was only one place to go in Stellenbosch: the mountain biking trail network in the Jankershoek Valley. I scrambled to find a mountain bike the week beforehand, and struck gold with a brand new Schwinn Moab 26r for a whopping 4000 Rand ($400). While the rest of the interns piled into a wine tour bus (with a driver who had been a pro mountain biker in the 80’s and therefore completely supported our decision not to join him in the bus), Scott and I loaded our two bikes into our trusty Toyota Avanza and bolted straight to Jankershoek, a natural reserve about 10 minutes outside of Stellenbosch. We reached the parking lot in the pouring rain, but we took our chance when we saw the clouds thinning only a few minutes after we arrived.

With the suggestions of two riders who had just finished, we set out on what soon became one of the most enjoyable rides I’ve been. We climbed a dirt road on one side of the valley and descended a single track that sent me flying into mud puddle multiple times, and then promptly ascended the other side of the valley via a very technical single-track (because why would we ever stop at only one side!?!). At the height of the Jankershoek, we skirted the bottom of a long series of cliffs extending up into the cloud cover and then plunged down one of the steepest descents I’ve ever ridden. The downpour resumed just as we finished, prompting a most necessary stop at the reserve entrance’s small café for some hot chocolate and French Toast. The two of us could not stop grinning for hours, and our smiles only widened at the puzzled expressions on our fellow inters’ faces when we walked into the hostel with mud spots all over our faces.

In other news, I had the opportunity to do the Man Box with all the site staff in Khayelitsha. For those who don’t know, the Man Box is the core exercise to all the masculinity conversations that I facilitated with the male sports teams at Colby and multiple schools and teams around the Upper Valley. I presented the activity to see whether the activity could translate to South African and Xhosa culture, in the hope that maybe we could incorporate it into the various GRS and Football for Hope Center programs. Although I felt a bit rusty after not presenting it in a few months, the discussion went very well. They really enjoyed it, asked some great questions, and I could clearly see a few of them still mulling things over after we formally finished. The same pressures of gender that American boys feel also push boys in the townships to form gangs that are hugely destructive to their local communities, and the site staff agreed that they would love to see a similar masculinity curriculum built with the help of their local perspective. I could pilot the program in the after-school community league that we are currently revamping, and if successful, it could become the first curriculum built specifically for the FFHC Khayelitsha.  I first need to concentrate my efforts on building up the community league’s structure so that we have a platform on which to place such a program, but the vision is there. Ladies and gentlemen, MAV is coming to Africa. 

Work in Khayelitsha

FFHC (Courtesy of Katie Pelo)

I imagine there are few jobs in the world like being a programs intern at the Football for Hope Center FFHC in Khayelitsha. There are also few, if any, days at the FFHC that are the same as any of those before it. If anyone asks me what a typical day looks like for me, I can't really give them an answer. Even if the other interns ask whether I will be at the center at 2:30 on Tuesday because they were hoping to visit, I can only shrug. I can be on the computer working on an assignment one moment, then I'll be driving coaches to an intervention at a local school (which is without question the best task), then I'll be pulled in to a meeting with GC, our site coordinator, before finding out that Anna and I need to head back to HQ to print a large volume of coaches guides, pre/post tests for Monitoring and Evaluation, or graduation certificates because the printer at the center is not only small, but also unreliable. As you can probably imagine, the biggest thing that I've learned so far about work at the center is to be ready and flexible for ANYTHING. Yes, I certainly have tasks to accomplish, but there is so much going on around the center and in all the townships that I need to be ready to change gears at a moment's notice.

Speaking of tasks, Anna and I are currently focusing on multiple concurrent projects. She has been hard at work writing budgets and recruiting schools for a program called Skillz Street - the GRS program for girls in grades 7,8, and 9 - that starts this week (woohoo!), while I have been working on a variety of smaller projects. In addition to a few writing tasks, I have focused my efforts toward planning one-on-one sessions that Anna and I will be conducting with coaches in two weeks to improve their computer and employability skills for post-GRS life. Coaches can only be part of GRS for two years and they gain so much valuable experience from those years, but they still have an extremely hard road to travel before finding a job. I have had way too much fun with organizing these sessions, and have created a restaurant menu to present at our meetings to make them seem less formal, and therefore more enjoyable. Or in one of the former interns' words, I'll simply be making a fool of myself, which the coaches love to see. Here are a couple of my sample dishes:

Fried Email Setup and Navigation

This is a classic delicacy in South Africa, and yet still many have not tried this fried dish, full of Gmail, Outlook, and many other varieties of email servers.  

