Pics!

My host sister outside our latrine at my house.



Walking home in the afternoon.



The Seleteng superhighway.

Mphahlele's central banking district.

Some other trainees and I at our farwell party.

My host brothers during training in our backyard.

I know these are only a few, but I will try and get some more posted as soon as I decide to get acquanited with the idea of walking around my village with a digital camera.

Saying Goodbye to Kansas and African Chile Rellenos

Trusted Comrades,

Firstly, I must apologize to all those who have been following my blog somewhat consistently for the time elapsed between now and my last post. I will admit that it has been difficult to sit down and write to you these last few weeks, given the pessimism I have been feeling and my attempt to avoid writing anything negative. But at the same time, I have come to believe that these more challenging periods are arguably the most important to report, although this realization is something that I have never acted on in my past travels. So I have now delivered the disclaimer and here it goes.

I have explored the idea of international development and relief work and the NGO sector comprehensively over the last four years throughout college, internships and other forms of pursuit. It has been a passion of mine and I have never questioned whether or not I would end up working in this field. Although I understood that I was far from being a seasoned expert on all issues involved, I had introductory knowledge on food policy, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, disaster relief, and organizational structures from the smallest NGO in eastern African to the UN agencies of OCHA, UNHCR, UNDP, and Unicef. I was well versed in topics of debate relating to sustainability, recognition of gender-specific issue and corruption. I always knew that there was a significant gap between my academic knowledge of these issues and field experience, but I felt like I was more than well prepared to thrive at the ground level…Life is great when you know everything.

And despite all this wealth of knowledge and critical understandings of situations and interaction with those who are the actors within this arena, I still had no idea about what I was in for. The only thing worse than the ending of a honeymoon is when the honeymoon wasn’t even that good anyway. You start wrapping your mind around the idea of making this your life and you slowly start inching towards adaptation and stability, and just when you think that you can do this the ground drops from underneath you and the reality that you thought you knew was like living an episode of Dora the Explorer in comparison to what your life will really be like.

If you are wondering whether I am aware of the degree of ambiguity my words have displayed, the answer is yes, I am well aware. I will now continue…

Going back to what I was saying earlier a paragraph back. I just feel so naïve in taking my world here and my organization at face value after everything that I knew about the field of development work. I guess it just goes to show how much more powerful life experiences are than academic and abstract concepts or how bad I needed to be humbled and brought back to earth. Despite everything I had learned and everything people told me, I still believed that my organization, the people I am working with, the government health structure, and everything else were actually doing alright here…then things start to slip out. You find out that everything is just as complex and corrupt and interconnected as you were taught, but you really can’t believe it or understand it until you live it and it is your life. It’s easy to learn about all these things in a classroom because you are a removed observer and you think, ‘o I can fix that…or, that doesn’t look too hard’, but when you are living that reality and you begin to process the concept that your work probably won’t change anyone’s life and it definitely won’t change a society…that’s a tough pill to swallow.

So as you might have taken from all this, work is tough. And when you don’t have any of the distractions or coping mechanisms that are available to you in other contexts coupled with the full-time job of living as a complete outsider, with another language, culture and race that acts as a social wedge between you and everyone else, the realization that ‘Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore’ takes new meaning.

But you live and wake up in the morning and start your 2 hour walk to work through the village, through the bush, the mountains, and the fields, and you start to think that maybe everything isn’t so bad after all. Maybe if I just bring down my expectations, reevaluate the situation and develop a new strategy for the next few weeks, then maybe I just might be able to make it until July. And then the next day is better because it has to be and you’re more prepared for the next hit you’re going to take, because it will come.

So I know that there might have been a more obtuse post than my previous ones, but I feel like it is the best way to describe everything that is going on without posting everyone’s business on a universally accessible website.

Once again, thanks for tuning in and I will be back in a week or two.

O ya…Feliz Cinco de Mayo! Tonight I will imagine my corn meal and spinach to be a nice, juicy, cheesy chile relleno and my water that I fetched from an uncovered, untreated oil drum in the backyard as a nice cold glass of Negro Modelo...Ooo life is sweet.

