Happy Holidays!

I'm leaving tomorrow for Botswana for the holidays, so I'll be out of
touch until January. I hope everyone has a happy new year!

Creche Graduation

Last Saturday, I went to the graduation ceremony for the creche of which my host mom, Masingita, is the principal. The weather was perfect: cloudy, so there was no sun and no rain. It, like so many ceremonies in South Africa, lasted about five hours, and not just the small children but also the adults in attendance became a bit restless by the end. However, there were frequent breaks where the adorable children performed skits, songs, and dances for the audience, which I think everyone appreciated. You can look at my pictures from the event here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Jade.Lamb/TipfuxeniMapayeniCrecheGraduation#

Picture Updates!

I recently got a bunch of pictures from vacation and training from a friend. You can see them here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Jade.Lamb/IST112209715PM

http://picasaweb.google.com/Jade.Lamb/TrainingPictures

http://picasaweb.google.com/Jade.Lamb/KosiBay

http://picasaweb.google.com/Jade.Lamb/WildCoast

Goodbye, Speed Bumps!

You might remember a previous entry on our new speed bumps, and the lengths taxi drivers go to to avoid them. Today, on my way into work, I saw a very exciting sight: a road crew going at the speed bumps with pickaxes! Some of the speed bumps have already been completely destroyed. Evidently someone decided that the speed bumps are actually creating more of a road hazard than they were preventing.

Pictures from Graduation

Last Saturday, we held our annual graduation ceremony for everyone who completed a training course at Khanimamba. Like all ceremonies, and all graduations, it was long and a little tedious, but all of the trainees were excited. Here are some pictures from the event.

Garden Route Vacation

This was my most athletic vacation of my time in South Africa so far, and possibly of my entire life so far. Every day Becky and I would go to bed with aches and pains from hiking, canoeing, riding on taxis, and other such physically taxing activities.

Here is a list (yay lists!) of the new things I tried or did on vacation:

*riding an ostrich
*eating ostrich meat
*sandboarding
*saw a whale up close
*went hiking in the rain (somehow it’d always been sunny in the past…)
*saw a blue duiker
*rode in a tuktuk

Things I haven’t done in twenty-one months:
*ate microwave popcorn
*got a hair cut by someone other than myself
*had a facial
*ate cheesecake that tasted like cheesecake (Fynbos Café in Knysna!)

Somehow I thought those lists would be longer…oh well.

We started in Knysna, which was my favorite town of the three, and it rained pretty much every day we were there. Not to be deterred, we went hiking, canoeing, and ferrying regardless, though I did not get to go snorkeling. We then made our way to Wilderness, which involved walking through a National Park for an hour with all our luggage in order to get to the backpackers, where we spent a day canoeing and hiking in the sun. Lastly, we went to Mossel Bay, a much larger town, where we were also blessed by sun.

One of our days there we actually spent on a day trip to Outshoorn, a bit to the north, which is kind of the ostrich capital of South Africa. There, I got to ride an ostrich (!!!!!), which I stayed on for about ten seconds before falling off. On my Picasa album, you can see a picture of me on the hooded (and thus calm) ostrich, and another of me falling off. If you’ll look closely, you may note that in the second picture, I have lost my shoes. I was the only one in the group to volunteer to ride an ostrich—they’re pretty ferocious creatures. That day, we also went to the beautiful Cango Caves and an animal reserve.

Our last day in Mossel Bay, we got quite close to some whales—one actually swam right underneath our boat. Afterwards we went sandboarding, which is like skiing but minus the ski lift, thus leaving the terrain pristine but making the biggest deterrent to going down the hill the idea that afterwards you have to go back up.

This entire vacation also involved being around lots of European tourists who will never see any part of South Africa besides the little vacation town with the pretty beaches, which was even more disheartening than walking back uphill after sandboarding down.

Pictures from the Garden Route

I returned from holiday on the Garden Route yesterday, and have managed to upload my pictures from the trip. I was hoping to do captions (and correctly spelled ones at that) for more of them, but have had more than the usual difficulty doing so. I'm not sure if it's the fault of the interweb or my computer. Anyway, here's the new album:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Jade.Lamb/GardenRoute#

More descriptive post upcoming!

I Predict We Will Submit This Constitution in the Year 2011, Basically Unaltered

Today there was another board meeting for the nascent Rivoningo NGO Forum. It’s worth noting that the meeting started ten minutes early, which is practically unheard of in South Africa. On the other hand, this is probably undermined by the fact that there wasn’t a quorum, as three people had send their apologies, so technically it wasn’t a meeting. I think they are supposed to have another tomorrow, but it’s unclear that attendance will be any better.

The ostensible agenda for this meeting was to make alterations to the constitution, fill out the NPO application form to register with the government, and set up a time to get a bank account. We accomplished exactly zero of these. Here is an approximation of how the two hours were spent, instead:

10 minutes: writing agenda, passing around apology note, debating whether or not we can have the meeting without a quorum. I point out that technically, they haven’t ratified the rules about what a quorum is yet, so…

10 minutes: rapid discussion of all the different issues encountered so far with setting up the bank account. Numerous phone calls to people who might have more information are made, but no one picks up.

10 minutes: someone receives a phone call and the meeting stops while he takes it

20 minutes: discussion of whether there is money to buy bread for this meeting. Search for money. Everyone talks about how hungry they are. No one goes to buy bread.

10 minutes: gossip

40 minutes: look for receipt book. Look for cash belonging to the Forum. Total receipts of money received by hand on some scrap paper. Figure out how much money is missing. Scramble around for receipts of money spent. Find them. Total them. Make phone calls to confirm they are correct. Double check all numbers. (In other words, balance the bank book.)

20 minutes: I’m not sure. I had zoned out by then. They were talking about individual centres in serious tones of voice, so I think it was actual business, but it definitely wasn’t related to the constitution or their application for an NPO number.

Another productive day goes by…

Steps to Deliver an Assertive Message

1. Explain your feelings and the problem.

“When no one asks or answers questions during class, I feel like no one cares about the class.”

2. Make your request.

“I would feel better if everyone participated.”

3. Ask how the other person feels about your request.

“Do you think you can tell me when you don’t understand, and answer questions when you do?”

Last week was the life skills training course for the carers, which covered material for teenagers about goal-setting, communication skills, self-esteem, early pregnancy, drugs and alcohol, etc.—and of course, how to deliver an assertive message.

As per usual, the biggest obstacle for the course running smoothly was everyone sitting there in silence. It’s daunting to try to present to twenty (I can’t believe I did this in classes of forty a few months ago!) people who just stare at you blankly without speaking. On day three as we hearken back to earlier lessons, building upon our foundations, there is the sinking realization that no one actually understood what you thought was a fairly straightforward lesson…and so a half-hour reprise of the material (on delivering an assertive message) becomes a two-hour review of the material. The example I used to illustrate it is above.

However, when the trainees did understand what was going on, things went very well. One game we played took half an hour to explain the rules of, but people got really competitive once we really began. There was arguing about the point allotment at the end, regardless of the fact that it was their tea break. And, wonder of wonders, on the third day some of the trainees finally submitted lesson plans that were correctly written! The next challenge will be to get them to incorporate the awesome games we played in class into the activities they do with their OVCs, instead of just delivering the lectures their lesson plans specify.

Talk About the Weather

Winter in Giyani lasted for four days, sometime in mid-July. I was doing site visits those days, and bundled up in a heavy sweater and scarf. I even brought my gloves. On the fifth day, the sun was out and shining, it was hot, and the scarf, gloves, and sweater all went into my bag.

Winter is followed by a shoulder season that lasts until the rainy season begins. It begins with being really hot and sunny all the time, which is when I start to wonder (if this is just September!) how I will possibly make it through summer. Last year this lasted through October, though I think it may be ending for the year right now.

Hot and sunny is followed not by the rainy season, but by the prelude to the rainy season where it becomes really cloudy and cool for a few days and everyone gets excited about the idea that it might rain. After those few days, it’s sunny again, and we grumble because that set of clouds has passed us by and gone on to Tzaneen instead, to water their fertile valley. Last year, I would prevaricate about doing my laundry if it was cloudy outside. This year, I know better. At best, it will start raining and I will bring my clothes inside to dry. At worst, my clothes will be clean and dry normally.

And if the rainy season starts soon, there will be mangos this year!

Heritage Day

Today is Heritage Day. I would explain what it is, but that would basically be plagiarizing Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritage_Day_(South_Africa)

In other words, it's basically what it sounds like. Happy Heritage Day, everyone.

SA Embassy Closed Tomorrow

...and the Associated Press is implying it's because of a terrorist threat.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/09/22/world/AP-AF-South-Africa-US-Embassy.html

I find the technique the article uses to imply so very suspect, but the information I have is no less cryptic. (Thanks for the link, Dad!) Hopefully won't affect us much out here in Limpopo.

