Orangpples

I got back yesterday from a week away from site. I spent all of last week with 10 other volunteers preparing for the next group of volunteers – SA20 – to arrive late next month at what Peace Corps calls General Training of Trainers or GTOT. This means I was at the training college in Marapyane were my Pre-Service Training (PST) was held last July. Instead of spending a night in Pretoria to catch the Peace Corps provided transport at 10am I decided to stay with my PST host family before GTOT started. It was great to spend the night with them and see how they were doing. In the morning I made my way vie public transport from their small village to the training college. It was amazing to realize how easy that actually was, but I never once did it during the three months of PST last year.

We put a lot of work into designing the schedule and divided up when we will all return to facilitate sessions at SA20’s PST. SA 20 will be replacing the SA 16 education volunteers leaving over the next few months and will mostly be on the opposite side of the country from me in the North West Province so I’m glade I’ll get a chance to meet them at PST. They will also all be learning Tswana. At our PST people learned 5 of South Africas 9 official languages: Sepdi, Tsonga, SiSwati, iNdebele, and Zulu. With so many languages being learned large group sessions had to always use English and practicing with people not in your language group was basically impossible. Our PST was a microcosm of the linguistic soup that makes up South Africa, but it wasn’t very conducive for learning or cross communication. It will be interesting to see how SA 20’s language training goes.

Sunday also happened to be the start of the FIFA Confederations Cup here in South Africa. There has been lots of build up to this international event in the news media. The Confederations Cup is a test run for the World Cup next year and from what I saw in Pretoria earlier this week I think they’ll be ready. I actually got to go to the USA vs Italy game on Monday night, and although it was 1 – 3 Italy it was very fun. There were plenty of buses between remote parking centers and the stadium and roads were closed around the stadium making it easy to walk there. Wait lines going in weren’t very long at all, though it did take a while to get out. My one complaint would be that there was very little order in the concession and bathroom lines during half time, it was pretty much a free for all mob and you had to force your self to the front to get anything. Never having been to a World Cup game before I’m not sure how much of a chaotic mad house half time concessions are but I think there’s was some room improvement. Maybe putting up queuing lines or something.

Coming back to site always requires a major mental shift. Your going from constantly being around other Americans where conversations that seem normal and not forced to being the only person from your cultural back ground and understanding. But its also nice to be back to the familiar routine, sounds, and feel of my little street in the township. There’s about one and a half weeks left in the school term here before a month long break. I want to try to get the ground work for projects I want to work on next term done in that time. The first week of break I’m planning to do math prep classes for the grade 12 students at a few high schools in this area. In November all South African 12^th graders have to take matriculation tests to pass high school and over the next few months they will all put enormous amounts of energy into studying. I’m hoping to give them some tools that will make their studying easier and more efficient. After that I’m planning to go on a trip from Cape Town through the Eastern and Western Cape with a few other volunteers and a good friend from high school who’s coming to visit. So I also have a lot of work to do planning all the details of that trip.

Last week I got back from SA 18’s first in service training. This week long training marks the 6th month we’ve been here. It’s hard to believe its only been 6 short months (7 on the 14th) since I left, so much has happened in those months that I feel like I could pack 2 years of college into them. But then when almost every minute of every single day is a cross cultural/linguistic moment and those that aren’t are still filled with new sights and sounds the number of new experiences I’ve had probably add up to 2 years at UVA. It’s still surprising to think that everyone I interact with on a daily basis I didn’t even know existed 6 months ago and they didn’t know I existed. When I walk down the street I greet people with words from a language I hadn’t even heard of before I left (and didn’t actually train in during my 3 months of training, but SiSwati and Zulu just a little more different than American and British English). And somehow after 6 months this all becomes normal. The human mind has a great capacity to adapt and acclimate if only you approach life with open eyes and unjudging mind.

Coming back from the week long training was almost harder than coming back after vacation this last December. After traveling around and living out of a backpack for 2 1 /2 weeks I was ready to come back to site. It’s still new enough here that its like coming back to more vacation in an exotic place. But after a week of being back with all 33 remain volunteers from my group going back to being the only American in a South African township took a few days of mental adjustment. No I didn’t want to wave for the 3rd time in 30 seconds to the kids screaming my name from 300 ft away. Yes I wanted to talk about the book I was reading with someone, but no one was really interested. No I don’t have any cigarettes on me you asked me that yesterday and the day before and the day before that. Yes I wanted to play a game of 6 person Hearts. It was really nice to be able to see everyone, most of whom I hadn’t talked to much since September, and catch up on how their first few months at site went. Everyones placement and experience is a little bit different, but being able to share our feelings, observations and frustrations of living and working in South Africa was great.

