Jade in South Africa

You Know You're a PCV in South Africa When, Redux

2011-12-23T19:01:00.002+01:00

The internet is a funny place. Three years ago I made a list called "You Know You're a PCV in South Africa When..." and posted it on this blog. You can find it here:

http://jadeinsouthafrica.blogspot.com/2008/08/you-know-youre-peace-corps-volunteer-in.html

Today, innocently browsing the interweb in between job applications, I found this youtube video someone had made, largely (though not entirely) out of the material from my old post:

I'm not sure whether to be flattered, or offended that I wasn't cited or asked for permission.

Return of the Fuzzy Fruit!

2011-08-18T17:35:00.009+01:00

Careful followers of this blog may remember the Incident of the Fuzzy Fruit from 2009. (See comments here, pictures here).

For everyone else, what happened was this.

E, Milenka, and I were on holiday in Mozambique. Any good holiday involves randomly buying things you think might be edible off the side of the road, especially if you're driving for twelve hour stretches listening the same 5 mix CDs. Accordingly, we bought the fuzzy fruit.

After sawing at the fuzzy fruit for an hour, we finally got it open. Inside, we continued with the theory that it might be edible, though tasting it wasn't much confirmation.

Though we opened the fuzzy fruit, we never solved its mystery. Until--Return of the Fuzzy Fruit: 2011!

E and I were once again on holiday, this time in Kenya. A day at the lovely Gede ruins peaked when out guide pointed to a piece of fruit lying near the ruins. I squinted. It looked familiar.

"E," I said, "I think that's the fuzzy fruit."

"That," our guide pronounced, "is the fruit of the baobab tree."

Baobabs are kind of a big deal in Africa. They are enormous, old, and a pretty common sight in touristy places. I saw the one below in Botswana. You would think that after seeing so many of them, I would have figured out what its fruit looked like by now, right?

We told our guide our story from Mozambique, probably confirming any beliefs she had already that Americans are totally nuts. She also didn't quite believe us, but every look closer confirmed it: the fuzzy fruit is the fruit of the baobab tree!

It turns out that the correct way to open the baobab fruit is NOT to saw at it for an hour with a pocket knife. Instead, you're supposed to break it in one hard blow with any handy rock you can find.

Opening the fruit further confirmed it. The baobab fruit had the same little pellets of styrofoam-textured, slightly sweet fruit around seeds as our mystery fuzzy fruit did. It turns out, we were not poisoning ourselves--fuzzy fruit is edible!

A satisfying conclusion to an abandoned mystery! Eventually, everything comes full circle.

Lebanon Pictures

2010-05-02T04:55:00.001+01:00

http://picasaweb.google.com/jade.lamb/Lebanon

The 10 Best-Documented Days of My Life (Namibia Pictures)

2010-04-20T08:28:00.003+01:00

Never in my life have I taken so many pictures in such a short time as in Namibia. Here are just a fraction:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Jade.Lamb/Namibia03

Great Zimbabwe Pictures

2010-04-20T08:26:00.000+01:00

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

The Great Zimbabwe Nightmare/Awesomeness

2010-04-01T08:39:00.003+01:00

A travel tip: when you intend to travel during the Easter holiday in Southern Africa, don't wait until the day before you want to leave to buy your bus ticket, even when peer pressure is exerted. (Corollary tip: know when the Easter holiday is.)

Yes. Well. Instead of about five days, I spent 24 hours in Zimbabwe. The only available ticket to Masvingo was so close to when I was scheduled to fly to Windhoek that it barely seemed worth it--but I've found that when my other option is two more nights in Pretoria, I sometimes make extreme decisions. So I got onto a bus Monday night with two other volunteers and sixteen hours later (four hours behind schedule) I arrived in Masvingo.

Getting from Masvingo to Great Zimbabwe, 27 k away, was complicated but not difficult, unless you consider the fact that I was carrying everything I own on my back, and that it turns out my possessions are compact but heavy. Basically, we convinced the bus driver to let us off in town instead of the Shell Garage stop, then walked oto the University of Great Zimbabwe to catch a combi to Great Zimbabwe. We arrived in the early afternoon at the Great Zimbabwe Hotel, where the front desk very graciously agreed to store my luggage and charge my phone (which is also my only remaining timepiece). From there, we walked 700 m to Great Zimbabwe itself, a UNESCO World Heritage site. Basically, Great Zimbabwe is the ruins of an 11th-13th century civilization in Southern Zimbabwe, for which the modern country is named. I needed to see it all in one afternoon, so I asked for a guide and got a fantastic one who spent about 3 hours showing me around. Photos are forthcoming.

When, exhausted, we finished around five, I had nearly 7 hours to kill before my bus was scheduled to arrive. I retrieved my bags and went to the hotel restaurant. I had arranged with the taxi driver who had taken us to the park to pick me up, but he never showed up, so the hotel helped me find another way back to the bus stop. The hotel found a guy who was about to go into town with his girlfriend and greed to take me, too, at what seemed at inflated rate considering I'd only paid $2 to get there (and by the way, it's very strange to use USD after so long on rand). They turned out to be very nice, and like everybody else I'd met in Zimbabwe, had a lot of complaining to do about their government. I think Zimbabwe might be my favorite country--it's beautiful, friendly, safe, and well-educated.

I waited at Wimpy Burger for a few hours for my bus, spending most of the time sipping Coke Light in order not to fall asleep in the restaurant and worrying that the bus would be late, whidch would in turn make me late for my flight to Winhoek. A four-hour delay like the trip up would mean that I would arrive in Pretoria, which is about 45-minutes from the airport, 2 hours after my flight's departure. This was not the plan when I bought the ticket, but the cost to change it was exorbitant. Miraculously, I arrived in Pretoria exactly on time, and despite multiple misdirections (because ORT does not believe in labels), I arrived at my gate with 10 minutes to spare before it closed. And proceeded to fall asleep before the plane even took off, waking up only when my delicious and extremely large mid-afternoon meal was served on my two-hour flight. I hear you now have to pay just for peanuts in America--true?

Today I'm leaving Windhoek--pictures and more forthcoming.

Salani Kahle, Mzanzi!

2010-04-01T08:17:00.002+01:00

I meant to write this a week and a half ago, when the poignancy and disbelief of leaving were still fresh--but life happens. I have plenty of what's happened since to share, but I will try to stay on topic.

I left.

Well, what more is there to say? Doesn't that simple statement encompass everything? Wouldn't any detail of emotion or uncertainty pale in the face of the simple statement of fact?

All right, so I haven't processed it yet. I'm still focused on plans--what visa I'm getting, if I'll miss the flight to Windhoek (ETA: I didn't), how to fill out a FAFSA (off topic: I heard Duke made it to the final four last weekend!)--that the reality of Peace Corps being over is far away. I'm still in a happy delusion that hanging out at the Masvingo Wimpy Burger waiting for the midnight Greyhound is just another holiday (where I am writing this longhand), and that any discussion of Durham real estate is just as purely speculative as any previous trip to Craigslist has been (don't mock, it's a low-megabyte hobby). I still refer to Peace Corps in the present and schizophrenically seesaw between listing America and South Africa as my country of residence on visa forms. I've burned my Peace Corps manuals in a glorious bonfire and passed on my Khanimamba portfolio to our staff, yet still I worry I've forgotten an obligation.

Ah yes. The last days. I burned my Peace Corps manuals, as I said, in addition to countless other accumulated trash (why did I savfe all those half-done crosswords?), and handed things at Khanimamba over to the trainers and administrators. My room went through various permutations ranging from complete cleanliness to embarassingly improbable clutter as I sorted through what I wanted to keep, burn, or give away. In the end, I ended up with two backpacks full, a feat undermined by the generosity of those I've known here (a traditional straw mat is currently residing in the sleeping mat compartment of my backpack; let's not talk about certain baskets) but nonetheless accomplished. Work was not accomplished in the quantities I had expected, but nonetheless the _project_ succeeded--the trainers have begun to run the course without me.

And goodbyes were said. I never felt like I knew so many people until it became time to tell people I was leaving. Beyond the obvious--coworkers, family, neighbors--people grow to expect your presence: taxi drivers, the women who work at Roman's (a pizza place), security guards. Word spread quickly: weeks before it was planned, people I didn't know asked me when the farewell function would be. In the end it was a small affair, a braai with coworkers, family, and neighbors, but it was a wonderful opportunity to exchange thank you's and final thoughts.

That's all I have for now. I really do think that I expect, at the end of this trip, to return to Giyani and Mapayeni and all their accompanying frustrations and reqards. I doubt that will change until I return to America.

So a question for all of you: what will shock me most when I return?

Pictures from my last months can be found here: http://picasaweb.google.com/Jade.Lamb/FebMar201004#

Stay well, South Africa!

Pictures from the College

2010-03-10T09:27:00.001+01:00

Giyani College, where Khanimamba, my organization, has its offices, is
near a nature reserve. Consequently, there are lots of little monkeys
that like to hang out next to our office (see first picture). The
zebras usually hang out at the defunct golf course a few minutes away.

The college also hosts a number of other organisations, including a
creche (a preschool; see its playground in the second picture). This
creche is the nicest, best-funded one in the Giyani area.

Picture: Chicken and Pap

2010-03-08T09:28:00.001+01:00

If you've wanted to know what one of the most common meals in South
Africa is, here it is, a plate of chicken and pap, also known in my
area as huku na vuswa.

Picture: Children Selling Tomatoes

2010-03-03T12:25:00.001+01:00

I don't really have much to report these days--things are canceled,
there's lots of officework--so I am posting pictures when I get the
chance over the next 2 1/2 weeks...after which I will no longer be
blogging from the village of Mapayeni.

Mangoes Mangoes Mangoes

2010-02-09T17:13:00.002+01:00

Yum yum yum. We grow them at our house, a veritable grove, but last year there weren't any due to poor rains. This year the crop is better!

Peach Apricot Cool Time

2010-02-07T12:22:00.001+01:00

Best flavor innovation since Diet Vanilla Coke.

Roadblocks in Botswana

2010-01-13T12:16:00.001+01:00

We were stopped in Botswana:

• to be waved through: about 5x
• to find that there was no guard at the checkpoint: about 3x
• to dip our shoes in a hoof-and-mouth disease-killing solution: 3x
• to greet the guard/police officer stopping us: 3x
• to show a driver's license: 1x
• to get out of the car and pick up a safety pamphlet: 1x
• to change Rand into Pula for an officer: 1x

Let's not talk about all the cow crossings.