Postal Strike

For a few weeks, I just thought that my magazine subscriptions had expired in August instead of the later date I had expected. I wasn’t particularly expecting any other mail soon, and that which I do get arrives anywhere from ten days to three months after it is posted. Nobody here discusses mail or why it isn’t arriving (in addition to me, probably another dozen people share my office’s PO Box as their only mailing address, and I am pretty much the only person who ever gets any personal mail through it), so it took until I spoke to another volunteer to realize that in fact, there is a national postal strike going on.

I tried to find out more information through Google News, which has nothing more recent to report than stories from August, that the strike was starting, and one lone (one paragraph) story reporting that the courts had ordered the postal workers to go back to work last week, several weeks after the strike had technically ended.

Well, I went to the post office yesterday to buy stamps, and the strike is definitely not over. There were a couple of people working in the front, mainly doing money transfers and lottery tickets, but no one was working in the back and despite the twenty people waiting for service, the place was eerily quiet. I was never more than fifth in line but it took me more than thirty minutes to get out. People working the front would mysteriously disappear into the back for five or ten-minute intervals and then return. I’m going to assume this is because they had to get things for the people they were serving which were completely disorganized due to having nobody working there.

Strikes are pretty common in South Africa, for the very good reason that most people are paid very little money that goes to support a far larger number of people than a typical American worker’s would. Unemployment is ridiculously high and South Africa holds the distinction of being the country in the world with the highest level of inequality, as measured by the Gini index.

The strikes we are told to be particularly wary of are taxi strikes, which can sometimes become violent: in some ways, competing taxi associations are like the Mob. Giyani is a pretty chill little town, and we haven’t had any taxi-related warring, nor strikes for extended periods of time. Compared to that, a postal strike is pretty mild, though I fully expect to lose some large percentage of the mail sent to me over that period. Probably, though, it’s better not to eventually wind up with two months worth of unread Economists all in one day.

Obstacles

The past few weeks we’ve been going out on site visits to the drop-in centres. You learn interesting things on site visits, when you get to spend individual time with each centre. None of it is necessarily unique in South Africa. The obstacles that confront each drop-in centre is replicated somewhere else in the country, time and time again.

We visited one of our drop-in centres for the second time. The first time, about five months ago, they had started on a few of the assignments but had yet to implement most of the management material. Upon returning a couple weeks ago, they still had done nothing. The manager wasn’t there, so we spoke to one of the carers. The carer had never seen the empty record books we were upset about. She talked to us for a while, and it turned out that the manager was illiterate and didn’t want to tell us, nor did she want to deputize somebody else to keep the necessary records.

Up north near Malamulele, we visited a small network of centres we hadn’t worked with before. They seemed hard-working and eager, with a lot to work on. They showed us an enormous juice-making machine they had gotten from the Department of Social Development to start an income-generating project. A person from the DSD came out to show them how to use it, but the electricity at the centre was off indefinitely so they had to postpone the training. The electricity eventually came back on, but then the DSD worker was off in Thohoyandou and said he would come back after he was finished there. On his way, he got into a car crash and died. The DSD didn’t have anyone else available to train them and eventually discontinued the program. The juice-maker, along with sundry equipment like juice containers, has been collecting dust in a corner of the centre for three years now.

Based on visits this month to maybe a third of the centres we work with, I would say maybe ten or fifteen percent are implementing a significant amount of what we’re teaching them. On the brighter side, if that’s only five (maybe as many as eight or ten) centres, each one works with about 100 OVCs, so that’s five hundred children impacted.

Chicken Feet

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/16/business/global/16chickens.html?em

I had never eaten chicken feet before coming to South Africa. Here, though they are as much a less-desirable part of the chicken as in the US, they are still often eaten and served because they are more affordable than other parts. (You're not missing much, there's very little in the way of meet on chicken feet. They are mainly skin.)

Some eighteen months ago, during our "shopping day" where the PCVs in my group purchased the stuff we would need to get through two years here, a few of us met an Afrikaner salesperson who regaled us with his business plan to export chicken feet that no on in the US wants to South Africa, where they are frequently consumed. His plan would have failed. South African chicken feet, it seems, are if anything less expensive than their US counterparts.

I had no idea, though, that someplace in the world actually paid top dollar for them (see article above). Perhaps South Africa should start exporting them, too--though since most of the chicken I've had here had been delicious, locally-raised, just-killed, they probably don't have the Bigfoot sized feet of American Frankenstein chickens.

HIV Course

About three weeks ago I ran a training course on HIV/AIDS for the drop-in centre carers I am working with, and I have been delaying writing about it. It was the first time that I have actually been able to do HIV outreach since arriving here almost twenty months ago (who’s counting?), despite the job description. I have been delaying writing about it because I am still processing a bundle of ambivalent feelings about it.

Halfway through the course I was quite pleased with its progress. In the last hour or so I was incredibly frustrated. Neither of these moments captures everything that was important about the training, but they are revealing.

The first moment, too, is revealing. Both shockingly and fortuitously, turnout for the course was about half of what it has been for most of the other trainings I’ve been running for the drop-in centres. I’m still not sure why. Reluctance to discuss the topic? Feelings of being already informed enough? Bad timing? Financial constraints? No one did their homework from the last course? This did, however, decrease the class sizes--about fifteen people each--to a more reasonable number, making the planned activities much easier to run.

Halfway through, all of the excellent sessions I had adapted from the Peace Corps Life Skills Manual and the Planned Parenthood Association of South Africa Life Skills manual were going more or less perfectly--the sessions were proceeding as described, the learners were engaged, and people appeared to be learning something. The condom demonstrations in particular were, I hoped, helpful and entertaining.

Then came the end, the last few hours of the course when I couldn't wrench a review answer from anyone with a pair of pliers. Some people, I knew, hadn't been there for the first day, and others, I knew, were not as engaged as the majority. But I was still completely shocked at how little of the immune system material, which was accompanied by fun games and drawings, had been absorbed when we began to talk about treatment. How can anyone help someone adhere to a treatment plan or a schedule of clinic visits if they don't understand why? Failure. The quiz results were not promising, either.

And a final frustration: since then, I have been doing site visits to the centres (more on those later), and I have not yet seen one lesson plan for how they plan on teaching the course material to their OVCs. We spent about three hours that week going over how to write lesson plans, and part of their homework was to write five. The best we had was someone saying, "Oh, the carers gave a health talk one day, but we didn't write anything down." I am incredibly disappointed that after three days of material presented in an engaging, hands-on manner, no one so far has adopted any of it for their centres. Why even attend the course?

Sensing (and probably sharing, though she's more used to it) my disappointment, my counterpart has been telling me in a mix of Tsonga and English, "All we can do is try." This is also a mantra of preparing Peace Corps trainings for volunteers: we can make the material available, and it's up to the learners to use it.

First Response Action

A friend of mine started a blog as a part of her work to lobby for reform in Peace Corps' sexual assault and rape policies. You can read it here:

http://firstresponseaction.blogspot.com

When Casey went to Peace Corps after being sexually assaulted at her site, many of us were surprised to realize that Peace Corps has no worldwide policy about volunteers who have been sexually assaulted, and shocked at how badly Peace Corps South Africa handled her situation. If you know anyone who would be interested in her blog or has a story to share, pass it on.

Apartheid Museum

There is no more thankless task in the universe than ordering customized T-shirts for a large, disparate group of people with exacting standards. Whenever I asked myself why I undertook it, the answer eventually emerged...so that Diversity Committee would have the funds to sponsor a field trip to the Apartheid Museum for the groups doing their pre-service training, eager naifs expecting soon to swear in as Peace Corps Volunteers.

This time I actually got to go to the Apartheid Museum in the course of the training; last time, sadly, the organization of a braai (South African style barbeque) monopolized my attention. The Apartheid Museum, located in Johannesburg, is a rough equivalent to one of the larger Holocaust museums, though as far as I know it's the only one of its kind, excepting a few small, location-specific historical museums in Cape Town and Durban. It's an overwhelming experience that the few hours we're able to allocate can't possibly be sufficient for.

Apartheid, as a review/introduction, was a government regime in South Africa during the 20th century where the white minority oppressed and exploited the black minority. Its closest equivalent in the US was the pre-CIvil Rights Act South when Jim Crow laws and the like reigned, though sometime the German Jewish ghettoes during the Second World War seem like a more direct comparison. In fact, concentration camps predate both Apartheid and the Holocaust; there were used by English South African settlers to control and confine Dutch South African settlers, who are more often called Boers or Afrikaners.

The Anglo-Boer war, only the last in a series of encounters between those two sides, was fought between the two white ethnic groups in South Africa around the turn of the 20th century. The English won, and South Africa has since been a member of the British Commonwealth, formerly the British Empire. Oppression and exploitation of the natives, in this case a number of unrelated and often rivaling African groups whose histories are interesting in themselves, was par for the course, but not a particularly distinctive issue for the ruling English minority. The English secured their position as the economic elite of South Africa, while letting their interest in political control of the civil government languish relatively. As such, though they had comparatively little economic or cultural power, the Boer minority came into political power within several decades of their humiliating defeat and not too long after, enacted Apartheid. A psychological reading of this history would suggest that Apartheid was a method of giving the relatively disempowered Boers absolute control over a group even more disempowered than they.

