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.