This Side

OHMYGOSH I know, I am officially the worst blogger in the history of bloggers. For this I apologize, and I will try to improve, but seeing as how I seem to make this disclaimer in almost every blog, I think it is pretty safe to assume that I won’t. I planned to write this over the previous weekend, but we just now regained electricity after almost a week and thus I had to succumb to what life must have been like for Peace Corps Volunteers pre-Globalization era (round 2) and pre-Technological Takeover (yes I created that name myself) . Since I often feel lonely and isolated, I am thankful for the fact that I can so easily access the internet, or that my Blackberry features are all completely accessible and that I am able to use my GPS to get directions from my village to anywhere in SA or maintain the ability to BBM with loved ones from home. But I also think that back home in America, we are always complaining of all of the distractions, time wasters, and technological wonders that interfere with our abilities to really be alone or to fully engage ourselves on that journey of self-discovery. It’s much more fun to watch the Bachelorette and make fun of the participants than to spend time reflecting in a journal, much more visually stimulating to spend copious amounts of time on facebook catching up on the latest gossip than to read a book, much more memorable to grab drinks with friends than to spend that time in meditation or prayer or self-reflection. However here, I don’t always have those choices. Most of my “friends” range in age from 10-17, it isn’t advisable to go out at night, and even if it were, there is absolutely nothing to do. So often I am left alone, just me and my thoughts. And even in this intense isolation and free time I still find myself constantly checking facebook, writing emails to friends to see what’s new, and watching TV shows and movies over and over. It hit me this month, that I’m still afraid to be alone. I have been given an incredible opportunity to release myself from the increasing distractions of the First World, and yet I am still managing to grasp at whatever I do have available to me in order to...what? I don’t even know. But for these reasons I have decided to take a step back, and fully allow myself to embrace this opportunity that has been given to me. I know this is all sounding tediously similar to typical (or stereotypical) Peace Corps Volunteer verbiage, and quite honestly I don’t even know how or why I started rambling like this (reason #163 why I am a bad blogger), but I think that I’m trying to justify why I am so lazy in updating my blog? Anyhow, I will stop now, and get back to the stuff you came here for.
Because I sense the inclination of this post to become very long (after all, this month has been fairly exciting), I will divide it into two parts if you will, so that you can ‘skip ahead’ to what you are really interested in reading and knowing about moi. After short deliberation, I have decide to organize the post like so: Projects (and vacations) that I am doing and still hope to do and Anecdotes.


Projects (and vacations) that I am doing and still hope to do

This topic is very exciting to me, because things have really taken off and I’m finally feeling my sense of purpose here as a Peace Corps Volunteer. I’m going to have to save larger more complicated projects for the new year, as I have weeklong trainings and trips, and all of the students are in exams until December when the schools will close for the new year. As a result, I’m still in the process of building the library and computer labs, and hope to do a water sanitation project and a soccer project that combines the sport with HIV/Aids education, in the early part of next year. Many things that I had hoped to have off the ground by December will most definitely not be, but I’m far less stressed or upset about it than I would have been 4 months ago, and I think I can safely say that those ‘expectations’ that I swore I didn’t have, have finally adjusted.

In the project sphere, things are going great with the Girls Club. After two months of bi-weekly meetings, I have finally gained their trust and respect enough for them to confide in me about the serious things that go on in their lives. Though I often have no idea how to respond, I know that being able to even say the words to me are a big step. I’m happy that I can be that figure for them, distanced enough from their group of friends that they know I won’t gossip, and distanced enough from the rest of the community that they know I won’t judge me. Though I can’t begin to understand the cultural implications that cause many of these awful things to happen, and subsequently prohibit the girls from ever reporting the grave crimes or dealing with the less serious issues, I do my best, and I’m glad that I can be an outlet for many of these girls who are suffering.

