RIP Thomas Maresco

Sad news of the recent passing of Tom Maresco, a PCV serving in Lesotho (a country entirely surrounded by SA) who was evidently shot and killed in the capital, Maseru.

My heart goes out to the entire Peace Corps Lesotho community and all those affected by his death. He was also an education volunteer, teaching science and coaching basketball in his local high school, and seemed to be an amazing addition to his community. Here's the statement released from the Peace Corps on his death.

For all of you at home, please don't take this as a call to worry more about me! While violence like this can happen anywhere and to anyone, I feel pretty safe here in my little corner of SA. Seems like this was more of a situation of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. My thoughts are with all of Tom's family and friends!

Teacher strike!

So it looks as though SADTU (South African Democratic Teachers Union) may go on strike starting Wednesday of this week! This seems to be striking season in the country, as many civic workers have been going on strike for various reasons and for various lengths of time. Apparently a similar teacher strike happened this time of year in 2007 and lasted for over a month... yikes.

As always, it's for more money. The union is asking for an 8% salary increase as well as a R1000 housing stipend, but apparently the Department of Education is only offering a 6% increase and a R600 housing stipend, and if they do not give in to the demands of sadtu by tuesday.... no more school for us! Needless to say I think it's absolutely absurd that the teachers salary increase would rank as more important than children getting an education, but it is not even a little bit surprising given the attitude of the educators here and the failing system of education. Here is a brief article I found on allafrica.com on the impending strike.

Naturally this is happening right as Seniors are preparing to write their final "matric" exams, a test required for those who wish to complete high school and go on to any higher education. This is also one of the hot topics of the failing education system here, seeing as the pass rate is something like 35%. What a better way to fix this than to strike and demand more money... duh!

So what does it mean for me if a strike does occur? We have been reminded over and over again that as PCVs we are not allowed to hold any sort of classes or meetings at the school during a strike, as picketing, protests, and riots are not an uncommon sight during strikes here. I supposed I'll just have to cross that bridge when I get there... I'll keep you all posted as the situation progresses!

In other news, the PCVs in the Kuruman area are getting together this weekend for a little one-year anniversary celebration, which should be a great time! Monday is Women's Day, which is a national holiday that we get off school, so it should be a nice little long weekend in preparation for our possibly even longer strike holiday....

One year?!?!

First of all, sorry for my terrible lack of posting the last couple months. In my defense, it has been a very busy couple of months! But here I am, alive and surviving the post-World Cup blues that taken over the country.

So I guess that’s a good place to start… with the most AWESOME 5 weeks ever!!!!!!!! I truly believe I hit the Peace Corps jackpot being here for the World Cup, what an awesome and exciting time to be in SA. I ended up being around for 4 games, where most of the time we would have a big group of PCVs and other friends and go to the fan parks that were set up in the cities that were hosting the games. These turned out to be much more fun than anticipated… they were set up almost like a concert, with drinks, food and even live music before everyone would huddle in the cold to watch the game on the giant screen. I can’t even begin to describe the excitement that swept the country for this event. People from all around were there in support of their countries, and I still can’t believe how patriotic being in that environment makes you! I’ve never cheered harder for the USA in my life.


The most thrilling game for me was the USA/Algeria game in Pretoria, where about an hour before the game we scored free tickets from the backpackers we were staying at, and then were there to witness the USA make an extremely exciting goal in the last few minutes of the game and moving them forward in the tournament. The crowd went absolutely crazy, and I wasn’t even mad when I got hit in the nose with a vuvuzela and had beer spilled all over me… sometimes you just gotta go with it! Each game was also followed by really fun partying/dancing/mingling with more nationalities than I could count.

Sometimes I think the millions and millions spent on hosting the event could have been put to better use in a country with so much poverty, but alas… you can’t win them all. At least SA showed the world it was capable of pulling off such an event without any major problems! Besides, of course, our beloved Paris Hilton getting arrested… but who didn’t see that coming? Thanks for making us proud Paris!

