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.