Watching Oprah in Africa...

It always strikes me as strange: the cultural impact that the U.S. has, usually unknown to the majority of its citizens, in various parts of the world. Always, through reading newspapers and magazines, I had heard of the Westernizing influence that culture from the United States and Western Europe had on the rest of the globe. Yet, that influence, and the peculiar ways in which it is filtered down into Africa, will always strike me as a bizarre phenomenon.

In my naiveté I viewed such happenings as western clothing or music as being the main influence of America. Yet, it goes so much farther than that. I will always be shocked at the infiltration of “American values” into village life. Whereas I am surrounded by people living in poverty; it is shocking to see the influx of materialism that has permeated the conscious of these very same African people. People, who have next to nothing, will buy 150 dollar shoes, and still use a pit toilet or have a roof that leaks. They will buy a full entertainment center, with an exaggerated television, a sound system, and a DVD player, regardless of the fact that they don’t speak English and therefore can only understand a tiny portion of programs on TV a long with the reality that they have no DVD’s to play. In the afternoon, as I watch television in a set up that was nicer than the one my family owned in the U.S., I shake my head at the insanity of it. In my mind I see their priorities as severely misguided as their pit toilet heads toward the point of overflowing and Khutso continues to sleep on a blanket on the floor.

Many of the Africans I know have “things.” My host brothers and sisters wear brand name clothes much more expensive than my own. I may have more clothes than they do but they are far better dressed than I am. It traverses much farther than even this. In the haste to hide the poverty and to equalize themselves with the models they see in magazines and television, western culture in itself is misconstrued. The other day I was riding in a taxi having a conversation with a man about America:

“You are so lucky to be so very rich.”
“I am not rich. I’m only a volunteer. I live in the village just like you and ride in taxis just like you because I don’t have a car.”
“Yes I know but I also know you’re pretending. I know you are very rich: all Americans are.”
“You watch too much TV, not all Americans are rich.”
“Maga (Liar)!!”
“No, seriously, some people in America are very poor. When I was a teacher in America I had students in my class that were homeless.”

This cyclical conversation continued. The man simply could not believe that the streets of America were not paved in gold. This is my frustration, people here have had the idea that all westerners are rich so engrained in their head, that they see me as a walking bank and are embittered when I reject their pleas for money. So the cycle continues. I am annoyed with the dependence of people here on handouts from the West, and they are frustrated with someone they see as a cash cow hoarding away her money and not sharing it with them.

So, in the afternoon, on my family’s large television, I continue to watch the American shows that have overtaken much of the culture that was here before the influence of the West seeped in. Lucky for me, today Oprah is interviewing Dave Chapelle and he is discussing his trip to Africa: once again emphasizing these stereotypes by talking of African poverty and his own fifty million dollar contract. This is going to do nothing for my legitimacy in the village…

Mandela Barloworld Agricultural High School

Back in September, when I first visited the Modjadji area that was to be my home, I traveled with Mara and Kat to the head kraal to be introduced to the royal council and to receive our names: henceforth each of us being known as a former rain queen. It was from this location, high in the mountains overlooking my surrounding villages, that I noticed a structure that stood out for its superior workmanship, encompassed by the more dilapidated buildings of the villagers. After pointing it out to my principal it was explained that the green roofed creation below me was a high school built by Nelson Mandela. At that the subject was dropped.

Fast forward 7 months later to me sitting in the car with one of my principals, Mr. Moraba. We are returning from a visit to the circuit office when I point to the sign announcing the school and mention that I have been interest in viewing it. Mr. Moraba appeases me and brings me to a school that is an oasis against the degradation of village sustenance. Its wall are cobble stoned, its lawns, which do in fact exist, are manicured, and it is accented with tiny details that both distinguish and amplify it.

The principal of Mandela Barloworld Agricultural High School is young and vivacious. She quickly takes to me when she discovers my origins in the village and offers me a tour of the school. There is a full clinic on site, lab rooms with marble countertops, two separate computer classrooms, an auto mechanic class which the principal explains that many of the students are so well trained in that they have weekend and afternoon jobs in a country where a large portion of the adult population is unemployed, agricultural fields where students do practical work, and covered pathways.

