By popular demand...

WELL HELLO!  I've returned by popular request, aka Lauren.

Where to begin?  Well,where did I leave off?  Ah, yes, GITA!  Well, since gita, I have held another peer counselor workshop.  Definitely a different group of kids, but still very successful.  These learners were new to the peer counseling world (whereas with the last group, many of them had been trained in previous workshops - another example of the South African curse of perpetual workshops but no implementation, which is what I am trying to change up), so it was their first exposure to a lot of the material.  My team also got switched up a bit and I got to work with a couple different social workers, including the infamous Andile and one of our new interns Thapelo, who is awesome.  These elements, plus just having the experience of doing it once before and using the same material more or less, made it a very interesting learning experience for me, watching what things unfolded exactly the same and what took on a totally different direction.  Overall, a success.  My team is going to go introduce all of them to their schools next week (first week back after holiday) at morning assembly (oh yeah, btw, definitely did some morning assembly announcements for the last group trained, which involves me getting up in front of 1000+ Zulu kids and basically making a fool of myself, definitely worth a story/post).

I had a day to sort things out post-workshop/pre-holiday before Claire and I were off to Swazi (aka Swaziland) for Bushfire, a local music festival.  Highlights of the weekend?  Well, the lekker dance, obvi, and definitely the first night's line-up.  Unreal.  The headliner and known/expected hit was Goldfish, a South African legend.  A couple of my favorites:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cjwoit91SxU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAdX_nwXlrY&feature=related

But, the best and brightest moment of the night had to be the "surprise" opening act.  I mean, they were on the bill, so no surprise at their presence per se, but rather their sheer awesomeness was a surprise.  Let me paint you a picture.  Smoke machines.  Trippy electronic music.  Then this guy walks on stage and gets behind the tables and starts to spin:

And then two beautiful African women in traditional clothing appear and start singing backup of African melodies.  Slowly, a band starts forming as giant black men playing guitar and bass, etc come out.  Claire and I are already looking at each other with "This is going to be awesome!" in our eyes.  All of a sudden, I grab Claire by the arm, "Look!", pointing to stage right.  We see a figure cloaked in a spotted fur cape with a matching fur pillbox hat, head down, swaying to the music on his pimp cane, waiting for his entrance.  We look at each other, "Where is this gonna go? slash This is only gonna get awesomer!  Hells yeah!".  Oh, and did it!  Soon enough, he swaggers out to grab the mic and take the stage, front and center.  He starts to belt it out.  Damn g.  Not bad.  He finally pops his head up and opens his cape:

What?!  Holy shit!  He's white?!  He' white!  No freaking way!

Claire and I were instantly obsessed.  Their music was flipping awesome!  Afro-electro-disco.  Beat that!  We danced our little hearts out.  Couldn't help it.  It's music you just have to dance to.  A little taste of the good stuff:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DnZ36BxDeM

So, of course we had to buy the CD.  The amazing album cover that just speaks for itself:

Pretty badass, if I say so myself.

The rest of the weekend was just icing on the cake.  One of the other highlights for me was a local Swazi hip-hop group, Siyinqaba (do the click, you know you want to...), that headlined the second night and were awesome, not only because they had a song called "Wrap it up".  Gots to love it.  Overall, a fantastic weekend.