Thursday, October 8, 2009

What I did during my school break!!

We have had a 10-day break from school so I’ve made the most of it by becoming more familiar with Thutlwane and the surrounding areas.

Last Friday, Sonja and I met in Mafikeng for a little shopping trip. I had intended to try to buy a little two-burner stove with an oven. I didn’t have any luck finding one in any of the stores near where we were. I’ll keep trying because I’ve seen them in plenty of places in Pretoria. If worse comes to worse, I’ve seen one in a pawn shop type place in Delareyville and my supervisor can pick it up there.

My internet phone wasn’t working with the SIM card that was in it so I started off in the Vodacom store trying to get that fixed. I ended up with an upgraded SIM card for R20 that I didn’t want, but was tired of trying to explain. That seemed the most expeditious way to get a SIM card that worked and get out of the store.

We then went to the post office. One of the guys in our training class said near the end of training, “figure out the least efficient way to do something and that will be how it will be done”. That perfectly explains the post office. I had some aerograms to mail while Sonja has some postcards to mail. These were already stamped and ready to go. It took the guy at least 20 minutes to see if the correct postage were on the postcards and then stamp them. He couldn’t look at the stamps and see that he’d already totaled up the amount on the calculator once with the same stamps and these stamps were the equivalent amount. They all had to be totaled up separately and then stamped. Then, it wasn’t good enough to have written Air Mail on them. They all needed an Air Mail sticker. So he had to find a spot to put an Air Mail sticker on them. THEN I wanted to mail a package to Lisa. That took at least 30 more minutes. The customs sticker has to be glued on the package among other things. There isn’t a postage stamp or a metered amount that can be printed. Each stamp has to be put on separately, blah, blah, blah. And so it went…

I think there are going to be two things that drive me absolutely insane about SA. One is the inefficient way things are done. The other is the indirect communication style. I want to speak to my Austin friend, Steven, who is South African. I’m pretty sure American ways of coming directly to the point (even ones who don’t are direct compared to SA) and being concerned about time must have absolutely driven him nuts…I’d like to ask him anyway how he coped. My mother and I had lots of fights over what I now know to be just indirect communication styles. To me, it felt a lot like manipulation, but in fact it is not. It is just indirect. She must be laughing a lot watching me cope with this here.

Oddly, everywhere Sonja and I went we were told that people in Mafikeng “knew us”. We kept saying that, “no, we didn’t know anyone in Mafikeng”. Turns out that two girls got us in the market and insisted that we were on a show called The Amazing Race. There was absolutely nothing we could do or say that would prove that we were not on a television show called The Amazing Race. I finally showed my Peace Corps id and that sort of got me off the hook, but Sonja didn’t have hers with her and there was nothing she could do to dissuade people that she wasn’t from television. It was very odd and happened at least 4 or 5 times. I have never seen this show (as you all know), but someone said it was some kind of worldwide scavenger hunt. I plan to use this to my advantage and am creating a list of unusual things that I’d like to have so I can ask for them next time I’m in Mafikeng. Lion’s mane hair or crocodile tooth anyone?

So I’ve got my house pretty well set up now, but no oven yet. I’ve borrowed a two-burner hotplate for the time being and that works well enough to cook vegetables and pasta with. The plastic containers seem to work well enough to keep the bugs away, and anything else I can just collect as time goes by. It seems like it will take a couple of trips to get everything anyway and I’ve got time.

I walked to our local library. It is absolutely great all things considered. It is about a 45 or 50-minute walk from my house, but it is pleasant to do and I stop and talk to people all along the way. My Setswana is definitely improving by doing this. There is a fair collection of fiction and non-fiction, some relatively current magazines, a couple of computers, and a very nice children’s section. It is only open during the week from 8-4:30, but still, it is a good resource. There are plenty of open sections on the shelves, but I’ve seen where the two former Peace Corps Volunteers have made donations. I’ve got some books that can go there as well so I’ll take them when I return the books I borrowed. If books weren’t so expensive to ship, I’d ask for some from home to donate—you’d think there would be a better way!

It started raining two nights ago. It rains in SA like it rains in Texas. It is nothing like a soft, gentle rain that happens in Scotland. It rains like all hell has broken loose with thunder and lightening. Hail on a tin roof can wake the dead. Luckily, nothing at my house seems to leak, but that is not the case with everyone. When I think of all the water that is contained in clouds overhead for it to rain like that, I’m astounded at the forces of nature. All it takes is a little change in pressure for the clouds to not be able to hold it all in before it comes down to earth in torrents. I have the same feeling when I am looking at things like the Grand Canyon or at the dinosaur museum because I consider the forces of nature and how strong they are. Then I wonder about my little bitty part in all that and wonder if anything I do can change anything about the earth like global warming. Still I endeavor to make as small an impact as possible on the earth. I’ve got such audacity!