Jade in Botswana

2010-01-13T12:10:00.003+01:00

I don't think I've mentioned this yet, but we camped through Botswana. That's right, three of us in a teeeeeny little three-person tent and a car that wasn't much bigger, largely because there aren't as many backpackers in Botswana as in South Africa. Our first night setting up the tent was at the Khama Rhino Sanctuary, where we camped at an actual campsite (not just on the lawn of a backpackers). The tent itself was no problem, once we found a rock to beat the stakes in with. Looking around, though, we realized that though our tent was eminently appropriate to either 1) camping in the actual woods on an actual backpacking trip or 2) setting up on the lawn of a backpackers, we were not nearly as hardcore as the majority of people who set up camp at the adjacent campsites. Most people had SUVs, trailers, rooftop tents, grills and stoves that folded out of their trailers, chairs and tables…basically portable, collapsible houses on wheels. It was a little intimidating.

Still, we did our best. We bought some charcoal and firelighters and built up a fire in the braai area, on which we "cooked" pasta (it never really ended up cooked in the edible sense of the word) and
roasted marshmallows that we are pretty sure were made of asbestos, since they wouldn't catch on fire. The s'mores were delicious, if inauthentic—we replaced graham crackers with tennis biscuits, which I maintain are far better than graham crackers. The Rhino Sanctuary itself was cool—the best part was when a rhino came to drink out of the pool and frolic in the mud made by the sprinklers on the lawn.

Next we headed to Maun. On the way, we had an exciting petrol adventure. We'd certainly heard the warnings that you should fuel up every time you pass a filling station, and let me warn any of you headed to Botswana on a road trip to heed these warnings! Our map had petrol stations marked on it, so as we drove on a back road from Serowe to Maun and passed a filling station with most of our tank still full, we decided to skip it because the map said there was another one in about 60 km. Well, it turned out the map didn't qualify this very well. The filling station was deep inside a village and perpetually out of petrol. The next one was in Maun, quite a ways away. We gamely headed back onto the road to see if we could make it. About 80 km from Maun, our gas light started flickering on and we were pretty sure that gliding into Maun with our remaining fuel was a pipe dream. Fortunately we had just hit the last village before the main highway (there were maybe five or six villages between Maun and Serowe), so we stopped in a tuck shop to ask if anyone knew anyone that could sell us a few liters of petrol. Indeed someone did—a young woman pointed us in the direction of the butchery, where a man who worked there sold us 5 liters of petrol from a jerry can, which we poured into our tank using a cut off cold drink bottle as a funnel. That 5 liters got us just far enough, and at the next filling station we learned the exact price of a full tank of fuel.

In Maun, which we eventually made it to, we signed up for a two-day mokoro (traditional canoe) trip through the Okavango Delta. The delta was very beautiful, and I enjoyed our bush walks in the area. Just as in Khama, I think we won the prize for the least equipment taken on the journey. We fit all of our personal items into one person's backpack, and then also had a shopping bag of food, three sleeping bags, ten liters of water, and a tent—it could have fit in one of the canoes with a full contingent of people. We spent some time watching a hippo, which Becky was convinced would, at any moment, come charging onto shore and kill us. This did not happen.

The next day we went basket weaving. If you go to my photos of this trip (see previous entry) and look at the picture that looks suspiciously like a lopsided button, you will see the fruit of two hours' labor. It's definitely never going to become a basket.

After Maun, we went whitewater rafting. It was the coolest activity of the trip, even better than elephant riding. I managed not to fall out of our raft, though it was a near run thing and I spent a large percentage of our time in the rapids clinging on for dear life. I suppose it's part of the standard safety thing, but the guides definitely made us nervous beforehand as they described the rapids—one supposedly had a ten foot drop, which sounded to me like we were going over a small waterfall (we did not), and they all carried names like "Descent into Hell" and "The Rapid Where You Die" (I don't remember the actual rapid names right now).

We did a game drive through Chobe National Park. Chobe is a major national park in Botswana and has tens of thousands of elephants. How many did we see? Two. They run the game drives in the morning because the likelihood of seeing cats increases, though the odds of that are pretty low in the summertime anyway, even though most elephants and other large game don't come out to frolic in the water until afternoon. Since Chobe is 4wd-accessible only, we weren't able to come back in the afternoon. Still, we saw a dead impala in a tree, and some bok fighting with each other, so there were other consolations to the trip.

Our final major stop was in Nata, where we went to visit the baobabs and the saltpans. The saltpans were pretty extraordinary: suddenly, the savannah stops, and there is a dry, grassless, empty area where the salt has killed everything. During the rainy season, we can't drive out onto it, but even standing on the precipice was amazing.

Pictures from Botswana

2010-01-05T19:19:00.001+01:00

I'm back! Work resumes soon--I'm in the home stretch, less than three months to go--but until then, here are some of my photos from vacation:

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

More coming soon.

Happy Holidays!

2009-12-15T14:08:00.001+01:00

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

2009-12-09T16:14:00.002+01:00

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!

2009-11-25T17:30:00.001+01:00

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!

2009-11-05T19:54:00.000+01:00

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

2009-11-05T10:16:00.008+01:00

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

2009-10-28T20:31:00.001+01:00

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

2009-10-20T20:31:00.002+01:00

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

2009-10-06T22:37:00.000+01:00

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

2009-10-05T16:19:00.000+01:00

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

2009-10-01T08:44:00.000+01:00

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

2009-09-24T16:51:00.001+01:00

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

2009-09-22T19:44:00.002+01:00

...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

2009-09-22T15:26:00.000+01:00

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

2009-09-21T17:33:00.000+01:00

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

2009-09-19T05:28:00.002+01:00

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

2009-09-18T12:30:00.002+01:00

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

2009-09-15T05:47:00.004+01:00

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

2009-08-24T17:03:00.003+01:00

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

2009-08-12T12:04:00.002+01:00

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

2009-08-12T09:46:00.001+01:00

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

2009-08-05T19:28:00.001+01:00

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

2009-07-29T16:24:00.002+01:00

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

2009-07-23T11:37:00.001+01:00

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

2009-07-17T19:42:00.001+01:00

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

2009-07-16T11:40:00.002+01:00

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

2009-07-08T19:03:00.008+01:00

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

2009-07-05T20:23:00.000+01:00

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...

2009-06-19T18:09:00.002+01:00

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

2009-06-01T17:56:00.002+01:00

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

2009-05-01T23:06:00.000+01:00

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?

2009-04-15T16:39:00.004+01:00

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

2009-04-14T17:13:00.004+01:00

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

2009-04-10T09:59:00.000+01:00

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

2009-04-06T10:39:00.000+01:00

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

2009-04-03T09:07:00.000+01:00

Pictures from my parents' visit to Mapayeni and Khanimamba.

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

My Day

2009-03-31T19:19:00.000+01:00

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

2009-03-18T17:02:00.001+01:00

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!

2009-02-25T18:25:00.000+01:00

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

2009-02-24T21:00:00.000+01:00

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

2009-02-12T16:46:00.004+01:00

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

2009-02-11T15:20:00.000+01:00

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

2009-01-31T05:50:00.000+01:00

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

2009-01-30T14:09:00.003+01:00

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!

2009-01-23T14:50:00.000+01:00

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.

The Rest of Vacation

2009-01-09T18:11:00.002+01:00

After Cintsa, we went to Port St. Johns, where we stayed at Amapondo, a great backpackers on the beach which had a very relaxed atmosphere. Every day they do some sort of excursion, and on Christmas Eve we went on their "Mystery Hike." First we went to the Blow Hole, a natural phenomenon where waves crashing against rocks look like a whale's blow hole. To get to the Blow Hole, you must first walk down a steep, rocky path; then climb down a ladder; then climb across a narrow ladder; then up another ladder to another cliff; then finally down from the cliff to a slightly smaller cliff next to it. Before doing this, they show you the memorial stones of people who have died there and tell you stories about tourists who met their end at the Blow Hole in the last few years. Since it was also an incredibly windy day and even from the top I felt like I was going to be blown away, I decided not to go so far as to venture any the ladders and therefore, survived. The view was still pretty great.

Next we went to a traditional Xhosa spa, for lack of a better name. They covered us in clay and then mud (there are pictures on the Picasa album). It's supposed to be very good for the skin. Getting to each part--the clay cave, the mud pool, etc.--involved climbing barefoot up a steep, rocky wall, but yet again I narrowly avoided death. The next stop was a restaurant for lunch, where we were exiled to the porch seating so that we didn't shed clay all over the indoor seating. Finally, we had to jump in the river--the day was so windy that we were forbidden from going into the ocean--to get off the clay so that the backpackers' drainage system wasn't permanently ruined by the clay. That evening there was a seven course dinner to celebrate the holiday.

We spent the rest of the time in Port St Johns going to the beach and other idyllic places with great views. Afterwards I made my way to Coffee Bay to meet up with some other PCVs. Coffee isn't the prettiest beach I'd been to in South Africa, but it probably had the best swimming. One day we went on the hike from Coffee Bay to the Hole in the Wall, about 10k. It had a lot of climbing and a lot of steep precipices, plus I wasn't wearing the right kind of shoes, but I managed to complete it by going barefoot for about half the hike. The gorgeous pictures from the hike that are posted on Picasa are courtesy of Kim, who borrowed my camera for the occasion. It was the best of all worlds, as I don't particularly enjoy taking pictures but I do like having them afterwards.

On New Year's Eve we had a game marathon that included rummy, Balderdash, telephone pictionary, and 30 Seconds (kind of like Catchphrase--but the South African edition). We'd met some PCVs from Mozambique by then, so they joined our motley crew and I think I might have played enough board games to satisfy me for the next year or so. The last day there, I took a surfing lesson. No, really. The water was pretty choppy and it was definitely pretty tough on me, but also a lot of fun. It was early in the morning, so I spent the rest of the day lying down, aching from being tossed about by the waves.

Getting back was about as painless as you can expect from two solid days of travel, including an overnight bus. I kept falling asleep in the taxis at inappropriate moments, but I made it back, to the welcome of my village and my family.

And, I've done several loads of laundry now, so I am very settled in. I start back at the office on the 15th. Happy post-holidays, everyone!