Apartheid's restrictions were comparable to patterns borne through in the antebellum and postbellum American South, and Europe during the Nazi regime. A strict set of four racial groups was established: white, colored, Indian, and black. Even groups that did not fit into the eponymous descriptions were given equivalent designations--Japanese South Africans were white, Chinese South Africans were black. Certain areas were designated as residential areas for certain racial groups, and pass books were required to pass from one area to another. Whites, which included both the Anglo and Boer ethnic/linguistic groups, monopolized both political and economic power, and voting was restricted by race. Unimaginable violence and exploitation was carried out under the aegis of Apartheid.

Apartheid began to wane in popularity during the 1980's, and officially ended in 1994, when Nelson Mandela, formerly a freedom fighter and long-term political prisoner, became president. International boycotts of South Africa and gradually evolving cultural and social ideologies, as well as internal pressure by resistance groups, all played their part in its downfall. Following Mandela's election, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission took testimony from many, thereby preserving records of both perpetrators and victims of acts of violence and exploitation.

The Apartheid Museum covers all of this history, beginning briefly with the long history of South Africa and jumping in in earnest with the ratification of Apartheid and telling narrative after narrative of those who lived under the regime. Though interspersed with the occasional sculptural memorial or historical video footage, most of the museum is experienced through reading. The narratives are diverse, though not exhaustive, and focus primarily on the black-white struggle, but they are incredibly powerful. I was glad to have went.

Afterwards we went to a nearby mall, because that is what Peace Corps Volunteers do, and the trainees were desperate for some exposure to fluorescent lighting and American food.

It should be noted that there are no citations on my history lesson for a reason, I am writing this from memory while eating dinner, not while paging through a history book.

Rivoningo NGO Forum

A side benefit of getting so many drop-in centres together at training has always been the opportunity for them to network, and as such a parallel project my NGO and I have been working on is forming a networking organization for all of the drop-in centres in the Greater Giyani area. They started meeting in January on a quarterly basis, elected a management committee, and have tried to have a number of events for the OVCs. Only one of them, a huge soccer tournament, ever actually came to fruition, but the soccer tournament was a big success. The others floundered when centres and the forum balked at continuing to spend so much money transporting orphans to the events, which might mean as many as four taxi rides for the round trip for anywhere between 12-150 orphans per centre.

In March or April, I formulated a constitution with them so that we could apply for NPO (non-profit organization) status and thus be eligible for government funding and independent grants. We spent about four hours with representatives from every drop-in centre putting together what they wanted in their constitution, and at the time I was really proud of them. Instead of copying and pasting fromthe two generic constitutions making the rounds which every centre changes the name at the top of to adopt as their own (one of which, by the way, has a large number of errors), we put together something that was unique to this forum and reflective of its needs. I typed up the document under the assumption that the management committee would approve it at their next meeting.

After the next meeting, which I wasn't able to attend, I got the draft
back with a number of cryptic changes in the margins. Some of them were cogent but didn't make sense; some were legible but not cogent; and some were simply illegible. I asked my supervisor if she could decipher any of them, but in the end we gave up. Fast forward to today. There was another management committee meeting, and one item on the agenda was the constitution. It seems in the intervening months everyone has forgotten what changes they wanted made, and the draft with those corrections has disappeared. Still, it was agreed that changes had to be made, though they were non-specific as to which areas they had problems with. The only concrete suggestion made was that they should add more aims and objectives, but they didn't know what they wanted to add and deferred it.

Personally, I think the constitution is just lovely the way it is. It fills all of the requirements listed on the form and my supervisor checked it over for obvious flaws, too. However, the odds on whether or not it will be completed before I finish my service in seven months are even money.

Speed Bumps

Jokingly, people often refer to cows as "South African speed bumps."
This is because in rural areas, free range cows will wander onto the
road in their herd and they have no fear of oncoming traffic. It can
slow things down when the taxi has to wait for all of the cows to
finish crossing the street before continuing.

Traffic slows for any number of reasons. In Mozambique, the potholes
keep cars from moving too swiftly. Swaziland actually has speed bumps
as we know them at remarkably (and sometimes frustratingly) frequent
intervals. Though of course they interfere with quick travel, it's
not a bad thing--if AIDS were cured tomorrow, young Africans would
still be dying in legions from preventable causes, thanks to the high
number of crashes. My NGO lists lobbying for speed bumps as an
important children's rights initiative, and I see their point.

In my village, we favor the Mozambiquan style speed bumps--our tar
road was not professionally made, and thus has not weathered the test
of time particularly well. Most taxi drivers have elaborate dances
they do on the road to go around the potholes, weaving in and out and
driving in areas on the side of the road in order to make the
smoothest possible ride for the passengers--as a side note, this
morning's taxi drive definitely did not do that. Some village boys
make a business (though not a very lucrative one) out of filling the
potholes with dirt and standing by the side of the road, hoping that
grateful drivers will give them a few rand for their trouble.

In Section A of town, which is primarily residential and through which
the taxi from my village has to drive to get into town, they recently
installed a series of very hardcore speedbumps, the kind that imitate
the shape of corrugated tin for a few feet. My drivers are no more
likely to put up with these speed bumps than the inadvertant ones on
the road to Mapayeni. There are two favored methods for avoiding
them. One is taking a different route through Section A on less
frequented roads. The other is to just get off the road and drive on
the side for the length of the speed bumps. I find the latter to be
excellently amusing.

Related driving safety head-banger: seatbelts. Drivers of taxis are
required to wear seatbelts, but they'll only be checked in town, so
often the drivers will start doing complicated calisthenics to get
their seatbelts on when we get close to town while still driving.
This happens in reverse as we leave. I really think we would all be
safer if they just opted not to wear them altogether--or heaven
forfend, actually wore them the whole time. Instead we seem to have
reached the worst possible compromise.

More Fire Details

Remember that fire at the grocery store? And our rampant water
problems? Not unconnected.

Evidently it was an electric fire that occurred while some minor
construction/maintenance was being done, putting to rest all of my
morbid imaginings of competitor sabotage. It should have been
relatively minor, but when the fire trucks came they had no water with
which to put it out. Oh, Giyani.

Of course, if it really were minor a fire extinguisher should have
been able to deal with it, and no story I have heard yet has accounted
for this mysterious absence. You would think that basic standards of
commercial safety would cover this, no?

Fortunately, they were well-insured, so word has it that all the
(many) people they employed will still get paid while the store is
closed, which may take until December, current estimates say.

We should also all be grateful that I haven't set fire to my house
yet. Or electrocuted myself in a fatal manner. The tangle of cords
and switches in my cooking corner are a blatant fire hazard, and there
have been some exciting close calls. I'm considering forsaking
electricity for safety's sake, or at least until I get tired of
reading by flashlight and eating raw carrots.

On another note, I am dealing with the excruciatingly lines at the
other grocery store by buying produce from vendors at the taxi rank.
Today I bought some potatoes from a nice kokwana, who was so impressed
with my Tsonga skillz that she kept quizzing me while I dug for the
change at the bottom of my bag. It feels less offensive to have
kokwanas (older women/grandmothers) marvel at my strangeness than the
teenagers, though then again, the last teenage girl who marveled at me
(while I purchased something) was also awesome and ran to get me an
awesome container for the thing I was buying.

I wonder if I can live off of things purchased in the taxi rank? I
bet I could, but eventually I would run out of garlic and then go
running to the nearest grocery store unrepentantly.

African Time

People will tell you that African Time means that everything happens three hours later than it's supposed to. That's a misconception. African Time means that everything takes three hours longer than it ought to. Here's how.

My counterpart and I were visiting drop-in centres today. The plan was that we would go today, tomorrow, and Friday, visiting probably about five centres a day in our quest to eventually visit each centre three times (by the way, we're still on the first round). We were supposed to meet up as usual at seven-thirty in front of Mopani Spar, the grocery store near the taxi rank.

Usually something happens to foil this. Sometimes, my counterpart is late. Sometimes, my supervisor, whose car we use, is late. Sometimes, everyone is actually on time but we spend an hour at the office for unknown reasons. Because I take public transportation and know that my options are fifteen minutes early or twenty minutes late, I'm usually fifteen minutes early (sleep deprivation by the end of the week may make it my fault we're late this Friday, though). Today, they were both late. More accurately, my supervisor was with the car (and my host mom, so I should've seen this coming) in Malamulele, a town to the north of here, and didn't get in until around nine. My counterpart however did not see this coming and was going to meet them at the office and then pick me up in town. In fairness, she called me when she realized this was going to take longer than expected, about fifteen minutes after our meeting time. Oh, by the way, it's the dead of winter here and I was cold.

Fortunately I was very bundled up, had a magazine, and there weren't any random people to harass me because nobody was at Mopani Spar because it was on fire on Monday. Yep. People told me it burned down and I imagined ashes on the ground, but actually they put it out before it got to that stage. Word is it will be closed for two months at least, which leaves me with the dilemma of where to buy groceries, but that's another story. Anyway, as far as standing in the cold on random sidewalks go, it wasn't that bad. I anticipate these things now.