Yesterday morning, the cattle arrived from the surrounding plains to be inoculated. They clearly did not want to be inoculated. Nevertheless, they were herded into the kraal and then into a chute to be vaccinated and let back out. It took 4 or 5 hours and was clearly a community project. I asked to help it seems like anyone and everyone who wanted to help did. It was fun and anyone who REALLY knows me knows that I love nothing better than to be up to my ears in muck doing hard work.
It is hard to make me happier despite my ability to also hang with the rich and famous dressed in nice clothes. The really happy me is the dirty me. When a cow escaped, the young boys took great delight in chasing the beast down, corralling it, and making sure it got its due. The men and women, young and old, were out helping or just watching. It was a very interesting process and I at least understood most of the Setswana (Bula is Open and Tswala is Shut). I had a great deal of fun, but I’m the only one in the end who got sunburned. My nose is still red today.

There is a Peace Corps policy that we are supposed to have security bars on the doors and windows. I didn’t feel that I needed them in Thutlwane and was personally willing to forgo them, but the chief noticed that I like having the windows open when I sleep so he ordered them right up. So now I have steel bars on the windows and a steel door that keeps the riffraff out. There are some pictures of the man welding these bars on one of the windows. You can see the welding mask sitting off to one side…who needs safety gear? To install the door, they had to chip away at solid concrete for about an inch and a half. While the men were doing this, the chief remarked that I would be in jail soon. At least it looks nice and doesn’t feel like jail. It took quite a while (2 days), but I’m safe now. In fact, the chief is happy and I guess it is a good thing since I’ve got the computer here. Better safe than sorry.

I’ve also enclosed some pictures of my host mother cooking. She prefers to cook outside because “the fire is easier”. I think, in fact, it is easier when you are cooking pap and cabbage for about 15 people everyday. The big pots are heavy and you can just do it all in one shot. She can lift the lid off the pots with no potholder (I think I’ll get her some) and her hands are by no means callused or tough. Cooking is a huge job here along with nearly all the other chores women do. I can’t stress how hard people work here and I wonder if this is what it was like for my grandparents growing up. I remember my grandmother having a wringer washing machine, but this is more like the washboard days. I’ve seen a woman here doing washing for an entire day. It is backbreaking labor.

I can also say that my taste for meat is fading fast. I wasn’t a big meat eater before, but now I’m feeding these animals and then to catch them, slaughter them, clean them, and finally cook them makes my appetite for eating them vanish. Of course, if it is anonymous and served already cooked between a bun at Wimpy’s in Mafikeng, I’ll eat it. At least I feel that way now because the odd cheeseburger and fries is quite good.

Our turkeys and chickens are hatching chicks all the time now. There are little ones running around all over the place. Eventually, my host mother corrals them all into a pen like thing that protects them, especially at night. I think there are about 30 turkey chicks and half that many chickens right now. They are very cute. There has been a facebook debate among volunteers about whether baby goats or sheep are cuter. Hard to say, but I’ve got to add baby donkeys in there. They are very cute. Maybe all babies are cute. Here are some other local characters.













One other thing that I found when shopping in Mafikeng is Tang…when was the last time you had this to drink? I must say that I bought a couple of packages because I thought it would be a good change from water. It is. I got a slight cold last weekend and I started drinking Tang. It has vitamin C, vitamin A, and iron in it you know. I wish now that I had bought a lot more of it and I’ll certainly be stocking up on it when I go back in a week or two. There is a concentrated fruit drink here that is VERY sweet. It is so sweet that I dilute it about 3X what they say to do and it is still too sweet. Tang, on the other hand, is still Tang and although I dilute it now more than I did when I was a kid, I still like the taste and it is a lot better than the other stuff.

Of course, you can find Coke too…an interesting story is that in the 80’s when American companies pulled out of South Africa to protest the apartheid government, Pepsi pulled out and Coke didn’t. Pepsi still hasn’t recovered the market so to support their action, I try to drink Pepsi products when I can find them. Hard to do though when all you can find is Coke and Fanta (grape and orange). At home, I rarely drank a soft drink, but when I did it was usually Diet Coke, called Coke Light here.

I’ve been downloading my first CD through iTunes. Just to show how painful downloading is there are 15 songs. It is done with 5 of them and that has taken over 2 hours. We’ll see how long the whole thing takes, but I think it will be all day…needless to say, I don’t open YouTube videos, pictures that people send, links to whatever, etc. I just save them for when I get home and will open them then.