Vacation Pictures

2009-01-07T12:09:00.001+01:00

It turns out that posting pictures goes infinitely faster when I
substantially degrade their quality, which is why some of them have a
resolution about ten times better than others. Here you are:

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

Five Weeks In One Backpack: Week Three

2009-01-06T13:47:00.000+01:00

I am home. I have also awoken from my sleeping coma and gone grocery shopping, though I have a nightmarish quantity of laundry still ahead of me to do before I can really consider myself settled back in. As always, returning home was wonderful and I have to resist the urge to start immediately writing about my return rather than my time away.

After LST and GTOT, I took an overnight bus to Durban to meet Josh, who flew in to visit me for a couple of weeks. The bus ride was uneventful, or at least would have been, except that it began to rain, which is when the driver discovered that the windshield wipers weren't working and so pulled over and called a mechanic to come fix them. I was sleeping soundly and probably would have slept through the entire incident (one of my hidden talents is the ability to sleep in all circumstances), except that there was a white family seated next across the aisle from me who were very unhappy and very vocal about it. They expressed their frustration by being incredibly rude to the Black Greyhound employees. Finally, another white woman on board essentially told them to shut up, which seemed to give everyone else on board the courage to say the same. Other than other Greyhound trips, I haven't really had to confront too many racially loaded incidents like this one as Giyani is fairly monoethnic. However, out in other parts of the country, there is the constant haunting reminder of South Africa's tumultuous past and the PCV's inevitable uncomfortable role somewhere in between.

Arrived into Durban safely and still far too early in the morning, just happy to be somewhere where I could take a hot shower. Josh and I had a great time in Durban. We didn't spend too much time at the beach, which has unfortunately become much more polluted and crime-ridden than it was when dubbed the "Golden Mile." We visited uShaka Marine World, a Sea World-like place with dolphin shows and penguin feedings, plus a very cool aquarium. We toured the Kwa Muhle Museum, Durban's tiny apartheid museum, where we learned, amongst other things, the history of bunny chow, a meal consisting of curry inside a loaf of bread, a dish unique to South Africa. Evidently, under apartheid, Indian restaurants weren't allowed to seat black customers and the styrofoam take away container had yet to be invented, and so bunny chow became the first form of take out food. We went to Victoria Street Market in the Indian District, and I imagine that we wandered around more malls than Josh was expecting. Sorry, no Durban pictures, I was paranoid about carrying around my camera.

Next stop was Cintsa, a beautiful, sparsely populated area far south along the Wild Coast. The backpackers was a bit noisy, but the beach was beautiful. We spent a couple days just vegging on the beach and by the pool before going to Inkwenkwezi Nature Reserve, which contains all of the big five (according to it--we saw no cheetahs).

Inkwenkwezi was a nice happy medium between going to a zoo and going to the massive Kruger National Park. The Reserve did game drives, so it knew just where to take us. They also had only a few specimens of each animal, so there weren't too many surprises to be found--we pretty much just drove with some other vehicles, for example, to the place where the rhinos were grazing that day. The lions were kept in a separate enclosure (presumably to prevent them from eating precious zebras), which we got to see, but unfortunately we weren't able to go inside as four of the lions were lying in wait at the entrance, ready to attack. We did however get some great pictures of lions hunting tourists. Last stop at Inkwenkwezi was the separate elephant reserve with tame elephants. Tame is not so exciting at first glance, but it did mean that we got to feed and pet them!

Next entry: Port St. John's

Reflections on Malls

2008-12-13T12:48:00.003+01:00

In South Africa, I spend far more time in malls socially than I ever did in America. I don't really go to the mall in Giyani, either, mainly because it's small and the grocery store I shop at isn't in it. But whenever I'm in a city, or even in another town in Limpopo, the mall seems to be the first stop. Partly, the malls are more all-encompassing than the malls in San Antonio. They have, besides the usual stores and restaurants, grocery stores and movie theaters. If I want to buy food, I have to go to the mall. Movies are cheap here, so watching movies is a common past time for PCVs who have to pass through Pretoria and have an afternoon to kill (I have seen five movies in the last month! Five!). That also requires a visit to the mall. Hatfild Mall has a Lebanese restaurant and an frozen yogurt place, both popular stops, and a few coffee shops. Plus, frankly, there's not a whole lot to do in Pretoria when you return time and again.

In Durban, on the other hand, we had a free day before taking the night bus back to Gauteng before GTOT and it was more or less unanimously decided that we should go to the mall for the day. I was in favor of it, and enjoyed myself in the mall. But Durban has plenty to do besides malls: the beach, the markets, the museums, the Marine World, etc. Partly, we were tired from our week at LST and just wanted to zone out (we saw a movie at the mall). Partly, half the group had just been to Durban for vacation and the other half were going to be coming back soon. But really, if we had wanted to, there would have been something else to do in the city.

Malls, most PCVs who frequent them will acknowledge, aren't even that exciting. There's not much to do after you've reached the point where all the movies playing are so bad that you actually refuse to see them, after you've eaten three enormous meals, and after you've browsed through things you can't afford and don't want to buy, possibly running through your list of things you can't buy in your shopping town while at the grocery store. I think that we keep returning because they're comforting to be in. They remind us of home, even though very few of us ever went to malls much at home. They offer us anonymity and relative safety to wander, which doesn't really happen where most of us live. They're full of mindless activities, which is a relief for those of us who spend too much time thinking serious thoughts and need to get out of our heads. Yes, we could go look at important historical monuments and museums after traveling all day before our meeting tomorrow. Or, we could go see James Bond blow things up and then get ice cream.

Five Weeks in one Backpack: Update

2008-12-13T12:32:00.006+01:00

I am in the PC office between journeys. LST was really productive, we learned a lot about running life skills groups for youth in our communities. There were speakers from the CDC giving general background, as well as more experienced volunteers running mock sessions with us to discuss and practice faciliation skills and techniques. There was time to reconnect with volunteers I hadn't seen since IST in July, a beach, and a cheese plate at every meal. Great week overall.

GTOT was another productive week. We turned previously-arrived at learning objectives into a schedule of events for SA 19's pre-service training, and created lesson plans for all of the sessions they'll be having. There were also role-playing days where the language and cultural facilitators practiced their lessons, with the volunteers acting as students. We were some very troublesome pupils, far more disruptive than most trainees usually are, but I think that the new LCFs came away from the sessions much more aware of how difficult teaching Americans can be. I'll be going to PST in early March to facilitate a few sessions. Unfortunately, Tsonga, my target language, isn't being taught this time around, so I won't get to help out with language classes, nor will my LCF be back.

The most exciting part of GTOT was of course the fact that the water was off for the last three or four days we were there. Now, PC brought in barrels of water for us to use, but no water in an environment designed for indoor plumbing is a lot different from no water in a village with pit latrines. We grumbled, though mainly in an amused way. There was much discussion of bowel movements, but also something of an epiphany: GTOT was held at the same place that SA 19's training will be held, though PC has sworn up and down that the water issue will be resolved by then. What if we hadn't had running water our first few days in Mokopane? We would have been very unhappy indeed. After over ten months in rural South Africa, it's a problem to work around, but fundamentally not a big deal, and a source of humor more than anything else.

The title of this post is inspired by the fact that all of the things I took on this trip originally fit into one backpack. This is the same backpack I used in high school for my textbooks. Since I'm traveling between many of these places on public taxis, it's really the only reasonable way to pack. I plan to do a lot of laundry this month. However, the amount I have with me has already expanded frighteningly. Not only did we receive many, many manuals during LST, I went shopping in Durban and Pretoria, and picked up books at the PC library. I'm going to have to start shedding possessions soon.

World AIDS Day

2008-11-28T16:20:00.000+01:00

World AIDS Day is actually December 1st, which I think is Monday, but I'm not going to be around then. Fortunately, my village celebrated it today instead, so I got to go to an HIV Awareness event at our local clinic. It went as all South African events of this sort went: about ten people gave "short" speeches of anywhere from ten to twenty minutes, with a keynote address at the end just about the time everyone has fallen asleep. I think this happens because it's important to make sure that everyone who is important to the community gets his or her turn at the podium, but it really is not fun for the audience. Between each speaker there's some entertainment to break up the monotony, usually traditional dancing and maybe some HIV-related dramas. This particular campaign actually had some great breathers, mainly because they recruited a bunch of old women to sing traditional Tsonga dances and then, just when you think you're going to die of dehydration mixed with boredom, they played soccer! None of them really knew how to, but they also knew that that was the funny part, so they hammed it up.

After the soccer thing, I had been there about two hours (not counting the fact that it started an hour late), and I really was pretty badly dehydrated so I thought that maybe I could sneak out and go home. My host mom was organizing the event, but I felt that she would forgive me. However, on my way to freedom, I was ambushed and kidnapped by another of the women organizing the event, who works at the clinic, and forced to stay for the rest. However, we did take a break to go inside to a room with a fan and I found a tap at which I got some water, so death was delayed a few hours. This woman also made me pose in pictures with her after the event, which is awkward--it always makes me feel like one of those actors at Disneyland whose sole job is to wander around and pose as Cinderella or Mickey Mouse in photos. Including eating, the whole thing took a little over four hours.

The event was reasonably well attended by older members of the community, but there were very few youth there, other than the kids recruited to put on the HIV/AIDS dramas. It's good that the community has this sort of event, and that the chief and other prominent people attend it, but it's unfortunate that so few of the people who could benefit most from it attend.

There was of course much food afterwards, and on our way out Masingita and I grabbed a few extra cans of cold drink. She's decided that we should start bribing the girls not to cry. I guess if I'm seen as the bearer of cold drink, it will make me less scary to them. I'm not sure how well it worked. The past few weeks, Xihluki and Simeko have switched m.o.'s: now Xihluki is cautiously excited to see me, and Simeko bursts into hysterical tears. Maybe it's just a phase. Anyway, they got cold drink, but it may take another dosage before we see any effects.

Tomorrow I'm off to LST in Durban. After that, GTOT (General Training of Trainers) in Marapyane. After that, vacation. Don't expect too much in the way of updates until January. Happy Holidays, everyone!

Turkey Day Without Turkey

2008-11-27T17:49:00.001+01:00

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

I had a lovely Thanksgiving dinner this afternoon with some volunteers in the area, though strangely enough, the grocery stores were not overflowing with turkey and we had to settle for chicken instead. Squash was, however, abundant. There was also no football. No turkey, no football, very little cooking, no leftovers, and I didn't have to fly anywhere. In other words: Best. Thanksgiving. Ever.