Whew, so that’s my World Cup rant. I’ll say it one more time for good measure.. it was awesome. Needless to say, the transition back into my Peace Corps life has been a bit rough and slow. School started last Tuesday, and only this week have we established some sort of normalcy with teachers actually going to their classes and following some sort of schedule. While it wasn’t easy going from the excitement of World Cup back into “work” mode, it feels good to be back in the classroom.

And now for the typical thoughts of a PCV at their halfway mark: “Oh my god, I’ve been here for a year… now what the heck am I doing?!” The one-year anniversary is being met with a mixture of emotions: I am really excited I’ve made it through what is most often said to be the “worst of it”. I know that my second year will go much smoother, faster, and more comfortably than the first. I know my community and my school much better than when I first got here last September, and I am hopeful that I will be able to make some sort of tangible improvements in my schools in the next year. Of course, I still have days where I want to rip my hair out with frustration. After a year, it amazes me that I still have to explain to my educators that I am not their secretary, and although I now come to expect it, knowing I have only one year left to get something done makes it all the more irritating when things that could be finished in an hour end up taking days.

So what is on the agenda for the next year? I have decided to restructure my work days a bit here and there and change around what my focus areas. I now only work 1 day a week at my school #2 (the tiny one in the next village), for various reasons including the likely even that by next year it will be closed and combined with the school in my village. Which, frankly is what I am rooting for, as the school is barely at a functioning level, and my main school is more than equipped to take on more teachers and students. So my main work at the school this term is continuing teaching Grade 7 English and Life Orientation, Camp GLOW in December, implementing weekly reading hours for each grade and teaching literacy classes in all grades with our new librarian, and team-teaching English in kindergarten and Grades 1-6. This sounds like a lot, but it is actually only 3 classes since grades 1-3 and 4-6 are combined. I am quite excited about this, especially for working more with the really young ones. Nothing makes your day quite like getting attacked with hugs and “good morning teacher” by a bunch of adorable children! And our library project is underway… which is probably what I’m most excited for. In fact, I am currently finishing up writing a Peace Corps Partnership grant in order to raise funds to get the resources needed to finish putting together our school library. What does this mean? That soon a blurb will be put up on the Peace Corps website and all of my wonderful friends/family/colleagues from home will be able to donate to it! Exciting, right?! So if any of you are interested in helping out, I will be requesting your help soon!

OK, that’s all for now. Sorry for the incredibly long post… I’ll try to write more frequently so I’m not overflowing with updates on life in S.A.!

Weekend in Swaziland

May was entirely too busy of a month, culminating in a weekend trip to Swaziland…….. haha mostly it’s just fun to say you went to Swazi for the weekend. Some friends and I took the weekend to go to the Bush Fire music festival in Manzini and it was amazing to see a new country, some different landscapes, and really fun live music! My favorite was the band Freshly Ground, a fairly popular South African band. Apparently they are becoming even more mainstream with their new song with Shakira – “time for Africa”, the new World Cup theme song… pretty catchy if I do say so myself.

It was definitely interesting to see a new country after being in SA for so long. Because it is a country that is snuggled right into its richer and more developed neighbor, the influence of South Africa can be seen all over. I’ve heard the countries surrounding SA (or surrounded by, in the case of Swaziland and Lesotho) often reffered to as “South Africa Lite” since the country influences so many aspects of this region of the continent. While Swazi does seem to have many similar things (banks, restaurants, transportation, etc.), it was definitely evident that it is significantly less developed (especially if you compare the cities – HUGE difference between a capital city like Pretoria and Mbabane, the capital of Swazi). This may have been because we were there for a festival that celebrated Swazi’s music, art, and culture, but I felt as though the local Swazi culture was much more strongly embraced and present in everyday life than that of the local cultures in South Africa. This is not surprising at all when you think about the long-term effects colonization and the apartheid era had on the traditional African cultures. [As a side note, I think this may be even moreso the case with the Tswana culture. I’m not sure because this is obviously the only place I live, but they seem to embrace their more traditional culture a lot less then their flashier Zulu and Xhosa neighbors.]

