The Transition

Every December, most South African businesses (excluding the tourism industry) take a month off to celebrate the holidays. In keeping with tradition, my NGO knocked off from 12 December to 12 January. Like most other PCVs, I used that time to travel and see other parts of South Africa and escape the sauna that is Limpopo Province.

I was fortunate enough to have Steve visit over Christmas and our adventure took us from Port Elizabeth, along the Garden Route to Hermanus and finally Cape Town and the wine region. I say this only because I want readers to understand that for about a month (I traveled to Durban before Steve arrived) I was living in the first world: everyone spoke English, I ate at restaurants, drank in safe bars, acted like a tourist, spent too much money…you get the gist.  

So when I returned to my site in Limpopo (the poorest province of SA remember) it was a complete 180 degree turnaround from the life I had been enjoying. I was back to speaking Sepedi, enduring long taxi rides, hauling water, etc. I don’t mean to complain, only to say this has been a really eye-opening experience. I've never been away from site for this long and when I first got to South Africa, Peace Corps did a really good job slowly easing us from America to our middle-of-nowhere villages. It was nothing like the Cape Town to Site jump that left me sitting at the Drop-In Center, watching barefoot kids play games whilst caregivers napped on cardboard boxes, pondering how I got to this point in my life.

This is an experience I should be used to. As a PCV living in a country with some of the wealthiest people on the continent, I should expect to see this kind of disparity. Whenever I go to my shopping town, I encounter people asking for spare change side by side with the rich loading their Woolworths groceries (okay I sometimes shop there too) into their Mercedes or BMW. My holidaze however, left me with a new question that I had yet to consider: how do rural South Africans, who live without access to clean water, proper sanitation, etc., travel to places like Pretoria or (heaven forbid) Cape Town, and then return knowing there is no end date to their stay in the village?! See for me, I can always say, “X more months,” but my South African counterparts can’t and I wonder what that does to their mental state: If it’s a mind fu*k for me, it most certainly is for them but on a whole different level. Though maybe, like a lot of issues surrounding inequality and racism in South Africa, it's just part of their daily life.

Please don’t take this as saying I don’t necessarily enjoy living in the village. I have a wonderful host family, I've met amazing friends who inspire me, and I've already starting planning my activities for 2015. It’s just those first few days, that adjustment period, that time when I’m not quite out of First World Mode but not quite in Third World Village Mode. That is what really messes with me.