They did manage to provide a token jar, baby-food sized, of cranberry sauce. Since cranberry sauce is, we decided, to Thanksgiving as fruitcake is to Christmas, this was about the right portion size.

I hope that everyone is enjoying the holiday.

A Few Short Entries

2008-11-25T14:24:00.001+01:00

Goat Update

Sunday, I was sitting outside when I noticed a couple of animals in
our yard out of the corner of my eye, wagging their tails and
scratching themselves. I thought, "When did we get dogs?" Then I
looked closer and realized they were the goats.

Spring Is Here

And the world is green. It has been slowly becoming greener for the
past few weeks, but I didn't really notice this gradual increase until
this weekend, when I came back from a couple nights out of town.
Suddenly the once brownish landscape was verdant and beautiful, the
mountains in the distance cloaked in mist during rainy mornings.

The flip side of this is that all of the pretty foliage is covering
all of my mental landmarks. Reminiscent of my anxiety about getting
lost when I first moved here, my first few taxi rides since the
greenness began in earnest have all featured me looking anxiously out
the window for the latter half of the journey, looking for the
architectural cues that will tell me that I live nearby and should get
off the taxi.

Mail Moratorium

In early December, I will be traveling to some trainings for Peace
Corps. After that, my NGO, through which I receive my mail, will be
closed from mid-December to mid-January for the holiday break. I will
spend part of that time traveling. Since mail that languishes in the
post office for too long tends to disappear, it's probably a good idea
not to send me anything. Thanks!

Diversity Blog

2008-11-17T10:17:00.003+01:00

Hey everyone. Diversity Committee started a blog about, well, diversity in Peace Corps South Africa. Check it out. We're still getting it started, but there's the introduction and a link to AJ's blog there now.

http://meltingpotintherainbownation.blogspot.com

If you're a PCV reading this, consider writing something. Please? The more the merrier.

Books About South Africa

2008-11-14T10:05:00.001+01:00

I know that my blog makes for some fascinating reading, but, should you need something to fill the lonely days between posts, here is the rundown of a few books I’ve read about South Africa. Most have apartheid as a major theme; even though apartheid is over, its effects still linger, and its shadow over modern South African history still long and dark enough to make understanding apartheid important to understanding where South Africa is now, and where it will go from here.

A History of South Africa, by Leonard Thompson: This book covers the length and breadth of recorded South African history, from before colonization by Europeans to post-apartheid. And yet it’s only 300 pages! As such, it can be a little confusing, packed with unelaborated-upon references to events and people that make a lot more sense if you’re already acquainted with South African history.

Kaffir Boy, by Mark Mathabane: Mathabane is a journalist who emigrated to America to attend college and wrote this book, about his childhood experiences, while the apartheid regime still reigned. He lived in Alexandra, a black township that is part of Jo’burg, and chronicles the atrocities that he, his family, and his neighbors were subjected to by the ruling white minority and how he eventually escaped it.

My Traitor’s Heat, by Rian Malan: An incredible soul-searching account of apartheid from a liberal Afrikaner’s perspective, this could be read almost as a companion piece to Kaffir Boy. Malan is also a journalist who emigrates to America, though he returns to South Africa to write this book; it explores not only the atrocities of apartheid, but also the hypocrisy of white liberals, the complexities of various contemporary political movements in South Africa, and his own life and family history. This book, too, was written before the end of apartheid.

Cry, The Beloved Country, by Alan Paton: Maybe the classic novel of apartheid South Africa. It’s about a black man who travels from the country into the city looking for a family remember and then returning—it’s not the plot which is important, though certainly each event is telling, but instead the description of life, hardship, and love, revealed in dozens of narrative moments, as it exists for the characters.

Long Walk to Freedom, by Nelson Mandela: His autobiography, much of which was written while he was imprisoned at Robben Island. A moving portrait that also illuminates a lot of what was going on behind the scenes during the growth of the ANC and why apartheid fell when it did. A very enjoyable read.

Rain

2008-11-13T05:56:00.002+01:00

Winter is over, spring is here. Since spring started out with deathly hot days that I had hoped wouldn't come around until high summer, I was seriously considering spending the entire October-March season lying in a cool bucket bath eating custard and fruit, scratching my mosquito bites. Fortunately, the rain has come; selfishly, I am most excited about this because it means that it is cool and overcast most days--the rain comes mainly at night, keeping the mosquitos away.

The rain has other effects. It means that drought is less likely (the rain came late this year), so no more five day stretches without water like two weeks ago! And our mango trees have a chance to flourish.

Less expected effects include the fact that the goats seek shelter in our pit toilet. I don't blame them, since their kraal (paddock) isn't roofed and the pit toilet is very nice and watertight (cement rather than corrugated tin), but it definitely took me aback when I went to use the bathroom a couple of days ago and had to chase the goats out first. Now I'm used to it. Fortunately, the toilet seats are covered so that wandering goats and chickens don't fall in (it's a 10 foot drop, any goat that goes down isn't coming back up).

Also less expected, though eminently predictable, is the amount of mud I have managed to track in EVEN THOUGH I TAKE OFF MY SHOES AT THE DOOR. I don't know where the mud comes from. Maybe the bottom of the laundry bucket? I'm daunted by the prospect of cleaning it. However, it's a small price to pay for not coming home dehydrated every day.

Election Anecdote

2008-11-06T11:28:00.003+01:00

This didn't happen to me, it happened to another volunteer yesterday, but it's funny, and I think it says a lot about how South Africa's racial history impacts its perception of the rest of the world.

South African: Ah, I'm sorry about your election.
(white) PCV: Why are you sorry?
South African: Well, you lost.
PCV: No no, we won.
South African: !

In a country where much voting and party-building happens on primarily racial lines, I suppose it's not surprising that many South Africans assume that racial struggles are taking place in the same manner in America; for many, it's inconceivable that so many white people would vote for a black man. Needless to say, most South Africans adore Obama, and for them, his victory isn't a victory against Bush or for Hope (or whatever you think the election was about), but a victory for blacks worldwide of the same character as the end of apartheid.

(Of course, if Obama were South African instead of American, he wouldn't be considered black but colored.)

I am still alive, I swear

2008-11-05T09:45:00.001+01:00

More computer issues, so I'm still playing catch up. I'll post when I can, sorry about the long gaps. In the meantime...

A few weeks ago, I had a meeting with representatives from several recently established drop-in centres, including some from the DIC I visited a few months ago. The meeting was to talk about whether they would be interested in a training programme if Khanimamba offered one; the drop-in centres we are targeting are under-funded, staffed by volunteers who usually have little experience, and generally held together with both hands, so we are hoping that the sort of training we have offered to crèches will now be helpful to drop-in centres.

My supervisor warned me the week before the meeting that I shouldn't expect too many people to show up for the first meeting, and that anyone who does show up may very well be several hours late. Since this is a fairly common experience for everyone who tries to start something new in South Africa, I considered myself forewarned and not too expectant about attendance of the first meeting. Much to my surprise, even though I had come into the office well before the meeting to get some things ready, some attendees had beat me there, and most of the people who ended up attending were there half an hour before we were scheduled to start. We had nearly twenty people from eight different drop-in centres, and no one showed up more than fifteen minutes after our starting time (we actually started on time, or maybe five minutes late but that's on time even in America). Twenty is a great number to start with since it's nearly the maximum number we would ideally like to have in a training class.

The meeting was, on the whole, productive. Probably the best thing that happened was that we got a lot of data about the centres that showed up—things like when they were founded, how many employees they have, if they're registered with the government, receiving funding, etc. that we can put in our files, plus updated contact information for them. We tried to get them to do a couple of "exercises" in small groups that took a lot longer than they should have and didn't really get people thinking creatively, but since most of the small group work I have done with South Africans was like pulling teeth I wasn't too surprised.

My supervisor wanted me to run the meeting since the trainer I would be working with on this programme wasn't here (she was at a family funeral) and they needed to get used to working with me, despite the fact that many of the trainers don't speak English very well and my Xitsonga is not good enough to sustain what ended up being a three or four hour meeting. I gave it a shot, but eventually it became clear that I wasn't explaining the idea of having a training programme very well and my supervisor thankfully jumped in. She did a great job of explaining what we had in mind and it seemed as though most people were interested. Hopefully things will continue to come together and we will start actually offering the trainings in the New Year.

Part 3

2008-10-14T13:07:00.001+01:00

This past week, my mom’s oldest son and his daughter, Jablila, have been staying with us, which makes me very happy. Now, I love Simeko and Xihluki, the two little girls who live with us full-time, but they cannot decide if they love me or not. While I have on occasion had fun playing with them, the latest pattern seems to be that they will stand in the yard yelling for me (whether I am home or not, I am told) but, when I at last appear, burst into tears. I think the calling for me is instigated by the younger one, Simeko, who is not actually that afraid of me, and the crying is instigated by Xihluki, who is.

Jablila, however, is about six and most definitely not afraid of me. Moreover, along with her come a couple of her friends who are also not afraid of me. They’re shy sometimes, but there’s no bursting into tears. They prefer instead to hold my hand while we walk, play with my hair, sing and dance for me, or even just sit near me staring, all of which I find infinitely preferable to the crying vagaries of the younger girls and makes for a generally brighter, less stressful time at home.

Jablila won several trophies recently at school, one for Xitsonga recitation and the other for song and dance. Jablila is shy enough that she didn’t want to perform them for me with any ceremony, but she still wanted me to see her dance. So, she would start doing the march that went along with the song so that I could see it out of the corner of my eye, but if I looked at her directly she would usually stop. Eventually, in this manner, I got to appreciate the bulk of the marching dance she had won the trophy for. Her only-slightly-less-shy friend was, in the meanwhile, spinning around in his chair reciting every song, rhyme, or hymn he could remember learning at his crèche.

Under their good example, Xihluki at last stopped crying

Part 2

2008-10-13T08:43:00.001+01:00

2. Last week, there was a party in my village for women who completed the circumcision school. Now, I didn't get quite as thorough an explanation of the women's school as I got of the men's in July, but I gather that they are quite different. For one thing, the women's school only lasts a week. For another, the women appear to be generally older than the boys who participate in the men's circumcision school—one of my acquaintances who completed it this year must be at least in her late twenties of early thirties, and none of the women being celebrated at the party seemed particularly young. Finally, I don't think that the women actually get circumcised; at least, they all seemed very happy and active at the party.