Lately I have been meeting more and more PCVs who serve in other countries. This is partly due to the fact that South Africa is the regional medical hub for anyone who is serving in Sub-Saharan Africa who needs medical attention that their host country can’t provide, and partly because Southern Africa is extremely popular for traveling. Many of them (known as “med-evacs”) gush about how amazing it must be to serve in such a developed country with so many amenities. I think this becomes the view of many people who travel here – due mostly to the fact that when you are traveling to SA you are most likely not going to our rural villages out in the bush (especially those of us out here in the deserty north.. there is not much as far as tourism goes out here). While I can’t deny that it is nice to have things like malls, restaurants, and movie theaters when I go to Pretoria or other large cities, it’s hard to get across to people how different life really is in my tiny village that is cut off from access to such amenities. All I can conclude is that SA is just a really interesting and unique place to be a PCV. It also makes me very eager to visit other countries in Africa and see what life is like on the rest of this continent!

In any case, I’m sad I didn’t get to stay longer and see more of the country, and I’m not entirely sure the 2 days of treacherous taxi rides through mountain roads in the rain was really worth the day and a half that I got to spend in the country. But it is most definitely on my agenda for next May, as that will be nearer to my COS date (Close of Service) when I can justify going crazy over the AMAZING craft shopping there ☺.

Teaching...

Lately I have really been loving teaching. Many of us came into the education program in S.A. with little or no teaching experience, and I am still a firm believer that Peace Corps is a great opportunity to discover the teaching profession with limited experience. During my teaching English internship in France while I was studying abroad, I began to find that I just really really enjoyed planning lessons and being in a classroom. I was definitely still skeptical of doing it as a full-time career, hence why PC has been a great way for me to entertain this idea without committing long-term.

This came to mind today because of the particularly successful lessons in my English class I have had this week. On Monday I decided to give them a listening and reading comprehension exercise from their book on Nelson Mandela’s famous speech from when he was released from prison in 1990. It was a pretty difficult passage and I was worried it would be too advanced for the class (especially with a few learners who are still at the phase of sounding out their words in Setswana). It actually turned out great and the class ended up enjoying it a lot! I decided to stick with this for the rest of the week and do a similar exercise with MLK’s “I have a Dream” speech. It was nice to show them the parallel between the histories of South Africa and the US, and they were all really surprised to hear that A) black people live in America too (they consider Obama to be “coloured” and not black) and B) that we had a similar history of oppression and revolution.

One thing that’s really fun about teaching ESL is that you can incorporate a lot of other subjects into lessons depending on what you’re teaching. My lessons this week included new vocabulary, listening and reading comprehension, history of SA and the US, human rights, as well as a little geography (MLK’s speech references a lot of the southern states). Fun stuff!

One of the downsides of becoming more sure of teaching as a career for me is the recent increase in thinking about my post-PC future and making plans – and if you haven’t noticed already, I’m kind of an over-planner. With this has also come a recent re-obsession with French. I have been reading as many French books as I can (thanks to my fam for sending some!) and reading French news from lemonde.fr. I know, I’m a huge nerd… feel free to mock me as much as you want! I just can’t help it! Being in a country where I only really understand 1 (and a half, if you count my limited understanding of Setswana) of the 11 languages spoken makes me miss living in France, where I am continually challenged but can understand and communicate quite well. I guess I probably should have fought harder to be placed in Francophone Africa… but there’s no use in pondering the “what if” scenarios… SA is pretty cool too. I am really excited at the prospect of teaching French when I return though, even if it is a ways away… it’s nice to feel like I’ll have some direction after all this.

