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.