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.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
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.
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.
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.
Monday, September 21, 2009
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.
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.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
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.
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.
Friday, September 18, 2009
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.
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.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
