Janet

I settled myself into a plastic green lawn chair to pursue a conversation with Janet, a 71 year old villager. She was lounging on her small patio with a cup of coffee, facing her garden filled with rows of corn and the infant growths of watermelon. In her sea green dress, with a floppy, navy blue, knitted beanie she immediately animated at the appearance of a captivated audience as I explained to her that I was interested in the traditions surrounding childbirth.

I immediately found our language to be a barrier. Janet excitedly responded to each of my questions but often ideas were lost in translation or cultural impediments. I was a young, assertive Westerner, while Janet was from a quieter more guarded generation, a practitioner of blind faith, hard work, and frugality. Still, her information was forthcoming, and though not always well explained, nevertheless delivered with gusto and commitment to assisting me.

It was quickly apparent that, like so many of my expectations regarding my African assumptions, times were changing. The world and customs in which Janet had delivered her babies was very different than the ways her grandchildren were coming into being. Today women went to the clinic or hospital to deliver. In her day birthing in the village was the norm. She explained the reasoning:

We were suffering because the babies didn’t have IDs and we didn’t know when they were born. They couldn’t go to school without an ID. Now they are born in clinic to get ID.

It struck me that I had very different reasoning regarding clinic births compared to Janet. My immediate assumption was that women were encouraged to use the clinics as a step towards safer births, for lowering infant mortality. Yet, Janet saw it as a government ordinance, a reflection of their attempt to control.

I was curious about exactly how women got to the hospital when they went into labor. Many villagers rely on taxis as a means of transportation and often they can be sporadic and don’t run at night.

Oh, when it’s time someone must find a car. Sometimes babies are born in the car because they are too late.

Yet, in Janet’s day this was not the case. When it was near time women would prepare water and traditional medicines from the garden, “not white medicine.” When women felt “the pains” they would walk in the village to help the baby to come. Eventually she would deliver the baby while kneeling.

In the hospital you lay in a bed but at home we squatted.

After the baby was born, and the following still happens even today, the woman and the baby went into seclusion until the umbilical cord “was dry.” During this time the husband can be shown the baby, but he does not sleep with the wife. Instead, the new mom sleeps with her mother, if unmarried, or with her mother-in-law if married. In fact, even the new mother’s older counterpart, the infant’s grandmother, does not sleep with her husband during this period.

I moved the conversation backwards on the time spectrum in order to gain Janet’s views on conception and pregnancy.

The day man makes you pregnant, you feel somehow, you know.

How do you feel while you’re pregnant? Do you still work?

Sometimes you love your husband very very much and you don’t want him to go to work but sometimes….eish….you hate husband. We still work when pregnant, very hard and we are always vomiting and tired.

What happens if the mom gets sick?

She goes to witch doctor for traditional medicine

What happens if there is something wrong with the baby?

I had a baby in 1954 and it was born without skin over its stomach. It was at four in the afternoon and all of the livers and intestines were coming out. We took it to the hospital. The doctors said they had never seen that happen before. He died at one in the morning. The doctors took him and kept him to study him.

I paused to see the detachment in Janet’s fact as she told me this. It seemed to be an incident stored in her memory as an event that feelings were no longer connected to. I supposed this was a survival mechanism for Janet and as I sat there shocked and overwhelmed she urged me on with more stories.

It used to be very bad to have more than one baby at one time. You weren’t supposed to keep both, one was to be killed. In 1930 my Aunty had twins. She heard the other villagers talk about killing one of her babies so she ran way with her babies to Gauteng Province.

So people were afraid of twins?

Yes, in 1948, in my village a woman had triplets-all girls. No one had ever seen that and it was in the newspaper and the mom left with them. If she would have stayed they would have killed two of the babies. All three girls eventually got married and live in the next village over.

Is there anything else you can tell me about after the baby is born or feeding it?

After baby was born we used to rub on it a sour milk butter to help it grow. It smelled terrible…eish…I didn’t like to be near the baby when it smelled like that. We give the baby our breast for food. They usually take our milk until they are two years.

By now Janet had finished her coffee and I had my questions answered. I felt a deep connection with this woman, who like me was struggling to carve a place for herself in a world so drastically different from the one in which she had grown up. Her words compounded to give a visual picture to the idea that we all have our own stories and information and that each of us is worth communicating with and exploring.