Because I could sense that they were getting bored with our introductory topics of ‘goal setting’ and ‘what roles are expected of girls/women’, these next two months are going to be focusing on puberty, safe sex, pregnancy, and HIV/Aids and other STDs. Last week I had the girls write anonymous questions about what they wanted to know/talk about, and I was absolutely elated to find some questions of “my boyfriend is pressuring me to have sex but I’m not ready, what should I do?”. As I said, many girls here start having sex at young ages and end up pregnant by 15. So to find that this was not a rampant issue (at least for now) with my girls was very encouraging. Though today we are talking about puberty and menstruation (fun), I’m most excited for our STDs lesson where I will scare them with the pictures of what untreated STDs can look like and do to your body. As if early teenage sex wasn’t enough of a problem, safe sex is rarely practiced and many young girls who don’t know the implications end up with STDs that they don’t understand. Since they can’t or don’t talk to their parents about those types of things, and in the absence of any literature or proper education on the topics, many girls and boys let their STDs go untreated. I know that this happens all around the world, but I believe that with these types of issues grassroots education can be phenomenally effective.

Anyway, yoga with the girls is going great. They absolutely love their new mats, and I am trying to extend the yoga teaching to a larger group that can come on Saturday mornings. I can see that some of the girls are really progressing, and I am still amazed that they can be quiet long enough to do 5 minutes of breathing techniques and 10 minutes of savasana, because they definitely cannot find it in themselves to be quiet for even 1 minute during Girls Club meetings. I think they like it mostly because it is so different, and because I do it and they “love my body”, but I believe that in time they will come to understand and appreciate yoga as a practice and not just a fun thing to do on Wednesday afternoons.

The Gogo support group is still going strong, and we are picking up new participants weekly. My biggest struggle with them (and the people working on the project with me) is to get them to understand that this is primarily a support group, NOT a bead project. But as it happens here, there is so much focus on money and income that I can’t exactly blame them as using the bead project as incentive to get people to come. But people will stop me on the street and say, when is the bead meeting? And I reply, the SUPPORT GROUP meeting is Wednesday at 11. But gogos are gogos, and I love them most of all.

This month I did an HIV/Education and art project with the primary school and Jr. High, as a predecessor to the World Aids Day event that we are planning for December 1 of this year. I went into all of the classrooms of grades 5-9 and used the entire period to talk about the basics of HIV transmission and prevention, and a great deal about stigma. The stigma that surrounds HIV/Aids in the rural villages is devastating and prohibits and unfortunately large amount of people from testing, taking medication, or disclosing their status. Most people won’t even go to the local clinic to test for HIV, because they don’t even want the nurses (who are supposed to be 100% confidential) to know if they are HIV positive. People gossip so much in the small villages, and they are afraid of what they don’t know about. So my goal with this art project, and with the World Aids Day event, is to get people talking about HIV, what it is, how it affects us, and how we can still live healthy lives if we have it. That is my biggest goal when I do any sort of HIV education, is to emphasize the point that HIV is not a death sentence, it doesn’t have to kill us.

So anyway, this project was by far the hardest thing I’ve done since being here. Not only was I literally screaming in the classrooms (the teachers were all grading papers in the teachers lounge and were uninterested in keeping the students quiet for me), but anyone who knows me well most likely knows about my rational (yes, I meant rational) fear of teenage boys. Back home in Newport, I would strategically plan my run (which passed the high school and jr. High) for a time when I knew that the students would be in class and unable to taunt me. Teenage boys are SO HARSH and will find a reason to make fun of anyone for any reason at all. That was why I made some of my caregivers come in the classrooms with me, under the guise of needing help with translation. Luckily for me, I don’t speak fluent Ndebele and I couldn’t understand what I was sure to be rude and degrading remarks from the back corners of my room while I gave my lesson. Unluckily for me I didn’t break through to everyone, for a few of the pieces of ‘artwork’ I had returned to me simply held phone numbers of adolescent boys or requests for my phone number, because they ‘love me so much and need to marry me’. Eish.