I wasn't actually sure what the party was for while I was there, and given the general explanation only as I was leaving. I came home on Saturday in the early afternoon from doing some grocery shopping, and there were a bunch of people sitting quietly in our yard and some more in one of the buildings. I couldn't find anybody in my family, but my mom had called me while I was in town to make sure that I was coming back that day. Since I had told my sister that I was going into town that morning and I always let the family know if I'm going to be away overnight, I was really worried by this phone call—I thought that maybe someone we knew had died this week and I was missing their funeral or something else equally grave. The number of people sitting relatively quietly around our yard didn't make me any less worried.

Eventually my mom got back home—someone had explained to me that she was at Mavis's and would be returning—and she didn't seem too upset or worried, and after we had all eaten a comparatively elaborate meal (not just vuswa and huku!*) we all migrated to the party, which was very clearly a celebration of something. In addition to the dancing and the skirts that happen at all celebrations, there was a ritual for the women being celebrated where they are covered with clothes, blankets, and headscarves. The party went on for hours, people eventually coming back to our house to continue talking even after the main event was over. Even though it wasn't too late, my mom was exhausted from the day and falling asleep in her chair, but she couldn't go to bed until all of the guests left; eventually, they took the hint.

*vuswa=pap; huku=chicken

Hello Again

2008-10-13T08:42:00.001+01:00

Sorry about the long delay between posts. South African electricity disagrees with my power cords, so I had a bit of a wait while waiting for the newest one to arrive.

So. Making up for lost time.

1. Three weekends ago I went to Tzaneen, a township about an hour or so away from Giyani, with a couple of other volunteers to visit Cordelia, my language teacher from pre-service training. Now, Lonely Planet, ever generous in most of its descriptions and always ready to find delight in even the most boring subjects, basically describes Limpopo as a "barren wasteland." (I'm summarizing here, I'm not going to pull out my book for an exact quotation.) While I think the Giyani area is incredibly beautiful, after the dry/winter season where not much is growing and comparing it to the rather more lush vistas of KZN, I was ready to admit that perhaps they weren't speaking entirely out of their hats—though compared to the Bela Bela area, where SA 18 did their training, Giyani is still paradise. Tzaneen, however, is surrounded by orchards and is intensely green even now, enough so to make even an otherwise cramped and uncomfortable taxi journey pleasant. Once in town, we indulged in the pleasures of a larger, more diverse town than Giyani: we explored the mall. I bought pens, we ate Indian food. It's a good thing we didn't go to Woolworth's, or otherwise I probably would have gone broke buying cheeses.

Cordelia lives in a village outside the town, and we stayed the night at her house. We met her family, all of whom were incredibly welcoming and excited to have us their. They had purchased an enormous quantity of food for a braai (barbeque), and we, the Americans, were placed in charge of the grill. We made the mistake of putting the meat on while the fire was too hot, so the first batch of chicken taken off was an exercise in living dangerously—not only was John's hand in danger of being burned off every time he tried to flip a piece of chicken, but the chicken was seriously undercooked (we had the sense to put it back on for a second cooking after the fire had died down some, so no one ended up with salmonella, at least as far as I know).

That evening, as happens every time there is a large gathering in South Africa, Cordelia's family sang and danced in celebration of our visit. A large contingent of neighborhood children appeared and arranged themselves into a choir to serenade us. We were told that we should sing something as well, but unfortunately our imagination failed us and our self-consciousness at performing further constrained us, so we demurred as politely as we could. Cordelia helpfully explained that in America, people are too embarrassed to sing and dance like this; this is probably not true of all Americans, but it is certainly true of the three of us. We were given a reprieve, but told that when we return in November, we must come with something to sing.

FAQ

2008-09-17T13:58:00.000+01:00

Questions South Africans ask about America.

1. How long did it take you to get to South Africa?
2. How much did plane tickets cost?
3. Do you eat pap in America?
4. Do you eat pap here?
5. Have you tried the mopani worms?
6. Have you ever seen a goat before moving to South Africa?
7. Is there much crime in America?
8. There’s no poverty in America, is there?
9. Do you support Barack Obama?
10. Are there rural areas like this in America?
11. Do you have your driver’s license?
12. What kind of driver’s license?
13. Do they speak Afrikaans in America?

All of my answers are met with great exclamation or hysterical laughter (the latter usually follows all food-related questions).

It’s an odd list, I know, but then, the average American probably has just as strange ideas about South Africa.

The Yard Smells Like Cow Manure

2008-09-04T17:50:00.000+01:00

Back during training, before I had internet access, my primary hobby was reading ahead in "Everyday Tsonga," one of our grammar manuals. In one of the later lessons, one of the vocabulary words was "ku sindza." This means, "to smear mudfloors with cowdung." I thought, "Uh huh. Okay, not going to learn that word."

I went on site visit. By the end I realized, "Hmm...these agricultural and cowdung-related terms might be useful after all."

Today, there was much sindza-ing at home. The yard, as perhaps you noticed in earlier pictures, is made of hard dirt. This is not the kind of thing you can allow to take care of itself. Every morning my sister sweeps the dirt off the dirt floor, and every once in a while it has to be re-paved. I missed much of the process since I was at work, but I gather that basically it involves taking cow manure and spreading it into a thin layer on the ground, then smoothing it out with a stone or other tool, and then letting the sun dry it out. Mainly I witnessed this last bit.

The process for a fairly large yard was completed in a day, thanks to the help of our neighbors. My mom, Masingita, has occasionally gone to help other friends in the neighborhood with the same process. It's a nice network, being able to rely on other members of the community to help you out when you need it, because they know you'll do the same for them.

New Blood

2008-09-01T16:40:00.000+01:00

SA 18 just finished their site visits this weekend, and will be
swearing in as volunteers in about two weeks. About five of them are
slated to be in the Giyani area, three of them fairly near the town
and two of them further away, about halfway between Tzaneen and
Giyani. One couple, Pam and Dan, will actually be housed at Giyani
College, which is where my organization rents its office space.

I'm looking forward to having some fresh faces nearby, and wish them
the best of luck in their last few days of training. I hope that
they will come to love Giyani as much as I do.

You Know You’re a Peace Corps Volunteer in South Africa When…

2008-08-27T11:33:00.000+01:00

1. Walking around holding a roll of toilet paper seems like a completely normal thing to do.
2. You have unlimited internet access but no water for half the week.
3. Sitting under a mango tree watching the goats graze counts as a productive day.
4. You stop looking at your watch, even though you wear it every day.
5. You start buying bras with the primary criterion of their functionality as phone and cash holders.
6. You stare when you see a white person you don’t know.
7. The length of time it takes you to walk to the tar road is wholly dependent on how many people happen to be in their yards along the way.
8. Knee-length hemlines are shocking but toplessness is not.
9. Taking home a bag of 50 avocados on public transportation doesn’t strike you as problematic or inconvenient—even if you also have two weeks’ groceries and an overnight bag with you.
10. 2 weeks, 3 provinces, and 3 changes of clothes in a small backpack seems about right.
11. Seeing a movie in a theater is a good bargain, buying a book is an unthinkable expense.
12. $15 is an extortionate price for delivery Indian food.
13. $4 is an extortionate price for a cocktail.
14. You have come to realize that the monkeys in the parks play roughly the same role as squirrels in America, but persist in taking pictures of them anyway.
15. You are considered the preeminent expert on professional wrestling despite being able to count your WWE viewing sessions on one hand.
16. There is a rooster you would like to kill, if only he weren’t dangerously close to your size.
17. You have thwarted a guard dog by scratching it behind the ears.
18. You are outraged whenever the fare for a 30-minute taxi ride goes up 30 cents USD.
19. You are not outraged whenever your 30-minute taxi ride takes 2 hours.
20. You can identify an otherwise unmarked stretch of road by the pattern of potholes.
21. You have had extended and positive conversations about the bouquet of a $3 bottle of wine.
22. One of the more exciting parts of returning home is finding out what species of insect has decided to invade your Brita filter this time.
23. When buying clothes, you think, “How hard would this be to wash in a bucket?”
24. You have come to expect two weeks vacation every three months.
25. The fact that Pepto Bismol turns vomit black is a standard and essential element of your knowledge base.
26. Showering every day seems like a decadent vacation.
27. Though cognizant of being the worst dressed person in your village, you don’t care.
28. You live in an almost constant state of existential angst about whether or not you are driving on the wrong side of the road, no matter which side you happen to be on.
29. You double up on words beyond the standard “sharp sharp” and “now now,” so that such phrases as “soon soon,” “fast fast,” “long long,” and “hot hot” are part and parcel of your everyday vocabulary.
30. If you had to choose between whether you would rather lose your passport or your plug adapter, you really might choose the passport.

Vacation Pictures

2008-08-26T16:23:00.002+01:00

My photos from vacation are up here:

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/Jade.Lamb/KosiBay

Also, Becky, who I went on vacation with, has put her photos from our trip up here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/reford/StLuciaKosiBayMozambique

Beautiful, Beautiful Beaches

2008-08-25T12:03:00.000+01:00

I just had my first official vacation since beginning my PC odyssey. I went with four friends to St. Lucia's Estuary and Kosi Bay for a week and had my first Indian Ocean experience. St. Lucia's is a World Heritage Site, and its estuary hosts hippopatami, which I saw in abundance, and crocodiles, which I saw only one of thanks to the windy August weather. In addition, we went to both the St. Lucia's beach (more hippos!) and the Cape Vidal beach (so, so windy). We should have been able to see whales on the Cape Vidal beach, but I think that the wind kept them offshore. To get to the Cape Vidal beach, we had to drive through a game park, where South African wildlife roamed freely. The highlight were the rhinos, my first SA encounter with one of the big five.

After St. Lucia's we headed north to Kosi Bay, a very non-developed, non-touristy area. The signs to our backpackers (Thobeka, which is a great place and one I recommend heartily to anyone doing this route) had been stolen, so we had to drive a few kilometers down a dirt road without much idea of which turns we should take, causing some amount of worry that we had made a horrible mistake in choosing this site to visit. However, when at last we arrived (convinced it must be late because it was so dark even though it was only about 6), we got a warm welcome at the beautiful backpackers and a host of activities to be arranged. The first day there we were driven along a gorgeous route to an estuary where we punted across the Blackwater Lake and got to see some amazing raffia palm trees. That afternoon we went snorkeling in Kosi Bay--another windy but beautiful beach. The next day we were taken into Moz for the day and had some amazing seafood while overlooking a breathtaking view of lush green hills and sandy roads, which fortunately involved another incredible scenic drive through the open air over rolling untarred roads.