On a side note, I am going to Kuruman this weekend for a Peace Corps Cinco de Mayo party that will probably rock my whole world, and from there going to Pretoria for yet another week. This time it is for GTOT (General training of trainers), where a group of us will plan sessions for the incoming group of education volunteers who arrive July 15! Crazy to think that soon enough we will have been here for a year and meeting the new group of volunteers!

*** Speaking of which, any new PCVs headed to South Africa this summer... feel free to leave a comment! I know I was fairly fixated on reading peace corps blogs before I came to help with my packing, so i understand…

winter in may!

So I know I mentioned in my last post that the weather had changed, but after months and months of 80-100 degree weather, I don’t know if I really got my point across. It. Is. Amazing. I find that my whole demeanor has changed… turns out I’m just kind of a cold weather kind of girl. The crazy thing is really how abruptly it has changed…. I can safely say it is not just cooler here but actually cold. As in, I have taken out two extra blankets for my bed and comfortably hang out in my room in fleece pants and a hoodie. Granted, it is nowhere near the awesomeness of snowy Colorado winters – a season which apparently has decided to last all the way into May this year! In any case, the South African winter will do for now, and I know it’s only going to get colder for June/July. Bring it on!

I just got back from yet another trip to Pretoria. Peace Corps has been keeping me pretty busy outside of my site, which is not something I had really expected. Actually this time it was mostly my fault, since during PST I volunteered to be the warden for my region of Northern Cape PCVs. Being a warden basically means I get to keep track of when my volunteers leave their sites, so that in the case of any sort of emergency I will be able to contact people. I will also have to organize a consolidation in regional towns if PC ever feels we are unsafe in our region. The warden system is actually pretty cool…. Peace Corps works in some fairly unstable countries and is able to evacuate volunteers from their sites in all sorts of crises. Lucky for us consolidation or evacuation are not likely to ever happen as SA is a pretty stable democracy, but it’s nice to have the system in place just in case! And really if something ever did happen here, our villages would likely be much safer than any town or city.

I shouldn’t complain about going to Pretoria that much… it’s really an enjoyable time! We stay at a backpackers in town and I usually get the chance to meet and hang out with volunteers from other groups. It also means being able to go out at night, go shopping in malls, and get delicious food… on this trip we had really awesome Indian food and some good sandwiches. It will never be less weird to go back and forth between the incredibly developed first-world Pretoria and my tiny tiny village and it always takes a few days of adjustment.

I have been talking with other volunteers lately about a kind of “rut” we feel we’ve been in lately. I am still really happy at my site and feel very comfortable with my life here, but it’s just now starting to weigh on me how incredibly hard the “work” aspect of Peace Corps can be. I think maybe part of it is that I am more invested in my projects and seeing results, making it that much more frustrating when plans fall through, projects are postponed, and meetings are cancelled. Even harder to deal with than that is just the teachers’ general lack of motivation and excitement to do anything that could potentially improve their school. Of course raising learners’ scores is a nice idea, but when it comes to doing actual work it is extremely hard to get people moving. I guess this is all part of the “cultural adjustment” process… sometimes I have to remind myself that I’m in Africa, which means doing about the exact opposite of what I would think is the logical and efficient way to do something.

For example, take our library project. I have been in the village for almost 9 months and the lack of any sort of library was one of the immediate tangible areas where I saw I could help. We had a storage room full of dusty old books (some never opened) and an empty classroom. Put them together and we have the start of a library, right? My school agreed we could use a library, but it took my first couple MONTHS just to convince them that we should take the books out of storage and start using them at all. Their logic is that the kids will destroy and steal the books, and they can’t read anyways, so why should they use them??? Yes, silly from our American standpoint… but after a couple months of fighting to at least display the books somewhere I began to clean out the storage room. So then I spent a month or so sorting them, and we now have nice piles of books sorted by learning area and level. But nowhere to put them. So then I start pushing for one of our 2 empty classrooms to be made into our official library. But, of course, they disagree for another couple months because that classroom is being used for storage. Moving the books out of the storage room and into the classroom and putting the junk that is “in storage” into the storage room was a surprisingly difficult concept to explain. But after some more pushing they seem to agree and we begin that process. The next problem is that we still had piles of books and a classroom, but no shelves of any nature. And we are most definitely still working on this one. We have been asking for donations for wood to build shelves from local business, along with asking the community for anything they can give, neither with any luck so far. On a positive note, after a few months of community meetings and pushing the idea of a library, we officially have a volunteer librarian from the community. She is great and has come everyday so far, even when there has been nothing to do… so that’s a good sign! Our next step is raising money to fix up the room, get tables and chairs, build shelves, get burglar bars and doors, and to ship over more appropriate books. I’m going to look at getting at least 1 computer donated too… so if any of you have ideas let me know!