Free Lunch

A few of us met at Dulce (a coffee shop/restaurant in Tzaneen) before we left for Polokwane for lunch and to meet with Andrew, a former Peace Corps Volunteer who now works at a school near me, to talk about fundraising techniques. Meagan, Omar, and I all got food while Hossam and Andrew abstained. Eventually, Johan, our waiter who we know quite well at this point as we have become “regulars,” came over and the following conversation ensued:

Johan (directed at Andrew and Hossam) What do you two want to eat?
Andrew: Nothing, we’re okay.
Johan: You have to get something to eat
Hossam: No, we’re fine.
Johan: No, you need to order something.

(At this point my thought process is the following: What’s up with Johan? Why is he being such a jerk? He’s never been like this before.)

Andrew: Why?
Johan: You have to order because your bill has already been paid for…

Turns out the people who had been sitting behind us at the restaurant paid a tab of 250 rand for us as they left Dulce. That’s approximately 40 something dollars. For 5 of use a bill normally runs around 150ish rand. That’s a lot of money- a fifth of what I get to survive on for a month. We have no idea who these people were, none of us had seen them before and none of us talked to them while at the restaurant.

We can only assume that they overheard us talking about the work we do and were impressed or felt sorry for us or something. So often here I’m surrounded by passivity and/or negativity regarding my work so the awe of being appreciated left us all in shock. The best part of the whole thing was when Hossam proceeded to flip through the menu, find the most expensive item, and order the “rump steak.” We all had deep appreciation for the extravagance.

The Dam

Omar

Omar is a bastard who only makes fun of my toenails….actually he’s not but he is watching me type this so I thought I’d throw him a bone.

It is a completely different experience to be a Peace Corp Volunteer alone at your site as compared to being with another Peace Corp Volunteer.

After some initial headaches with Peace Corp staff Omar was “approved” to visit and help at my site. He showed up over the weekend and since then we’ve been “playing house.” For the majority of the week we’ve been working at Leakhale creating teaching schedules with the educators and developing science and math curriculum for the school. It was surprisingly exhausting, attempting to get so much work done in such a short span of time. Luckily for me, my school loved Omar and had our lunch catered for part of the week which was a nice change from my usual peanut butter and jelly consumption or peanuts and raisins.

Since there is not a lot to do around the village we have been entertaining ourselves in a variety of ways: playing a multitude of Scrabble, Perfection (which Omar is obsessed with), Blue’s Clues Memory, Catch Phrase, etc. In addition, we have been eating some really amazing pasta that has been stretched throughout the week.

The reaction of my community has been interesting. Everyone is really excited to find out where he’s from and to learn he’s also an American. I did have to explain to a few people that he is not my husband but this perception may help to curb males harassing me in my community if they think I’m taken so I don’t mind too much.

In the end, it’s been nice to have company and I feel like it has really gotten my teachers, especially at Leakhale, excited to use my help again. I do think for the rest of the year I will be busy at that particular school. For now I leave site for a week and a half for in service training in Polokwane. It’ll be nice to learn a lot of vital information and more importantly to hang out with 50 Americans.

Baby

My mom wrote me a letter requesting information on birthing practices in South Africa. This is what I have been able to discover thus far. Hopefully I will find out more, but it is difficult seeing as not too many people speak English well and the ones that do often give me vague reasons for things:

-When women are pregnant you aren’t supposed to ask them about it or recognize it as there are superstitions that talking about pregnancy will harm the baby. Sello tells me this is changing as the culture becomes more Western and more people openly do in fact discuss pregnancy.

-The women here do go to hospitals or the clinic to deliver their babies.

-After the baby is delivered and brought home it goes into a separate room with the mom and is not brought out or shown off for anywhere from a few weeks to a few months. This used to be only for traditional reasons but now it is also due to the idea of preventing exposure to disease. When we lived in Moletsi, one of the other volunteers didn’t know his host sister even had a baby until he had lived there for a few weeks, and he finally got to see it at the end of our stay. I remember him telling us: “I get to see the baby in two days.”

-Everyone here breast feeds and since breasts here are not considered private objects no one is discreet about it. I know at least one male volunteer who had to go home and have a few beers one night to recover after having to sit on a taxi squished against some woman’s exposed breast as she fed her baby. Even HIV positive women often breast feed their babies as there is a higher chance that the baby will contract a devastating illness from the water used to mix with formula than of becoming HIV positive from breast milk.

-All babies, from infant to toddler, are carried on their mother’s backs, piggy back style. They always tie the babies to their backs with a towel. Portia, the girl who helps clean my house, was playing net ball (girl version of basketball) two days ago with an infant tied to her back. I told her it concerned me a lot.