Chris

White ATMs

My dearest friends, family, and others,

My latest Blog entry finds me drinking instant coffee at my desk, 7 am, contemplating the work for the day, which would be a no-brainer in any typical job setting, but given the absolute void of structure into which I have been thrown, this ends up being a necessary daily task. After four years where waking up before 10 would conjure images of the apocalypse, my time in the mornings has been like discovering a new dimension of earth. The mornings here are quite refreshing, especially after days of 90+ temperatures; this is what people here call winter. The air is cool, the sounds are laced with a chorus of waking farm animals, flowing water and the sweeping of gogos, and the light, as it breaks through the mountains and trees to the east, helps me remember why I came here.

While this lack of structure within the workplace could be interpreted as disorganized and debilitating (which it very well could become), it has actually been quite a blessing and temporary due to the influx of administrational duties for the annual assessment by the Department of Health. With this excess time, I have had the ability to design a plan for myself and my work with the organization for the following three months while I will be fixed to the village.

Despite the overall positive opinion I have generated on the organization as a whole, there is a significant lack of planning of activities in a systematic fashion to encourage accountability, organization, coordination, and effective use of resources. From what I have been led to believe in the short time I have been here is that many of the organizations here in the health and HIV/AIDS sector within South Africa have sprung up for two main reasons: they have seen a significant need within their communities and have felt a personal responsibility to address these needs and government funding has begun to pour into this sector and organizations have thus jumped at the chase for these funds. Given the situation, some organizations are indeed doing great work (I believe mine is one of them), but there is a dire need for strategic planning to help guide these NGOs in order to better understand their contribution to social change, the autonomy they have and should exercise from the government (although current funding dynamics would put this statement up for debate), and monitoring & evaluation to ensure that programs being realized are effective.

Although I have very little experience (this is a generous statement) in the area of coordination, management and organizational/project development, I do have a access to a limitless amount of time to plan, conduct assessments and evaluate the organization and the resources and contacts to either educate myself or ask for outside help. Ironically, the greatest challenge this project faces, aside from putting their trust in a 23-year-old surfer from California, is the organization itself. I cannot and should not force the organization into a process it is neither ready for nor wants. This would just lead to a divide between the staff and I, a complete lack of sustainability, and my ultimate frustration. This is where I discover how I would have done in sales. Only now, I am trying to sell a substantially complex idea to a group of people I have known for two weeks and don’t speak my language.

As for my progress within the community itself, I would say that it’s going…well or poorly would depend upon the time of day you ask. My grasp on the language has actually been coming along to my surprise. Since few people around me speak a significant amount of English, I have tried to set a precedent of speaking Sepedi initially and moving to English when necessary. While my language is progressing, my toleration of the laughing and pounding guffaws every time I walk by is starting to wane. I would say that it splits down the middle. With many community members, I am a welcomed surprise and greeted with appreciative smiles and a short conversation on the day. Others are just so taken aback that they fail to answer my greeting or do anything except for hang open their mouths. And the people I have had most difficulty with are those who just laugh at me hysterically and the young men who constantly ask me for money. It didn’t bother me at first, but now it’s starting to get annoying.

I never thought I would be saying this, but my host family has become my greatest asset and relief. When I first arrived I was struggling with significant futility to be alone for a second. My gogo would be running around bringing me things I might need and asking me what I was looking at/for, who I am, etc. in a language I couldn’t understand. And the kids, who are 6, 7, and 10, were like wind-up dolls, but louder and with fewer boundaries. When I finally got moved into a room of my own after two months of being without any sort of personal space, I took a breath, poured myself a glass of water and looked through the crack in my door to see two sets of eyes staring at me. Although the next few days were a continuous game of ‘let’s-see-what-the-white-man-is-doing’, things finally started to settle down and now I am glad to say that I can open my curtains without three faces popping up to look in.

