American Diversity

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.