Tzaneen

Time for another quick update. I have been in my permanent site now for 10 days doing what Peace Corps calls a "Site Orientation." My site is approximately 80km southeast of Tzaneen and approximately 40km west of Hoedspruit. Although I cannot reveal the exact location of my village publicly, I can say that I am up in the Klien Drakensburg mountains: the very northern terminus of the Drakensburg range that starts in Lesotho. I have been assigned to a community organization that has four main focuses: home based care for sick and injured community members (including those suffering from HIV/AIDS), services for Orphans and Vulnerable Children, including a drop-in center where kids can get a hot meal and play games/get help on homework after school, HIV Counseling and Testing, including door to door testing, mass campaigns, and multi-session counseling following a positive diagnosis, and finally, a greenery/poultry project that gives jobs to community members, provides healthy food to bedridden patients, and sells chicken and vegetables to provide income to the organization. 

Tomorrow we head back to our training villages for 2 final weeks of training, focusing on what we learned during our orientations to build a plan for our first three months at site. 

At the moment, I am in Tzaneen with 4 other members of SA29 and a few other Peace Corps Volunteers that live around us, enjoying the first world amenities of a city: wifi, flushing toilets, safe drinking establishments, ya know, the usual stuff. 

Lessons Learned

I’ll admit, I was no expert on South Africa when I boarded that flight. However, we’ve learned a lot about the country and it’s culture, as well as learning a few things (some humorous) about ourselves and the Peace Corps in the process:

1) Before our arrival in South Africa, the Peace Corps explained that South Africa is a country of polar opposites. This is especially true in urban areas, where shantytowns can butt up against multi-million dollar homes. Similarly in our rural villages, BMWs and Landrovers cruise down streets next to donkey carts carrying water to homes without wells. 

2) South Africa is enormous.  The distance between Cape Town and Pretoria is equal to the distance from London to Rome. Yep. From the Drakensburg Mountains to the beaches in Durban and along the coast, to Kruger National Park and beyond, South Africa has a landscape as diverse and rich as its people.

3) Speaking of diversity, did you know that the National Anthem of South Africa is composed using the five most spoken languages in South Africa. The first stanza is Xhosa and Zulu, the second is Sesthoto, the third is Afrikaans, and the last is English.

4) If you want to learn a language and learn that language well and very fast...join the Peace Corps. It is incredible how much language you can absorb when you are immersed and your survival depends on your ability learn.

5) Running water is nonexistent in rural areas. This means that we collect water through a Jojo and use it to cook, clean and of course, bathe in buckets. This process really isn’t as bad as it sounds. However, no running water also means...pit latrines. Now some of these latrines are nice and don’t stink, and some aren’t. So, unlike many Americans who would avoid the public bathroom at all costs, when we walked into a KFC (pretty much the only piece of American “culture” universally found in every large town in South Africa) we lined up! A flushing toilet, running water sinks and soap immediately became the center of discussion among our group.

6) South Africa is hot. Not only is it hot, but the sun is much stronger than a summer day in the States. Every single one of us has become a few shades darker in the places where our business casual attire (required Mon-Fri) doesn’t protect us.

Until next time:

            Letters are always fun to read. It’s easy for me to post whenever I get internet but it is hard to hear about what you all are up to. Write and tell me!

Chris Tingley

Peace Corps

PO Box 9536

Pretoria 0001

South Africa

**In the near future I will be renting my own PO Box in my shopping town, stay tuned for its address**

Please note: If you do send care packages, please keep the value below $35 USD and list the contents as used clothing/books.

If you've come here to help me, you are wasting your time

“If you’ve come here to help me, you are wasting our time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

            -Lilla Watson

            The Peace Corps and its volunteers work to meet the basic needs of the poorest people in countries around the world. Oftentimes however, Volunteers report that the effect their service had on them far outweighs the impact they had on their communities. Peace Corps acknowledges this and preaches to us that over the next 27 months, we will change and grow as human beings in ways we cannot being to imagine. While I cannot say who I’ll be after service, I can reflect on some of my feelings so far:

            1) From the local Peace Corps staff, to the staff at our orientation site, and especially our host families and other South Africans living in our training village, every single person I’ve met has welcomed me gratefully to their country. They have opened their hearts and homes to complete strangers and accepted us immediately as members of their families. It is a great feeling to come home at night knowing your host mom is eager to sit down and hear what new phrases you’ve learned in Sepedi.

            2) Peace Corps Service is an emotional roller coaster. I’ve heard this from every volunteer I have had the pleasure to discuss service with. Over the next 27 months, I will experience the worst of the worst and the absolute best of the best. I’ve already found this to be true, but what I didn’t realize was that this happens hour to hour and minute to minute. In the end however, it’s the little things like singing “Sho Sholosa” and the National Anthem of South Africa with my family under an incredible night sky that makes me think, no matter what happened today, I am grateful to be here.

            3) Your Peace Corps Cohort will be the people you laugh, cry, struggle and triumph with throughout your service. I never thought that the 34 strangers I met less than a month ago in Philadelphia would become my biggest inspiration for working as hard as possible throughout training.

Posting at Last!

SA29 has been in country for 5 weeks now. Currently we are in the capitol of South Africa’s Limpopo Province, Polokwane, to meet our supervisors and head to our permanent site for the next two weeks as an introduction.  This post and the others posted today were all written about 3 weeks ago, this is just my first chance to post them.

            I would bet most of you are thinking, “That’s great Chris, but what HAVE you been doing over the past weeks?”

Well, here is a quick breakdown:

Upon our arrival at South Africa’s O.R. Tambo airport, after the 15 hour flight from JFK, we were greeted by our Country Director and Training Coordinators. We traveled to the Lowveld College of Agriculture, where we would complete the one week orientation all PCT’s (Peace Corps Trainees) in South Africa receive. The orientation included learning greetings in common languages (Sepedi, Isindebele, Tshvenda, Xitsongsa, and Afrikaans), an introduction to Medical and Safety and Security (and the Peace Corps staff that run these divisions), and brief introductions to the material we will learn over the next 2 months to better serve our communities.

            A week later, we anxiously traveled to a small village in Limpopo province, near the Mpumalanga border to meet our host families: volunteers from the community who had graciously offered to host a PCT while they underwent the intensive 9-10 week ordeal known as Pre-Service Training. The previous day, our target languages were announced and we learned who would be our Language and Cultural Facilitator throughout PST. I was assigned to learn Sepedi with Lebogang.

            The following weeks have been an absolute whirlwind of intense language, medical, safety/security, volunteer awareness, and job training. Our first week was 6 entire days devoted to learning Sepedi from 8 to 5pm. It was incredibly tiring but extremely effective.

            Other than having a packed pre-set schedule from 8-5 everyday, I find time to run and workout with other PCTs living close by, and spend time with my awesome host family. I have host parents, host siblings, and 4 host nephews and 1 niece. My parents are retirees who spend their time caring for their grandchildren and most of my host siblings work full-time in Johannesburg or Pretoria, traveling home to visit  the family at month’s end.  Most evenings I am in bed by 9 or 9:30, after studying some Sepedi and preparing for the next day. I am up between 5:30 and 6:15, depending on whether I want to get some laundry done (by hand, of course).

            Other than the occasional trip to town to buy necessities, or trips like this one to Pretoria, what I’ve described is pretty standard. Over the next 7 weeks, we will continue with training until our Language Proficiency Interviews and final technical evaluations. Then, if all goes according to plan, South Africa Community HIV/AIDS Outreach Program Cohort 29 will swear-in as Peace Corps Volunteers on April 4^th.