Finally we drove down along the coast of KZN to return the car to Durban, from which I took a bus to Pretoria and then a taxi home. The drive was stunning, and every hour or so the scenery would change. Limpopo is beautiful in a harsh way, but KZN is intensely green and lush even in winter. Dotted by tree farms and sugar cane fields, even staying in the car the whole time, the journey was magnificent. Durban itself yielded little interesting on this trip, as my hours there were too short and I was burdened by my luggage, but I spent the afternoon with a fellow traveler returning to Limpopo overlooking the beach and the evening waiting at the bus station. I arrived back last night, exhausted and dirty but fully convinced that I have had a wonderful vacation and ready to plan my next.

Pictures will be up on Picasa soon, and when other people post theirs, I will direct you to their collections as well.

American Diversity

2008-08-25T11:29:00.000+01:00

Sorry for the long absence. I have been traveling for the last two weeks, first to Pre-Service Training for SA 18 (ie, the group of Peace Corps Volunteers who arrived last month) to help run a diversity workshop and sit in on the Tsonga classes, then to Pretoria for a Diversity Committee meeting, and then for a wonderful trip down to St. Lucia's Estuary and Kosi Bay. I have lots to tell, and promise to make up for my few weeks' silence over the next few days.

I forget if I mentioned that I am now on PCSA's Diversity Committee, a group dedicated to negotiating and supporting the diverse experiences of Peace Corps Volunteers in South Africa. Doesn't that sound nice? In practice, it means aiding with Peace Corps trainings, currently pre-service training and in-service training (which I underwent a month and a half ago). We conduct workshops and panels, the number usually determined by the amount of time that PC is able to set aside for us. For SA 18's PST, we conducted a South African Diversity Panel, where South Africans of different ethnic backgrounds spoke about their experiences, primarily under apartheid, and an American Diversity workshop, which is what I was present for.

The South African panel held while I was a trainee was a really special experience. As a PCV, it is easy to identify only with the black South African experience in impoverished, rural villages. This is an important part of the country's history and culture, but it is not the whole picture of the country's vibrant and complicated legacy. There are four main ethnic groups in South Africa: black (encompassing all different African ethnic groups), colored (mixed black and white), Indian (a legacy of migrant labor in the 19th century; Mahatma Gandhi is an important SA historical figure), and white (further subdivided into the historically unharmonious English and Afrikaans populations). Under apartheid and to a lesser extent under current social conventions, these four groups were strictly separated and divided into a rough caste system. Hearing from people who had lived under the different strictures of the different groupings was an important part of understanding the divides that still permeate South Africa.

The American Diversity workshop held for SA 18 encompassed three activities, each designed to make the trainees more aware of the different experiences among their group, and how they can help each other to be supportive allies in negotiating the never-easy experience of being a PCV. The first activity we held was intended to spark discussions amongst the trainees about how the privileges they had in the US varied amongst different members of their group, and how in turn those privileges changed and varied upon arrival in South Africa. The second activity was Common Ground, a fun activity that emphasizes the similarities as well as differences amongst the trainees. Finally we did an ally-building activity that used gender roles as its model, which was intended to make male volunteers better conscious of how they can be supportive of and sensitive to the unique challgenges that the female volunteers in the group will face as volunteers; the model can also be cross-applied to other social dichotomies.

PCVs are often spoken to as if they are all young, white, single women. This is because over 65% are female, over 80% white and young, and correspondingly few are married couples. Still, to do so is counterproductive to the strengthening of ties between PCVs, and between PCVs and PC staff. Heightening awareness of the fact that not all PCVs are the same PCV is essential to a supportive and inclusive environment--and certainly, these demographics will never change if those volunteers who are not in keeping with the stereotypical PCV feel excluded.

I hope that the activity gave the trainees something to think about, though overall it was not quite as well organized as we would have like for a number of reasons that we should be able to better handle with SA 19. Helping out with Tsonga was a lot less stressful, and I was glad both to see Cordelia, who was my language trainer, and to meet the group that may potentially be stationed in the Giyani area.

On Saturday was the quarterly Diversity Committee meeting, which was productive but probably fairly boring for all of you. One thing we discussed was the creation of a diversity blog for PCSA, as a forum to discuss the multitude of experiences PCVs have in this country, varying based both on their backgrounds and the variations in the communities they are placed in. We are still sorting out the preliminaries, including getting approval from PC, but I will let you know when/if the blog goes up.

Taxis

2008-08-06T20:49:00.000+01:00

I think I often vaguely allude to the taxis, but have never fully explained how they work. Taxis are a pretty awesome phenomenon, and I am given to understand that they work on a similar pattern (though hardly identical) throughout much of Africa.

The taxis are the equivalent of public transportation and are the standard way for people to get from the village to town. The system uses vans that are supposed to seat fifteen, though in practice can seat many more—though South Africa tends to be stricter than many other countries about enforcing the fifteen people rule. Since people often take enormous suitcases, their groceries for the next month, boxes of bread or snacks to sell in the village tuck shops, or other sundry items, even with only fifteen official passengers (not including the children sitting in laps or strapped to their mothers’ backs), the taxis can sometimes be a little to crowded for comfort, especially on a hot day.

Guidebooks call the taxis “minibus taxis” to distinguish them from the private taxis you can get in large towns or the cities (not in Giyani, however). The private taxis I have taken have been frankly horrible: expensive, slow, and prone to getting lost. The public taxi drivers, on the other hand, know exactly where everything is, can juggle change while swerving to avoid both potholes and other cars, and operate their route with supreme efficiency. They drive along one route like a bus, picking up passengers who hail them and letting off passengers when they yell out. At a particular point in the journey, everyone will hand forward their fare, one row at a time, and some combination of the driver and other passengers will make change. Unlike a bus, however, the taxis will wait at the ranks—both in town and in the villages—until they have a full load to go, so they keep to no regular schedule. My commute takes anywhere from forty minutes to two hours, doorstep to doorstep.

The taxis are used pretty much exclusively by black South Africans; other than Peace Corps volunteers, I have only seen one white person on a taxi in my six months in the country. White South Africans express shock when you tell them that you take the taxis, since they tend to believe them to be unsafe. Indeed, my presence on the taxi—as in most places I go in Giyani—tends to cause comment. However, the taxis (despite the occasional unpleasant incident) are incredibly safe, and one of the things I love most about South Africa.

On the taxi, you are part of a community. There is an enormous amount of trust and assumption that the rules will be followed when everyone passes their fare up front to the driver, and if you get shorted on change or the driver misses your stop, the other passengers on the taxi will stand up for you and make sure that you’re taken care of. If somebody harasses me, the kokwanas on the taxi scare them off.

On the taxi from town to work, I rarely see people I know and often have the frustrations and triumphs of first interactions, and I expect that I will continue to feel like a newcomer on these taxis for months to come. On the taxi from my village to town, on the other hand, I am an old hand; all the drivers know me, passengers greet me by name, and the queue marshal at the rank never fails to usher me directly on to the correct taxi when he thinks I am heading towards to with too much hesitation. I don’t even need to call out when I want to get off, since the drivers already know where to slow down, and if they forget, the other passengers remind them.

Annoyed

2008-07-31T16:51:00.001+01:00

The plans to visit drop-in centres to talk about the training programme and curriculum ideas have been canceled. Actually, they have been moved back a week. This is unfortunate because when we made these plans two weeks ago, I planned my non-Khanimamba schedule accordingly and commited to help run the diversity workshop at pre-service training for the next group of PCVs that week. So, I have nothing to do this coming week. The week after I will shlep to training via Pretoria, back to site for two days to cram as many DIC visits in as possible, then back to Pretoria for Diversity Committee training (assuming that's still happening, which is always a crapshoot).

So. That's that. I guess I will spend next week doing village things, which I haven't gotten to do a lot of since IST.

On the upside, I am going to Venda this weekend to visit another volunteer and verify whether all my guidebooks are justified in gushing about how "mystical" and "mysterious" the region is. It is supposed to be very lush, though Lonely Planet really could have used an editor who had read some Edward Said for that section. Hmm...I should probably go charge my camera battery...

What I Have Been Doing

2008-07-28T17:37:00.002+01:00

I haven't been updating much this past week because I've been busy doing boring things. A week ago I finally got to have a good, long conversation with my supervisor about what I'll be doing, and we've decided that I'm going to organize a training program for the people who work at DICs (drop-in centres). Since then, I've been doing some research and writing some grants, and this will more or less continue through this week. Next week I'm supposed to go visit a bunch more of the drop-in centres.

Today when I got home I watched my kokwana cook pap. Pap is the staple food in South Africa, and is sometimes called maize porridge (pap is the Afrikaans word for it). It's incredibly dense and incredibly bland, and you use it to scoop up sauce, meat, or whatever. I mainly cook for myself so I don't eat it very much, but I have acquired a taste for it and figured out the best ways to eat it when in social situations where it's unavoidable. There is definitely good pap and bad pap, but even bad pap improves if you mash each bite in your hand for a while before eating eat.

I've only watched pap being cooked a handful of times, so I still find it mildly fascinating to watch. You start by putting a blend of the maize flour and water into boiling water, stir it for a while, let it thicken, add some more, stir, let it thicken, add more flour, beat it in repeatedly (this is the hard part!), add more diluted flour, beat it more...and eventually you have pap.

For my part, I am eating curry right now. With rice.

Goats!

2008-07-20T18:07:00.005+01:00

While I was away at IST, our goats gave birth to baby goats. To be more exact, three of our goats were pregnant, and we now have seven of the most precious, adorable baby goats in the world.

The goat who was a baby when I first arrived is now an adolescent, and like an adolescent, is scruffy, awkward, has balls to big for his body, and likes to cause trouble. The two toddler girls in our family were getting ready to have their morning tea, but the younger one managed somehow to disappear for a moment right before it was served and reappeared with grey dust all over her hands and face, looking extremely bewildered. Her tea and bread were placed on the mat next o her sister's, but while her sister dug in she was taken off the be cleaned. Well, of course, the adolescent goat thought this was too good to resist and came up with every intention of enjoying the tea in the girl's lieu. The usual "Sa!" and "Tch!"'s didn't seem to have much effect, so eventually my sister had to go get my kokwana's walking stick from against the wall and chase the poor goat all the way back to the kraal before he gave up on turning back towards the tea.

