Vacation Plans: December 10

Looking forward to our upcoming school break and the end of travel restriction, we had been toying with the idea of a hiking and backpacking trip with two of our fellow PCV’s. We were super excited at the prospect of seeing more of the country, especially since we had only moved 30 minutes from our training site, and stretching our legs on some spectacular hikes in the mountains. The tricky part was that Kelli’s family had planned a trip for the last two weeks of our school break and in order to go hiking we would have to leave a few days before our travel restriction was up. One of Peace Corps many rules states that all volunteers must spend the first 90 days in their respective villages. While trying to make this decision, we carefully considered many factors:

-all of our schools would be on vacation from December 5 – January 9 and even our secondary projects were shutting down for the summer

-over the past three months we had been working very hard to integrate ourselves into our community and as many of our new friends and family members would be on vacation during this time, they encouraged us to explore the country as well

-due to the absence of PC staff at our initial training, we were trained by current PCV’s who spent numerous hours encouraging us to travel as much as possible and even giving us advice on how to bend the rules in order to accomplish this

-due to the lack of support and guidance from our PC advisor, we had cultivated a support group among our fellow volunteers and wished to spend some time together rejuvenating and refreshing ourselves in the great outdoors

-we had worked extremely hard over the past few months learning a new language, building relationships, renovating our house, getting acquainted with a new school system and culture and planning and implementing school projects and we truly felt that engaging in one of our favorite activities, hiking, would give us the break we needed to start the next school year fresh and full of enthusiasm

After carefully weighing all of these points, we decided that the benefits outweighed the feelings of guilt for breaking one of the rules. Therefore, we planned a week and a half long hiking extravaganza with two of our friends. Our plans included two national parks, scaling the fourth highest waterfall in the world, overnight backpacking, showers, swimming pools and lots of wide open spaces. Kelli was a little anxious about her back, but her excitement for hiking (her all time favorite activity) overwhelmed her anxieties and she was hoping that three days of physio in Pretoria would fix her up. Nevertheless, she made sure to pack lots of Ibuprofen.