The story behind the high school is as follows: when Mandela came to visit the area after becoming president many actions took place. To begin with the dirt road leading up the mountain to the queen’s home was washed out due to the multiplicity of rain which the area receives. As a result, Mandela had to be flown via helicopter to his destination. At that inconvenience he had the road paved. After meeting with the rain queen of the time, Kgosigadi Modjadji V, they discussed the creation of an agricultural high school. The idea took hold and the plan was soon set in motion.

Modjadji V insisted that the high school be built in a location where, from her home, she could see it each morning when she awoke and view it one last time before retiring for bed. An old primary school at the base of the mountain was chosen as the location. The old classrooms were renovated and turned into the clinic that serves the school and community. The project manager was touched by the fact that many of the class’s, due to lack of classrooms, had taken place under large fig trees. As a result, he insisted the designs be made to accommodate these trees to signify the school’s humble beginnings. He also made sure that all the walkways were covered so that the students would no longer be prohibited by the weather in their learning processes. Finally, the project manager, a former inmate at Robin Island, added a small tower to the entrance of the school to symbolize how far he had climbed since the days of apartheid.

This year signifies the first year that the school will boast graduating students. When the school began in 2002 it had 32 grade 8 students. As an incentive for the students to pursue their academics through the rigorous course work offered, Mandela signed 32 diplomas each with the original students’ names. Today, less that 15 of those original students remain, but those who do will receive this coveted diploma at the end of the year. Also, the school will be holding its first matric ball (equivalent of prom), for its Grade 12 students, which I have been invited to attend.

In the end, I hope the story of this school will become an emblem of prosperity to the many struggling village schools of the country. It is heart warming to know that it is possible for this school to exist, amongst its village surroundings, and causes me to be hopeful that eventually the educational system as a whole will change.

"Because I'm Black?"

It was late afternoon, and I was out walking around the dam trying to get some exercise and enjoy the sunset. I often encounter villagers on this walk who either don’t know me except by rumor or have never heard of me due to the fact that the walkway I follow leads to the opposite side of the dam to another village which I have never visited or been introduced to. I always obtain the first suspicious glances which are immediately dispelled into smiles as I greet the person in question in their language. Often, after, they ask me the following questions:
Do you speak Sotho?
I speak Sotho a little.
Where do you stay?
Rasewana.
What are you doing here?
I’m a volunteer. I work in the schools.
My answers tend to immediately transform me into a friend. I have gotten used to this type of interrogation as it happens on a weekly basis.

As I was walking yesterday I met two grade twelve boys who did not know me. One of them had a camera and wanted to take a picture with me. As I posed with him he reached to grab my hand. I fended him off. His response: “Why won’t you hold my hand? Is it because I’m black?”

I’m incredulous that I still receive this type of questioning. Obviously, by being here and making a life for myself in the village, color lines must not play a significant roll in how I perceive people. This type of question often frustrates me because of the pressures it leads to. “No, it’s because I do not know you and you are not my boyfriend.”

Yet, the question still hangs thickly in the air. I am trying very hard, in my service here, not to make race an issue, but obviously, in a country where apartheid was so recently eradicated, it is a huge issue. The reason why I get upset when I receive comments like these is because I feel like it is pressure to hold his hand even if I’m not comfortable doing so. I find it asinine that the smallest action I perform is always judged on a color line. People forget that many of the things I do here: the foods I eat, the shows I watch, the music I listen to; are not a reflection on the color of my skin but instead the culture I come from; the fact that I was raised an America. So no, it’s not because you’re black, it’s because I have a comfort zone, as a human being, that was just crossed.

Corporal Punishment

A parent showed up at school today with the desire to fight one of the teachers. Apparently, this teacher had called her child a baboon and told her to go home and have her mother teach her instead of the school. All of this transpired due to the fact that the child called the teacher vulgar names. This took place in a kindergarten class. When the principal confronted the teacher her response was “Well, Makobo said I couldn’t use corporal punishment so I did this instead.”

Oh, the woes of the exceptionally misguided. Afterwards, upset and frustrated my principal vented to me while I was showing the certificate I had made for “educator of the month.” She said: “This is very good. It shows who good teachers are, not the ones who call their learners baboons!”

Teacher of the Month

At Letseku I definitively have two teachers that I feel are far superior to the other’s at the school in terms of their ability and dedication.

I decided to have an Educator of the Month Award in order to reward those who work hard and are actually pushing learner to succeed. Every teacher was given a ballot to cast a vote for who they felt were superior teachers and their reasonings. Every one of the teachers voted for one of the two teachers which I know to be the best. Their reasoning included:

“She is always dedicated to her work. She tries very hard to make sure that all her students understand the material.”