Later that day, we let the goats out of the yard for their afternoon of wandering around the village to forage for food. They're supposed to do this on the roads and in the vacant fields. However, one of our neighbors had left their gate ajar. The goats sussed this out with surprisingly little delay, and made a mad dash around the corner for their yard, which grows temptingly green grass (remember, it's winter here—most of the grass is pretty yellow right now). All of our dozen or so goats were standing in that yard milling around. We had to send somebody to go chase them out before they completely tore up the grass.

Day Three of My Coughing Marathon

2008-07-17T08:46:00.001+01:00

I have been cooped up for the last two days, going on three, with a disgusting hacking cough. Seriously, every time I cough I sound like the bile monster. Yesterday my family tried to get me to go to the clinic, but being me, I opted for suffering instead. Actually, it's not that bad, it's just a bit annoying and makes me unfit to be around other people.

Fortunately I bought 7kg of oranges on Monday, so I have enough vitamin C to see me through the week. It's the end of orange season, though, so the oranges are not as heavenly as the last enormous bag I bought, so I've been making orange juice. It's sticky and a lot of effort, but it's a good way to stay hydrated when our water is off--which it was for the last four days. It came back on this morning. I celebrated with a hot bath and now I am drinking almost-hot water with lemon juice, possibly the most pathetic drink known to humankind but it seems to be helping more than tea. Hopefully tomorrow I will feel well enough to do laundry.

If anyone would like to send me entertaining e-mails, consider this a pathetic plea for them. I can only spend so much of the day reading the enormous quantities of books I got from the Peace Corps library in Pretoria and doing crossword puzzles (I think I have lost my crossword skills. This is highly disappointing. Maybe the focus on them this week will revive my mastery).

Coming soon: a goat update, with pictures.

Down From the Mount

2008-07-13T06:58:00.000+01:00

Every few years in some rural areas in South Africa, the circumcision
schools, also known as the mountain schools, are held for teenage
boys and girls and last about a month. They're held separately for
each gender, and their exact curriculum is a closely guarded secret.
The gist, though, is that boys are taught how to be men, girls are
taught how to be women, and they are put through harsh trials that
ensure that they are ready for the harshness of life. I have heard
all kinds of rumors—ranging from the food they eat to the wild sexual
and sacrificial rituals they partake in—but it's hard to gauge what
is true and what isn't. Keep in mind that it is winter here, even
though it is not particularly freezing in my part, and enduring the
cold seems to be an important part of the trials. The men get
circumcised, as the name implies.

Yesterday the men came down from the school, bodies painted red and
wearing red cloths wrapped around their waists. There were a few
less than a dozen from our village, when in the past you might expect
fifty or a hundred to partake. They all walked with their heads
down, stepping in time with walking sticks, and as they passed
through the village the kokwanas who saw them kalakala'ed (I don't
know what to call it in English—stick out your tongue, move it up and
down, scream, and you'll get the noise).

The nduna (a local sub-chief) held a braai in honor of their return.
Some of the village women, including my sister, brought out their
traditional skirts and took the opportunity to dance. The
traditional skirts have two gathered layers of cloth, the first thick
skirt very short and ending just past the hips and the other skirt,
the same thickness, going down to the knees. People wear them,
though more often the toga-like cloths that are supposed to be worn
over them, around on normal occasions relatively frequently, but the
skirts are especially created to dance in—you can imagine how
extraordinary the two-layered skirts look when they start to move.
Some of the skirts had a red stripe down the back, adding to the effect.

As always in the village, I hung out primarily with the middle-aged
women, and my sister and I left after we had eaten, so I was only at
the braai for a couple of hours. The men from the school, too, could
be seen walking back from it in their straight line only a little
while after we left. However, we live in the lot adjoining the
braai, so I could hear the music playing long into the night.

Home Sweet Home

2008-07-08T11:42:00.002+01:00

After two weeks away from Mapayeni and Giyani, it's remarkable to come home again. I suspect that in my absence, a number of people have magically learned my name, because I can't walk anywhere along my familiar routes without everyone smiling and greeting me by name. It's true that my neighbors and the taxi drivers have known who I am for a while now, but it seems like that number has multiplied fivefold, from kids riding their bikes down the tar road to the kokwanas (grandmothers) with a month's worth of groceries at the taxi rank. It is a refreshing change from Polokwane and Pretoria. I hope that this results in getting things done and projects moving, although I suspect that I am in for a slow week or two: my NGO is on half-staff for the next two weeks as people go on rotating vacations, and the schools don't open up again for a week.

IST was moderately productive and hugely refreshing. I ate so much that I don't think I'll be able to consume anything for the rest of the month, unless perhaps the grocery store has eggplant when I go there on the way home today in which case I will make eggplant curry (ETA: there was eggplant, and so there is eggplant curry). Seriously, there were restaurants in Polokwane, and even more in Pretoria, plus the hotel fed us. I had my first bagel, first saag paneer, first real coffee, first falafel, etc. in five months. The grocery stores in Polokwane have non-disgusting cheese!

At IST, we had a few lectures of questionable worth, a few helpful presentations, some time with our supervisors to do a project-planning exercise, some language review, a field trip to a successful DIC, many many tea breaks with little toasted cheese sandwiches, and plenty of time to catch up with the other volunteers in SA 17. Of everything, I found it most helpful to sit down with my supervisor for a little while, though I will still need to track her down sometime this week to talk about some things that we didn't cover during the two days she was there in order to more definitively figure out what I will be doing with my time here, how often I really need to come into the office, how we can improve our communication, etc.

It was also great to catch up with the other volunteers. Everyone's experiences seem to have a common base, with a lot of variation around the edges; there are volunteers working with corrupt organizations or in remarkably dangerous areas who have since been moved, volunteers whose organizations have yet to even register as NPO's, volunteers who have already gotten projects going and volunteers who are so far away from their offices that they can hardly ever go in; there are volunteers who have never felt more at home. Everyone feels some frustration and some helplessness, but miracle of miracles, no one has gone home yet; we still have all thirty of the volunteers that were sworn in three months ago, a feat almost unheard of in South Africa's Peace Corps program. Despite everything, we are happy enough to stay, or at least too stubborn to go quite yet.

I capped IST at the ambassador's Fourth of July celebration in Pretoria. It was unremarkable except for the face painting, which may technically have been there for the embassy kids but of which I nonetheless took full advantage. I was the coolest tiger ever, and as soon as I track down one of the pictures other people took, I will show you just how amazing and ferocious I was.

IST

2008-06-22T07:05:00.000+01:00

I'm leaving today for in-service training, and will be away from my
laptop (but probably not e-mail) for the next two weeks. IST will be
held in Polokwane, and I'm looking forward to going to get a break
from constantly standing out and constant culture shock, plus seeing
all the other volunteers I went through training with. And I guess
I'm supposed to be a learning a few things, too, though that's really
ambiguous.

These past three months seem at once endless and incredibly short.
I've started a lot of things and have a lot of ideas, but have been
frustrated by many other factors: lack of understanding why I'm here,
both on my part and others', difficulty moving things along, getting
people to follow through with things they've told me to do. At the
same time, I've had some pretty incredible experiences, especially
whenever I get a chance to meet and interact with youth here.

That last paragraph was so typically Peace Corps. Prepare for another.

The thing most often mentioned by other volunteers was not to have
any expectations, and I though I'd purged myself of them before
coming to site, but alas, it was not so. Some things I'd been
prepared to laugh off and take in stride, like my strange tea habits
or children touching my hair and even waiting hours for a scheduled
appointment to start, but others, like actually getting to work in a
field that has to do with HIV/AIDS, have taken me by surprise.
Hopefully the next three months will be easier, though that's another
expectation too.

After IST, I'm planning on going to Pretoria for the Fourth of July
bbq at the embassy. I'll return to Mapayeni the following day.
Happy Fourth of July, everybody!

DIC Redux

2008-06-15T17:13:00.000+01:00

Last Thursday, I went to visit another drop-in center that my NGO
helped get started. This one, Ntlakuso Drop-In Center, is located in
an extremely rural village outside Giyani. It was started about a
year ago and received official non-profit status this past March. It
feeds and cares for nearly fifty orphans and vulnerable children
after the school day is over, and is financially supported only by a
handful of small donations from people in the village, which is used
to buy food for the OVCs.

I was able to meet the carers and talk to them at length, though it
was a somewhat difficult process as none of them speak--or at least
were willing to speak to me in--English, so we had to get by with my
very basic Tsonga. Fortunately there was a very nice man named
Leonard there who happened to be at the creche whose space the DIC
uses doing monitoring that day, and he helped translate back and
forth when we needed. I conducted a SWOT analysis of the DIC with
the carers (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats),
though I don't think they really understood the concept. Getting a
discussion going was a bit like pulling teeth--partly it was the
language barrier, but also I think that there is not much tradition
of a free exchange of ideas, and that hurts. But we did it, and they
were happy to have me visiting.

I'll be returning next Wednesday when the DIC is actually operating--
I was there too early in the day, all the kids were still at school
then. Hopefully that will allow me to actually meet the OVCs and see
the carers in action. In addition, I told the carers that I'd work
with them to get food donations from local grocery stores in hopes
that they can start directing their budget to alternative uses.

Still more pictures

2008-06-11T17:51:00.001+01:00

I found these on the computer at work today, my supervisor took them a
few months ago when I first visited Giyani and Mapayeni. The first is
of me meeting the local nduna (kind of a sub-chief) with my host
sister Masingita, and the second is me meeting the nurses who work at
the clinic in Mapayeni. She took a few more, but these were the only
ones that aren't too washed out or too blurry.

Jonathan, you should be happy--there are other people in these pictures.

I'm supposed to visit some more drop-in centers tomorrow, hopefully
that will happen!

More Pictures Up

2008-06-10T12:12:00.000+01:00

A few pictures of our yard here:

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

Edward Homu High School

2008-06-03T15:43:00.001+01:00

I went, as promised, to the high school today. It was an interesting
experience, full, as is typical of Peace Corps, of surprises, both
frustrating and uplifting.

