Heatin' Up!

The past couple months since vacation have been such a whirlwind! I really don’t know where the time has gone since I got back from vacation. It blows my mind that its now December and my mom is about to arrive!

We traveled straight from vacation back to Pretoria for Regional Training, a week long in-service training for health volunteers and their South Africa counterparts and supervisors. It was the first time I had been reunited with my cohort since May, and it was really good to see everyone! We all stayed in a hotel in Pretoria and MJ was my roommate, so we spent a lot of our time just messing around in our room, talking, watching movies, and hanging out with other volunteers!

I can say I was pleasantly surprised not only with how smoothly the training ran, but also with how organized and inspiring the resource partners were who presented to us. We got a lot of information on young men’s and women’s empowerment programs which I look forward to taking back to site and implementing, I cannot wait.

Aside from the presentations, we worked out at the hotel gym, went swimming, and had dance parties in our room. I loved being reunited with the other Americans who I started this journey with, it was so nice!

As much as I enjoyed vacation and training, I also really missed my host family! I was so happy to come home and get huge hugs from all my host siblings and unpack to spend some quality time with them! A month away from site is a really long time.

Many of you ask how my work is going, so I figured I would give you a picture of exactly what I am working on over the course of the next 18 months. This term, so Oct-Dec, I really had to hit the ground running. I am still preparing all of my materials and supplies to start my girls afterschool dance club this coming January. I had to finalize applications, pass them out, and collect/evaluate them to choose which learners I wanted to participate! Reading those applications made me so happy and it was so refreshing to hear from young motivated women who wanted to do something I was making possible for them. Everything here takes a LOT of time. I have been talking about this club since March and it will be starting 10 months later, crazy! But I can only hope that all of my hard work will pay off!

Next term I will continue to teach in local schools but will be attempting to teach English rather than Life Skills. If it goes well, I will stick with that. Teaching is a small part of my service in my community, but I want to make sure that what I am teaching and how I teach is of the most possible value to my learners.

I have also started an after school homework help program at the local primary school, where grade 5 and 6 learners come every Tuesday and Thursday and work on homework or a specific task given to them by their teachers. It is kind of a mix of math (yikes), social science, and English assignments depending on what they are struggling with. I know it’s a small chunk of time, but I am happy to stick around in the afternoon if it means giving kids extra time to work on their homework and perfect their skills.

Boiketlo, the organization I am paired with, has a spare room that is being used to storage now. With the help of a couple grants, I am in the process of building a reading room and study lounge for local children. We are redoing the roofing, installing shelving and tables/chairs, and it is my hope that kids will come to study or read for fun from time to time. Although the organization cannot feed local kids like it used to, I want to bring Boiketlo back as a central institution in the community where people can go for some sort of resource. Hopefully this will be completed soon!

I also am in the process of applying for grants for a couple sleepaway camps in the near future. The first camp will be based on gender rights and unity among young South African men and women. We will have about 50 young boys and girls in grades 8 and 9 participate in individual workshops during the mornings, and by afternoon we will do trust building exercises all together. My hope is that this camp will happen around late June or early July 2014. I absolutely cannot wait!

Near the end of my service in September 2014, MJ and I plan to do a young women’s wellness camp, a similar timeline and format to the one I just explained except based on mental and physical health of young women. We want to incorporate yoga and dance into women’s sexual and reproductive health issues and gender rights here in South Africa.

The projects mentioned above are my main goals, but I also plan to do a few side projects over this course of time, so stay tuned! Its so difficult to do everything you want to in such a finite amount of time.

Over the next couple weeks I will just be prepping for my girls club and packing for when my MOM visits!! She arrived December 16^th and I could not be more excited!

Anyway, I think that is about all I have to report for now, but I hope you all enjoyed my updates. I will attach some pictures of my host family, Halloween celebrated with local PCVs, regional training, and my host sisters kindergarten (or as they say here grade R) graduation. I miss you all so much, and you’re all constantly in my thoughts! I hope everyone had a truly wonderful thanksgiving.

All my love,

H

Wild Coast Trip!

This blog is super behind so forgive me, but the past couple months have been crazy busy getting everything ready for the new year! Busy is good, definitely makes the time fly! I’ll start with talking about my very first Peace Corps vacation!