CV and Cover Letter Burrito

Our most popular dish, this Mexican Dish includes hefty portions of “Drafting CV’s” as well as “Cover Letters.” We also recommend having this with a side of Linked In.

In addition, I have been racing around the center to register as many coaches for a new fingerprinting pilot project. The goal is to have every FFHC staff, volunteer, or GRS coach fingerprinted so that we can track who comes to and from the center (especially coaches going to/from the local schools) without tracking the attendance on paper. Everyone will simply have to place their finger on a little scanner and the system registers them before automatically sending it to a database online. While the vision is quite cool, I have been given the heavy lifting: the task of recording everyone's prints so we can match those to our list of staff and coaches. It has been a bit stressful (especially when the program decides to shut down with no warning), but it has also given me a chance to get to know almost all of the coaches, who continue to amaze me. They are really a great group.

GRS Coaches at a weekly coaches development session
(Courtesy of Betsy Kaeberle)

Although this last segment is rather disconnected, I'm going to say it anyway. I mentioned printing earlier, and we have found out very quickly that printing will be a very large part of our job description. For instance, we found out last week that we needed to print 1,000 graduation certificates back at HQ. And when you think about printing over 1000 certificates, the task seems tedious and and daunting. Essentially we sit on our computer printing 50 or so at a time (sometimes competing with others who need to print curricula or something) and  get up when the printer jams to remove errant paper. But then as soon as you realize how all these certificate will be given to 1,000 children child in or around Khayelitsha, the task becomes much more enjoyable. And each of those children has the ability and knowledge to "make there move" to prevent themselves from getting HIV as well as educate others in their community about what they have learned. That is the essence of Grassroot Soccer, and I will spend hours battling with printers for the smile of one kid as she smiles and holds her GRS certificate out in front of her.

Week 1

Wow...there's so much to report since my last post, so I will do my best to get the majority of it all.

Looking at Lion's Head and Camp's Bay from Table Mountain

Well, last week ended with a great hike up Table Mountain with fellow interns Anna, Caitlin, and Kat on an absolutely beautiful day. In addition to the amazing view, an a cappella group called AfricaJams provided a great soundtrack for our ascent as they sang traditional African songs that reverberated off the trail's rock walls. It was one of those experiences where I couldn't help but smile.

This week marks my first days of work for GRS, and it has started off well. Anna and I have been driving out every morning to the Football For Hope Center (FFHC) in Khayelitsha, the biggest township outside of Cape Town, and every day has been completely different from the one before. We spent most of the week driving around Khayelitsha and the neighboring townships to watch GRS interventions in primary schools. Interventions are the sessions run by GRS coaches, who are all young adults from townships around Khayelitsha that GRS trains to implement their various curricula, for students in local middle and high schools. We have spent an extensive amount of time with these coaches in our travels, and they really are a special group of people. They engage the students (or "learners" as everyone says around here) so well, they have an amazing amount of energy, and it has been great sharing stories and laughing with them as well as learning from them. This was especially evident on Friday, when Anna and I watched a Coaching Development session at the FFHC. Most of the 35 coaches were there presenting certain topics and gaining feedback on their facilitation, and I was again blown away by their charisma and skill. They lie at the core of GRS, and they really are making a name for themselves in addition to GRS.

NOTE: I promise I will have more photos of the FFHC and Khayelitsha soon...I definitely need to get my act together in that department.

