CHINA! oh, and election day

I found out this morning I've been accepted to transfer/extend to China for a year... this means I'll serve another year in Peace Corps but I'm moving to China to do it. I'm excited. I'm overwhelmed. I have a lot to think about. I'm really looking forward to the new challenge.

It has been interesting to hear South African's views on China and Chinese people today, as I told people what was happening. My students all insisted on saying "ching chong ching chong" imitating spoken Mandarin... which gave me an opportunity to gently challenge them by impersonating what Setswana sounded like to me before I understood it (and they enjoyed impersonating the American English on t.v. that they cannot understand). One of my principals gave me a twenty minute lecture on how the Chinese people are harder workers than anyone else in the world (this was all based on the fact that many things in his home were made in China). Many people just commented on how far away I was going, which I thought was a little charming because they don't seem to realize that I'm already pretty far from home. All in all, I was really pleased with how excited people in my village are for me, how supportive they are of my going and how sweet they have been about me leaving early. It won't be easy to leave the people I care about here.

In other news, the South African elections were held yesterday. My host sister Barbara was the presiding officer at the polling station and my friend Nono was also a volunteer worker at the station so I went to visit them. Across South Africa there were long lines and some reports of voting not going smoothly but the polling station in my village (a classroom in our school) was running like a well-oiled machine. This is a result of two major factors: 1) Barbara is not someone you choose not to listen to and 2) there were about twenty five people working the poll and about three voters. It was touching to see how excited the people in my village were about voting and about democracy, and it was a good reminder of how hard South Africans fought for the right to pick their own president.