Fun with Rubbish

One of my favorite things in life is when I am able to make a connection with another person. Living in South Africa, where everything is strange to me and I am strange to everyone, has made that a challenge. However, the other day I was able to make such a connection.

I arrived at work at my usual 9:00 AM and hung out with the women cooking for the children and read my book. At 2:00 the children arrived for their after-school meal, which was chicken liver, rice and squash. I am always amazed how their small bodies are able to take unreasonably large mounds of food and turn them into empty plates. While the kids eat I walk around and talk to the different groups of kids. After they finish eating they usually like to play some games that involve chanting or singing in Zulu. This day the playgroup was limited to three boys. I was bored with playing games I don’t understand and seemingly have no point so I exercised some “cross cultural exchange” (PC buzz words) and taught them “Down by the Banks.” After a couple rounds of that they taught me a variation, which was actually in English. The game’s song was about a police officer that needed to shoot someone in the head. When the song ended and your hand was slapped, you got to choose who was shot in the head. Morbid, I know. After that, they taught me a game using three sticks. You place them equal distances apart and, going in a line, step between them. The last person jumps as far as they can from the last stick at which point the last stick is moved to where that person landed. This is repeated from the opposite end until the sticks progressively move wider and wider apart. It was actually really fun. Don’t worry guys, I won. After that we played a game similar to dodge ball. The only problem was that my drop-in-center doesn’t have any sporting equipment. No balls, bats, hula hoops - nothing. These resourceful kids improvised by going to the trash pile (or rubbish as they call it here) and picking up a sheet of plastic which they tied around other garbage, forming a ball. I was so impressed by their resourcefulness and ingenuity. What these children lack in physical resources they more than make up in imagination.

While we were playing something completely genuine came through. Our interactions didn’t focus on the strangeness between our two cultures or the differences in our skin color. It didn’t even matter that our ages were so different. All of that subsided. What was left was four people genuinely having a good time together and connecting.

Lock Down

So that last update was actually written on April 3. Since that time, I have sworn in as an official Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV), moved to my permanent site and lost my grandpa. The roller coaster continues.

The next three months are a complicated one in the life of a PCV. We are on “lock down” – officially known as the “integration phase” of our training. We are expected to remain in our sites and not travel further than our shopping towns which is  an approximately 50km radius for me. We are also not implementing projects, getting to know our orgs and communities.

In my experience the overriding feeling of service thus far is one of insecurity. I don’t really know what I should be doing at work or how I should be acting at home, and they don’t really know what they should be doing with me. We are figuring it out as we go, and I like to think we are making progress. Thus far a day in the life goes like this:

6:00 – Wake up/fight waking up

6:30 – Breakfast

7:00 – Run

8:00 – Bathe

9:00 – Make the 3 minute journey to my org.

10:00 – Tea–time which lasts a few hours

1:30 – Lunch prepared by the Drop-in Center

2:30 – Children arrive and eat

3:00 – Play with the children

4:00 – Go home

8:30 – Go to bed (I wish I could say that an 8:30 bedtime is a new thing for me, but I would be lying)

Sometimes this schedule varies, like when I go to out on visits with the Home Based Caregivers, or meet with teachers at a local school. This past week I met with a school and they wanted me to teach physical science, math, health, cure the children’s ringworm and find out if it’s safe for them to be living amongst cows and goats as one teacher had heard that they cause skin rashes. I explained that I am not a medical doctor (something I have to tell people everyday), and told them about that time I got ringworm in Ghana. We compromised by agreeing that I will come back to observe the life-skills classes and implement clubs “at the appropriate time.”

Everyone thinks we're a couple. May as well play the part.

Me with my language group. Go monate mo!

A superb morutišigadi - Teacher.

Standing awkwardly with the US Ambassador - a really cool guy.

Mother Boy

I am sitting in my freshly cleaned room, all packed and ready to be picked up to be taken to the college where we will be swearing in tomorrow. I arrived with a couple cases and intense emotions. I’m leaving with approximately eight bags and bitter-sweet emotions. I will be leaving the host family I’ve been living with for the last ten weeks. The family that has so selflessly taken care of me and made my experience during Pre Service Training (PST) so much better. From peanut butter and polony sandwiches to the progress Gogo and I have made in our ability to communicate, I will forever be indebted to this family.

