Welcome to our blog

I have a lot to catch you up on (and I know you care, but only so much), so I'll make this quick: 

• Last summer, Adam accepted a job as the director (aka mr. fancy pants) of a  new influenza program for the CDC in South Africa.  While I'm very proud of him, I'm still not sure what he does. (He can blog on that.)  But I know he's (A) working on improving southern Africa's response to flu, (B) its flu season is reversed with the U.S.'s because it's summer here now [January], (C) he collaborates with folks at South Africa's version of the CDC, the National Institute of Communicable Diseases (NICD), and (D) he promises not to travel as much (though he's already been to Ghana and is Atlanta right now. Hmm...).  He works some of the time here in Pretoria and some of the time in Johannesburg (30 minutes south w/o traffic).
• We always wanted to live abroad and thought it would be a good experience for the kids (minus the sadness of not seeing the grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends quite as often).
• We both did stints in other parts of Africa when we were younger and loved it.  (I did a semester abroad in Kenya and Ad did a med school rotation in Zimbabwe).
• I determined I could continue to work for my current company, GeoStats, as a part-time telecommuter.
• We decided to go for it.

Six months later, on December 26th, 2010, after a rockin' goodbye party given by our friends, Jacek and Seema, we boarded a plane for Johannesburg.  (I'm skipping the boring parts, like selling our house, figuring out what to pack, locating a school for Lucy, getting me a long term Visa, and me [Glenn] freaking out about various, sundry things along the way... as you know I'm want to do.)

How long will this mishigas continue?  We made a two year commitment, but we can stay longer if we like it. (Don't panic, Grandmas.  Those decisions are a while off.)

A few highlights... (Ut oh, he's creating headings.  Danger, verbosity alert!  I'm just trying to give some context so then we can just blog every so often when something interesting happens and/or we think our friends and family might be bored at work and think to visit our site, expecting some news.)

The flight
It was direct (really the only way to do it... believe me) and the kids did great.  Noah slept for many hours and Lucy watched many episodes of Dora.  The little guy cried some, of course, which led to some dirty looks from a stern, Afrikaans-looking woman sitting behind us.  But in general, he was quiet and patient.  (When we landed, I really wanted to turn and say to her, "You had a baby sitting in front of you on a 16 hour flight and he cried for all of 20 minutes total.  You should be kissing him and throwing us a 'Welcome to the Continent' party!")

Our house
The government chose our accommodations, which of course made us a tad nervous, but we ended up getting a great place to live.  It's a two-story freestanding house, in a compound of 5 houses, in what we quickly figured out is quite a ritzy part of town [future City Planning-related blog post to come] called Waterkloof Ridge.  It was built about three years ago and has lots of windows (and a few water leaks).  It's bigger than our house in Atlanta and has four bedrooms upstairs, the fourth of which I'm using as an office and sitting in right now.  It's also our guest bedroom, so, please, come visit!  The downstairs is an open floor plan, so you can see Noah chewing on the coffee table from the kitchen.

Crime and Safety
The crime stats are significant and it was definitely a concern when we decided to move.  But our house has a large amount of protections and our compound has an on-location guard.  I'm still processing this because it reflects a variety of forces and stresses in post-Apartheid South Africa.  I'll write more on this later, but for now I can say that we feel safe, we take precautions, but we don't feel like we live in a bubble in terms of our ability to get out and do things.  (I will add that we just had our first party and some native South African friends -- yes, we have a few! -- made fun of our Fort Knox-like collection of keys, gates, and sensors.  But you stop noticing them after a while.)

How's it going?
All in all, it's been a great and fascinating experience so far.  While Pretoria doesn't feel like the Africa I knew from Kenya, we're definitely not in the US.  The city is vibrant and, though World Cup fever has waned (a few games were played in a stadium near Lucy's new school), I have a palpable sense of being in a country that is very optimistic about its future (even with the artifacts of its past in clear sight).  Pretoria itself is pretty, with rolling hills and broad vistas, and we recently drove by some zebras on our way home from a trip downtown.

Finally, some pictures!
Here are some pictures from our first week (Dec 27 - Jan 1), and then it's it's time for bed. (Lucy has to wake up early for school over here. So I do too.)

Lucy enjoys the sprinkler in our backyard

A shot of our patio from the backyard

Nice kitchen, eh?

Our dining room with its crazy tall ceiling.

Living room with government-issue furniture.

Lucy with Meg of our "sponsor family" (US folks who've been here a while and helped us get settled).   We made caramel corn from scratch!  (Lucy loved it, to put it mildly.)

Noah says, "Jet lag, jet shlag!"

Rooibos tea is everywhere.

The US Embassy's community center, about a mile from our house.  (Who said anything about this being a hardship post?)

We venture out for New Year's Eve

Four days after landing. The kids are alright.

Thanks for reading. More to come...  xo,
Glenn