MST and the Health Symposium

As of March 26, 2011, I was officially a PCV for one year (the first two months of training don’t technically count as service). To commemorate this incredible achievement (if I do say so myself) and reflect upon our positive and negative experiences over the past year, we had a 2 day conference called Mid Service Training (MST) with all of the people in my group (some of whom I hadn’t seen for 8 months). We were lead through some exercises to aid us in reflecting over our accomplishments, failures, joys, and struggles as well as planning for the year to come. Mostly I’m just so extremely proud of us for coming this far amidst the obstacles, loneliness, and really big spiders/rats/BATS that have invited themselves to live with me in my room.
Of course, a training wouldn’t be complete without something absolutely ridiculous...enter: karaoke. Now, getting around the city is difficult without a car, and taxis are expensive so we don’t often deviate from the normal restaurants and bars. That’s why it’s wonderful to make friends with South African’s who have cars and love to cart around Americans and watch them look like idiots. My friend Andrew had long ago suggested we find a place to karaoke, because well...karaoke!! Luckily, our South African friends knew just the place! Only thing is, karaoke bars aren’t often teeming with talent or business on a Wednesday night. Perfect, you must be thinking. So was I. We enter the bar in an extreme gust of adrenaline and excitement to find...no one. Well, not no one. There was one shady dude in a suit sitting alone at the bar, two larger men singing an Afrikaans love ballad to...the shady guy in the suit sitting at the bar? And finally, maybe 3 or 4 teenagers playing pool who just wanted a night off from studying to relax and have some good conversation. But they got so much more. I want to say there were about 20 of us present, and our song choices ranged from Total Eclipse of the Heart, to something by ABBA, to Bohemian Rhapsody, to a tribute to SA21 with Sweet Caroline, to Frank Sinatra. Intermixed with our passionate and heartfelt musical stylings would be an occasional Afrikaans love ballad that we couldn’t understand but sang along to anyway. We also fashionably demonstrated how to Suki Suki (sp?) which is a wonderful phenomenon in which South Africans ballroom dance to hard rock music...yeah. I want to say that the high point of the night came when my friend and I were singing the Titanic theme song, My Heart Will Go On, and the DJ decided he had heard enough and literally turned off the music and welcomed the next performers on stage in the middle of me harmonizing (read: screaming) “Near, Far, wherEVERRRR you are”. Talk about an ego boost, am I right? As the night progressed, passerbys on the street must have heard the commotion and come in, because by the time we decided it was time to leave, we had quite an audience, and we were all losing our voices. One for the books, this night was.
So...after MST we had a week long all-volunteer conference that was called the Health Symposium. There we about 100 volunteers + their counterparts (both health volunteers and education volunteers) being trained in the responses of the SA government, PEPFAR, and the CDC to HIV/Aids and Orphans and Vulnerable Children in SA, how to teach and facilitate life-skills with youth, organizational development, and permagardening. I attended the permagarden track with a co-worker from my organization, where we learned efficient and environmentally friendly practices for training and operating small gardens. This year we hope to do trainings with various community members and organizations to start or improve on their gardens.