Now, I cannot say exactly when and how it changed, but at some point the kids stopped making me want to put my head through glass and I began to thoroughly enjoy their antics and crazed interpretations of well-behaved children. I think we are all starting to share camaraderie in the fact that we are all here in this house and in this village without our immediate families, since they are all cousins with each other and I am…ya exactly. Within the villages there truly seems to be a generation of children raised by their grandmothers. This can be attributable to a variety of factors, including those orphaned by HIV/AIDS, but also those quasi-orphaned by migrant labor and the magnet of industry that is Johannesburg and the flood of working-age South Africans that arrives in the millions. So, this is my new family and while life and work here as one of 2 white people in the village can be tough, at least I can come back to my kingdom of sugar cane, orange trees and my adopted nephews who think I’m the best thing since sliced bread.

Well as you can see this is a long one, but for those of you who stuck around, you have a piece of ntso (chewed sugar cane) here waiting for you. I thought you might enjoy.

Chris

Day 3 as a PCV

Hey all!

So hopefully most of you received my last email. I had the liberty of spelling out my contact information more explicitly and free of the dangers of these Somali-like waters that Peace Corps likes to call the world wide web.
Where was I? O ya, South Africa. Unlike some of my other adventures where I tend to wake up after every sleep and expect to see the Pacific out of my window, promptly followed by a few seconds of confusion and fear, here I haven’t really been that shocked to realize that I am 13,000 miles away from In-n-out and Zuma Beach. I can’t say whether it’s that my acclimatization to being here or just that everything has been moving so fast since training ended a few days ago and I have finally arrived to site as an official Peace Corps Volunteer.

I never thought that reaching the title of PCV would be something that I would celebrate, but after the frustration of being in international purgatory for the last two months and finding myself at the butt end of endless condescending remarks by smug ‘veteran’ PCVs, it’s a welcomed transition.

So I guess I should probably speak a little about my new home. I have spoken briefly about the village where I will spend my next two years and the organization, Pholoshong HBC, with whom I will be working. Now that I have arrived to find that I was mistaken to think that my new efficiency (ha!, I use the word with all literary freedom possible) would be ready for me to move into, I have spent the last few nights with my host family who will be living in the main house next to mine. Although this gogo (grandmother) and her young children and so unbelievably sweet, it has become somewhat aggravating to have to rely on 6-year-olds to bring you meals and water every time you want to bathe. Although many men here have no problem being served without end, I prefer to retain some vestige of personal autonomy and like to take care of myself and my living quarters. So there has been somewhat of a tug-of-war between being annoying to my supervisor in helping with the necessary logistics of moving-in and desperately wanting my own space. I am currently writing for one of the first times alone for more than two months and it feels like the tide is finally moving back out and allowing me breathe.

Since I am someone who needs to have their personal life organized before I can be at all effective in my work, I now feel like I can start thinking about my plan of attack for the next few weeks. It seems like it’s gong to be easy to get tied up with different types of work here. With my supervisor moving at the speed of light and me struggling to keep up under an unforgiving southern African sun, I have been introduced and made tentative plans to work with several parties, within and beyond Pholoshong. It is going to be a challenge to decide whether to begin working on programs and trainings early on or whether I should probably be spending this time settling in and learning from an observer’s perspective. On the one hand I have been warned not to spread myself too thin and learn before jumping in headfirst, but on the other hand it is impossible to ignore that there are serious gaps within the organization and in regards to the organization’s response to the community’s needs. All of this despite the fact that Pholoshong is one of the better-developed orgs in the district.

Anyways, with any remnants of a social life being put on hold for the next three months while us newly initiated PCVs enjoy ‘lock-down’ and the fact that my life outside the house ends when the sun sets because of security reasons, it seems like I will have a lot of time to explore these issues and continue writing these endless blogs.

O ya, I also need to start posting some pictures of my village. I’ll get those on this week. Until next time…

Site!

Hello Everyone!

I am pleased to tell you that I am back in communication with the world after almost two months of the painstakingly tedious initiation process which Peace Corps likes to call 'training'. For the past two months I have been living in a rural village with a family and shuttling to a dilapidated campus fifteen minutes away where we spend the day learning about 'culture', 'goal-setting', medical issues, miscellaneous bureaucratic policy, and continuing our studies with the local language. As fun as this may sound to you all, I and many of my counterparts have been more than ready to reach our permanent site which will be our ultimate destination for the next two years.

