Ok, so what have I been doing?

Since coming to site on April 4^th, we’ve all been busy adjusting to our new environments. While my last post generally explained what’s been going on, I want to take the time to explain in detail:

As I have written before, the organization I have been assigned to has three main focuses: Home Based Care, Orphans and Vulnerable Children, and a Greenery and Poultry Project.

As a Peace Corps Volunteer, my first three months at site are called Community Integration Period. During these months, I cannot travel further from site than my shopping towns Tzaneen and Hoedspruit. This restriction encourages me to spend more time in my village getting to know my neighbors. Throughout Community Integration, or lockdown as we like to call it, my job is to observe. I watch the daily activities going on around me, participate when possible, but I don’t start new projects or implement programs.

The point of this is simple and accurate: The time allows me to get to know the community, and for the community to get to know me. I will have a much better understanding of the problems facing the community in July than I do currently and, the community will (hopefully) have come to know and trust me. The final piece, the knowing and trusting of the Peace Corps Volunteer is incredibly important. All of our projects require an enormous amount of community investment and involvement. Without this, projects ultimately fail. Sure I may be able to teach a few people about HIV/AIDS or make some changes to the way we handle orphans and vulnerable children but, as soon as I leave, will those changes remain? Will those who I taught go on to teach others? It is incredibly important for PCVs to do projects that the community feels it needs, rather than projects the PCV thinks the community needs.

So maybe some of you thought I was building clinics and researching the cure for HIV and the paragraph above let you down. Now you’re wondering what I really do 9-5 everyday. Here ya go:

6:00am- Wake Up

6:15-7:30- Exercise

7:30-8:30- Make Breakfast, Coffee, and Bathe.

8:30-12:30- Spend time at the office. This could be reading through grant    applications, listening in on meetings, learning about the financial structure of the organization, or simply just talking about the community with my co-workers.

12:30-1:30-Head home, eat some lunch and perhaps read a few pages of a book.

1:30-4:00-Drop In Center. Here I play games with the kids like scrabble or jenga, talk to the caregivers and help serve the kids food.

4-8pm- Personal Time. I spent time reading or walking around the neighborhood. Then it is all about cooking, cleaning and bathing.

8pm- Reading and bed.

So there you have it: a day in the life of a PCV in lockdown. It sounds boring and, I’ll admit, sometimes it is. However there are really awesome learning experiences too. Last week I sat in on an 11^th grade English class where the students were learning about a poem by Robert Frost. It was very interesting seeing the teacher present some concepts in English but switch to Sepedi when explaining difficult concepts. This presents a serious problem in the long run: ALL final exams for Matriculation (the South African Secondary School Exit Exams) are in English. So how then can students write essays on Robert Frost’s poems for their final if the most important concepts are only known to them in Sepedi?  Also last week, I was able to help some of the Poultry workers sell the chickens they had been raising for the past 5 weeks. I watched as two workers walked calmly around the coop as chickens screamed and ran for their lives. They’d bend down, grab two or three by the leg and bring them back out to the truck. Finally, after we had about 30, we drove off to a neighboring village where it seemed as though a few different parties were in the planning stages: two families each bought 15 chickens for their upcoming festivities.

But what about weekends? Well, weekends are my time to catch up on things I haven’t been able to do during the week. Like laundry, or sleeping, or just sitting outside reading and drinking coffee. I also am fortunate to live close by to three very good friends of mine who are PCVs in other communities. In about a half hour, I can meet up with them and head to town, or just hang out at someone’s house. Today for instance, I met up with my friend Veronica and made the 2 hour trek into Tzaneen. The thing about being a volunteer in South Africa is that we go from third world village to “American City” to third world village within a day. It’s a little crazy and at first its quite shocking, but I think I am getting used to it.

All in all, everything is going well here in South Africa. I am excited to continue learning about my community, and I am looking forward to our Provincial Conference in May and our In-Service Training (aka the end of lockdown) some time in June or July.