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.