Elisa at last did arrive, around nine (did I mention I woke up at six? I did. That's sleep I could have had), and we drove off to fill up with petrol. While at the filling station, she mentions, oh by the way, we can't do site visits tomorrow, Queen (my supervisor) needs to car to go to a meeting in Polokwane. I kinda saw this coming, too. Last time we had three days of site visits scheduled we missed the middle one because it was Election Day (that one we really should've seen coming). We need to schedule three days just to assure we'll get one.

And then we drove to the first site, Loloka. Not only does this involve driving out of town and eventually turning onto dirt roads that have bumps on their bumps, we also don't actually know where the drop-in centre is, so we have to keep stopping to ask people. Sometimes the people jump in the car with us and give us directions from the backseat. This happens pretty much every time. I'm still impressed that Elisa knows where all the villages are, since some of them have some pretty gnarly turnoffs from the main road.

When we do arrive, we are greeted either with great excitement or bewilderment. Both of these are time-consuming. If it's great excitement, we have to sit around and greet each and every person individually. There is small talk. If it's bewilderment, underlings (carers and cooks) get on the phone with or send a small child off to find the supervisors who have all of the documents, etc. that we want to see. Then, we do the actual evaluations, which takes maybe half an hour, including going over the most egregious things that can be corrected. Like totaling income and expenditures to get a balance, grr, did you not go to the financial management course or did the trainers decide to skip the most important part or just screw it up /rant. After that, we are fed. Tea and bread, cold drink and pap, whatever. We are guests and therefore we must be fed. I don't eat actual meals at home on site visit days, the five meals I eat during the visits are pretty hard on my stomach. Then there are lengthy farewells, and at last we leave, to repeat the cycle again, driving a ways to the next village over.

Just when I think it's about to end, it's not. Today, we were driving back to Giyani and we passed a bunch of people from two other drop-in centres walking by the side of the road. So we stopped for twenty minutes to hang out by the side of the road with them. Which was perfectly entertaining. But that is why everything takes longer in Africa.

On the way home, we decided we would do site visits tomorrow anyway using public transportation. I'm excited to see how that will add a new wrinkle to the experience.

Kitchen Update

Here's how our kitchen is coming along. It's lacking some essential
pieces, like a roof and doors and window panes, but I think it's
starting to look pretty good.

Water

The water has been off in my village since Monday. Water has been a problem this year in the Giyani area; in town, the water is often off several days a week, and recently it has been off for about two weeks straight. Usually it is more reliable in my village, where it only goes off occasionally, and then usually only for one or two days, but right now it's the height of the dry season. The water was off for about a week around this time last year, too. This year is even drier, since during the rainy season the rain started late and wasn't as plentiful as usual when it did at last begin; our mango trees consequently produced barely any fruit, and the dam near Thomo is nearly dry.

Even though the pipes that bring water have been dry, there is still water available to me. Because this happens occasionally, my host family (and most people who live here) are prepared and keep several barrels and buckets full of water to use as a back up source. We're more frugal when the water's off, of course, which means forgoing laundry and less bathing. Fortunately I did my enormous backlog of laundry just a couple days before the water went off, so I'm okay on that front, though my hair really needs to be washed. After a week our water supplies are pretty depleted, but we refilled them yesterday thanks to a neighbor with a car who took all of our barrels somewhere where the water was working; still, we're hoping that the water comes back on shortly...and that it's a rainier season this year.

Vacation Roundup

I wrote this post in Word at the office, and then when I went to save it, Word ate it. It was a really long post, and I had some other stuff written that also got eaten, so this version (being written directly into the website) may end up being a bit shorter. I know--how does Word eat documents as you're trying to save them? Because of virus-riddled South African computers, that's why.

Anyway, I began vacation in Maputo, where we wandered around and only managed to accomplish about half the things we intended to but still had a great time. It was a Monday, when the museums are closed, so the Natural History Museum was tightly gated shut; the Art Museum, on the other hand, had somebody there who would let you in for a nominal bribe. And the art was well worth it. We got horribly lost on the way to the fish market, but spent a nice hour wandering through the central market and buying immense quantities of fresh produce, including the first cilantro I've seen for sale in a year and a half. So instead of fish, we had delicious guacamole and very rich pastries (bought from one of the 5 million bakeries in Mozambique) and some other mezze for dinner).

After Maputo, we headed up to Vilankulos, which turned out to be a much longer drive than we had anticipated. My fault, I didn't realize how much the pothole obstacle course would slow us down. We got in well after dark and then got lost in Vilankulos looking for the backpackers, since Mozambique is very poorly signposted and the map in Lonely Planet is basically like navigating off of a globe. So we ended up parking near some distinctive statuary and calling the backpackers, which sent someone to guide us the rest of the way.

The next day, we had a relaxing morning sleeping on the beach. Well, relaxing except for the horde of dogs that tried to have a fight on our beach towels and spent the day stalking us, begging for morsels of our fruit (we didn't have any food that should have been appetizing to dogs, I swear. It was all fruit and chocolate). At last somebody from a nearby bar/restaurant chased them away for us, and I attempted to read but promptly fell asleep while E and Milenka went wading in the ocean and had a fun brush with death (Milenka can't swim). It was wonderful to sit on a beach. About four days in, I finally felt like I was on vacation--not to say I wasn't having fun already, I just didn't feel like I was actually on vacation yet. That afternoon, we rode camels. Seriously. Evidently there was a Sudanese guy who brought some camels with him when he emigrated and runs half hour rides on them now. Camel riding on a beach, after you get over the initial fear of death, is quite fun.

For day two in Vilankulo, we took a dhow, which is like a sailboat, out to the Bazaruto Archipelago, where we went snorkeling and had some amazing fresh crab and fish. It was beautiful out there, though the current was overly swift and instead of gently floating through the fish it was more like speed cruising through the water while straining your eyes to make sure to see all of the cool sealife as you careen past, while also trying to avoid running directly into the 8 million jellyfish the current seems to want you to accost. No stings, though I had some still-healing wounds from scraping against the coral. We spent that evening wandering around for about two hours looking for a restaurant that was open and had food, the latter being a much more difficult prospect than you would think.

After Vilankulo, we headed down to Tofo, which involved another insanely long day of driving. However, we didn't get lost on the way and we made it into the backpackers before dark (though the previous entry's photos were taken later that day in the backpacker's parking lot). We also found the bread shack that day, which listed donuts on its menu, a very exciting prospect, but they turned out to just be fat cakes with fillings. The bread was great, though. The next day, we went whale shark watching. It started with an ocean launch, which involves pushing a motor boat into the ocean and then hopping in while it is getting ready to start motoring rapidly against the waves, and then riding on the side while it rocks back and forth wildly on the water. No seatbelts, terrifying, and not a little nausea-inducing. Lots of fun though. Unfortunately, it was really cloudy which made it difficult to see any whale sharks in the water, so we didn't spot any. There were many, many dolphins out frolicking, though, so we jumped in the water to snorkel with them instead. Well worth it.

After the whale shark watching, we went down to the market in Tofo which sold textiles rather than fresh produce and was a lot of fun to walk around. Combined, E and Milenka are fantastic bargainers, and I got to reap the bounty of their skills. We also had lunch at a little hole in the wall restaurant that served fantastic tasting and fantastically cheap shrimp. Mmm.

The next stop was Swaziland, so we wished Mozambique farewell--which, as always, took a lot longer than expected since the drive took twenty million hours and included bribing a cop, buying strange fuzzy fruit, and getting lost looking for the border--but we made it into Swaziland before the border closed. Seriously, finding the border was a lot trickier than expected. Have I mentioned yet that Mozambique was really poorly-signposted? Also, the last stage involved driving through a tree farm. No joking. Now, Lonely Planet's map of Swaziland is a lot less globe-like than their Mozambique map, in no small part because Swaziland's map covers a much smaller area in the same sized page, and it is infinitely better signposted (they also have a strange obsession with speed bumps, which we experienced in a number of different flavors, none of which were potholes [Mozambique] or cows [South Africa]). We still got lost on the way to the backpackers. This was because it was dark, the map of Swaziland is still like finding a particular hotel on a page-sized map of Massachusetts, the Coast to Coast directions are usually only penetrable if you already know where you're going, and we were really tired. But we pulled into a restaurant and got surprisingly good directions, after which we found the backpackers. We then drove back to that restaurant for dinner, before watching Brazil humiliatingly defeat the US in the Confederation's Cup semifinals. Eish, we were up three when we left the restaurant! What happened?

We considered going back to the same restaurant for breakfast, but sadly it was closed. However, it worked out for the best, because it turned out there was a great coffee shop further down the road. We needed to get to the South Africa border before it closed at 4 pm, so we had an activity-packed morning and managed to get everything we wanted to done in record time: hearty breakfast-eating, craft-shopping, museum-visiting, and hot springs-swimming, where we attempted to teach Milenka to swim (see pictures). As expected, it took twice as long to get to the border as we had expected, but now that we know to expect it, we made it in plenty of time.