[I think I could also use the example of the use of corporal punishment here, as it is the thing that frustrates me the most and the thing that will likely NOT change. But, I feel I have done enough complaining about this issue in my blog already ☺]

So in any case, this is all just such a huge learning process of how incredibly long it takes for things to get done here, and it has really taught me to manage (in some cases lower) my expectations. Which is sometimes really hard to do when you have a vision of what could be done how things could change. But alas, this is not just the case in Africa but really a fairly standard way things happen for PCVs around the world. Just have to keep moving forward!

Crazy month!

So I am finally back to my village after 4 weeks of traveling South Africa! It was a fun month and nice to get to see some new parts of the country, but pretty exhausting and needless to say I was very ready to get back to my home and not live out of my backpack any longer! So here’s an update on all that went down:

LST


Life Skills Training was my first stop and help at the Sparkling Waters Hotel near Rustenburg – this in itself was awesome as we had incredible meals, nice rooms with awesome showers, two pools, and a SPA! The counterpart I brought was the administrative assistant at one of my primary schools who has been wanting to get involved in some sort of community project. The workshop was run by David Patient and Neil Or…. Two very interesting South Africans who own a company that gives workshops and trainings on healthy living and HIV/AIDS. In fact, David Patient is one of the longest surviving people with AIDS. We learned all sorts of things about the virus itself as well as how to live a healthy life and keep your cd4 count up once you are already infected. My big complaint was that it was mostly directed at the Americans and not so much the South African counterparts we all brought, so it will be interesting to see what they got out of it (hopefully some of it seeped in!). The last half of the training was on project design and management and grant writing, so maybe some sort of community project will be able to come out of this!
Me and my PC besties being awesome...


My counterpart (Lorato) and I


Longtom Marathon

From LST we piled in a coombie to take us to Sabie where we ran the half marathon! I ended up running most of it and finishing in about 2 hours 34 minutes. The marathon went from Sabie to Lydenburg down the windy and hilly Longtom Pass that provided us with spectacular views as we ran! The water stops were also awesome, where people would give us not only water and powerade but also coke, sweets, and at one point even mini potatoes!!!!! Haha… I haven’t done a marathon anywhere else but I have a feeling that was one of those “only in South Africa things”. Again, THANKS TO ALL WHO DONATED!!!!!!!! I ended up raising about $200... 100 more than required, and as a group we raised over $17,000!! That is about $1500 more than last year. So give yourselves a pat on the back for taking part in sending a disadvantaged learner to a prestigious high school on a 5-year scholarship! I look forward to doing this again next year, possibly even training for it and shooting for 2 hours.

Here is a link with some pictures from the race!


Kloofing and hiking

After the marathon (and a much needed rest day on our sore muscles) a group of us decided to go “kloofing” (canyoneering in US terms). This involved putting on a padded wetsuit, a helmet, tennis shoes, and a “rubber bum” (shorts with rubber on the butt), hiking down into a canyon and basically trekking down the river. It was pretty much like a bunch of sports combined – we hiked, did a few small cliff dives, swam under waterfalls, rock climbed, scrambled over boulders, went through a couple caves... at one point we even slid down trees like fireman poles!! IT WAS SO AWESOME! My new favorite sport for sure. The canyon we were in was extremely jungly and made me feel a little bit like Tarzan (in a silly looking suit), making it extra awesome.