“She loves the students and her classroom is very clean.”

“She is trying very hard and accurately in making sure that the school and the learners work harmoniously. She shows commitment to her work even though I can say she is overloaded.”

“Sometimes she stays with learners after school to make them understand what she was teaching. She uses different kinds of learning materials and learning methods to support her lessons. She gives learners a good foundation in learning.”

“She is always punctual; and remains at school in the afternoon for decorating her classroom.”

“She is approachable to learners.”

So, evidently all of my teachers understand and acknowledge the components of a good teacher. They see the value of staying after school, being approachable to learners, and attempting different teaching styles. Yet, most of the rest of them don’t follow by example. Why is that? Do they hate their jobs? Do they think being a good teacher takes too much work? I thought, in coming her, that my job was to take teachers who didn’t know how to teach well and give them the tools in which to do so. Apparently, the description has changed: I need to be a beacon of inspiration and a founder of dedication.

Side Note: The teacher that won started crying because she was so happy. It was one of the best moments I've had here.

"Slow Learners"

As I think back to my college years, which evidently weren’t all that long ago, I find myself wishing I would have had more training on identifying and helping children with disabilities. One of the conundrums of the village schools is that each class is overcrowded, holding at least forty children, and inevitably some of these children have disabilities. The problem here arises. The teachers were never taught about different disabilities or how to facilitate learning in students that do not fit the norm of children their age. In addition, the district provides no support in identifying learners with specific disabilities or to create separate classes for these students who fail in a mainstream classroom.

Here is where the cycle begins. Teachers already feel overstressed and overworked by their abundance of learners. Add disabled children and the teachers reach a heightened level of feeling overwhelmed. There is not enough time to give individual attention. There are no resources for assisting children who have difficulties, and there is no education regarding the disabilities of children. This leads to one thing: all learners who are not performing with the rest of the class are labeled as “slow learners” regardless of whether they are simply behind due to problems at home, learning difficulties, physical difficulties, dyslexia, autism, fetal alcohol syndrome, etc. It is in a state of utter frustration that teachers approach me regarding their “slow learners.”

Now I know enough, through my education, to guess at certain problems. I can almost guarantee that two boys in grade 3 are dyslexic. I can guess at retardation and fetal alcohol syndrome but I can’t be sure. So I am left with this puzzle: I don’t really know the problems of different children so I guess at them and ask around trying to find possible ideas to work with these children. For example, I have my possible dyslexic children observing letters with colored plastic placed over them and practicing their writing by tracing dotted numbers and letters. The teacher is frustrated because she wants this to solve the problem and cannot comprehend that this will be a life long struggle for them and that sometimes she has to have separate assignments and expectations for the boys than for her other students. This is frustrating when she already thinks she has too much work to do.

So I am stuck. I need to find someone to come to my school to diagnose children so that we can work towards overcoming their disabilities and give them a chance. Yet, being in a rural area is not exactly conducive to this need. Hopefully I can throw my weight around to accomplish this but for now I will continue to guess and hope I’m helping students that are otherwise disregarded.

Pictures from a Village

My bout with ringworm















Shack in Seth and Ivy's village












House in Seth and Ivy's Village

Pictures from a Village

Preschool playground in Seth and Ivy's village














Artist's house in Seth and Ivy's village

You may be a South African Peace Corp Volunteer if...

*Over a vacation you get your thrills through going skydiving and getting ringworm.

*You debate over who has the most disgusting pit toilet.

*You share a chamber pot at night with the 10 other volunteers your visiting and argue over who has to empty it in the morning.

*You complain about the nasal voices children use to imitate your accent.

*You burn your trash next to where you dump your environmentally friendly dish soap.

*The highlight of your month involves renting a movie.

*You order a White Russian and receive each of the ingredients in a separate glass and are also charged separately for each of these ingredients.

*Your margarita glass comes lined with sugar.

*You annoy male Peace Corp Volunteers with an inordinate amount of time and energy focused on knitting.

*You share a bed with 5 other people at get togethers.

*At any one time you are using three different products from your medical kit for the various ailments that you are currently experiencing

*You will never understand why village women don’t shut the door to the toilet while they are using it, regardless of whether it is a pit toilet or a toilet in a movie theatre.

