PCV in south africa

Some things I have learned:

 

1. Most important thing is to find people and organizations that are motivated and that you can work with, for education volunteers there are plenty of teachers that you will not be able to work with. So learn to identify the people and areas you can help in and avoid wasting time doing things which do not bring you joy because these things will  mostly just bring you frustration and not much else.

2. Adjusting to the community takes time more so than anything else, it will not happen overnight.

3. Learning even a little bit of the local language goes a long way towards smoothing social relationships, but beyond beginner level it is up to you how much you want to use it.

4. Maintaining connections with other volunteers is important.

5. You will probably have a lot of “spare time” learn to do things to occupy yourself: lots of people develop into cooks, learn another language, write poems, start personal gardens, read tons of books, join soccer teams, or run marathons.

6. Stay in touch with the friends and folks back in America.

7. Do not get too angry about the way people act or think here, there’s a lot of attitudes (racial, gender, etc) that you may find extremely wrong-headed or hard to swallow, and a lot of things that go on in this country that will drive you crazy when you are faced with them. Try not to stress yourself out about them too much, focus on the good and do not dwell on the bad.

8. Probably wise to leave site at least once a month it’s a big country and your village or neighborhood is only a tiny corner of it.

9. Follow your gut, if you feel your site is unsafe or your work is just horrible, change sites, too many people wait for too long to do what needs to be done, make sure you communicate with Peace Corps staff if there are problems, be persistent and annoying as possible if you do not feel they are taking you seriously.

10. Keep the faith. Always keep in mind the reasons that you came here and what you are getting from it as well as what others are getting from it. Peace Corps is probably the most deeply personal experience you will have in your life, you are on your own, you will get a new perspective on your place within the world. Remember you are a volunteer and you are here to help and to have an adventure, it’s up to you how it plays out.

 Last weekend was the second of two camps funded by a VAST grant, the first had more of an HIV/AIDS focus, this second was more about camping for the sake of camping, though we did graduate five more kids as peer educators, adding up to ten total with over twenty kids receiving the HIV/AIDS training and an introduction to Scouts. There have been a lot of challenges in getting this group started, I have been learning as I go along, not really having any background in youth work, but I feel like we are really taking off. We have a few core kids who are very motivated, a membership of around thirty to forty in two villages, a few projects and activities that we are working on… So on the whole I feel that it is going very well, and I believe it has a future after I leave.

 

Other than that, I recently returned from my brother’s wedding in America which was an excellent experience, I was only there for two weeks so it wasn’t too hard coming back to South Africa. Not a whole lot else… things with my organization have pretty much ground to a halt due to the fact that they don’t have any funding now, so 100% of my focus is on the youth activities. Yesterday I went to a HIV testing event and got a t-shirt for getting tested.  I am also looking towards my plans for when I return to America which is (amazingly) only 6-7 months from now I need to find employment and a place to live.

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.