Farewell, Swaziland. Farewell, Mozambique. I really love both countries, and would love to go back...or transfer to there...but probably won't get a chance to before my service is over. Oh, final note: fun game to play while driving through Mozambique? Spot the Peace Corps Volunteers. They're the white people jogging by the side of the tar road with their iPods.

The Adventures of Chico Rojo

On this past vacation, my friends and I rented a little car we referred to affectionately as "Chico Rojo." Chico was a little car, untested and new to the ways of the world. Chico did not like Mozambique at first. Mozambique's roads are kind of like driving on tetris blocks, if tetris also had crazy people trying to commit suicide using your car. But Chico grew up during his trip to Mozambique. Chico became strong and arrogant. And then, the Bamboozi parking lot happened to him. Here is Chico Rojo, stuck in the sand at Tofo, with Milenka trying to push him out:



Here is a close up of Rojito's wheels:



We put our heads together. How could we possibly save our darling Rojito? And then inspiration struck! We would use the carpet trick, except instead of carpet on the snow, we would use palm leaves and coconut shells on the sand!



Victory!



The pit Chico left behind:



The second time Chico Rojo got stuck (also in Tofo), we didn't have time to find palm leaves before some Afrikaners on vacation came by and latched Chico to their tail and pulled him out. No pictures of that one, sorry.

Pictures from Vacation

Here are my pictures from vacation to Mozambique and Swaziland:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Jade.Lamb/MozSwaz

I've also added more pictures to my album from Kruger National Park:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Jade.Lamb/Kruger

Oops, I still have a blog...

I had grand plans to post a few times this week. Ultimately, I didn't feel like/didn't have time to write anything, and suddenly it's Friday night and tomorrow I'm starting a journey to Mozambique. Obviously since it's Friday night I have much more exciting things to do than write blog posts, such as wash my dishes and sweep, and besides this week though busy was disappointing so I don't have a lot to report. But here is what I've been doing lately, encapsulated in a list, because I like lists. This should not come as a surprise to anyone.

1. I discovered that it is very frustrating to make changes in a language manual when you don't speak the language and all of the edits come from margin notes, made by people whose contact information you don't have.

2. I was supposed to do site visits today and yesterday but they were canceled at the last minute. By canceled I mean my counterpart pretended to forget that we were supposed to do them and totally never admitted that we had ever scheduled them at all. She also ignored me every time I suggested we schedule new ones. (Site visits to drop-in centres taking the training class.)

3. I spent nearly two days solid doing data entry on the fifty drop-in centres that have in some way or another produced paperwork at our organization. My back hurts but I am very pleased with the state of my spreadsheets now. They are beautiful and it is easy to find data!

4. I made a vow never, ever to have anything to do with ordering customized clothing emblazoned with a logo for a large group again. Unless maybe it comes from cafepress.

5. I went to a Peace Corps workshop to work on the next pre-service training and learned an enormous quantity of Setswana grammar over the course of two days while pretending to be an eager American trainee with lots of clueless questions. I only know about ten words, though, if you don't count noun concords (which I can recite, by the way).

6. Our kitchen is looking really good. No roof or door or window panes or indeed floor yet, but the basic shell is done. I would post a picture but I keep forgetting when it's daylight.

7. I realized that rounding up, I have been here 17 months. 9 more to go! That's kind of scary.

All right. That's all for today, folks.

Nutrients

Oops, somehow an entire month went by without any blog posts...and let's face it, the one saying I was going to MST doesn't really count...sorry, guys. By guys I mean the handful of relatives who actually care how often I update. I've done some sort of interesting stuff that I'll try to start posting about, but writing just never seemed that appealing. I'll work on being better.

We started a two-day training session on nutrition today. Today's class covered the basics of food groups and healthy cooking, and tomorrow we'll be working on applying that knowledge to the drop-in centre menus.

Food groups in South Africa are pretty widely known. Unlike in the US, where we are taught four basic food groups, South Africa teaches three: energy (carbohydrates and fat), body-building (protein), and protective (fruit and vegetables). You can see a poster for them on every clinic, school, or creche wall. We've tasked the drop-in centres with making their own, using magazine pictures to illustrate different examples of food. Khanimamba is sort of in love with projects that help centres create educational wall posters.

However, basically none of the drop-in centres I've visited so far actually applies that knowledge to their menus. Most serve vuswa (pap, or maize porridge) with some sort of protein source, no vegetables. Some centres have a vuswa and cabbage day. I went to one that was serving vuswa and potatoes. It was a carbohydrate orgy. It was also my lunch. Tomorrow, therefore, they will be revising their menus and writing up budgets for them.

Remember that many of the kids who attend these centres are HIV positive and/or have other illnesses, making basic nutrition and a healthy diet even more important than for the general population.

On to my fun anecdotes from today.

I blew the minds of my trainees not once but twice today. It's so much fun when I blow their minds. They think I'm lying to them. Here are the facts I imparted:

1. Bicarbonate of soda (baking soda) is bad for vegetables. (I'd never heard of putting baking soda in vegetables before moving to SA. Do other people do this?)

2. You can eat potato peels. In fact, potato peels contain half of a potato's nutritional value (NOT as some Americans have tried to tell me its entire nutritional value).

It took a lot of convincing, including Elisa's very vocal support (and I'm pretty sure the potato peel thing was new information for her too...), but I'm reasonably sure that some people believed me. Of course, I also believe that deep-frying my potatoes is bad for me and I do so anyway on a somewhat regular basis, so we will see if anything changes.

I also bonded with the trainers today about how much we hate the colored chalk the administrators bought. My hands are still yellow, and despite sponging down I don't think the blackboard will ever be the same--the blue chalk isn't even visible. And the box they got was enormous.

Off to MST

I'm leaving Saturday for mid-service training, aka our mid-service
medical checkups. Hopefully I won't have TB, malaria, or any other
horrible diseases. I am studying up to pass the tests :)

I'll return to site Sunday, May 10. Internet access in the interim
will be more sporadic than usual.

What's Wrong With This Picture?

Perhaps you remember this picture from last year:



I got home yesterday pretty tired from a wonderful day of organizing and alphabetizing (our DIC files are soooo pretty now) to see my kokwana seated outside, which is not unusual, with a few other people who looked vaguely familiar. I greeted them, and my host mom came out and greeted me too. There was a small child there who was frightened of me despite my best attempts to charm her. I had all the while the oddest sensation that there was something going on, and I couldn't figure out what it was. And then, at last, it was called to my attention. The kitchen, pictured above, was no more. It was replaced by this:



D'oh. Blame exhaustion, nearsightedness, obliviousness, whatever.

They are getting rid of the mud-and-thatch kitchen, which was to be honest not in great condition, and replacing it with concrete--which explains all the concrete bricks piled in our yard.

Party Weekend

On Friday, I went to a birthday party, and on Saturday I went to a wedding. A lot of events, especially things like weddings, are crammed into the time around Easter (or other holidays) because family will be back in the village from their jobs in towns or cities.

I didn't get any warning before going to the birthday party, and since I had been at home making crepes I was wearing very ratty jeans and a very bleach-stained Peace Corps T-Shirt. (I also didn't know we were going to a party when we left...) This is not appropriate wear for a birthday party in South Africa. Most people there were wearing traditional dress or otherwise dressed up. I felt a little embarrassed but I've definitely learned that most people don't really notice what I'm wearing at first. So it was okay.

The food at parties follows a regular menu, though the particular subsets might vary. This party had mainly beets and coleslaw with the mutton and pap. Am I a bad person for not liking beets? Or coleslaw? I always feel really guilty when I don't eat my beets. I keep trying to like them, but the taste just hasn't come (as a side note, I very much enjoyed broccoli the last time I had it, a thing I thought might never happen, so perhaps it will happen with beets as well...on the other hand, the broccoli was smothered with cheese sauce and I was starving). Fortunately, my neighbor is used to my strange eating habits by now and she ate the evidence on my abandoned beets. She also very usefully chased away all of the drunk men who tried to talk to me.

A small girl was sitting near us. There was a cake that we had somehow come into possession of, and people kept giving her chunks of it--she was clearly in the right place. Eventually she was given several chunks and told to share them with her friends. A few minutes later she and a friend wandered back with icing smeared all over their faces. Hilarious.

A confession: I didn't actually know whose birthday it was. Um, or whose house we were at. Or, well, that it was a birthday party. I found all of these things out as we were leaving and I was taken to be introduced to the host. In South Africa, there are no invitations, you just show up and anyone's invited. Including me.

The wedding I had a few hours notice on, so I was in skirt, headscarf, etc. in time. My host mom looked kind of relieved when I came out of the house wearing this...I think she was a little concerned about a reprise of yesterday's wardrobe. Anyway, we left a few minutes late and ended up getting there forty five minutes after the wedding started, trying inconspicuously to sneak into seats in the back. (I was a little concerned we were gate crashing the wedding since I didn't see anyone I recognized, but it turned out that they were just sitting somewhere else.) After a few minutes the minister stopped preached and the music started and people began to dance, at which point I thought, "Oops, looks like we missed the whole ceremony!" And, "that was a lot shorter than I would have expected..."

