Down From the Mount

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

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

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

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

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

A few pictures of our yard here:

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

Edward Homu High School

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.