Saturday, November 27, 2010

L.S.T.

Jess writes:

Last week, Adam and I attended yet another of our –ST’s in Peace Corps! This one, following PST and IST is “Life Skills Orientation Training” (as mentioned in a previous post, apparently the ‘O’ does not mesh well with the acronym, so it is conveniently left out!) LST pairs PCV’s with their counterparts, usually from departments of their organizations that focus on work with orphans & vulnerable children or education with adolescents. The purpose of LST is to train PCVs and their counterparts on the techniques associated with transferring critical, life-changing skills to youth – i.e., responsible decision making, anatomy and sexuality, myths & facts about HIV/AIDS, etc.

Thus, with Margaret (from Jeppes Reef) and Busie (from Thembalethu) in tow, Adam and I made our way to sunny Durban. Well, first of all, not so sunny when we arrived… but that’s okay, we were staying in a hotel with flush toilets, showers, and a 3-times-a-day free buffet!!! Ahhhh, civilization!!

As always, it was great to see some of our further-away-fellow-PCVs, all those Limpopo and KZN people that we only get to fraternize with on the rare occasion that Peace Corps pays for our transportation to get together! And, also as always, the training itself had its high points and its lulls, but unlike some other PC trainings we have attended, the counterparts at LST were surprisingly engaged, communicative, and questioning – oh my!! In fact, the majority of questions and input came from our South African coworkers, rather than our fellow PCVs, a rare and entirely surprising thing to witness! Nearly all the PCVs made some mention of this observation and all of us felt pretty excited to be a part of the experience!!

While the overall training was fairly informative, certain highlights stuck out:

For example, AIDS Soccer…beachside – hosted by our own Nkomazi-based Alex Tran – in which teams were divided into ‘HIV’ and ‘Immune System’. The ‘Immune System’ team was expected to play by all the regular rules of professional league soccer, while the ‘HIV’ team was (conveniently) allowed to push, hit, kick offsides, and in general, create all-out chaos on the pitch. Furthermore, team ‘Immune System’ was often given red cards for penalties such as “falling down when being pushed” or “unfair goals”… for absolutely no reason!! And finally, whenever an ‘Immune System’ player was escorted off the field for receiving these dubious red cards, they were also given a paper describing the type of stigma with which they had been assigned (i.e., ‘Prostitute’, ‘In Denial’, etc.) and another ‘HIV’ team member was invited to join the winning team. Slowly but surely, team ‘Immune System’ was down to only a handful of flagging players and team ‘HIV’ had increased exponentially in size to almost twenty players!!! (Are we getting the metaphor here??) Thus, it was a truly unique and fun way of providing a visual to the HIV vs. Immune System battle and, of course, also allowed for lots of trash-talking and laughs!! Thanks Tran!

The mid-week, Role-Play Teach-Backs were also pretty entertaining. These were performed by PCVs and their counterparts, in pairs or small groups. Each would be given a lesson to ‘teach back’ to the larger group in some type of engaging way. Busie & I were assigned “Decision Making” and decided to focus on the ineptitude of many youth to assist their fellow peers in making tough decisions in life-altering circumstances. In order to introduce this approach, we acted out the following – slightly stereotyped – skit, where Busie played the role of a young female in trouble and I played the role of an unhelpful schoolmate:

Me: Hello SesBusie [Sister Busie]! Howzit [how is everything]?

Busie: Hello sesi [sister], oh, not very good. Yesterday I found out that I am pregnant… And I can't tell my parents...

Me: Eish! Shame…

Busie: Yes, and now I think I will have to marry an older man to pay for everything…

Me: Oh my sesi, ooh…

Busie: And he will not let me go to school, because I will have to take care of his other children…

Me: Oh so sorry…

Busie: And I will have to sleep with him in order to get enough food for me and the baby…

Me: Eh! Shame sesi…

Busie: So I have no idea what I should do, I’m struggling.

Me: Yebo [yes], I see this. I do. So do you want to go to town after school today and look at the new skirts at PEP?

Busie: Ummm… okay.

The fact that Busie spoke in perfect English (with perfect grammer) and I spoke with a very heavy South African accent and utilized every physical gesticulation I could think of with all the ‘Eish’ and ‘Shame’ remarks had everyone quite amused, and yet, we also seemed to get the point across quite well.

And finally, while not entirely related to training, perhaps the best part of LST was witnessing the sheer joy of our counterparts playing at the beach. While it may seem entirely normal to any of us (especially those of us that grew up on or near the beach), the thought of running in the sand and, quite literally, frolicking in the waves was unsurprisingly foreign to our wonderful, South African coworkers. Thus, on the very few days when afternoon sessions allowed for free time on the beach, our counterparts were some of the first to strip down to bras, slips, and other undergarments and go rolling around in the tide! It was delightful to watch – as uninhibited PCVs and spontaneously free counterparts dove under white caps and got tossed onto the beach by every other wave. At one point, I sat beside Busie and Margaret in the surf and asked if they had ever been to Durban before. Both had, but at much younger ages, with family. And Margaret added with a huge smile, “But I don’t ever remember having this much fun!” Yeah, it made me smile too!