No such luck, though if there were vows exchanged we did miss them. The following THREE HOURS (for a total of nearly four hours) were taken up by long-winded speeches by relatives about how wonderful the bride and groom were, which were actually kind of nice except that there were so many of them, then another sermon, all interspersed by minute-long musical intermissions and on one occasion, the cutting of the cake. By the time it was over, I thought I was pretty near death. Yeah, we were sitting in the sun and the small tree shadow we were chasing with our chairs kept moving.

I was a little disappointed to find how westernized the wedding was. The bride wore a big poofy white dress and veil and the wedding party were wearing ugly bridesmaid colors. The cake had white frosting and many tiers with a bride and groom on top. However, there was no throwing of the bouquet/garter, alcohol, post-ceremony dancing (only during the ceremony), "you may now kiss the bride," or rice throwing. I'm not sure if there was a formal walking down the aisle or exchange of vows since we were so late. I didn't notice any pillow-bearing children, though.

The food was pretty good. I avoided beets and coleslaw, though they were both present. However, what I really wanted after sitting in the sun for three hours and walking half an hour to get there was cold drink. I was even willing to drink grape fanta, the bane of my cold drink-related existence (this post has taught me that I am a pickier eater than I thought). When I got to the end of the buffet where the drinks were, they took the cold drink buckets away! I was going to cry. My host mom browbeat them into letting us take some juice out from it, though, so it all turned out all right.

Another key difference? While at a party, you eat and then linger for hours, after a ceremony (or any kind of festival where you have to watch something), it goes on for hours and hours, but you get to leave as soon as you finish eating.

We bought pretty tomatoes on the way home. They taste delicious.

Rockstar Moments

It should surprise none of you that I can be a really lazy updater. Sometimes, this is because I am busy. Sometimes, this is because I don't feel like I have anything to write about. Sometimes I'm just being lazy. But I wanted to write about a cool afternoon during the training session on gardening that we did last week, even though more than a week has elapsed, unfortunately due more to not feeling like writing than to being crazy busy.

If you have been following this past year's chronicles, you will have noted ongoing struggles to express myself and be understood in both Tsonga and English. This has been coming to a point recently, as the current crop of trainees aren't managers but cooks and gardens who speak less English than I do Tsonga. And then, while I was teaching them cool gardening techniques and factoids, I stumbled upon a solution trained by many years of 64 shades of crayola and infinite plastic cases of watercolors. D'oh. So I drew everything.

I am particularly proud of the chart I drew of Garden Pests and Friends. My pictures, except for the aphid (partly, I'm not one hundred percent sure I know what aphids look like, and partly I'm not sure that aphids are indigenous to South Africa...ditto for the ladybug, though it was a very well rendered ladybug if I do say so myself) were totally legible and everyone knew what I was talking about. True, the explanation of why earthworms are a Garden Friend was a little prolonged despite my awesome pictures of the worm eating mulch and pooping plant food (I know it's a simplification, don't start), but still so cool. I felt like such a rockstar, aided in no small part by the multicolored water soluble markers I was using. You know, the kind you can stack into a lightsaber and have duels with during elementary school. If the papers are still around, I'll take pictures of them at the office next week.

Currently, things are quiet. It's easter week, which means nothing is happening at the office. At home there is a construction project going on in our backyard to expand the raised bit. This usually starts very early in the morning right outside my window, which is of course no end of fun to wake up to. It's just a bunch of concrete bricks spaces out now, I don't know when they're going to get around to filling it in with mud and cow poo.

Happy Passover/Easter, everyone.

More Pictures

From Cape Town in February, diligently culled from over 200 taken:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Jade.Lamb/CapeTown#

Kruger National Park pictures:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Jade.Lamb/Kruger

They're animals, not much to say about them.

Pictures

Pictures from my parents' visit to Mapayeni and Khanimamba.

http://picasaweb.google.com/Jade.Lamb/Giyani#

My Day

6:00 Alarm goes off. 10 more minutes…

6:30 Eek! Time to get up.

6:35 Second Day Oatmeal is gross. This is because I always forget and put milk in the whole batch the first day. The peanut butter seems to be mitigating the taste, though. Thanks for the tip, Peace Corps cookbook!

6:40 Must. Drink. All. Tea. Before. Leaving. Caffeine good.

6:55 Is there anything else I need to do that could possibly make my clothes dirty? No? Time to get dressed.

7:00 Out to get a taxi.

7:05 Taxi already! My lucky day.

7:40 Arrive at rank. Need to go to Spar to buy tea things for training today.

7:45 Okay, we cannot possibly need 6 boxes of creamer for this week alone. Can we? Well, I should get everything on the list just in case…I’m going to need a bigger basket.

7:50 Cart acquired. Well, there are only two rolls of toilet paper on the list. We can definitely go through that in a week. So it must just before the week.

7:55 Checkout.

8:00 These bags are really heavy. I am so screwed.

8:05 I hate the new queue marshal. Next time he says that, I should yell at him. I’m only going to talk to the nice, female queue marshal. She always has my back.

8:10 No! I’m going to the college!
Driver: Well, you need to ask to go to the college.
I know! I did ask! I asked at the rank! (I guess she didn’t have my back today. Grumble.)
The driver makes a swift U-turn and drops me off at the college.

8:15 I may not still be alive by the time I get to the office. 30 pounds worth of tea stuff in plastic bags…I’m getting interesting blisters on my hands.

8:20. Still alive! Why is all of our exhibition toy equipment (made from paper mache and cardboard) out on the lawn?

8:25 Ah. Because the classroom is flooded.

8:30 Are there really no trainees here yet? I think that’s a record. Oh, no, they’re just all in the non-flooded classroom.

8:50 Class starts! Only twenty minutes late, too. Singing.

9:00 Argh, need to go make more application form copies. Let’s see, there are about thirty people here…will forty-five be enough?

9:05 Forty-five was exactly enough. For this moment. I should go make another twenty copies.

9:10 Nobody else arrived? Great! Emma’s walking them through the form…it’s like in high school, taking the SAT, where the script says that you can’t go on until the proctor has explained what each and every blank means.

9:30 More people. Good thing I made twenty more. Let’s see…there are only five copies left, and it’s only an hour after class was supposed to start…are more people coming? Yes. Let’s go make twenty more.

9:40 The flooded class is cleaned out. We can go back in. First item on the agenda: creating ground rules and expectations.

9:50 You’re supposed to /pass/ the attendance register after signing it, not just sit and stare at it.

10:30 Introductions, while I get the tea things ready.

11:00 Tea time. Hmm, between the two classes we are going through creamer awfully quickly…maybe the estimate was right…

11:05 A trainee comes up to me and tells me and greets me. She has a small child. Hello, and hello you sweet little small child. She tells me the crèche is closed. Um…okay… I’m not reacting how she wants. She tells me again (still in Tsonga) that the crèche is closed. Am I missing something here? Pfala is closed, right? She says in Enlish, “Creche. Closed.” Oh…I get it…she’s apologizing for having a small child here and explaining that the crèche is closed today. Right, there’s a world out there where it’s not acceptable to bring your baby to work.

11:30 Class resumes, and the actual program begins. I had prepared to do this bit, but Elisa jumps in. Well, that’s fine, less pressure on me.

12:00 Elisa has decided that we need a singing break. Okay.

12:05 We need another singing break already?!

12:30 Elisa says, “Over to you, Sesi Tsakani.” Um…what? Oh, I’m presenting on this bit? Well…I guess I can do that. (for more on this, see the upcoming post, “How Conducting Trainings in South Africa is Like High School Debate.”)

1:00 Lunch. Which is traditionally when I run around making more photocopies.

1:05 Making tea for everyone. Carrying insanely heavy tea things has made me feel very proprietary about the tea provision. I pour some for myself. This is the muddiest tea I have every made, and it is delightful. It is also lukewarm, which the trainees will not stand for, so I heat up water.

1:10 Refill creamer and sugar. We’re going to go through a fair amount of cream this week but nowhere near the 10 kg of sugar Free had me pick up.

1:15 Photocopying. The photocopier and I are good friends

1:25 Talk to Free. He asks why I have forgotten the toilet paper. I say I haven’t, I put it in the bathroom. All of it? Yes… A dawning realization sets in. Oh, when you said two packets, you meant two large packs of ten rolls each…not two rolls. That makes sense.

1:30 Ooh, I have mail! Thanks Mom!

1:35 Bank of America is going to start charging an account maintenance fee?! Not cool. Not cool at all. I could buy 230 oranges with those $6!

1:35-2:00 Stewing over BoA while talking with Elisa, who is admiring my pen. This pen, which Mom brought for me last month, is probably the only conspicuously expensive thing I use in public (well, at least since I lost all my pairs of prescription sunglasses). Camera and computer and imported fruit all hide in my room.

2:30 Class resumes. With a song, of course. It’s interesting to have lyrics memorized that I don’t understand.

2:35 Class prayer for three drop-in centre carers we knew who died in a car accident last week.

2:40 Um…where did Elisa go? Okay, class, get in your small groups and draw an organogramme! (I hope Elisa gets back before you finish…)

2:45 Elisa returns. Yay!