Now that I’ve been back at site for a week I’m back into the swing of things. Its been a busy few days and I’m working on some cool projects. As more things develop on all of them I’ll be sure to post them here. But for know I’d like to leave you with some advice I thought up while sitting in kumbies traveling to and from training last week. For those of you who have never ridden in African taxis before its a one of a kind experience. Your crammed 3 or 4 to a row to get 16 people and luggage into a small van for up to 4 hour trips. South Africa has quite an extensive kumbie system and you can get almost anywhere on them as long as your willing to switch cars several times, sit for hours waiting for a 15 person van to fill up, and then sit for hours in a packed car with just your thoughts and the blaring radio to keep you company. To keep my self busy during my last kumbie trek across South Africa I thought of a list of things to help prepare anyone for the same ordeal.

• Bring a Rubiks Cube and see how many times you can solve it on the ride. It’s also a great thing use to start a conversation with you neighbor.

• Don’t sit in the back if you’re over 6ft tall. The back seat is the one that always gets 4 people to a row, has no leg space and takes the longest to get our when you stop.

• You can try to get a window seat, but it wont help much with the over 90 degree weather because everyone will tell you to close it. Even people wearing wool sweaters in the middle of summer will tell you to close it, somethings I’ll never understand.

• Go to the bathroom before you leave in the morning and be sure to take advantage of any stops you do have. And bring a roll of toilet paper just in case because you don’t know where those stops will be.

• If you ask for directions to the correct taxi rank in Pretoria you’ll most likely get a different answer from everyone you ask. And when they say go 3 robots down and then make a right they mean 3 stop lights.

• Wear flip flops on the taxi even if it means you have to carabiner your tennis shoes to your bag, it will make your life so much more enjoyable for the hours your crammed on the taxi.

• If the car is slowing down its because there’s a traffic cop in the next 5km not because your going to fast.

• Bring cookies

One of the first things we learned after setting foot in South Africa way back in July was that food is a big part of every event here. For the first 4 days before we went to our training home stays every meal was large enough to be a Thanksgiving feast and on top of that we had tea twice a day! South African’s have most definitely mastered the art of making massive amounts of food and can easily a whole cow for a funeral or wedding along with pots and pots of pap and rice that will feed 200 people for a whole day. On this my first Thanksgiving in South Africa I’ve been contemplating what it would be like if South African’s celebrated this traditional American holiday. And I think it would most assuredly be on a scale much much larger than in America.

Of course you’d have to replace turkey with beef, cranberry source with beetroot, stuffing with pap but you’d get to keep you sweet potatoes. But the amounts of these foods that a are produced are absolutely astounding. Food and celebrations are community events here, more so in the rural village where training happened then the township I’m living in now, and Thanksgiving wouldn’t be any different if it were celebrated here. The whole community would come together to enjoy a day of celebration and thanksgiving for everything they have.

At the end of training all the volunteers, with lots of help from the Peace Corps staff, made a giant meal for all the families of our host families. This was after I’d already been to the wedding and funeral where I’d been on the consuming side of the massive amounts of food given at such events. But seeing it from the production side was truly amazing. I helped cut carrots, lettuce and meat as well as chopping wood for the fire that the meat was cooked on. The salad that we ended up making was a giant heap of carrots and lettuce that I ended up cutting smaller by attacking the whole pile with a knife. In order to give you an idea of how much food I’m talking about here I’ve posted a new photo album and you should check it out: http://www.photos.trevorperrier.com/index.php?album=pc-training%2FFood

During training there was a wedding in the village my language group was staying at.  The four members of my language group and a few volunteers from the neighboring village went to it.  Weddings in rural South Africa are a very very big event.  Family, extended family and friends came from all over the North Easter area of South Africa.  It really was a whole community event and anyone who wanted to go seemed able.  I’m sure everyone there somehow knew everyone else since that’s the way rural villages work, but only knew about 7 people but was still welcomed.