*You will never understand why people think it is always okay to wake you from sleep regardless of time or illness

*You make jokes such as “Okay where’d we park the car” before grudgingly squishing into the back of a taxi with three big mamas, a box of chicken feet, and two suit cases

*Every time you ride a taxi the first person to exit is always the one sitting in the back corner forcing no fewer than 6 people to exit the taxi with 80 pieces of luggage before reloading and starting again only to drop off another person from the back seat 300 yards further down the road

*When you feel like spoiling yourself you heat up 3 kettles of water instead of 2 for your bath

*You marvel over the genius of the person who invented insulation for houses and wonder at the logistics of importing him to the village for lessons

*You text message so often that you are more comfortable with the buttons of a phone than with a keyboard.

*The biggest thing you’ve accomplished is hearing a principal lament over the fact that children can’t learn will when they are being hit.

*You only buy things like pickles and diet coke for special occasions.

*You discover a village preschool with a playground, blocks, and dress up clothes and see it as revolutionary.

*You realize that jumping out a plane assumes less risk than walking through a village at night.

*You make someone’s day by bringing Girl Scout cookies to a gathering.

*Book talks come very easily as the same 11 books continuously circle through all the Peace Corp Volunteers.

*You become personally insulted when people make judgments based on race and lifestyle because you have completely forgotten that you are in fact not a black villager.

To my fellow Peace Corp Volunteers:

Somewhere, in the midst of everything, we have seemingly lost our intent, our focus. We all were alone, coming here for our various goals, reasonings, and that created a bond amongst us: seemingly unbreakable, creating a system of checks and balances we could all rely on.

I used that system, depended on it, we all did. At the end of the day, when I was frustrated or pulling out my hair- a result of impermeable boredom, or was reduced to tears from utter pangs of homesickness- I knew I could send a message to one of my counterparts and knew they would send an encouraging word or make me laugh because they too were enduring the same trials.

Now, after being in this country for nearly 9 months, I’m seeing the gradual erosion of that system. As many of our smaller frustrations are compounding and morphing into full grown problems I see we are also more and more expelled on our own to deal with these issues, forcing us to lock them away, building a mass of perpetual hostility, and chipping away at our efficiency and capability for completing the jobs for which we were assigned.

Inevitably, as a group of people spends increasing amounts of time together, temperaments will collide and clashes will arise, but we need not to focus on these instances because as we do we are also corroding our ability to be successful in our villages as part of our attention shifts to these outside events and feelings.

I discussed all this with Seth and Ivy, and realized that in myself my behavior has been changing. I now avoid large group gatherings of Peace Corp Volunteers for the utter sake of wishing to avoid the attached drama. I have witnessed entirely too many volunteers become upset, even be reduced to tears by other volunteers and see this as a hug failure on our parts. What happened to the days where debriefing our experiences with other volunteers acted to help us in keeping strong and focused? Why has our group laughter turned into animosity with certain people avoiding others for various prescribed reasons? We see so much emotional instability in the village: so much avoiding of the truth, lethargic values, taking the easy road out. Now these characteristics are reflecting in how we act towards each other. Often we think of ourselves first, not actualizing the fact of the strenuous places we place others, many of whom are already struggling to retain their much tested sanity.

Seth and Ivy asked me if I thought the drama would eventually ebb, reach a high point, and gradually descend, bringing us back to our former days where we were there for each other, when we realized we could do our jobs most efficiently when we were tranquil and happy, and we reached this step when we supported and respected on another.

I don’t know if we can return to that point. How many bridges, once burned, can honestly be resurrected? I look longingly back to the days when we joyfully celebrated Thanksgiving and New Year’s together and enjoyed ourselves, came together as a family, and left feeling stronger, returning to our villages renewed and inspired.

Our transcendence is frankly depressing. As adults we should be able to weigh our actions and work together. I came to South Africa to discover people who were leading happy lives despite dire predicaments. I’m beginning to think that people in my village are better at focusing on what is really important in life, maybe the problem lies in the way we were raised, the materialism we constantly witnessed.

I hope, in the end, that I discover the true value of people and can demonstrate my respect of these values. I hope that we all regain the focus that propelled us towards this experience in the first place. For now I hope we find a balance of equilibrium between our feelings and actions. Currently, I feel very alone, I think many of us do, and hope we can all reach a place that allows us to be a support system once again.