3:00 All the tea I’ve been swilling is starting to kick in. I feel energetic. Is there work I can do? Why don’t I write a letter to BoA asking them to waive my account maintenance fee as I am doing good works in far-off countries for very little money?

3:20 How do we always end on time despite starting late? Because I pad the schedule. We sing to close.

3:30 Everyone leaves. Elisa tells me that she found out that the room was flooded this morning because someone had left a sink on outside all night. (The college frequently has no water, which is how I suppose the sink got left on unnoticed.)

3:40 All the trainers go outside to stare accusingly at the sink. I’m trying to clean the room so we can go.

3:50 Staring over, we bring in our example toys, most of which are thankfully intact.

4:15 Can I go now?

4:20 Waiting for the taxi.

4:25 Taxi! Swiftest taxi day ever.

5:00 In town, switching taxis. Squashed in the back.

5:25 What, no one in front of me got off before me? This never happens. Everyone gets out so that I can disembark.

5:30 Home. Where is everyone? Masingita is in Malamulele at a training course, Kokwana Selina is…I don’t know where. Church? The younger members are staying with other family.

5:35 Food is good. I should eat. Hmm…I could cook something, or eat leftovers. What leftovers do I have? Half a bowl of fried rice, two-day old oatmeal, and some cookie dough. Cookie dough it is.

5:40 I already knew that trying to make cookies in the skillet doesn’t work. Why do I persist?

5:45 Still energetic. Blogging!

*All time codes are estimates.

Breaking the Little Red Taxi Curse

I take four taxis every time I go in to our office, two to get there and two to get back. My commute is usually about two and a bit hours round trip. I am something of an expert at this route: I have down cold the times that I should leave home or the office to minimize waiting time, exactly when to start digging through my bag for the taxi fare, who to tell when about where I'm getting off...etc.

There is a definite hierarchy between kinds of taxis. In my area, there is a rough divide between the quantums, which are more bus-like, and the older taxis. The quantums are more spacious, more comfortable, and newer; I can stand upright in them, and their seats have head rests. There is also a functional aisle between the seats. The older ones are shorter, have fold-out seats, and are often in varying states of disrepair.

There is one particular taxi that goes from Giyani to Mapayeni, or from town to my village, that is substantially worse than the others. Instead of having four rows behind the driver which seat three people each (or four in the back row), it has three rows which are supposed to seat four people each even though it is the same size as the ones that seat three. I'm pretty sure that the back row isn't bolted down as it should be and most of the seat linings have disappeared. It is also the only red taxi that runs this route, so I can recognize it from some distance away. So can everyone else. Consequently, this taxi takes forever to fill, since no one wants to get in it. Since I stand out too, I rarely get the option; the queue marshall just ushers me on.

Before this month, I'd probably only ridden in this taxi three or four times over ten months. Riding in it isn't actually so bad, but waiting for it to fill--especially if you're squashed in the back row in intense heat--is murder.

For the last week, ending yesterday, every day on the way home the little red taxi (fondly referred to by me as the "crap taxi") was waiting to fill. Last Wednesday I got there around three and it had only two people in it; those two people actually abandoned the taxi and so after ten minutes there were actually fewer people than we had started with. It took an hour to fill. The next day I showed up at four and it was half full, and filled up in a normal amount of time. This week, the first day I showed up at four thirty, and there was the little red taxi again. Quite a streak, eh?

Then, yesterday, I was there at five, sure that I was late enough in the day to avoid the little red taxi. But--there it was! So I climbed in with a resigned sigh.

Around five thirty we hit the road. Halfway to my village, an ambiguous but very disconcerting scraping sound seemed to be coming from the undercarriage. We stopped. The driver got out to inspect, shrugged, and climbed back in. We started off again.

A few minutes later--more scraping. It sounded eerily like a corpse trying to escape from its grave. We stopped for good this time.

In America, this would have been cause for some outrage. But, TIA--this is Africa. Resigned good humor with a certain amount of repressed laughter seemed to be the response of the day, which both I and a girl a little younger than me who I had been talking to in the taxi seemed inclined to. After all: it had been a long day already and I was exhausted, so of course this would be the day the taxi broke down.

This was followed by a dawning excitement. The little red taxi broke down! Maybe it would never drive again!

A few minutes later we transferred over to another passing taxi--a quantum! There were a few hiccups (the two drivers were actually arguing about how much the one had to pay the other. Come on, guys. We want to go home; and I was actually standing up, which was fine except that I couldn't see to figure out where I needed to get off), but I was home before dark.

And today? The little red taxi curse is broken. A normal taxi with four rows and a bolted down backseat. Not a quantum, but we can't have everything.

Happy Dance!

My VAST Grant just got approved! The grant was to do more of the training workshops with drop-in centres, so you can look forward to hearing more about them in the future.

What is VAST, you ask? What does it stand for, and why does Jade have to have all these silly acronyms in everything she writes? The answer to the last question is that typing everything out all the time is really unappealing to me. Plus of course, I like to sow confusion.

To be honest, I don’t remember what VAST stands for and I’m feeling too lazy right this second to look it up. Besides, some mysteries must remain to keep my readership engaged. I think that ‘V’ might stand for ‘volunteer,’ but even some strong head-scratching has kept the other letters from me.

I can tell you what VAST is, though. VAST is a program specific to Peace Corps Volunteers working with HIV/AIDS. The money comes from PEPFAR (I know this one! President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief! A rare helpful plan from the last eight years), and is to be used in small-scale, sustainable projects, facilitated by PCVs (you should know that one by now), that mitigate the impact of HIV/AIDS (another acronym you should know, yes?) on their communities. The grants are quite small, usually between three and five thousand dollars, but that money goes a long way in a poor community if you use your resources well.

ETA: VAST= Volunteer Activity Support and Training

Cape Town

My parents are visiting right now. We were in Cape Town and the Winelands last week, and are at my site now (more on that later). I know what you’re all thinking: Didn’t she just get back from a three-week vacation? Yes, I know, this is pretty rapid vacationing, even by Peace Corps standards, but it’s when they decided to come. And no more vacation until July, I swear. Maybe.

To the meat of the post.

Reasons my parents would like to retire to Western Cape:

-really extraordinary, really inexpensive food
-gorgeous, striking, massive scenery
-Mediterranean climate that’s perfect year-round
-penguins!
-thousands of unexplored vineyards
-local cheeses and chocolates
-cute goats
-friendly people
-easy hikes in mountainous areas
-beautiful beaches
-everyone speaks English

Reasons my parents will not retire to Western Cape:

-driving on the left side of the road
-two nights on a plane to get back to the States
-bourgeois guilt over omnipresent poverty next to extreme wealth

They are, however, already planning their next trip for 2012.

Adventures Involving Transport, Miroho, and Xitsonga

It turns out that the taxis do run that early, for those of you in suspense about the ending of my last post. There's also a bus that stops by Mapayeni around 6, which is what I took. And it turns out the bus has a rush hour price! It was R1.70 more expensive than the 7 and 8 o'clock buses! Ish. Anyway, I got into town in plenty of time, only to wait around for an hour with one of the trainers before everyone else showed up. We then went to the office, where we loitered around for another twenty minutes before actually heading off to visit drop-in centres.

To maximize efficiency, we dropped off one person at each DIC in the morning. The one I went to was really a very well-run organization, though it was a joint home-based care organization and drop-in centre. (Home based care units send carers to the houses of people with TB, AIDS, and other illnesses to monitor their health and provide basic medical care.) The HBC part was housed in one of the nicest buildings I've ever seen in a village, including laundry machines, flush toilets, a laptop computer, and other luxuries. Evidently, it was brand new, donated recently by the government. Their DIC was across the street and somewhat less luxurious, but in good repair. Their offices were impressively well-organized and they had a flourishing vegetable garden. The DIC's buildings were only for office space, though; there was no proper building for the OVCs to spend time in, just a yard and porches.

When I left, they bestowed upon me two plastic bags full of miroho from their garden. Miroho means leafy green vegetables, and include multiple types of plants, but basically they're all akin to spinach. I happen to quite like miroho, and usually this particular food doesn't cause as much mirth as when I say I eat pap or have tried mopani worms. Today, though, this was met with much disbelief, particularly the idea that I could cook miroho, so they felt it necessary to gift me with rather more than I was expecting: one bag full of the spinach-like leaves, and one bag full of the flowers that can also be cooked with it. I find the flowers daunting. I'm not sure if they need special preparation or not. I'll experiment tomorrow--if I can't figure it out, my kokwana may either be asked to help, or else receive a donation of miroho.

After we'd finished our morning visits, we were picked up one by one and went to the office for a few minutes to drop of a pair of shears (I really don't know why) and use the toilet. When we came back to the car, it wouldn't start. Shame! So we went inside to have tea while we waited for someone to come fix it. An hour later we were on the road again.

