Happy Holidays!

Dumela Family and Friends,

This year has been quite an adventure. Our first few months of the year, we spent lots of time with family. For two months, we stayed with Matt’s sister and brother-in-law and their new baby, Amélie.  It was so nice to spend so much time with a young baby. While Amanda and Sean were busy with school and work, we took care of Amélie. We learned a lot and had a great time with the Cash family. We went mountain biking, snowshoeing, snowboarding, hiking and did some extreme sledding. We also got to spend some good quality time with two of our other nieces, Addison and Avery. We went on nature walks, cooked food and played silly games. We really cherish the time we were able to spend with the kiddos on the Kogle side. We also spent time with the rest of our family – sharing time between our parents’ homes. We loved spending time in the Olympia area, especially hunting for mushrooms with Eileen and Vince. We also had a fun time at Mark and Marty’s, there’s always something happening!

When we started out this year, we thought that we would be Peace Corps Volunteers serving in Ghana as science and math teachers. In March, we got a call from Peace Corps stating that our invitation had been revoked. We were told that our options were to either go to Botswana for an agriculture assignment leaving in 5 weeks or wait until the summer and one of us would have to teach English. Teaching English was one of the things we really didn’t want to do and we also couldn’t imagine waiting until August to leave, so we told them to send us the invitation for Botswana. Peace Corps Botswana is technically an HIV/AIDS program, but we were told that we would use our agricultural background to promote better nutrition. That meant we only had 5 weeks to prepare ourselves for our Peace Corps assignment. This also included preparing our family members who would be taking care of our pets and possessions. We are very grateful to Eileen and Vince for taking care of our beloved dog, Sammy, Amanda and Sean for taking care of our bunny, Daisy, and Matt’s parents for holding on to our stuff!

We can’t believe we’ve been in Botswana for over 8 months now. Time really flies. Although there are inevitable ups and downs to Peace Corps service, we have enjoyed our time in Southern Africa. We spent two months in southern Botswana before heading to our village in the Okavango Delta Region. It is really beautiful here and we couldn’t be happier with our area. We have been busy doing gardening work, helping out at the clinic and doing environmental education. This area has so much to offer - Tsodilo Hills, the Okavango River, Moremi National Park, and Namibian National Parks. We truly got lucky with our site placement. We hope friends and family visit us so we can show them this beautiful area. We look forward to seeing what 2013 has to offer us in our Peace Corps service. As Peace Corps Volunteers, we hope to promote world peace and friendship and we hope you can too. 

Wishing you peace and happiness this holiday season!

Lots of Love,

Bridgette and Matt