Life & Laundry

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!

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

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

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

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

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.

Hello/Avuxeni

Hello, internet. How I've missed you.

I have been in South Africa a little over three months now, and they have been such eventful, stressful, and wonderful times that...I am going to completely skip over the first two of them (training). I was sworn in as a Peace Corps Volunteer about a month ago, and have since been living in Mapayeni, a village near the township of Giyani, which is in the Northeastern-most part of South Africa, near Kruger National Park. I have also been renamed: I am now Tsakani Ngobeni. Tsakani, as I have been told countless times this past month, means happiness in Xitsonga, the language spoken in Giyani. It is a fairly common name around here, although I suspect that I am still pronouncing it incorrectly. When I introduce myself, people usually either start laughing or else demand to know my real name (which no one can pronounce). The same thing usually happens when I tell them I am living in Mapayeni, or when I try to speak Tsonga. I get laughed at a lot these days. I suppose it is pretty funny.

I am living with a wonderful family in Mapayeni. My sister, Masingita, chaperones me around and has been introducing me to the village slowly. Unfortunately, I usually get back to the village around 5:30 or 6, right before dark, so my time in the village has been limited to weekends. I will try to upload pictures of Mapayeni and my home eventually, but for now let me just note that we have goats and mango trees. There is a baby goat who I have to take a picture of while he is still cute and small.

I will be working with Khanimamba, an NGO in Giyani that does in-service training programs. So far they mainly seem to be involved in early childhood development, or training preschool teachers, but they also have programs for business management, vegetable garden development, and some other things that I am not too clear on yet. They also have several "community projects," one of which, an OVC drop-in center, I got to visit briefly yesterday. I am hoping to work more closely with the community projects as time goes on; for now, I have observed some training but spend a lot of time in the office trying to figure out how to build my organization's capacity. It's not exactly what I expected when I joined Peace Corps, but if there's one thing that was browbeaten into us during training, nothing is ever really what you expect in Peace Corps. However, my supervisor is amazing, and I am cautiously optimistic.

ps-Avuxeni literally means "Good Morning," but people say it all day long.