PST has been a continuation of the Emotional Rollercoaster. I was able to visit my permanent site for ten days, and it is a very cool and beautiful community in southern Limpopo province. Also during PST, I’ve taken two language proficiency tests and performed well at both. I’ve strengthened the relationships with fellow trainees, and will greatly miss our weekend get-togethers, which are always an adventure in and of themselves. I also ate a dried caterpillar or “Mopane Worm” complete with head, spines and legs. It was as awful as it sounds. I’ve heard they’re better when fried or cooked in a sauce, so I’m open to the Mopane Worm redeeming itself.

Since returning to PST, I have been anxious to get back to my permanent site where I will be working with a Home Based Care/Orphan and Vulnerable Children Drop-in Center. I still don’t know exactly what it is that I will be doing. The next three months are supposed to be spent assessing my community and org. for possible projects. One of the things I’m most excited about is the Sporting Grounds near my house. They have a tennis court and volleyball court: my two favorite sports. And it’s a really natural place to interact with the community and develop relationships. My permanent host family consists of a single woman, her elderly brother and her two-year-old grand niece “Lerato” who is adorable and ridiculous. One day, during the 10-day visit, I was outside my room reading when Lerato began marching around the yard chanting something in Zulu. She was very serious and evoked as much authority as any two-year-old, with hair in pompoms, possibly can. I asked my host mom to interpret and she told me that she was chanting “In the name of Jesus! In the name of Jesus! In the name of Jesus!” Ridiculous. During the site visit I ate meals with my host family. I had the pleasure of feasting on chicken gizzards which were chewy-I pretended they were clams. I also ate cow heels which can be described as a mildy beef flavored hunks of gelatin attached to a cross-section of the cow’s severed hoof. Remember when I was vegan?

We had a farewell function to thank all of our host families. The day before, we slaughtered a cow and two sheep. Put yourself in my position: an obnoxiously liberal vegan who started eating meat 1.5 months before coming to South Africa. I watched as the cow was murdered, skinned and butchered. I watched as fellow trainees slit the throats of the sheep with zeal. A few of the other trainees participated, but I was content to watch.

“Thabiso!” I heard while watching the sheep spurt blood to the beat of their still pumping hearts. “Come look at the bible.” The cow’s stomach had been cut open and the contents hand-raked out onto the grass. “The Bible” referred to the chambers in the cow’s stomach. They call it the bible because you turn the chambers like pages in the bible to scrape out digested grass. “Oh…cool.” I replied while slowing backing away for fear that I would be invited to participate in the bible scraping.

The farewell function went great. A lot of trainees were decked out in traditional Sepedi, Tsonga and Venda dresses. My family surprised me with a shirt, which looked like a South African flag to match Gogo’s South African themed dress. She sewed it herself and it was amazing. Someone later compared it to Lucile and Buster dressing up for Motherboy on Arrested Development, which described it perfectly. I am so happy to be the Buster to Gogo’s Lucile.

A Day in the Life of a Peace Corps Trainee

The roosters begin their obnoxious crows from 3:00 to 6:00 AM. I put in earphones and fall back asleep until its time to get up at 5:00. After sweating it out with Jillian Michaels, I go to the kitchen and fetch the water that my host mother has so graciously warmed for me. I bathe in a large metal basin filled with less than an inch of water situated on the floor of my bedroom. I begin by kneeling over it and wash my hair and face. Next comes my arms, and then I get into the basin to wash the rest of my body. One of my first purchases was a large sponge. It changed my life - it's the little things, people. No longer do I have to inefficiently splash water on my body, which typically resulted in a wet floor and an inadequately clean body. 

Once I'm dressed, I pack my backpack and straighten my room. Gogo calls "Thabiso!" and presents me with a breakfast tray. Some mornings it's Jungle Oats (basically oatmeal) and other mornings it's cornflakes cooked into a porridge. I accept the tray with a "ke a leboga." This interaction illustrates an interesting gender dynamic that exists amongst PCTs. Women PCTs have been expected to largely take care of themselves since the beginning of our home stays. Most have even been assigned household chores and are expected to assist in nightly meal preparation. While I have never been asked to do anything. This experience has given me a complex. But mostly I am just extremely grateful that Gogo does do so much for me. 