There were so many people there that it was hard to find a quite place to sit and rest.  I didn’t actually ever see  the wedding ceremony it self but it seems like most people there didn’t.  The bridal party was danced in and out of the party several times by a long train of people and spent most the time at a nearby house I was told.

Instead of doing a long blog post explaining the wedding I’ve posted a photo set.  So go check out what a South African wedding looks like here.  It will do much better than anything I could write here. Hope you enjoy the photos!

Photo Link: http://www.photos.trevorperrier.com/index.php?album=pc-training%2FWedding

One major aspect of Peace Corps Training is the home stay, the purpose of which is to teach you through cultural immersion what would could never be taught in the class room. Here are some of the things I learned while living in a small South African village for two months where the water flowed out of the communal spicket about once a week, the cows and chickens roamed free, the garbage was thrown over the fence for the goats to eat and every house had an identical government build bit latrine.

On bathing in a 2 ft basin with half a bucket of water

• Always start with your face because you wouldn’t believe how dirty the water is by the end.
• Blow out your noes while you dunk your head to wash your hair because sneezing shampoo out your nose is worse then soap in your eyes.
• Dead bugs don’t teach live bugs how not to die because ever morning there will inevitable be a few dead bugs in last nights bath water.
• No matter how good the book you’re reading is don’t wait two hours after the water is ready to bath because after taking an ice cold bath in the bleak July winter not even three blanks on your bed will warm you up.
• Don’t forget to put the lid on the bath water while it boils over the fire because smoke scented bath water can’t be masked by your Old Spice deodorant.
• The phrase don’t throw the baby out with the water finally makes sense to you after a month of throwing your dirty bath water over the fence.

On hand washing your cloths

• Always soak your socks for a good 2 hours because it makes getting the African dirt (there’s really nothing special about it that makes it African dirt its just that there’s so much of it) our of white socks so much easier.
• Don’t bring white socks or any other white clothing to Africa or any place you’ll be washing cloths by hand unless you have always wanted to tie-die them a nice tanish color.
• The answerer to a mud stain isn’t magic bleach but more elbow grease.
• It is always best to check the 3 day forecast (if you have access to a semi accurate one) before planing to do laundry because a cloudy day or dust storm ruins your plans.
• If everyone washed their cloths by hand once a year quite a few of the worlds problems would be solved because there’s nothing like 3 hours of scrubbing to let your mind come up with the best ideas.

On using a pit latrine (mine was really nice as pit latrine’s go)

• The first 3 times not flushing seems really weird, then after that its so normal you hate doing it when you use a flush toilet.
• Always care a flash light with you at night because light is the best way to scare the cockroaches back down the hole.
• Cockroaches really are going to be the only things to survive a nuclear holocaust because they seem to thrive in places you don’t eve want to see.
• On the cold July mornings you actually welcome the heat coming out of the bottom of the pit.

You ask questions you never would have asked before: Like did humans sense of smell evolve to detest the pugnacious aroma of feces or did the pugnacious aroma of feces evolve so that humans detested it?

On English

• It’s Maths not Math

Sample Conversation:

Me: My favorite subject is math.

5^th Grader: You mean maths.

Me: Yeah math like arithmetic and geometry.

5^th Grader: Yeah thats maths not math.

• American TV is not always the best teacher of English because young kids understand when to use swear words but not what they mean.

Sample Conversation:

Me: That’s actually 4.75 cm see you it goes to this small tick and not the tick half way in between.

1^st Grader: Shit. Asking for eraser.

Me: (cringing at a 6 year olds use of such a word). What did you say.

1^st Grader: Shit. It’s English my mom likes me to speak English, it means I did something wrong.

Note: The 1^st Grader’s English in question was not really good enough for me to communicate in full sentences with and was probably only a little better then my understanding of Zulu but that’s what I imagine he would have said if I could have asked him.

On other random facts of life

• Cows have much more intelligence then I ever thought, they’ll go wondering around all day and then an hour before sun set trot back home in a nice line. Its blew me away to see a double file line of 20 cows running down the street taking weaving their way through all the cross rodes to get home.
• The best way to shut the back door of a taxi van when no one is in the back is to slam the breaks really hard being sure to give the passengers a good 2 second warning.
• Breast feeding on a 3 hour taxi ride is perfectly acceptable but listing to an MP3 player will earn you strange looks.
• The best way to make sure the wild grass in your front yard or a crossed the street is to light it on fire.

