Orangpples

The Umjindi Mumicipality hereby informs you that reticulation has been completed.

This was the beginning of a message that greeted me as I entered the small one room library in the location. Reading further down the announcement I found out that reticulation (what ever that actually is) was completed for Phase 2 and Extensions 15 – 17. This are some of the least developed areas of the location. I’ve been through them only once or twice, but the difference between them and where I live is almost as great as between where I live and Barberton itself. Almost every single house is made of wood planks and you can see in through the cracks. There’s also a vegetable garden in front of most houses and the number of chickens wondering the street is closer to that of a rural village than a township.

I had to wonder how many residents of these areas 1) actually make it all the way up to the library which is in a much different area of the location and 2) how many of them would understand what the message was about. When reading it I had no idea what the word reticulation actually meant except for something I might have found on the GREs. After reading further down the letter and seeing that requests to have water hook ups could now be made I figured it had something to do with water piping. Since I was at the library I went in and found a dictionary to look reticulation up, here’s what I found.

reticulation: to divide, mark, or construct so as to form a network

Ok I can sort of see how that might somehow be the same as connecting really poor houses to the main water supply, but seriously, which ever office bound bureaucrat who picked that word had no idea what their actual audience was like and must have only been trying to impress their boss. I didn’t see a SiSwati translation of the announcement anywhere (I was sort of looking forward to using the SiSwati equivalent of reticulation in random everyday conversations), so I can only hope that there were other means of getting this message to the people that live in this area.

This is the great divide that exists in South Africa right now, and its not a racial one. It’s between those people who can use the word reticulation in the main subject of an official flier about water distribution and those people who cut their own wood to build a small 2 room shack for their families. These two groups coexist with in kilometers of each other but each has very little understanding or the other. For me as a Peace Corps Volunteer it is very interesting to sit somewhere in the middle of the two groups and go back and forth.