So all in all, I think our counterparts took back quite a bit of useful information from our LST lessons and sessions, but more so than anything else, I think we all got a rare chance to see eachother just having fun – acting like carefree kids in a profession and country where we (both volunteers and coworkers) do not typically get a chance to do so. It seemed to me that this was a true vacation.

Thursday, November 11, 2010

RWO: Hey, Hi, Howdy, Hello

“Hello”, in almost all indigenous South African languages, translates literally to “I see you” (yes, think Avatar). And the formal way of greeting someone is in the plural, which symbolizes not only addressing them, but also all those in their family, which we think is kinda nifty. Where we live, it’s expected to greet virtually everyone you see on the road to/from work by at least making eye contact and saying hello, “Sawubona” or “Sanibonani”, and asking how they/their family are doing “Unjani” or “Ninjani”. This becomes especially important when passing Gogos (grandmothers) because they are particularly happy when greeted by visitors, so the procedure usually involves slowing your pace (perhaps almost to a stop in the middle of the road) and often involves much more elongated and inunciated greetings, “Saw-u-boooo-na”, and even sometimes a hand shake/hold as well. The only time that these greetings are waived is during particularly busy travel time, such as when school lets out… simply put, because it is virtually impossible to stop and talk to that many kids! But either way, it certainly does put a new (or perhaps old) twist on the whole nod-and-mutter-greeting that we’ve come to love so much in the States… ahhhh.

Thursday, November 4, 2010

Block B: From Big Braais to Boo Bashes

Jess writes:

October has been the month to be in Block B – the town on the East Side of Nkomazi that one of our fellow PCVs calls home. And while Block B may not be the most convenient get together location for all, our Block B PCV happens to have the largest host family home in the area – hence, the place to eat, drink, and be merry! So, this month, Block B hosted two Nkomazi events: A BBQ, dubbed “The Newbie Braai”, and an oh-so-creative Halloween Bash!

The Newbie Braai brought together the last-few-standing SA19s (from January 2009), the feet-now-wet SA21s (us, from January 2010), and of course, the shiny-and-new SA22s (from July 2010). We were also joined by some Afrikaaner friends that were assisting with a video project in some of our PCV villages! Coming from the western reaches of Schoemansdal and the eastern reaches of Steenbok (as well as the civilizations of Pretoria), we gathered to cook way too much food and welcome our new Peace Corps family members. Beginning with Mexican food (what else?) on Saturday night and topping it off with an obscene amount of bbq-ed meat on Sunday, we managed to cover everything from Peace Corps paperwork requirements to the best shopping spots in “the pocket” (aka, Nkomazi)! All in all, it was a great way to get to know our newest neighbors. So, to Matt, Kristy, Andrew, Meg and John: Welcome!

The Halloween Bash was just that – as we joined with our Nkomazi crew, as well as some fellow 21s from far-away Mpumalanga lands (okay, not really far-away) and some of the other volunteers/residents from our own Thembalethu family! The highlight, of course, were the very creative and the not-so-creative costumes that accompanied the night. Bottoming out the list, sadly, was our own group from Schoemansdal – due mainly to the last-minute decision to join on our small budget – so… Adam dawned his Porkslap t-shirt and we called it a “beer snob” costume; I put on a skirt for the first time in almost 6 months and called myself a “Peace Corps Trainee”, Hank (the Dutch volunteer at Thembalethu) wore his normal clothes, which screams enough EU-ness to be considered a “Johnny Depp-ish” look; and Corey (our Thembalethu-based American resident) wore, well, nothing that resembled any form of costume, but gets more credit than the rest for driving us all over there in his wonderfully air conditioned car!! Next came the all-blue jumpsuit that designates the typical, South African “Eskom Worker”, made even better by the fact that the pants were more than a couple inches too short; followed by our resident “Cat Lady”, which was basically every-day wear as long as you were carrying around Savannah, the house cat; then the mosquito-netting-winged “Mosquito” costume, paired with a dozen mosquito-borne illnesses on index cards that were egregiously handed out throughout the evening; arriving fashionably late was our “Indian Couple”, complete with a bindi for the girl and a full turban for the guy; there was also a “Coombie”, yes, the entire coombie, made from cardboard and drawn-on with crayons, that fit not only the driver, but even a few raucous passengers; and finally, perhaps the most disturbing of all, was the… ummm… I have no idea what it was: Afrikaaner-esque short shorts, tall socks, sandals, a Springbok rugby jersey, a two-cup beer helmet, and to top it all off, an insanely tacky South African flag cape – circa World Cup 2010. Oh boy… now that was a sight to behold (I encourage everyone to see the Facebook photos for the full effect)!! In order to make the Halloween party as interesting as possible, our genteel Nkomazi government decided to cut the electricity until after dark, which conveniently added to the Haloweeney feel to our night. But as the dark got darker, we mustered all our night-trekking skills and gathered as much brush and as many random branches as possible in order to create some make-shift firelight in a braai pit in the courtyard – hey, you need at least a little light to keep eating, drinking, and making merry, right?

In the end, as October closed, we managed to celebrate not only a successful welcome party but also a happy Halloween afterall… Block B style… with just a little more than a bit of a South African flare!!