PCV in south africa

This week Scouts Thomo/Giyani were able to have their first camp. The camp was funded by the VAST program of Peace Corps and USAID with funding and facillitation provided by Keep the Dream an NGO which has fostered the Scout movement into a very large youth group in north-eastern limpopo. Twenty two kids were able to come, about half from my group in my village and half new scouts. They participated in activities which which taught them about scouting and camping. A highlight was the campfire on night two when they had a chance to sing campfire songs and to plan their own songs and dances. The theme of the camp was to educate the participants to be HIV/AIDS peer educators, giving them sufficient knowledge about HIV/AIDs, its prevention and its impact to provide information to their peers. While I think all of the scouts learned a lot about the virus that they did not know, only seven qualified to be peer educators. Fortunately there will be another camp. It was quite cold at the camp site but I think everyone had a wonderful and memorable trip. It was definitely one of the high points of my time here.

 

It has been too long since my last entry. A fair amount of things have happened since then. I just got back from a very nice trip to Pretoria, where we had our last training as Peace Corps Volunteers it was a wonderful opportunity to see people from my group and for us all to take stock of where we are in our activities. It is also necessary to go to the big city every now and then when you are in South Africa. In the rural villages, where most residents have lived for their entire lives, a foreigner can stick out like a sore thumb. In the city, there is anonymity which comes as a relief until it makes you appreciate that in the village people are expected to greet one another and to be polite to everyone, which is really a very positive way to live life, I think. It is so strange in the cities here, or pretty much everywhere in America to pay much attention to people you don’t know, but in the villages everyone is expected to take a personal interest in everyone else. This is not to say that village life is some sort of utopia where everyone loves each other and there are not any social problems, alcoholism and the collective trauma of HIV/AIDS are severe problems in rural South Africa and there are certainly a lot of disputes and rivalries in village life. Still, to me village life offers a wonderful contrast to the impersonality and atomization of modern life.

 

Right now I have a couple of big activities going on. First is a peer educators camp that I am trying to get funding for from PEPFAR, which is the AIDS relief program that America is running in South Africa. There have been snags in getting the grant in so I won’t go into too much detail because it might jinx whether it gets funding or not. Another upcoming event is a run in early June, there is a runners club in the town of Giyani that is taking the initiative to set up a running program for children and youth. This type of activity is, I think, a fantastic initiative that I am very excited about because the funding is from local businesses and the people who are running it are doing so because they care about their community’s kids it’s a spirit of volunteerism that is very, very rare in South Africa. So, I am trying to get kids from my village over to do the run, to me it is a fantastic form of exercise and it is cheap to be a runner, all you really need are shoes and shorts. And kids here desperately need outlets,

 

Finally, I am trying to be part of a gardening initiative right now. Part of it has consisted of distributing seeds to teens in my Scout group, I have started a garden of my own to be a sort of model garden for the kids (have only carrots and watermelons right now, but more seeds are coming.) The other part is working with the local Catholic church to start a community garden for about ten to fifteen families through a program called Food and Trees for Africa. Food and Trees for Africa is one of many programs in Africa that is trying to introduce a form of agriculture that can produce high yields for families without a lot of land or resources. People in the villages often have gardens but don’t know how to take care of the soil, and only plant during the rainy season instead of maintaining gardens over the entire year, despite the availability of water. A gardening initiative that can meet poor family’s nutritional needs is what we are trying to do at the church and I feel that with effort we will be successful. We also want to start another garden for the Mozambiquean immigrant community in Giyani. Immigrants to South Africa live at a poverty level that is considerably more severe than most poor South Africans, oftentimes they live in informal settlements that are unhealthy and lack even the most basic services. My hope is that initiatives like this, South Africans helping other South Africans and the immigrants who live among them, will help this country be a happier and healthier place.

My body just stopped being sore from the run on Saturday. Longtom 2009, held in a small town called Sabie in Mpumelanga, was a good time. I finished my first half-marathon in a little under  two hours after a few months of training for it and I am happy about how it went. It was a lot of fun running in the crisp mountain air of beautiful Mpumelanga and this race was the goal of regular exercise over the last four months.

Many congratulations to my friend and fellow PCV Oliver Borzo, who ran the entire 38 mile ultra marathon (his first marathon ultra or otherwise) on his birthday and qualified for South Africa’s most well-known marathon, the Comrades Marathon. I think over 50 serving volunteers were able to make it to the run, most doing the half-marathon. It was great to see my friends from my own training group SA17 as well as South Africa’s most veteran volunteers SA16, and to meet for the first time members of the still green SA18,  sort of a picture of  “before, during, after.” To be with volunteers working in a very wide variety of situations helps to give me a sense of perspective on my contributions and experiences in South Africa and a chance to simply be an American among Americans in a foreign country.

Traveling this weekend was a challenge. Predicting public transport in South Africa can be a bit like reading tea leaves: largely relying on bizarre, esoteric knowledge about the habits and routes of minibus taxi drivers, intuition, and a lot of luck to get to anywhere outside of one’s site within a decent period of time. For example, this weekend I had to get to Sabie, which in a car would  be about two and a half hours from my site, luck was against me and I spent roughly ten hours in taxis to get to Sabie, mostly waiting for them to fill as most drivers won’t leave until a taxi is full. Mpumelanga is beautiful but I am not sure if I will be visiting again without a rental car. (Which of course, for any alert staff members reading this entry, I will need to take leave in order to drive.)