At the end of September me, Kristen, Kathleen, Allie, Melinda, and two of Melinda’s friends, Mel and Kayleen, traveled to the wild coast, a gorgeous coastal region in the eastern cape of South Africa. I started by taking an overnight bus from Pretoria to Durban which took about 9 hours, and then arrived at about 5 AM in Durban! I was couch surfing that night with a guy named Will. For those of you who do not know what Couch Surfing is, it is a social network where people from all over the world can stay with others for free. It is a highly reputable system where people communicate online and plan visits to each other. I did it in South America and in Southeast Asia when I was there, so I figured why not try South Africa too? The experience was great. Will lives with about 6 other roommates and we all had a big barbeque and watched scary movies in their living room once the other girls arrived. Will was so accommodating to us and we had an amazing time getting to know them!

The next morning we set off to catch a taxi to Port St. Johns, where we would begin our hike through the wild coast! We stayed the night at a local hostel which was absolutely gorgeous! It overlooked the ocean and had an amazing outdoor bar and restaurant, so we enjoyed some beers and delicious food and got some sleep and showers in before the next morning when our guide would come pick us up to start the trek! We took the hike with another South African family and a German tourist named Sebastian who was traveling the world after graduating University. The total hike was about 60 kilometers. Each day, we would end up with a different host family along the way who would serve us homemade bread, tea, and coffee, and we would have some chill time to take a bath or rest until they cooked us a traditional South African meal for dinner like pumpkin, chicken, beans and corn meal, etc. Needless to say our stomachs were always full!

The views on the trip were gorgeous, and it was so nice to have quality time with this group of girls. We live very far apart and catching up with them and joking around was so good for my soul. I loved being with them. Beautiful scenery, delicious food, and amazing friends, what more could I ask for in my first vacation? It was amazing!

We ended the hike in Coffee Bay, and we stayed there for about 5 days just relaxing, walking on the beach, eating junk food, and drinking. I cannot stress enough how important it is to take vacations in Peace Corps. Sometimes you need to turn your brain off and focus on nothing but resting and spending time with people that make you happy. I fully support vacation time in the states, and this was just the same. So needed and so nice to not think about work and the difficulties of service, and just laugh and be for 10 days! The vacation ended early October, and it felt like it went by in two seconds. I absolutely loved it and cannot wait until the next time I get to travel with these lovely girls!

Below are photos of our trip, the group we couch surfed with, and gorgeous sites we saw. Enjoy!

Work Work Work...and Patience

I feel like not much has changed since I wrote my last post. I am still working on my same projects and attempting to get a hang of this whole teaching thing, cooking and experimenting with different ingredients and budgets, and practicing my language! Something tells me I will continue to do all of this until I close service. Hard to believe I have now been in country for 8 months!

One of the biggest and best things that has happened to me since my last post is that I officially moved! I am now a member of the Makena family. All I can say is this was most definitely the right decision and I am SO much happier!! Before I felt so isolated and although I had good neighbors, I spent majority of my time holed up in my room, which only made my homesickness worse. Now, an average day for me looks so much different. I wake up around 5:30 or 6 in the morning to the sound of my siblings singing, playing, or cleaning, and as I drink my coffee they greet me, ask me how I slept, or just giggle which absolutely warms my heart. I am always in and out of the house because my schedule varies so much, but when I do come home my gogo (or grandma) is always there, either napping, chatting with neighbors, cleaning, or relaxing so we talk a little bit (she only speaks Sepedi so its lots of laughing and nodding), and then once the kids come home I drink tea and play with them or help them with homework, do my thing and end the night by watching tv with them in their house when I feel like it. Being surrounded by such a sweet group of people, and naturally falling into helping them makes me feel wanted, supported, and useful and I could not be happier that I made this decision.

                I have decided to postpone my dance project’s start date until January. Schools here are year round, so this term, 4, is the last of the year. Since it is right before the December holidays, attendance is usually lower, and I figured that it would be best to take my time, prepare the facilitators and supplies, and start in January with a well-done platform and group of learners. It is very frustrating for me to start late (I will be starting my first secondary project when I have been in country for a year) but I need to remind myself that moments like this are the reason Peace Corps is 27 months, not 6 months. As an American and a type A personality, it is SO hard for me to not have running projects a year in. One of the most difficult aspects of Peace Corps for me is taking deep breaths, realizing everything takes time, and that so much of the impacts I make I will never see or know about. An anxiety I experience daily and a question that is always on my mind is, “am I really helping anyone?”. Its so hard to reassure myself but I am so excited to put the finishing touches on this first project, and I can only hope the participants will enjoy it as well. I am continuing to teach Life Skills at 3 local schools, and am considering switching to English at the beginning of term 1 in January. I feel like my skills might be of better use teaching my home language and that I might be more understood, but I am giving Life Skills one more term and we will see how that goes. Another project on my mind is an after-school homework help program, but that’s just brewing in my mind at the moment, so we will see. There are so many things I WANT to do, but to do them well, I have to pick and choose and that is really really hard!