After having heard many horror stories from past volunteers about traumatic site placements including, but not limited to working organizations which had completely gone under, questionable security situations, and out-of-control homestays, the days leading up to our site announcements were nerve-wracking to say the least. So, as we braced for the inevitability of our future site, many of us saw their fears become manifest, while others were pleasantly surprised upon their arrival to their village.

Thank God, I was in the latter group. Although because of security reasons I am unable to say the name of my village on this Blog (yes, apparently Peace Corps health programs head the list of targets for violent anti-Americans), I can say that I am in a very rural village in northern South Africa. I must say that the village is pretty spectacular. It rests at the foot of jetting green mountains and is split by a bellowing river (it’s actually dry tight now). There are no tar roads although there seems to be active construction to make this a thing of the past (I use the word ‘active’ relative to rural South Africa standards). The houses in the village range from tin shacks to 4 or even 5 bedroom, one story houses. And roaming cats, dogs, goats, cows, chickens and donkeys are common visitors on these superhighways of dirt and rock. So this can give you a brief idea of my new home.

In regards to the organization with which I have been placed, I am also very happy and even excited. Pholoshong HBC (Home-Based Care) was begun in 2001 by a nurse who is my current supervisor and director of the organization. Its initial headquarters were in a tree but, unfortunately due to common and quite malicious lightning strikes, the tree is no longer with us. What began as a community's response to the overwhelming burden upon families of their members who were either very or terminally ill has blossomed over eight years into an umbrella organization which is comprised of Home-Based Care (HBC) activities, Drop-in Centers for Orphans and Vulnerable Children (OVCs), community advice and dispute settlement, a youth center, 80+ lay counselors for volunteer counseling and testing (VCT) for HIV/AIDS and prevention of mother to child transmission (PMTCT) and the beginning of several income-generating activities (IGAs) including a permaculture garden. So as you can see, there is a lot going on.

Saying that my supervisor is driven would not even begin to explain his work practices. His intensity as a trauma nurse has carried over into Pholoshong and I doubt he has ever sat at home for more than an hour for anything other than to sleep. Given his dedication and comprehensive knowledge of the response to HIV/AIDS from a non-governmental and governmental perspective, I am in a place where I can learn a lot about a variety of different initiatives. Pholoshong’s ability to thrive within the funding politics of a notoriously corrupt industry and share their internal transparency with other organizations was also very welcoming and truly somewhat shocking. Understanding that I have only spent a week at site and realize that I still know very little, these first impressions may change, but for the most part things look very positive.

So as for me, there are several places where I could see myself fitting within the organization and using some of the skills I have to strengthen Pholoshong and possibly develop new projects. But more than anything, these first few months will be a time for me to learn, as much about the organization as the language and the community where I will be living.

As positive as I may sound now, a large part of this could be attributable to the contrast of the drawn-out frustration that I have experienced during training. And although I understand that these next three months will be neither smooth nor easy, I am enjoying my situation for the time being and will consider the upcoming challenges when I reach them.

Anyways, life is good, I am still going strong, and I am stoked to become an official Peace Corps Volunteer on April 2, when I swear in and permanently move to site. For now I will stomach the last week of training and take advantage of the people I have gotten to know over the past two months.

For those of you who are interested in calling me, my new phone number is (from the US): 011 27 72 712 9898.

Thank you for all your love, kind words, and support. I look forward to hearing from you and I will try and write again as soon as I can.

Best,
Chris

Internet@!

So I have managed to sneak a few minutes on the global information network to which I am apparently having withdrawls from. Our training supervisors have restricted us from several froms of technological communication during our training period, but, for better or for worse, we have managed to chip away at the system to get a few minuted today.

Just to give you all a little update, I arrived in South Africa on February 4th with my 24 other Peace Corps Trainees (PCTs) and were shipped directly to out training site an hour and a half from Pretoria where we will be spending the next two months. I have now moved into my homestay in a small rural village. The landscape is breathtaking. The rainy season has created an striking horizon of interminable green plains dotted with small trees. The sky is overwhelming in size and the cloud systems are wonderful to watch especially when they deliver rain to save us from the unforgiving heat.

Unfortunately my time is up, but I will be back on in a few months with more info, pictures, videos and stories. I miss you all.

Chris