Last month I went with three other volunteers on an incredible backpacking trip through the Drakensberg mountains. This is an absolutely gorgeous mountain range which stretches from the northern province of Limpopo down to KwazuluNatal, which was where we went. The particular place where we entered was part of a village, where the chief actually owned the land. So the tourism center was more of a community development project, and all of the guides were local men who had grown up in the village and new the area. We hiked for four days with our packs on our backs carrying all of our clothes, food, and tents. We spent one day walking from the center through the village to the base of one of the mountain, one day hiking up the mountain, and two days hiking back. I wish I had the ability to describe how beautiful and breathtaking the sights were, but hopefully my pictures will suffice. This was one of the most incredible (and badass) things I have ever done and am so grateful to be serving in a country that allows me such incredible vacation opportunities. It is also hard to describe how incredibly alone we were on that hike. There were no other hikers or travellers, and we were completely alone in nature. It was an overwhelming and amazing feeling that is increasingly hard to find in our world. By the way, on the second night we camped on top of the mountain. And when I say on top I really mean on the side of, as in, we were basically sleeping on a cliff, on which if you lost your footing, sleptwalked, or maybe had one drink too many you definitely could have fallen off the side of the mountain. After I survived that, I acknowledged how awesome it was, but I spent a long part of that night convinced I was going to tumble off the side to my death.

Anecdotes
Now, it is important to note that this umbrella of a topic is a constant part of my daily life, meaning weird stuff happens to me every day. I will try to highlight the more interesting ones.
To begin: yes I am still having my spider issue. I haven’t yet seen another monster sized one; I think this is primarily in response to the fact that I constantly douse my room with the insect killer known as Doom (the most wonderful invention and probably the most used by PCVs around the world), but I also choose to believe that it is because I sometimes like to ‘leave a warning’, and the insects truly get my message. Leaving a warning means that when I kill a smaller spider or gross insect on one of my walls, I will sometimes leave the dead body there to deter and other unwelcome guests and to send the message that should they attempt to enter my room, they will meet the same fate. I wake up every day and scan the walls and floor to make sure I’m not surprised by any death seekers while I’m washing dishes or getting dressed. The other day I found a fist-sized spider on my wall, and since my big host brother was at school, I made the 4 year old come into my room, because somehow that mitigated my fear of what would happen if I threw my shoe at it and it didn’t die. Sometimes I wonder who let me into Peace Corps in the first place. On Monday I found a centipede on my floor, and I know from personal experience that if they bite you, it HURTS (and by personal I really mean my I watched how horrifically it hurt my dad because my sister and I screamed and forced him to kill it when we found one in our bed while on vacation not too many years ago). True to form, I yelled for my host brother (the big one), and he came in and I pointed out the centipede for him, which in my language means, ‘take care of this please’. He then asks, ‘Uyasaba?’ (are you scared?). I tried to explain that no, I wasn’t scared, but that I happened to know that their bites can be very painful, but I think he stopped listening to me. Now every time I call his name (for something unrelated to an insect), his first question to me is, ‘Uyasaba?”.

I don’t feel too bad about designating him as my personal guardian against insects, because I do my fair share of things for him as well. Today, for instance, I was preparing for Girls Club in my room, and he walked in, set the 5 month old baby down on my floor, and walked out without a word. Okay, I’ll babysit. I’m happy to babysit actual babies, but grown women, not so much. Take, for instance, last weekend. South Africans (at least in the villages), love to use a social media tool called Mixit, which is very similar to an online chat room, except that people use it on their phones. People meet through friends, or whatever, and talk about who knows what. My host brother told me that sometimes he goes on and pretends that he is a girl, and also sometimes a lesbian. He also poses as himself to meet girlfriends. For two months, my brother had been chatting with one girl who somewhere along the way became his girlfriend, though they had never met. Last weekend was destined to be their first date. And by date I mean she comes over to the house and he hides her from his parents. In this culture it is often considered disrespectful to talk to your parents about boyfriends/girlfriends, and especially about sex. This clearly has negative consequences, since girls are growing up not understanding the basics of sex and end up pregnant at 15. Since many teenagers live in rooms outside of the house, they will have their ‘significant other’ stay there for the night and the parents will never know. This was my brother’s plan. What he didn’t anticipate however, was an interception by his father who needed help fixing his taxi. So he made the poor girl stand outside of the compound in the pitch black (it was around 7:45 pm) while he went to help his father and form a plan. Thus, he came to me in desperation, needing my help because she was scared and I apparently had nothing better to do on a Friday night (wrong, I was going to watch Star Wars while I ate my salad). After some cajoling I end up walking outside to pick up the poor girl who thought she was going to get killed by Tsotsi gangsters (don’t worry, I assured her, we have to Tsotsis in Bundu—as if I have any idea what I’m talking about), and proceed to escort her into my room. Well, the taxi repairs took longer than anticipated and two hours later, Precious was still sitting in my room and we were discussing our favourite flavors of pie. I had shown her every single one of my pictures (which elicited the response, “you love to go to parties, don’t you”), and had exhausted every topic of conversation that I had. Luckily for me, she spoke perfect English and she was so nice that I felt truly sorry for her that her first date had taken such an unfortunate turn. My favorite part of the night, however, was when I asked her how she knew my brother, and she replied that they chatted on the phone every day. I tried to assure her that he was a really great guy, and her response to me was, “I’m aware”. Oh, I’m sorry, are you giving me sass right now? Well, finally the taxi was fixed and my brother came back to escort his girlfriend back to his room. When I woke up the next morning, Precious was gone, and my brother gave me bread to express his thanks for my babysitting. This may all sound utterly ridiculous, and it is, but to be honest, absolutely nothing surprises me anymore.

