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.