I figure a good place to begin would be the beginning and the start of Pre-Service Training. Over the 47 years the Peace Corps training process has continually evolved searching for the fine line between overwhelming new trainees and boring them to death. That line is incredibly hard to find because it’s different for every single trainee, but riding that line is important not only because it’s efficient, but also because pushing hard builds the strongest bonds of trust and friendship among the trainees. My group of Peace Corps trainees was one of the most diverse groups of people I have ever had the opportunity to work with. Sure, at some deep level there must be common reasons that made us all decide to leave behind friends, family and lives that we knew for the totally unknown, but other than that we came from all walks of life, from all around America and where born in many different decades. Even so because we were all experiencing the same new adventures and working 6-8 hours together each day, Peace Corps training forged strong bonds of friendship and cooperation.

PST can sort of be thought of as multiple stages designed to push your threshold of cultural awareness and immersion. Just as your feeling comfortable at one stage the next one comes to push you further and faster along (see nice graph I made). It all started way back on July 12 when 44 complete strangers mingled in line, comparing how many socks each had packed, while waiting to sign in to Peace Corps Stagging for the 18^th group of volunteers to go to South Africa. After two days of getting to know each other we woke up really early on the 14^th , were bused to the Department of Health to get our first series of many more shots, took a quick picture in front of the capital, bused to Dullas International Airport boarded a plan, 17 hours later landed at OR Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg and where promptly bused the 2 hours to or training site in Marapyane. The first week we all stayed in the dorms of the old Teaching College training would be taking place at. We learned the greetings to six of official South African languages, got introduced to the training staff and got to know each other better.

After 4 days life seemed to have stabilized we packed one of our two bags with everything we would want for the next 8 weeks sent the other one to Pretoria for the duration of training and went to live with our assigned host family. It was during this time that the meat and pap (pap is the staple food of South Africa made out of boiled corn meal and very very filling) of training occurred. A typical day would start with 2 hours of language lessons with our language groups who all lived close by. We would then be bused to the training college for sessions a range of sessions on everything from the educational history of South Africa, cultural diversity, cell phone companies and options, or what our life might be like for the next two years. This part of PST lasted for quite a while and we had all adapted to the daily routine when the week of site visits came.

Ever since week 1 we had all anxiously been looking forward to the site visits. All questions and answers were just hypothetical until this occurred. We may have traveled over an ocean and half a continent but still Shrodinger’s cat was in the box and we had no idea what the next 2 years would actually bring. Sites where announced on a Friday and the following Monday we would all leave for a two day workshop with our new supervisors and then meet brand new host families and explore a new town. When your site was announced you were handed a small slip of paper with the name of your supervisor, the name of your host family the name of your shopping town and then name of the village. It was a weird feeling, here you sat finally holding in your hand the answer to everything you’d been wondering since the first letter of acceptance to Peace Corps came and yet it was just words on a paper with absolutely no meaning to you. Over the course of the next exciting week those names would take on meaning, would become a face with a voice, would become busy streets and would become coworkers and friends. But for now a giant 42 could have been written there and it would have meant just as much.

After a week exploring our new sites we had to all find our own way back Marapyane. For me this was a interesting and exhausting day of travel. I made it all the way from Barberton to Pretoria and then from Pretoria to Marapyane kumbies, small 15 person vans that travel a vast network of taxi ranks connecting South Africa). The journey took about 12 hours, but would have only taken 8 if I hadn’t tried to meet of with some other trainees in Middleburg. I ended up calling them right as their kumbie was driving past me and then had to wait 4 hours for the next ride to Pretoria. It was a great sense of accomplishment knowing that all alone I could get me self half way across South Africa. When we all got back together each one of us shared about our experiences over the past week. This was probably one of my favorite sessions during PST. Sure everyone had has some bad experiences, but the enthusiasm and excitement everyone had it talking about their sites was electrifying. We had reached a point in PST where no amount of additional lectures and lessons could have taught us much but were demotivating and unpractical. Going out and seeing for our selves what we would be doing and meeting the people who would become our counterparts over the next 2 years brought back the realities of why we had decided to sign up for Peace Corps in the first place: to experience apart of this vast world first hand and maybe in some small way change it as much as it would change us.