Since nothing about my villages surprises me anymore, I would think that nothing that I do anymore should surprise the people in my village. However, that is not the case. I’m convinced that everybody in my village already thinks I’m crazy, among other reasons because: I don’t like or eat pap, I am 23 and I don’t have any children, I run and do yoga, I don’t sweep the dirt in front of my hut, I don’t dust my shoes off right before I start walking on a dirt road again, and on the weekends I like to sleep late. However if any of them had doubts about me before, I’m quite certain that the actions I took part in this weekend convinced them that I am indeed nuts. Since summer is upon us and every day is about 100 degrees and sunny, I decided that yesterday would be the perfect day to start working on my tan. My family has a porch with a small wall so nobody outside of the house could see me, and none of the boys were home so I was stoked to take advantage of the miserable heat. Pointing to the spot I had designated and speaking in my pathetic Ndebele I told my host mom that “I am going to sleep here because I like the sun and I want to be black”. I didn’t know the word for lay down, and I’m 98% sure they don’t have a word for ‘tan’, so this was the best I could do. My host mom says, “okay!”, which I find out soon to mean she didn’t understand what I was saying. About 5 minutes into my peaceful tanning session (don’t worry mom, I was wearing lots of sunscreen) I hear shrieks of “SBONGILE WENZANI??? KUYATJISA!!!!!!!” (translation: what the heck are you doing, it is really hot outside). These shrieks were followed by the neighbor girls coming over to see what I could possibly be doing that would make my host mom yell so loudly at me. Now since none of my village friends and counterparts have the same issues in this department, I found it difficult to explain why I would want to do this to my skin. I didn’t mind, but things got awkward when a small crowd of friends and neighbors gathered around to stare at me and talk about how absolutely nutso I was. I then decided it was time to be culturally appropriate and go inside.

Since this is quickly becoming the longest blog in the history of blogs, I’ll end here with some things you may not know about South Africa.

*Starting with, in the Ndebele language there is no word for thin or skinny. There is a word for fat, but the translation for thin is “small body”. In case you don’t know why this is funny, it is funny because the greater majority of people here are huge.

*There are two phrases that people love to use to describe place, these being ‘this side’ and ‘that side’. This side means wherever I am right now, being perhaps my bed, my village, or South Africa as a whole. That side means, wherever you are or were, and it could mean anywhere from the other side of the house to the other side of the world. It’s all relative.

*South African beer does not taste good. South African wine tastes wonderful.

*Finally, people in the village are not so kind to animals, especially dogs. Dogs are mostly for security and protection, and are not so nice when people (me) try to pet them or play with them. When a dog is getting too close and personal, the term that people use to say go away is “Fut Sec” (I know that the spelling isn’t right on that), which I think is Afrikaans and translates to “Piss Off”. When I went to Pretoria to go to church for Easter, I was told by the family that I was staying with that if I wanted to say ‘Thank you so much’ for something, that the Afrikaans phrase was “Fut Sec”. Fortunately for me, I already knew the real meaning and so did not fall victim to their trick, but I cringe to think how embarrassed I would be if I had.

Peace out people, pictures to follow!