Official Peace Corps Volunteers!

Hello all! I must apologize for our lack of communication. We have completed our pre-service training (PST) and were officially sworn in as Peace Corps Volunteers on August 10th. During our PST we were living in a small rural village in the southwestern part of the country. We had little access to internet and when we were able to go online unfortunately, this page refused to upload. So here we are our first update!

Swaziland is a beautiful country and one thing I must say is that it gets surprisingly cold at night, especially in the highveld which is where we were during PST. We were living in a rondavel with a thatched roof and although it was amazing it was also pretty chilly at night. We spent the 9 weeks of training studing siSwati and learning about Swazi culture. It was definately a chanllenging but rewarding time.

We are now getting settled in to our permanent site which is in a small community called Ngcina. It is located close to the eastern border of the country in the lowveld. This means we will be in the hotter area of the country and summer is right around the corner. From our house you can look eastward and see the Lubombo Moutains which run along the border of Swaziland with Mozambique. It is amazing to watch the sunrise over the mountains! We are pretty spoiled in our accomodations as we have a 5 room house with electricity! (I'm pretty sure it is bigger than our apartment was in Fairfax, VA) We were even able to get a small fridge for our kitchen! It is amazing how much we have come to appreciate ice cubes!

Our new address is Jerome & Amy Mayer, P.O. Box 391, Siteki L300, Swaziland, Africa. We would love to hear from you all as mail is very exciting to recieve! I promise that we will be giving more frequent updates now that we have completed training.

Miss you all!
Amy & Joe