Growing up in North Carolina, living just outside Durham in a house in the woods surrounded by lots of woods and plants and space to roam and explore, I felt like I was pretty in touch with nature. I spent hours upon end building forts, hiking and exploring, looking for spiders and other insects, doing all sorts of things in the forest. There weren’t many ‘rules’ given to me/us, but there was one very clear one that we all knew from a very early age: never pick mushrooms. Don’t pick them, and certainly don’t eat them, because they are almost all [View Full Entry]

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Here are some pictures from Thanda Basketball's first ever game against a 'real' opponent! Below is a short review of the game I wrote for Thanda: ***** Thanda Afterschool vs. Genesis Afterschool!! Our First Game!! Saturday, August 17th will be a day etched in the minds of Thanda Basketball students for a long time. After weeks and weeks of practices, of teaching the kids about dribbling and passing, about working together as a team, about taking care of the ball, about being aggressive and about rebounding, our players finally got to play their first game. The students were all ex [View Full Entry]

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The final week before the beginning of the school holiday at Thanda, the last of the long-awaited baseball gear arrived. Up until this point, the extent of the baseball program at Thanda involved me making several baseballs a day out of plastic bread bags, and cleaning out several 5-gallon peanut butter buckets to use as ball buckets. So the day the equipment arrived was a BIG DAY for Thanda baseball. I have several folks to thank for the baseball gear. Kevin Slowey, my good friend who pitches for the Minnesota Twins, donated baseballs and some baseball gear. The Bois-Guillaume Woodch [View Full Entry]

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I am a bit nervous about this dance performance that will take place here in New York City in two weeks, but the fact that we have already performed it once in Poland takes the edge off a bit. And the fact that the experience and the final performance in Poland was so crazy and unpredictable makes me feel that if it worked out in Poland, then it will surely work out in New York. I got one comment from Carolina, my blogger friend, a while back saying: "so how'd the show in Poland go?" Here's a quick recap. Sunday, July [View Full Entry]

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In all of my travels in Europe, I have been stopped by the police twice. The first time was in Moscow in the Red Square, when I was standing outside with some friends having a beer and we were ticketed for having an open container in public. The irony of the situation was that everyone in the Red Square (or so it seemed) was drinking beer, and everyone (or so it seemed) was speaking Russian except us. We stuck out like a sore thumb, the police tagged us, and we eventually and reluctantly forked up a small bribe so that they [View Full Entry]

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Wednesday, September 3, 2008: Today was the first day of the new season of baseball players. At 9 AM this morning Sigitas picked me up from Viktorija’s place and we headed to the schools to go class to class speaking about baseball and inviting them to come and try it out. We were going to two primary schools where we have been before, one of the schools being the school where our teams train in the wintertime. We decided that, since I now speak Lithuanian fairly well, I would be the one to do the talking about the baseball program in [View Full Entry]

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Hi everybody who is still reading this blog. ☺ In the last several months since my last blog entry I have received a steady stream of comments from all sorts of folks asking how I am doing. It is always so cool to get comments. All of these comments also had in common one phrase: “I see it has been a long time since you have wrote.” And that it has. A long time. I am back in New York, New York, back in the US for the first time in almost eight months. With all of the traveling and moving [View Full Entry]

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Before we left South Africa it was imperative to make one more trip to Port St. Johns.....and I know I already wrote about the place, but I just wanted to share some more shots of this beautiful place. Keep in mind that all of these photos were taken on the same day!! [View Full Entry]

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Boarding the plane, i was asking myself: am I really flying to Poland right now? Right now I am in the Southernmost part of Africa, and in several hours I will be touching down in Krakow, Poland. It felt unbelieveable, and somehow also just the 'next step' on this journey that is in one sense so planned out and in another so unpredictable and spontaneous. And like so many other moments over the past several months, I found myself saying over and over in my head 'I can't believe I am doing this, I can't believe I'm doing this.....' I have [View Full Entry]

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Friday was the final day of the term at Thanda, and the beginning of a two-week school holiday. Viktorija, myself, Jeff and Amy planned a three day trip to Port St. John, a small town about three hours’ drive down the coast from Hibberdene. The ride through the mountainous region along the southeastern coast of South Africa was really beautiful, and exactly what I had been wanting to see here in South Africa. Living in Hibberdene has a sort of Post-Apartheid feel, working out in th cane fields it feels as if the Apartheid never left, but inland and down the [View Full Entry]

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