For the afternoon visit, one of our trainers and I went together, which was definitely a good thing as there was a lot more technical discussion that needed to happen at the next DIC about things like how to organize records and keep receipts properly. This one was much newer, less developed, and struggling financially. While the last DIC didn't have enough buildings, this one didn't have any roofs, except a small tin one over the cooking area. The buildings were all half-built in the way that often happens here: buildings develop in pieces, growing as money is available. Here, the walls were constructed out of concrete and bricks, but the windows were empty and the roof, absent.

The coordinator there knew me from the workshops we've been doing, and didn't think I spoke Tsonga. Now, at the last DIC, the coordinator and I managed to communicate pretty effectively by me asking questions in English, and her responding in Tsonga. We understood each other and felt more comfortable talking that way; I actually originally tried asking her questions in Tsonga, but she didn't understand my accent/questionable grammar. But this coordinator was astonished that I could even greet in Tsonga. I suspect this means that she never showed up in time for class, because I always greeted people at the beginning in Tsonga. So then I had to explain to her (in Tsonga) why I didn't teach the class in Tsonga. Basically, I can talk about the weather, food, goats, and what have you in Tsonga, but I have a difficult time explaining the intricacies of what a mission statement is or what the elements of a constitution are. So she spent the rest of the afternoon quizzing me on what different things were in Tsonga, which I think is the most annoying reaction possible, even more so than exclaiming in English, "Oh, you understand Xitsonga!" (which happened on the taxi on the way home) and then lecturing me (in English) about how I will becoming fluent in a matter of months (which thankfully hasn't happened in quite a while).

But everyone was very nice and welcoming, and they fed us pap and miroho. Yum.

Life is Full of Surprises

Surprise One. Last week the training workshop we did had not fifteen but seventy-five learners. Seventy-five! Way too many for one classroom. So, we split them up, putting the fifteen who had been to a workshop before in one class and the sixty new people in another. I worked with the sixty new people, which was exhausting and I missed my old learners, but…now another twenty-odd drop-in centres know the ins and outs of how to write an organization’s constitution and a few other useful things. Despite the massive quantity of extra people, this session actually went smoother than last time, as we had ironed out some of the bumps and I had adjusted to speaking at a pace and in a manner that people better understood.

Surprise Two. The drop-in centres have a functioning networking committee now, which I found out today when they came to Khanimamba to have their monthly meeting. I sat in on their meeting, which they used to plan a calendar for the rest of the year, including events for the OVCs like a netball tournament and an awareness campaign. A pleasant surprise.

Surprise Three. Tomorrow we are visiting drop-in centres. We are leaving from town at 7 am. I have never actually arrived in town this early before. It seems logical that they wouldn’t have planned to meet this early if the taxis didn’t run then, right?

One Year Anniversary

I've been in South Africa for a year now, and in Mapayeni for nearly ten months, a time that is naturally introspective to the PCV. I've accomplished less than I hoped but more than I feared. As the cast of Rent asks, "How do you measure a year?" I could summarize the postings past, listing again all that I have done, things I have gained or lost, but it's an exercise that seems besides the point to me. Instead, I'd rather take this opportunity to think about the year stretching before me. I feel, though at times I felt as though I would never feel this way, as though I'm positioned to do a lot in my second year as a Peace Corps Volunteer.

Exciting things to look forward to:

Developing more training programs for drop-in centres
Finding out if my VAST grant gets approved
Developing computer literacy program for high schoolers
The Mapayeni Drop-In Centre growing and strengthening
Parents visiting
Welcoming SA 19 when they arrive
Encouraging more people to submit to the Diversity Blog (I say encouraging, they say badgering...)
Playing with the small children who are no longer afraid of me
...and hopefully a few pleasant surprises.

Of course, there are a few things I am not looking forward to. For example, as I discovered yesterday, a year really takes the novelty and sense of productivity out of doing my laundry in a bucket. But fingers crossed that the good will continue to outweigh the bad, as I think it has so far in 2009.

(Also: Happy slightly-late Chinese New Year. It's the year of the ox, which is also my zodiac year.)

Back to the High School

The administrator at my organization, Free, has decided he wants to start a computer literacy program at his alma mater, Edward Homu High School. Free is about my age, and back in his day, Edward Homu (the high school in Mapayeni) was a pretty good institution for a rural South African school. It had a full staff, a respectable matric (like graduation) rate, and a working if unsophisticated computer lab. Since then, however, standards have dropped steeply. Attendance by both students and teachers is spotty, curriculum standards have changed multiple times, and the place is falling apart. Attendance isn't exactly helped by the fact that as soon as school begins, the gates are locked and tardy students (easily over fifty every day) aren't allowed in at all; the students often linger in front of the gate, afraid of the reprisals they'll receive from family if they return home. The computer lab remains, though dusty and unused; there is no staff to run it, or students who have the education to take advantage of it. So, Free and I went this morning to see if they were interested in us beginning an after hours computer literacy program with them.

They were interested. However, by now the computers are so old and unused that they are basically non-functioning; repairing them would be prohibitively expensive and the software on them hopelessly out of date in a world where the computer industry doubles its efficiency every eighteen months. The school has enough difficulty providing desks and chairs for learners, much less textbooks, much less computers. We left them with a promise of bringing by the forms for a Dell Foundation grant, the foundation that has generously donated computers to many organizations, including Khanimamba. Even if they get the grant, it will probably be a few months before they are here and installed. Everything here happens slowly.

Training Begins!

With not too many more bumps than should be reasonably expected, my training workshop for drop-in centres began this week and ran for three days. We ended up having between eleven and fifteen people there each day of the week, from eight different drop-in centres. Hopefully, the trainings will continue over the next year into a full program that covers all aspects of running a successful drop-in centre.

The training was a three day workshop on the organization of a drop-in centre (or really any organization--much of the material we used was the same material the trainers use for creche trainings). We covered writing a constitution, vision and mission statements, roles and responsibilities of employees and board members, the definition of management, and a few other related topics. Overall, I think it was pretty successful--the learners learned something and seemed engaged in what we were covering.

That hardly means it ran completely smoothly. The first day, Tuesday, we were supposed to start at eight and didn't end up starting until eleven thirty. Actually, we began at nine, and realized after half an hour that the people in our training room were actually there for a different training taking place in the next room over. Then the administrators at Khanimamba started phoning around and rounding up the people who said they were going to come, and we managed to actually start after a late tea break. We still ended up with a decent showing, though, and several of the people promised to bring other people from their organization the next day.

Which they did! Day two we had our peak attendance, fifteen people. We were planning the sessions a bit by the seat of our pants, as the trainers and I had a different idea of what the title of the course meant. In the end, I think that their interpretation, which covered some very basic practical topics that are mainly listed above, was the right call. I also didn't realize that I would have two trainers doing the sessions with me, though it was definitely helpful that there were as they both had a habit of wandering away just before their presence might be useful, and I needed them to translate and clarify much of the part of the workshop I ran.

Anyway, we kept adding things to the agenda of day two during the morning of day two. There was a couple extra hours of padding built into the schedule that I had made because I figured we would start late (which we did, but only one hour this day) and that one of our trainers would take more than her allotted time because she is very garrulous when in front of the classroom (that's okay, the learners like her and she explains things well). However, with three extra topics added on, we ended up having to move half the day two agenda to day three. At the end of the day, we had the following conversation:

Elisa: Tsakani, why do you think we ran so late?

Me: Well, we did start an hour late.

Elisa: Mmm. And we had to spend a lot of time explaining things, because this is all new to them.

Me: Mmm. Yes, that. And of course, we added three extra sessions. That might have been why we didn't finish the agenda.

Elisa: Ohhhh.

But day three we easily made it through the agenda, even though once again Elisa took way more than the time allotted. I had given myself three hours to do a session that should only take an hour, so even with starting late, we were home free.

Even though the sessions were pretty successful, it wouldn't have been nearly so much without Elisa and Emma, our trainers, since the learners had a lot of trouble understanding what I was saying. My American accent takes some getting used to, and I had to adjust to speaking a lot slower than I think of as a reasonably slow presentation speaking voice, as well as constantly modify the way I phrased things to make things easier to understand. A lot of nuance was lost--I had to translate "enthusiastic" to "excited" for one exercise which was interpreted by the learners as over-excited, and therefore a bad thing to have in employees--but it improved over the course of the week.

Running a training course in rural South Africa is also a lot different than running a training with Americans. Exercises that I had originally planned as group brainstorming, for example when defining abstract terms like "leadership," that would have ended in a laundry list of alternate definitions, had to be done backwards. We did small group work where the laundry list we would have created at the end was made up beforehand, and the learners had to assess whether the things on the list were good or important and why or define them or some such. This is because people aren't used to critical thinking because of the way the education system is and therefore first, don't participate and second, don't give very thought-out answers when they do participate. The language barrier doesn't help either--one of my favorite participants defined the difference between planning and organizing as, "planning is when people get together and plan, and organizing is when people get together and organize." I knew she had more to say than she was able to express, but....well, welcome to my week. A lot of the brainstorming resulted in jargon that the people speaking didn't understand but either saw in their handouts or remembered from earlier sessions; people would sit debating alternate spellings of a word (both wrong) instead of spending the time at hand. I learned very much to appreciate my own education this week, even more so than I had before.