I leave my home at 7:15 with a "šalang gabotse" and walk ten minutes to meet the nearest PCT. We walk another 30 minutes to an old Roman Catholic Church where we have two to three hours of language lessons. My LCF is fantastic. I have learned a lot and I think she's starting to understand my personality. "Thabiso, your sentences are always so mean," she tells me after I came up with "The uncle does not like the fat niece."

Language is followed by technical trainings in a smotheringly hot community hall. There, we learn about all of the ways we can get sick, robbed, sexually assaulted, STIs and kicked out of Peace Corps. We also have some very enlightening sessions. We were recently visited by a panel of South Africans representing the country's diversity. I was particularly struck by the story of a sex worker who came to South Africa illegally from Zimbabwe. She was raped by her guides and found out that she is HIV positive when she sought medical attention. Through all of this she emoted such strength and resilience. 

Lunch comes and I explore what strange combination of peanut butter sandwich Gogo has made for me today. So far I've had peanut butter and Palony, peanut butter and lettuce and peanut butter and butter. We eat and converse until we are wrangled back into session. 

Sessions end around 5:00 and after I typically run with a few other PCTs. We run and greet everyone while accumulating a small army of barefooted children behind us. After running I make the 30-45 minute trek back home. I am inundated with the same question as people take note of my strange runnin clothes. "O twa kae?" Where do you come from? I tell them that I have been running and they laugh. This conversation is repeated ad nauseam the rest of the way home. Recently, a new tradition started. Every day, at the same spot, a group of 10-15 children run at me chanting "Thabiso! Thabiso! Thabiso!" in unison. Slightly terrifying and hilarious at the same time. They walk me the rest of the way home and quiz my Sepedi by pointing at things along the way and telling me to say it in Sepedi. When I'm right they cheer and laugh. When I'm wrong or don't know they teach me the word. 

Once I'm home I bathe again in cold water. It is delightful, perhaps my favorite part if the day. I then study, read or hang out with my host parents while Gogo prepares dinner.  We eat around 8:00-8:30. Dinner is usually pap and chicken. I don't hate pap yet. We eat dinner outside and one night, out of the corner of my eye, I saw what looked like a small rodent dart toward my host father. He instinctively tried to stomp on it but it bolted away. It was incredibly fast. I asked him what it was and he told me it was a spider that lives in the sand, under the mango trees. I shuttered at the size and speed of this spider and went to bed early. Another night, after a rainstorm, I was walking toward my door when I saw something that looked like it had a tail run into the dark shadowy corner near my door. I froze and retreated while Gogo investigated. She eventually found a small frog and laughed a little to hard, if you ask me. She laughed even harder while retelling what had just happened to my host father. "Don't run away from the frogs, Thabiso!" My host father said with a laugh. Hardy. Har. Har. 

I am exhausted by the end of the day and fall asleep almost instantaneously. This routine is about to change drastically as I will be finding our what my permanent site placement will be on Friday. I'm very anxious and excited to know where I will be living and what I will be doing for the next two years. I'll keep you posted. 

Thabiso

If you happen to find yourself in my rural village i Limpopo province and want to find me you'll have to ask for Thabiso. This is the name my host mother gave me shortly after our meeting. It means happiness and I believe it represents perfectly my feelings while being in South Africa for the past 27 days. 

So much has happened since my arrival, and I have experienced the Emotional Rollercoaster that is so widely discussed within Peace Corps. We finished our 15 hour plane ride from JFK to South Africa without incident and started a three hour bus trek to our first training site: an agricultural college in Mpumalanga province. We were spoiled there. We had showers, flush toilets and catering. Upon arrival, our bus was greeted by our Language and Cross-Cultural Facilitators (LCF's). They welcomed us to South Africa by singing a few beautiful South African songs. It was a really cool and welcoming experience. 

After a week at the college we moved into our home stays where we will be completing our training. Myself and my group of trainees arrived at a tin roofed building and say on one side while our prospective host families sat on the opposite side. Peace Corps staff spoke with them in Sepedi for a time. I imagine that they were being warned that we will probably be the weirdest things they've ever experienced:we scream at any sized insect, defy traditional gender roles, require "alone time" (not a thing in South Africa) and drink from two buckets stacked on each other with a spigot on the bottom. Our poor host families. 