Earthquake

Last night I awoke to strange creaking noises emitted from my house and was convinced the ground was shaking. Then I thought logically, “No, Cait you must have had a larium dream. You’re in South Africa there is no way we are having an earthquake.” Subsequently, as I got ready for school this morning, and was listening to the radio, I discovered that there had, in fact, been a 7 point something earthquake in Mozambique around midnight. I told Omar I had felt it, and I think he thought I was insane. Later Tom sent me a message that pretty much summed up my feelings on the situation:

“So it turns out that earthquake that I felt last night wasn’t a larium dream after all. How do I leave California and end up in an earthquake.”

My sentiments exactly.

Education

As for the potter he had lived long enough to know that the best way of killing a rose is to force it open when it is still only the promise of a bud. –Jose Saramago, The Cave

I am struggling with accepting the education system here: not that it’s not good, it is, but that’s the primary problem. It’s good for me, but I’m a white woman, from Western Society, with resources. I get it because I have always gotten it. I was born into this system, lived it, learned it, know it. But, to be African, growing up in an era of apartheid, it is vague and obscure. It’s completely alien. In fact, it is foreign: it was written by Europeans.

Imagine the following scenario: You have a job and you’ve always had the same job. In fact, you’ve been doing it exactly the same way for the last ten years. Unfortunately, some people from a distant country have decided that everything about your job: your performance, your routine, your structure; is absolutely wrong. They come in, give you a few workshops and walk away patting themselves on the back for “saving you.” Meanwhile you feel confused and overwhelmed. When you attempt to do your job now, things continuously fall apart, yet there’s no one there to pick up the pieces.

This is the fallacy of the West. This idea that we can save third world countries with everyone’s ideals except for the country in question:

I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means except by getting off his back. –Leo Tolstoy

So, I sit here, attempting to sweep up this mess of quality, but unfortunately oblivious, intentions. This education system is now trying to produce clones of suburban American children. Yet, these children do not fit the description; they are African children who are struggling and impoverished. They are the forgotten ones. By adopting Western standards we continuously make the rural areas messier while effectively increasing their gap with the city-folk, the better off. Unwittingly we have boosted the established further ahead while ignorantly forcing a greater cache of poverty to persist.

What is the solution? We need to get back to the basics. I don’t suggest scrapping the entire education system, but, for now, abandon the obscure. We can’t ask teachers to have a learner-centered classroom without first addressing the issue of getting teachers to stay in the classroom for a full day. We can’t expect integration across subjects when teachers are struggling to comprehend the curriculum in general. We can’t ask for individualized instruction when there are no disability services, and teachers have had no training for working with children with disabilities. We need to address underlying problems instead of ignoring them:

I’d like our children to have skills that help them to survive: that’s the long and short of it. –Emerging Voices: A Report on Education in South African Rural Communities

We can’t force these schools to become mirrors of idealism: there are too few classrooms, too few resources, too few well-trained teachers. They aren’t ready to assess students individually when there are 75 first graders in a classroom, or to perform science experiments when there aren’t enough chairs for all of the children. Once again the West has done a really quality of job with distributing beautiful theory to Africa. It’s simply unfortunate that it causes a lot of uncertainty.

More Pictures

Drops

Rain, rain, rain: I have concluded there are two weather patterns is South Africa: blistering, sweltering, oppressive heat and pula, rain. Though the showers do have their downfalls, multitudes of mosquitoes and rivers of mud, the enclosed world I reside in has been tinged with an Eden like atmosphere. The shades of greens fancifully intermingling as they sprout from the ground: cucumber, emerald, sea, forest, pea, jade, lime; only a master painter would be capable of coming even slightly close to representing them with his copious strokes.

My family laments over the leaks that water tinkles steadily from into bright, strategically placed buckets. They grumble over the strident drone the rain emits upon hitting our tin roof: its soliloquy to the world. For me, reclining in the obscurity of night, I find the faithful drumming soothing. It lulls me into peace with its constant soundtrack.

In the morning my dirt path suffers endangerment as newly formed tributaries crisscross it, often ankle deep. I hop, skip, jump my way to a taxi or to school or to whatever my given job of the day happens to be. Undoubtedly more than one part of me finds itself covered in varying layers of muck.

I ignore my own dishevelment as I gaze into the mountains where the cotton ball clouds fold themselves into various crevices: the billows so low that I could easily ascend the hills into vapors covering myself with their sparkling droplets. As a child I dreamed of clouds where fairies played but only here have I found their actual existence.

