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.