They paired each trainee with a host family one by one and there was lots of cheering, crying and hugging. After the obligatory Peace Corps anticipation I met my host mother who is 60 and speaks virtually no English. In South Africa she is known as a gogo, meaning grandmother. We drove to her house, which is located on a road of fine, deep red sand. I was led to my room behind the garage. I dropped my bags in my room and stared awkwardly at Gogo. She stared back at me with a look of "What does it do now?" She eventually oriented me to the pit latrine, which is in the backyard, about 50 yards back. It is made out of tin and inside is a raised tin/linoleum shelf with a jagged toilet bowl shaped hole cut into it. The backyard is equipped with mango trees, a lemon tree, chickens, roosters and two goats. Don't tell Gogo, but the goats sometimes benefit from my Palony and peanut butter sandwiches. A guy can only take so much Palony. Google it. 

Having been dropped into a completely foreign country, a rural village and into a home where gestures were a more effective mode of communication than talking, I was feeling very overwhelmed. The Emotional Rollercoaster was on the downhill. The next day I mimed that I needed to do laundry and Gogo got me buckets. I washed my clothes by hand and places them on the line, feeling very accomplished. Once they were dry I took them off the line and was miffed when I found them to be stiff and appearing as if they were still hanging on the line. Apparently one is supposed to have two rinse buckets and a fabric softener bucket. I did not get the memo. 

A few days after arrival I discovered that Gogo had a husband who works in Pretoria and would be arriving for a while. He speaks very good English and has been extremely helpful. My evenings are spent sitting with him discussing South African/American politics and South African society in general. 

We started language training approximatelt two weeks ago. I am learning Sepedi. YouTube it to hear what it sounds like. There are some sounds that we do not have in English and the grammatical structure is very different. I have become very good at greeting people, which involves standard exchanges based on age, gender and the number of people being greeted. Once the greeting has finished they either chuckle to themselves that a legua (white person) is speaking Sepedi or ask a follow up question. If they ask a follow up question I smile awkwardly until they say "ahhhlriht" and walk away. Lately, I have been able to answer some follow up questions such as where I come from, where I stay etc. but we've got a long way to go before it can remotely resemble a conversation. 

I still don't know what I will be doing or where I will be permanently placed. We won't ind out for a couple more weeks, but for now I am enjoying exploring the village, greeting as many people as possible, learning Sepedi and hanging out with my fellow trainees who are all so great. 

So there's my first, rambly blog in-country. I am hoping to be able to post more often so I don't have so much ground to cover, but as we say TIA-this is Africa. 

Staging

After submitting an application one year ago, answering the oft repeated Peace Corps Questions,  quitting my job, getting rid of my car, moving all my worldly possessions into my parents house/storage and the goodbye party, I found myself at the airport. There, I said goodbye to my closest friends and my parents. I went through security and waited at the crowded gate feeling terrified. The abstract idea of Peace Corps which had existed for the last twelve months in my mind was suddenly and uncomfortably real. 27 months is a long time and South Africa is a long way from Salt Lake City (approximately 9900 miles hence the blog address).

I slept through the majority of both flights it took to get me from SLC to staging in Philadelphia. I picked up my awkwardly enormous bags and lugged them to the hotel shuttle. They weighed about the same as an adolescent corpse and look as if that may be what they contained. I arrived at the hotel, checked in and met a small group of volunteers who also arrived a day early. We went to dinner and I was instantly overcome by the warmth and understanding that I received from the other volunteers. Everyone had similar anxieties, excitements and it felt really nice to be in a group of people also embarking on this 2 year adventure.

The next day I awoke to snow fall comparable to that which I'm used to in Utah. We went to staging which consisted of discussions of our thoughts and feelings toward Peace Corps and Peace Corps' thoughts and feelings toward us volunteers. It was a heart warming affair. It snowed the entire day and well into the night. As a result, our bus ride to JFK and subsequent flight to South Africa were both delayed to the next day. We celebrated/commiserated the delay by going out to dinner that night. I packed for South Africa, not Alaska, so it was a very cold walk - made colder by the fact that many of the restaurants were closed due to the weather or were not equipped to handle 35 bushy tailed Peace Corps Trainees. We finally found a restaurant and bonding commenced. Everyone I have met has been so great and I am excited to see the great work everyone will do. I feel like I have instantly made 35 new best friends. We are set to fly out to South Africa and actually begin this crazy adventure. I'll keep you posted....don't hold me to that.