And now for something, completely different

You must by now actually be wondering what I have been doing IN the village, you know...what your tax dollars are actually contributing to apart from my fabulous vacations. Well you are in luck, because things are as busy as ever.

Before reading this post, I would like you to learn the Zulu term, Sizobona. It means, we will see. I could try counting the number of times in a day I say that, but I think I would lose count and you wouldn’t really care to know anyway. My point is, some things that I’m doing are really wonderful. Some are supposed to be wonderful, but they never end up happening. Some were never planned, but end up being wonderful. Some are just flat out the worst. If I’ve learned one thing over the past year as a PCV, it’s that things will never go exactly the way I want them to. So instead of freaking out and crying when my co-workers aren’t at work by 9:01 a.m., I’ve adjusted to a much more laissez-faire attitude, and I take each day and experience for what it is. And what it becomes, sizobona.

Things you already know about:

The Gogo group: The support group is going strong, and each meeting brings new participants and more questions and discussion than the last. This week we had a record high of 30 attendees, and a record high of 3 questions being asked on health topics unrelated to what we were discussing. In case this seems small, you should know that this is HUGE. Many people are very reluctant to talk about personal issues in public, and the idea of a support group is foreign to them. In fact, the first few meetings consisted of me talking about my problems and women sighing or groaning in relation to my pain, but not offering anything up of their own. Finally I wised up and realized that this would have to come, and we devised a routine that makes them more comfortable, in which we “lecture” on an aspect of health education for about 30 minutes and then ask some discussion questions. Afterwards, we quiz them to make sure that they understood or were listening. To hear them ask questions about other things they are struggling with or unclear on, is wonderful and I definitely consider it a breakthrough. My day is instantly turned around when a Gogo from the group spots me from across the road and proceeds to scream out a song or dance that we did in one of our meetings. AND, I brought the beaded AIDS ribbons that they had made to the Health Symposium and thanks to the generosity of other volunteers and PC staff, made over $100 for the Gogos to take home as personal and independent income. Yebo Gogo!

Girls Club: Also going strong. Due to graduations and some of the girls realizing after 7 months of meetings that I’m not actually as cool as they think I am, we added about 10 new members. It has been a lot of fun getting to know new girls and they add a great dynamic to the group. We have 30 yoga mats and we have impromptu classes other than the scheduled Wednesday for whenever girls decide they want to do it (best news ever: i found out that some of the girls got together and did it themselves while i was away on vacation. Yahoo!). What I love the most, however, is their willingness to finally open up to me and talk to me about serious issues that are affecting them at home and at school; issues that they may not have anyone else to talk to about it.

Things you may not know about:

Computer classes: Late last year I found out that the Jr. High that I am helping to build a library, was also stocked with 10 computers that had just been sitting at someone’s home for the past year because none of the teachers know how to use them. I finally forced the principal to bring them in, emphasizing the fact that I won’t be here next year (omg) to help teach and train. I honestly thought it was never going to happen until one day I show up at the school and all of the computers are inside and set up and oh I’m supposed to be ready to teach tomorrow. Who would have thought. After discussing that tomorrow probably isn’t best but I can be ready by next month, we agreed, fixed all of the virus racked computers, created a time table of when and how the classes will be conducted, and spread the word to the kids about what a treat they were in for. Well, Monday is that day. I’m excited to start, but am also pretty nervous due to my aforementioned rational fear of adolescent boys, combined with the fact that I know I’m not a great teacher. But regardless, Monday is approaching and I no longer have any excuses to put it off. Sizobona!

Pen Pal Exchange: My friend Eric has been doing Teach for America in LA for the past two years. We decided that s neat project could be for our students to participate in a letter writing pen-pal exchange. I remember having a pen-pal in third grade, I think she was from Japan and that’s all I remember but I do know that I really liked it. So last week the 6^th grade English class that I sometimes work with wrote letters to each of his 5^th grade class. The kids loved it, and though there will definitely be some cultural confusions and literacy issues (one kid wrote that his “fafored color is red”), I’m really excited to see what Eric’s class responses are. Some letters were pretty lame (the cool kids in the back don’t need pen-pals, they have mp3 players with Rihanna’s new song to listen to instead) but some kids got really into it and described their experiences as South Africans and how interested they were in meeting kids from America. I’m hoping we can set up some kind of Skype session once more contact has been established.

Camp Glow: This will be my major project for the next two months. Another PCV and I are planning on holding a 5 day leadership camp in July for the girls in our Girls Clubs. At her site in Limpopo, she is working with a similar group of girls to build knowledge of basic life-skills and help the girls in realizing their goals and dreams while achieving empowerment. I have really high hopes for the camp, (GLOW stands for Girls Leading Our World), and we have some great ideas on how to make this a unique and memorable experience for the girls. Many PCVs around the world conduct camps like this and I’ve seen them to be a highlight of service for those whom I know.

I promise it won’t be another two months before you receive 20 updates from me again. Until then, e-mail me and tell me what the heck is up with you!

Lots of love.