I was supposed to meet initially with the principal, but she had to
leave before I arrived so I began with speaking to the deputy
principal, who is a bit of a blowhard. According to him, the big
thing I could help with to improve the school was to build
administrative offices, and maybe help refurbish the classrooms. And
his church would like a well. Every time I tried to bring up HIV/AIDS
or the learners in the school, we kept going back to the well.

However, after speaking to him, I got to talk with another administrator about the teenage pregnancy rate (high). She mentioned the stereotype of girls wanting the government grants that go along with single motherhood, but interestingly, she thought that social pressure, particularly from parents and the initiation ceremonies, played a larger role. The principal also arrived in time for me to meet her. After introductions (I think she was predisposed to like me since I defied her expectations and was able to pronounce her name, which I unfortunately now forget), we had the following exchange:

Her: Ah, you are a woman. I did not know that.

Me: Yup, I am.

Her: Ah, that is good. Women, they do their best to achieve what
they say they are going to, and they succeed.

Me: And men don't?

Her: (shakes head): No.

Considering her deputy principal, I can see where she's coming from. She thinks the high dropout rate has a lot to do with parental involvement, ie the lack thereof.

I then went to observe a couple of classes. The classes were crowded,
with perhaps seventy people in the eight grade room I was in. The
second class I watched was grade twelve, and by then there were only
twenty-five learners. After the first class, I went into about a
dozen (no exaggeration) classes looking for one with a teacher so that
I could actually watch a class rather than babysit one, and found no
one; between understaffing and teachers out sick, less than half the
classes were staffed.

I was surprised at how poor the English of most of the learners was. The curriculum is supposed to be taught in English because the national test, matric, is administered in English. However, as I discussed with one of the teachers after school was out for the day, English in the classes is very poor, much poorer than it was in the Bakenburg schools (also village schools) I visited during training. Even the smartest kid in the world won't be able to matric is he or she doesn't understand the language the test is given in.

The teacher I was talking to also wanted to know about schools in the US: he was surprised to learn that some of them have even worse problems than they do in South Africa--dilapidated schools, no teachers, no enthusiasm, poor language, skills, high dropout and teen pregnancy rates, plus violence and drugs--and that there's poverty in the US.

Whatever problems the schools have, there is at least one that none of the faculty mentioned today. Teachers are much quicker to condemn students than to praise them, and often worry more about the facilities than the curriculum. Many teachers are shuffled around classes and never get to know their pupils because of staffing shortages, and many much interest in the subject they teach or passion for their profession. High school is boring enough under the best of circumstances; indifferent teachers and poor prospects are an unfortunate combination.

I know there are exceptions, and some of the teachers I spoke to
after the day was over seemed to have different attitudes, and I've
only been at the school half a day; I'm sure that the picture will
become more complicated as time goes on. I'm going back tomorrow.

I walked back with a guy named Chester in Grade 12, who seems both
smart and ambitious; his English is much better than the average, he
wants to know if I'm going to come talk to the school about studying
for their futures, and he wants to be a mechanical engineer. Talking
to him was an uplifting end to a sometimes frustrating day.

Life & Laundry

2008-05-30T18:16:00.001+01:00

I have been spending more time in the village, less time at the office
these past couple of weeks. My visits have included a couple to the
clinic, a couple to the creche, and one to the elementary school, with
another excursion to the high school on the agenda for next week
(though you can never count on the agenda). Most of my visits have
been more along the "I'm accompanying Masingita (my sister) while she
runs errands" vein, but I'm hoping to make them more me-centric (as
in, "so what do you do and can I help?" and less "I'll just smile and
nod while you talk to Masingita"). Everything happens at a very slow
pace, which can be frustrating and discouraging. However, I would
rather have them happen slowly in the village than at the office, so
this is an improvement.

Today instead of wandering around, I did laundry. Obviously it's by
hand, since we have no indoor plumbing. A few thoughts:

1. I have been doing my laundry indoors since arriving at site
because I learned during training that if I do it outdoors, people
will watch, laugh, and criticize. Fair enough, but sometimes I need
to not be the obvious target for laughter/criticism. Today I did it
outside because outside I can use the hose instead of hauling buckets
of water inside. Sure enough, I was doing something wrong. *sigh*

2. I really should not have brought any white clothing to SA.

3. The goats, despite having their own water bucket to drink out of,
decided that my water bucket looked way too appealing to resist.
People chase animals away shouting "Sa!" around here, so after waving
my scrub brush intimidatingly failed to have much effect, I "Sa!"ed my
first goat this morning.

Training Pictures Up!

2008-05-30T16:35:00.001+01:00

It only took me a week, but at last I have loaded (most of) the photos
I took during the training. After discovering how long it takes to
load one, I culled a bunch of the more redundant scenery pictures.
You can view them here:

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/Jade.Lamb/TrainingPictures

Eventually I will post some more pictures from my permanent site, but
right now none of them are interesting enough/I am sufficiently
traumatized by uploading the first batch that it willl be at least a
week before I start.

Picture

2008-05-23T11:10:00.000+01:00

I am in the process of updating my Picasa album with pictures from
training, but for now, here is a picture of the building I am living
in. The white square building is my room, the blue-green rondeval is
one of the three other rondevals on my family's property. It's sad
that it's not a rondeval, but it's pretty nice. Sorry it looks so
dilapidated, it had just finished raining when I took the pictures.
More to follow!

Violence Against Immigrants

2008-05-21T16:43:00.001+01:00

In case you haven’t seen it in the news, here’s a link:

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-safrica-violence.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

South Africa has a fairly large immigrant population, since it’s a relatively wealthy nation in a poor region, and tumult in Zimbabwe has only exacerbated the number of refugees coming in. A couple of villages over from where I’m living, there’s a lot of Mozambiquean immigrants clustered together; though the violence thus far seems to be limited to cities, the immigrant population certainly isn’t. Though the area I’m living in isn’t exactly highly developed, the immigrant communities are notably poorer and more haphazardly constructed.

I was talking to a man who lives in Johannesburg yesterday who was near to some of the violence. Two points seemed to stand out in what he said. First, he insisted that the people who are participating are usually good people. People seem to be acting out against scapegoats for economic circumstances—unemployment is really high in South Africa, and a lot of people in the villages go to Jo’burg or other cities to find work, often in nearby mines. The people who move to the cities tend to be men, leaving the villages largely run by women. Second, he felt that it was noteworthy that the government wasn’t involved in the attacks. I suppose that popularly instigated violence is a step up from the government-sanctioned violence that was prevalent under apartheid. Hopefully the government’s response to the violence will help to make the riots short-lived, though the underlying causes will indubitably take much longer. South Africa, much like the U.S., will remain a draw for immigrants for a long time, and economic conditions in South Africa will be slow to improve.

At least there’s one currency weaker than the dollar.

Note: I wrote this yesterday but had trouble posting it.

Oh, and I'm fine, not near any of the incidents at all.

Tsonga Encounters

2008-05-16T16:50:00.000+01:00

I am very proud of myself. I had a successful interaction with my supervisor and one of our trainers in Tsonga today that encompassed more than whether or not I would like tea, if I was tired, or the weather. I showed my supervisor, Queen, the webpage I have been working on for our NGO, and managed to explain most of the content in Tsonga with only a few random English words to fill in the gaps. True, this is made easier by the fact that a lot of technical terms—including all the computer terms and the names of the training courses—are the said in English even by Tsonga speakers, but I’m still very pleased. As is she, since as a byproduct of the webpage I had to organize all the photos that were haphazardly on a dozen different CDs.

The thing about language study in South Africa is that most people speak English passably well because the school system is conducted in English. In addition, because SA has eleven official languages that are regionally distributed, people who conduct business cross-regionally often have to communicate in English, even though it might be the second language of both. Hence most people, other than the very old, speak English significantly better than I speak Tsonga.

The unfortunate byproduct is that most people either don’t want to speak Tsonga with me, or else assume that if I know a little Tsonga I am fluent and thus that I will understand them when they start spouting off at about the same speed our taxi is going. My sister and supervisor sometimes explain to people that I’m learning Tsonga but need them to speak slowly, but I think slow is a relative concept. The former is more frustrating than the latter. People often continue to ask me questions in English even when I answer in Tsonga, totally ignoring my effort. It’s depressing to think all my hard work during training has gone for this.

There are other annoying language-related things I could rant about, but I will refrain.

As a consequence, I very much appreciate the few people I know who make an effort to speak with me in very slow Tsonga. They put up with my slow speaking and are patient enough to repeat themselves rather than just switch languages. My supervisor, my sister, and the trainers at Khanimamba have all been very helpful this way. Whenever I manage to speak to someone in Tsonga beyond the usual greetings or such, I feel like I’m accomplishing something, even if it’s not going to change the world. It’s very uplifting.

Drop-In Center

2008-05-10T17:48:00.000+01:00

Nothing really noteworthy has happened since the last time I posted, but I feel like if I don't keep posting every few days, the notability requirement for posting will climb to precipitous heights.

I have spent the last week going in to the office and hanging out there, drinking tea, reading, and doing a very little bit of work. As I membentioned in my last post, on Monday I got to go for the first time to see one of the community projects my NGO works with, an OVC drop-in center. OVC stands for orphans and vulnerable children, many of whom become OVCs due to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Here, orphan is defined differently than from in the US; orphans have at least one dead parent, not necessarily two. Because family networks are so large and strong in South Africa, most orphans still live with family members, though often the OVCs that use the drop-in centers are from poorer families and need the support of the center to give the OVC a safe, supervised, and stable environment for a few hours.

Drop-in centers are similar to afterschool programs. Usually, children under 18 come there before and after school to do their homework and play, though none of the drop-in centers here are as organized in terms of scheduled activities as the afterschool programs I went to as a child. The most important function of the drop-in centers is that they provide a meal to children who might not otherwise get one at home. For some drop-in centers, this is a difficult enough task that they have no resources to organize something more ambitious.

I only got to visit the drop-in center my organization works with for about half an hour. It took me so long to get there (two taxis) that they were winding down for the day by the time I got there. Still, I'm glad that I got to meet the staff and see the kids, although there wasn't as much interaction as I would have liked. Most of the students that I saw seemed to be at the older end of the scale, teenagers rather than small children, which is nice since I see so many little kids at the creches (like preschools) my NGO works with. I have been to a lot of creches in the past month. Little kids can be very uplifting to be around, but at the same time, the fact that my NGO is so involved in early childhood development--something I have basically no interest or experience in--can have a dampening effect on my enthusiasm. So, it goes up and down.