We are all dreamlike here: the village becomes lazy and fanciful with the rain. We all sleep later, startled not to be awoken by the first crowing roosters or the searing sun. The children arrive late to school as their walk becomes more treacherous and their bodies crave the inviting blankets of bed. The day is spent in a half daze craving a hot glass of cocoa and a pleasant book. The water seeps into everything as papers curl, refusing to lay flat, reaching their saturation point. Butterflies and birds dart in between droplets to find the shelter of a tree or flower.

I enjoyed rain in America but here, in the village, I have found the time to fall in love with it. I have a profound worship of its power over life and growth. I appreciate its ability to overwhelm the senses: the smell it embodies, the touch on the skin, the freshness of taste, the redundancy in its sound, the views it endows. It was fitting that my counterparts gave me the African name of the former rain queen, Makobo, for now there is no grandeur higher than the rain.

Torn

Last night Sello was explaining to me that Khutso had been crying in the afternoon because he wanted French Paloney (cheap sandwich meat). My host mom told him that he needed to tell his mom to buy it for him.

Background on Khutso’s mom: I’m going to put it nicely and simply state that I don’t like the woman. She’s a drunk who is always in and out of jail for something or another. Yesterday was the first time Khutso had seen her since mid-December. She apparently receives some sort of child grant for him that he never sees any of the money from.

I constantly feel torn over the treatment of Khutso. There are extra beds in the house yet he sleeps on a blanket on the floor. As far as I can tell dinner is the only time he receives any type of protein and vegetables in his diet, and he always gets the smallest portions of these. For breakfast and lunch he eats bread. I never see anyone hug him or ask his about his schoolwork (he’s only seven). It kills me to see this but I feel helpless to do anything about it. I try to give him treats as often as possible, but I honestly feel he’s simply neglected. I want to complain to my family about it, but they are already doing him a favor by giving him a place to live, which is more than his mother provides.

I could buy Khutso French Paloney…it’s not expensive and would set me back less than two dollars. Yet, I don’t want his mom to think I’m going to give him a free ride, and I don’t want to cause any type of negative feelings in my family “Why are you buying things for Khutso?” My “mom” did convince his mom to give her money to buy the meat but it cost a long battle that Khutso was there for and know can’t have felt positive to a child who receives so little love and attention already.

I don’t know what to do…

Malnutrition

An interesting observation I have recently made: the children of one of my schools are generally much larger than children of my other schools. Why is this? Most of the children I encounter here are much smaller than their counterparts in the states and not only regarding their weight. I can also make this observation in view of height and general build. I was discussing this issue with Caitlin and she cited her kitten as an example.

Recently, Caitlin received a kitten that her “family” has been feeding store bought food to. Its brothers and sisters, like most of the animals in the area, are fed scraps. Her kitten is now twice the size of its brothers and sisters. This got her to thinking. In her host family her “sisters” are much larger than the other children in their grade. Initially, she thought her “sisters” must be old for their grade but now her theory is similar to the kittens: her “family” has more money thus the girls get a more balanced diet and grow properly.

The village has become a case study of the effects of malnourishment. Likewise, I’m curious to know if the families of my one school, which is only a few kilometers from my other two schools, are better off financially. It certainly seems that the food distribution on this side must be better. Yet, another idea for me to contemplate.

Illness

I have been mildly ill a number of times since my arrival in South Africa but this last weekend was the first time that my body completely fell apart. Unfortunately my bout with illness began when I was in town doing my shopping, so I was forced to endure the hour ride home on a crowded taxi, head out the window, as the bouts of nausea wavered in and out. I finally got home, and barely made it the short walk from the road to my home before collapsing from exhaustion into bed. I did not stay that way long, I spent the rest of the day trudging between my room and the pit toilet. The pleasant experience was completed even more fully as I threw up with flies pelting me from every direction. For all of Sunday this continued: a long with a high fever and other less pleasant scenarios, and I spent all of Monday confined to a bed. Now, Tuesday, I have made it back to school, but the mile walk here has left me completely exhausted, and I can only hope that I am in fact getting better and not in for another horrendous case of complete loss of digestive functions for any longer.

As a side note I have come to the realization that I am, in fact, not going to have any visitors while I spend time here in South Africa. As far as I know I am the only volunteer who has no family and/or friends willing/able to make the trek across the Atlantic Ocean to this beautiful and glorious country (yes, this is my form of a guilt trip). I feel after being miserably alone and ill for the past few days I can send this low blow and eventually receive forgiveness.

And yet another side note: The woman I share a post box with asked me today if I had changed my address. "No, Why?" "You used to get tons of mail and now you rarely get any I don't think the people in America remember you anymore." How depressing, to have rejection pointed out due to mail.