                I am a member of the Volunteer Support Network (a peer to peer support group for volunteers), and was recently elected as Deputy Chair or vice president! I am really excited to be serving on a committee that helps other volunteers, and was so surprised and touched to be elected! I oversee a lot of the budget and subcommittees (LGBT, Sexual Harassment, etc. ) and besides this position we have been traveling around training the new cohort that just arrived in July. It is so nice not to be the new kid anymore! All of the other members are awesome and its so nice to get to know people from different parts of South Africa who are all at different moments in their service! Anyway, just something new and fun to be a part of J.

                I really don’t have much else to report! I am going on my FIRST vacation since arriving next week, a hike through the wild coast and I cannot WAIT!!! Pictures and details to follow.

                Lastly, I wrote an article for the newsletter on Culture Vs. Poverty so I figured I would attach it below. Feel free to read! I love you all, sorry for a kind of boring post but I hope you enjoyed it a little!

Pictures include my host sister Bokamoso’s birthday, and random ones playing with the kids. Enjoy!

All my love,

H

Culture Vs. Poverty: Which One is Pushing Our Buttons?

                Being alone at site, we all have a lot of time to think. We imagine home, the comforts and people we miss, what it will be like to go back, and we also compare those memories with the realities we face here in South Africa. Most of our day to day life as volunteers is anything but easy. We are constantly learning new aspects of the cultures where we live, about our capabilities as people, and our willingness to accept or reject pieces of our interactions and struggles that test us to no end.

                Often times when upset we naturally focus on the pieces of South African culture that are different from our own, things we do not understand, which cause obstacles that sometimes seem impossible to overcome. At least in my own head, it is very easy for me to grow angry with what I see as “South African Culture.” While there are pieces of my background and that of host country nationals that do differ, creating a clash that often makes me angry, sad, frustrated, etc., I feel that a lot of it has nothing to do with culture, but rather with poverty and socioeconomic status.

                Let’s examine attendance for example. One of my biggest frustrations with starting an afterschool dance program is that I just cannot get people to show up unless I provide food, and even then it is a struggle. All I could focus on for the longest time was how angry I was that I was spending my time and energy to offer locals a free, fun, recreational activity, and they couldn’t even leave their homes for thirty minutes just to try it. I know many other volunteers as well as organizations locally have similar issues. If we take a step back and look further into the issue rather than assuming the emotions and motives of local youth, there could be a ton at play. They could have chores, their parents could be neglecting them and their siblings so they have to care for their families, they could have work, or most important to me, they could be scared or embarrassed to try something new when no one in their life has ever encouraged them to do so. So maybe just maybe youth are not skipping out on my functions or being flakey because they’re South Africans and its their “culture,” but because they are at a poverty level where every minor move someone in their family makes, whether it be a change in schedule, lack of funds, or abusive comment, immensely affects the way they view themselves, their time, and their goals. Obviously it cannot be applied to every challenge, and it is natural to feel helpless at times when you just can’t understand how people and politics can be so different from a place you know and call home, but there is something to be said for taking a step back. 

Spinning my point of view and making room in my head and my heart for these possibilities makes my day go by just a bit faster, opens my eyes to  ways I can be of service during my time here, and leads me to a deeper understanding of a place and a population so different from anything I have ever known. It is times like this where it is our chance to learn. I am not saying it is all black and white, one or the other. I hardly know the answers to why the challenges I face seem to keep happening and probably will never find out even one month before I close service. I just encourage you to live with an open mind and open heart to the possibility that something bigger is at play than personal preference, cultural difference, or lack of interest. It takes a lot to swallow your pride, refrain from taking things personally, and putt less pressure on yourself to solve the world’s problems, especially as Americans, but we can do it.

When we swore in we promised to communicate a positive and accurate image of South Africa to citizens in our home country. I believe this is one of the ways our eyes are opened and we have the chance to go two directions. We can lash out, write off a culture we know so little about, and move on to continue meeting these speed bumps in our service with anger and resentment, or we can ride the wave, accept that life is hard (not always hard though), and take a deeper look at what really is at play in those moments of clash we face all the time. Maybe our open hearts and minds will lead us to success, and if not, at least to a better understanding of those around us which is what life is all about.