Taxis

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

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

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!

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

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

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.