Victoria Falls

I think that the understatement of the year would be to tell you that South Africa loves Easter. I love Easter too, but they looooooove Easter. So much, that we get practically 3 days of extra holidays, and the entire country shuts down. Thursday, let’s call it Good Friday eve, becomes a half day, meaning organizations and schools either close or work until about 10 a.m. (after opening at 9:30 a.m.), and then decide to close. Nothing can or will be done until next week Tuesday. Good Friday is a holiday, then the Monday after Easter is “family day” (no I don’t know what that means). The timing of Easter this year was extremely convenient (thanks sun or orbit of the moon or whatever it is that dictates the date of Easter) and happened to collide with an array of other holidays such as: well I don’t actually no what they are but NO WORK! Most organizations and schools were closed from Thursday April 21 (Good Friday eve) until Tuesday, May 2nd. Even though I had just been gone for almost two weeks due to MST and the Health Symposium (see below posts), everybody else leaves the village for Easter and I always do what everybody else does, so..vacation!!
Three friends and I decided to fly to Zambia to see one of the 7 natural wonders of the world (yes I googled it to make sure my bragging is justified), Victoria Falls. The falls are absolutely enormous and beautiful, and at this time of year are so mighty and full of water that at many angles you can only see the mist from the falls. After entering the park, there are 3 different trails that you can take, one leads pretty much under the waterfalls (I’ve heard you can do this in Niagra falls, but I’ve never been so don’t take my word for it) and you get absolutely soaked to the bone. It is pretty awesome, and..free shower. Another leads you on a walk along the outside, where you can see the falls from several different angles, and much farther away so you can get a better idea of how big and expansive they are. Our favorite was the hike down to what is called the “Boiling Point” where the water creates whirlpools and you can see the path of the water through a beautiful gorge after it falls off of the cliffs. Unfortunately the water was too high at this time of year to do white water rafting (but, been there done that) or what is called the Devils Pool. My sources say that Devil’s Pool is literally a group of pools on the top/edge of the falls, that are surrounded by rocks and you can swim or hang out with them. Meaning you are mere feet from going over the edge of the falls. Awesome! Sadly we were prohibited from being so extreme so we had to settle on watching the bunjee jumpers off of the bridge that connects Zambia and Zimbabwe. For the record, cynics, I would have jumped but it cost $150.
Other highlights included safaris and game drives (baby elephants are the CUTEST), a sunset cruise along the Zambezi river, and my personal favourite...pretending to be rich. In true PC fashion, we only make enough money to stay at backpackers (hostels), in some of which you may or may not encounter bed bugs or really drunk fat guys sleeping in the bed above you. I like backpackers, but you never know what you’re going to get. Which is why you must learn to hotel crash! Hotel crashing is the best. All you do is put on your nicest outfit, take a taxi to the nicest 5 star resort along the Zambezi river, and walk in like you own the place. If someone gives you a questioning look, you take out your cell phone and pretend to call your mom and tell her that you’ve arrived at their hotel. Then you walk over to the pool and lay out for the next 6 hours. Now it’s not absurd for people who don’t stay at hotels to go and have a meal or drink, and I’m not without a moral compass, which is why I believe in order to ethically hotel crash you must order food and/or drinks by the pool. That way you are contributing to their economy and if you get caught then you can say, “Oh I’m sorry I didn’t realize I wasn’t allowed to drink this cocktail in my bathing suit while inside of the pool. That’s for residents only?”
Other No-No’s while hotel crashing:
• do not talk about living in your village so loud that the evil lady next to you realizes that you are not actually staying here and tells your friend that the chair next to her is occupied, when you know full well that it is not.
• when the waiter asks if you are staying at the hotel, do not say no. say instead, oh we’re staying at the sister hotel next door. or the before mentioned, my parents are staying here.
• do not under any circumstances, freak out when you realize that the Margarita you just drank cost you $16. if you could really afford to stay there, cost wouldn’t matter.
All in all, Victoria Falls was great. We are still trying to figure out the best time of the year to go. Friends have gone when the water was too low that you can barely even see anything coming over the falls. We went when it was so high you can’t defeat death by swimming in a pool of rocks at the edge of a cliff. You must choose your own fate.

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.

Longtom Marathon

Though I unfortunately do not have any pictures to prove that I completed the race...I DID! I planned to walk at least half of the half-marathon (I’m not a very good runner), but the adrenaline, fabulous play-list that I made, and encouraging friends kept me going strong and I ran almost the entire time. I finished 13.1 miles in 2 hours and 20 minutes, a slow pace but a pace nonetheless. The feeling of ‘bad-ass-ness’ that I experienced after finishing the race was unreal. It felt so amazing to have completed that race and to have pushed myself beyond farther limits than I ever thought I could. And by that I mean, the longest I have ever run consecutively in my life is 3 miles. And that was in high school.

There were about 30 other PCVs who came and participated in the race, and it’s always fun to get together with friends that I sometimes don’t see for 3 or 4 months. After the race we had a huge braii and dance party (pictured above) to celebrate our completion of the half-marathon (13.1 miles) and the ultra-marathon (34 miles) that some crazies kicked butt in.

Through the selfless donations that many of you made, along with those solicited by other PCVs, raised over $22,000 for the KLM Foundation. This will cover the entire tuition and living expenses at a private high school for two deserving South African students. I can’t fully explain the significance of this without you experiencing how awful many of the education systems and facilities are in these rural areas. As I said before, students are learning in overcrowded classrooms with little to no resources, with teachers who often do not show up to class because they are ‘tired’ or ‘stressed’, and are taught primarily in English by many teachers who do not even understand it completely themselves. Attending a private school (which most cannot afford) offers a world of opportunities that may not be available to these children otherwise. Thank you for your donations and your support, and stay tuned for updates about the ultra marathon (58 miles) that I will be running next month (PSYCH!).