More than 14,000 USD (roughly 140,000 SAR) was raised by Peace Corps Volunteers for the KLM Foundation, which sends exceptional underprivileged students to a private school that is outside their price range. Many thanks to my brother, my parents, and my grandparents for sending in donations for my run. It is a sad truth that the current situation of South African education is so bad that only private schools and an all too small number of well-run public schools provide students with an education adequate for sending them to a decent college and on the path towards a successful career, which is a tragedy because there are some very bright kids here, this money will ensure that some of them will get the opportunities at an advanced career that they should have. The KLM Foundation was started by Peace Corps volunteers a few years ago and I had the opportunity to get a ride back to my site (see above for how fortunate this is) from one of its founders, who is now a professional in international aid. It was an interesting ride, learning about Peace Corps past and the challenges of working for current international NGOs, which is one of the career fields I am looking at for after Peace Corps a life that will begin roughly a year from today.

  I think its high time that rather than go over what I do and my life I would touch on some of the many exotic things about living in South Africa and the people here.

The first question for many people I guess would be: what is the food like?

Personally, I cook for myself and the food that I can buy at the supermarket is not very much different than what I can get in the U.S. just with lower variety. On the other hand “exotic” fruit here is cheap and plentiful: guava, avocado, mangoes, papaya, litchis, marula, prickly pear, kwiwis, as well as plenty of apples, oranges and peaches. The one thing you cannot get is berries, forget blueberries, strawberries, and cherries. But  despite the fact that “American food” is invading, people here do have a different diet and there is definitely a South African cuisine. The different groups all have their own foods, Afrikaaners (white South Africans that speak Afrikaans as a first language) love to braai (what we call barbeque) and a specialty for them is boervors a spicy, fatty sausage that one must cook forever and a day to cook through, another specialty is their dried meat or biltong which is extremely popular here, ostritch biltong is fantastic. Indian South Africans have their own cuisine of curries and other Indian foods like naan unfortunately for my stomach (but fortunately for my wallet) there is no Indian restaurant in my area, but when I travel I almost invariably get Indian if I eat out.

Black South Africans meanwhile, have a diet that I have decidedly mixed feelings about, its largely shaped by the poverty of the area, people often cannot afford to eat healthy food. The big “staple” is mealie cob which is cheap corn that is either grown in the villages or bought ground at the supermarket. It is used to make a hard porridge, called pap in Afrikaans and vuswa in Xitsonga. One eats pap with chicken, stewed greens (not good I am afraid), squash, and/or beans, generally with one's right hand (washed before eating of course) using pieces of the porridge as a sort of edible utensil to absorb gravy or pick up meat. The pap  itself has no real taste, nor nutritional value, it’s pure empty carbs, but it fills the stomach and its cheap or free; corn needs little water and rain is not plentiful. It’s such a big part of people’s diets here that they have a very hard time understanding that I never ate it in America, and when I cook I eat potatoes, rice, or bread. They will eat all those things but cannot imagine a day without eating pap, even for those people who can afford more expensive foods. The lack of nutrients from the pap diet causes many health issues here and diabetes is rampant with older people. Still it is not bad and when you are at someone’s house, an event, or with coworkers it is what will be on the plate. Compensating for that is that a lot of times you’ll get fresh chicken. Chicken that’s just been killed is extremely savory and much better than beef that’s just been killed, or fresh pork, which most people consider treats for special occassions. Also pap mixed with squash is sweet and quite decent, I would make it occasionally if pap didn’t require constant pounding and stirring to prepare. Beans and peanuts are a big part of the diet and are a definite plus. Poaching is illegal here but there is a wink-wink attitude towards it if you don’t kill animals in the nature reserves, there’s no shortage of duikers, just like in America there’s no shortage of deer, rabbit, is gamy but tasty. There are also foods that are alien to an American, grasshoppers and termites are considered food in the villages. I personally rather like mopani worms which are little caterpillars that are found in large numbers around Christmas on Mopani trees. They can be pretty succulent little beasties, good with salt or a decent sauce once one gets past the unavoidable fact that one is eating an insect (thinking about their high protein value can help reassure the faint of heart.) Kind of an acquired taste but I rather like them. Maybe something about music next time I write an entry like this.

Well Longtom is almost here and I am pretty excited. Of course the training is the big part of any big run so I am trying to eat a lot of good food and push myself to run farther and faster. Training can be tricky because sometimes you have to push yourself to do things you really don’t feel like doing. I have found though that eventually your body kind of takes over and your brain can just get out of the way. Good stuff.

 

Also, I said a while back that I would write about my vacation to Cape Town at New Years so I will very briefly. Cape Town is an amazing place. I spent about a week there and aside from the pain my wallet went through it did not feel like it was nearly long enough. The most striking thing about Cape Town is its location. It has a stunning juxtaposition of the ocean and mountains, especially the incredible Table Mountain. It also has a very diverse culture, a different flavor from the other big South African cities. I was there with one other Peace Corps Volunteer and as a result we hooked up with other people at our Backpackers to do things (a surprising number were themselves alone) So, I got to climb Table Mountain twice (second time was better) see the Cape Town Karneval, (a New Years Parade put on by the city’s Couloured majority) visited all different kinds of neat little shops, bars and restaurants, see historic Robben Island, took a very enjoyable wine tour. I tried salsa for the first time. Anyway the place is a blast and a half and it seems like no matter what you do with your time there you will enjoy it. I really want to go back, but like I said, it’s a bit pricey. I am thinking I might take another week there to close out my time here in April 2010.