Haha I love this picture, we look like little bobble heads!

Us in our awesome suits, complete with rubber bums..

After this we went on a 3-day backpacking trip on the Fanie Botha trail. The first day was pretty easy and we ended up at hut #1, right on the edge of a thick jungly forest. The best part was that there were a whole bunch of monkeys jumping through the trees that we got to listen to all afternoon while we relaxed and napped! Day 2 was much more difficult but incredibly gorgeous. We went through extremely dense forest and had to cross a whole bunch of creeks and stumbled upon many waterfalls and beautiful pools along the way. The uphills were pretty rough and were covered in extremely slippery rocks… it took us almost a kilometer an hour through the hard stuff! Once we climbed out of the forest we were pretty much on top of a plateau and walked through the clouds a few more kilometers to our next hut. We also saw some animals on the way – not sure if they were springbock or gemsbock but they were way cool! Day 3 was mostly downhill and looped back to where we started. Overall it was an awesome hiking trip and I was pretty much like a kid in a candy store being back in the mountains again!!
View from Hut #1
Crossin' a creek..
Bunch of awesomeness at the last hut


Camp GLOW

After Sabie and a stop in Nelspruit along the way, a few of us went to help a PCV who was holding a girls’ leadership camp in Schomensdal (which is right near the border of Swaziland in Mpumalanga). We did sessions on journaling, goal setting, dealing with peer pressure, overcoming challenges, and some guest speakers came to talk about HIV/AIDS, child advocacy, and other issues. We had a lot of fun and learned a lot for the camp we will be holding in December! One of the best parts of this week was the place we stayed, which was a home for orphans that this Irish woman runs. The compound was amazing and there were about 15 orphans living there along with volunteers from all over the world (U.S., Zambia, Canada, and Germany to name a few) living there and volunteering in various places in the community. The kids all have amazing English and are tutored by the volunteers, and the household runs smoothly with everyone helping out with various activities. It was awesome to see and be a part of for a week (although I have to admit I had major site envy to know that a PCV has been living there for 2 years… what an awesome site to have!!!)
The whole group!
One of the facilitators running a session


Pretoria/ Global Camps Africa training

From camp glow we made our way back to Pretoria for a couple days before heading o yet another conference. We had a lot of fun staying at the backpackers, gorging ourselves with delicious food (we found an amazing Lebanese restaurant..), and seeing a couple movies. We then went to the camp training with about 8 PCVs and many other people from organizations all around the country. The days were packed (8am to 9pm everyday!!!) with info on how to run and manage youth camps. Some of it was very helpful – especially being able to network with other South African organizations – but much it was directed at American-style camps and didn’t really include the African perspective as much as it could have. While it didn’t really cater to the South African cultural context, everyone seemed to really enjoy it!

Back home!

Yesterday I FINALLY made it back to my village, after an exhausting ride into Kuruman on Sunday. I have never been more thankful to be back at my site and stationary again. I wasn’t even upset to find my new bug friends that have taken over my room in my absence! I was also THRILLED to find that the weather has actually become chilly!!! Everyone keeps saying the winter has come early…. Which is better news than I could have ever hoped to receive. Today I went to school in both a sweater and a scarf, and I am fully planning on taking out the extra blankets for my bed tonight! I have officially made it through my first summer in Africa.. only one more to go. I am feeling good about my work at school, as I also learned that one of the mothers in the community has volunteered to help with the creation of our school library!!! I could not be happier with this news, as I was really hesitant to begin a library project without having a community member on board to help. My principal kept telling me that no one in the community would want to volunteer their time… so this was a good lesson in persistence paying off! I am much more eager to take these projects head on with a little community support. Term 2 is pretty short since it’s ending early for the World Cup break and I have a lot of work to do for my classes, projects, and PC stuff… it’s going to be a busy couple months!