Sunday Pickup near the Nelson Mandela Stadium in Cape Town
(photo credit to Betsy Kaeberle)

Outside of pure "work," my days have been full of soccer (to my chagrin, as you can imagine). A bunch of the younger GRS staff and interns play in a 5 vs 5 league Thursday nights, and there is an open weekly pickup with all of GRS on Sundays. In addition, I have managed to play pickup for almost an hour every day with the locals who show up around 3 at the FFHC. Although we can't communicate very well, and their English is much better than my Xhosa, we have no trouble playing together as soon as we step on the FFHC's field turf. It continues to amaze me how you can make friends as soon as you touch the soccer ball. The first time Anna and I tried to play, the kids would barely even look at us until we split into teams and started playing. As soon as each of us had received the ball and played it smartly away to feet, they wanted to know our names and were giving us as many high fives and sharps (a local standard handshake) for goals and good plays as any of the other players. So cool. I also had the unique opportunity to run a session with RV United, the one and only women's team from Khayelitsha. These highly skilled group are normally coached by Vuyo, one of the great people on staff at the FFHC, but I stepped in for the day. I ran a practice that I have done with the Colby Men's Soccer team, yet there I was on the sun burnt dirt of Khayelitsha as dusk arrived with close to 100 young kids running around and watching both our practice and a game on the adjacent turf field. It was one of those experiences when you feel obligated to soak in everything around in that one moment before moving on to the next your next thought.

Bear with me, I'm almost done. I have just one more thing to say, because I'm overdue to thank all the amazing interns with whom I get to spend most of my time. This weekend's trip to the Cape of Good Hope provided a perfect example of how much I enjoy their company. Eight of us piled into our aqua green Toyota Avanza (or "Intern Car") and drove the hour and fifteen minutes to the historic final resting place of the Flying Dutchman. Although the weather wasn't perfect, we braved the blasting coastal winds and found ourselves face to face with penguins, baboons, ostriches, and cliffs that fell away into churning waves that seemed like the end of the earth. I know it may be hard for some of you at home to believe, but this Cape Town crew are just as weird as I am, and we have so much fun together. Thank you for being the fantastic people that you are, and here's to more penguin posing in the near future!

The Cape Town crew (or most of it) at Simon's Town with perfect penguin form.
(photo credit to Betsy Kaeberle)

   

MADE IT!

I have made it safely to the great city of South Africa! After getting settled (partly...still a work in progress), we had a great couple days getting to know all the wonderful people at GRS Headquarters and the walk from the office to our amazing house on the the Kloof Street. And while I'm on the subject, it hasn't taken me long to fall completely in love with 115 Kloof Street. Rather than try and fail describe it without any cliches, I'll give you all a glimpse:

Yes, that it a small turf pitch, yes that's Devil's Peak (to the left) and Table Mountain (to the right), and yes, we have already done Body by E on the turf. It's easily the most beautiful place I have ever done a Dana Roll.

Other than that, Anna and I have been practicing our Xhosa clicks after meeting a wonderful GRS intern from Cape Town named Notula, and have reached the point where we can say "Hello, how are you?" "I'm fine, and you?" as well as "Thank you" and "You're welcome." Not too shabby for Day 2.

That is is for now, but before I sign off I have to give a huge thank you to Hooter, SCal, Leah and Austin for a perfect sendoff to our year with GRS. When all the interns went our separate ways in Johannesburg, we kept remarking how it seemed impossible that we had only met less than four days prior. Our intern class is full of such great people whose weird quirks all meshed seamlessly, which is almost exclusively down to the preparation, energy, and care from our orientation leaders. That last little piece or credit goes out to Brudad, Cindy, Soy Dog, Junior, and co for giving us the perfect atmosphere to...well...say goodbye to our home :)

Getting Close!

Starting August 4, I will serve as a Programs Intern for GRS at the Football for Hope Center in Khayelitsha on the outskirts of Cape Town, South Africa. My responsibilities as a programs intern will include coach recruitment and training, as well as support for local staff with the planning, execution, and evaluation of multiple concurrent projects and community events to deliver effective interventions. One of these programs, called Champions League, targets young men ages 18-24 and focuses on gender, masculinity, and violence in addition to HIV prevention; I am greatly looking forward to the possibility of bringing the lessons I have learned from starting Colby’s Male Athletes Against Violence to enhance projects like this and GRS’s overall mission. I'm getting SO excited!

Welcome!

Thanks for visiting my soon-to-be-filled blog on which you can follow the comings and goings of Eric in Cape Town, South Africa. The blog will be much more exciting in a few months, but congrats on making it here!