Library

Last week I received close to 10,000 rand for the building of library shelves and tables from the grant I wrote for Peace Corp Fellowship money. I was absolutely thrilled at finally being able to proceed with the library. I have put down the deposit for the materials to build the structures needed. All of the construction should be done in two weeks time at which point I’ll be able to move my approximately 1000 books out of boxes and into the room for the library. I’m hoping by this time in March we will have teachers trained on how to use the library and students borrowing books. This is, by far, my biggest project to date and I’m thrilled that it’s going to be a reality, especially as my time here winds down here.

My other large project is building a playground at the other primary school I work with. Peace Corps told me that after my library project was fully funded they would post my playground proposal on to the internet for potential donors. This has yet to happen; it seems there is some confusion in Washington over posting this new grant. I have been in the midst of dialogue with Peace Corp staff and hopefully the grant will be up for donations soon. As soon as I learn that it is up I will place the information here for anyone interested in being involved.

Pit Toilet Chronicles Continued...

I hope that this is the last chapter in my battle with my pit toilet. I noticed this morning that there has, in fact, been a hole started in the yard for a new toilet. This came as a result of some not so gentle prodding, on my part, to my principals over the fact that part of Peace Corp requirements for housing is a usable toilet facility. I can deal with a leaking roof, I can handle killing scorpions in my bed in the middle of the night; but I can’t deal with a too full, maggot infested, fly inundated toilet. Hopefully now I won’t have to…..

Joyce

A few months ago I met Joyce on a taxi coming home from Tzaneen. She was an animated woman who immediately began a conversation with me about my life in the village. When she got off at her stop, she took my phone number and promised to call.

Thus, this weekend I met her in her village, a few miles from where I stay. She made me tea and we began an in-depth discussion of the education system as her sons sat on the couch next to us and shyly stole glances my way. Joyce was distressed; she wanted her children to have good schooling but couldn’t afford to send them to a good school. She was an out-of-work nurse desperately searching for employment. Her husband was a teacher. Since he made over a thousand rand a month (a little more than a hundred dollars) they couldn’t get financial school grants for their children.

One of Joyce’s main concerns was that her children had such little understanding of English. She was upset that the teachers did so little to further her children’s education. She recalled stories of teachers ridiculing her sons over various offenses and as a result how little respect both she and her son had for the teachers. She lamented about how they could possibly learn under such circumstances.

I talked with her about the fact that part of the problem was the teachers had no accountability: parents rarely made complaints about teachers, thus teachers easily got away with things such as corporal punishment and leaving their classes unsupervised for hours at a time. I told her that parents needed to get involved with the school if they wanted things to get better. The problem with this idea, she recounted to me, was that parents were terrified of the teachers and so in a culture where people typically avoid confrontation, this did not seem a viable solution.

I found it refreshing to talk with a parent who really was trying her best to give her children a future. Thus, I agreed to give her sons English lessons on the weekends. Joyce also wants me to move in with her which is tempting with the current pit toilet situation…

The Black Pouch

Last week I was at school, gleefully sorting through six new boxes of books that had made their way from Strafford, Missouri to our library here. In the midst of my complacent state, one of the teachers entered the office with a request; the deputy principal wanted me to go through her purse and give him her digital camera. I began going through her cluttered bag with only a vague idea of what the case looked like. Soon I came upon a black pouch which I assumed to contain the camera. I opened in and instead found…a gun.

To put it mildly, I was in shock; what in the hell was a teacher doing with a gun at school? I quickly pushed it aside, found the camera and handed it off to the teacher as he left the office before I collapsed in my chair to contemplate…

In this situation, what do I do? Technically, I should have never found it in the first place. Now, looking back, I wonder if I just imagined the entire thing. The whole situation seems too fantastic to be a reality. Do I say something to her, a woman I find incredibly intimidated, especially now that I know that she feels the need to carry a gun to school? I suppose my only real fear, because I don’t think she plans on using it, is that the weapon gets in the hands of a student. Yet, this is only a vague fear as students have almost no access to the principal’s office. How is it that I’m in this ridiculous conundrum to begin with?

Geography Contest

One of my side projects right now is a geography contest in the sixth grade at one of my schools. Basically, the kids are given a map to study for a week and then given a quiz on the map. For every answer they get right they get a sticker on a chart that is displayed in the classroom. Last week we had a quiz on South Africa and frankly, I was discouraged. Seventy-five percent of the children couldn’t label Limpopo on the map. Limpopo is the province they live in. Can you imagine if you went in an American 6th grade classroom and 75% of the kids couldn’t label their own state? It was ridiculous and a reflection of just how bad teaching methods are out here.

I talked to the teacher about it after and he shrugged his shoulders and told me the kids don’t study. I then explained to him that if the kids didn’t know something he just couldn’t ignore it; he needs to follow-up and teach the lesson in a different way so they can comprehend it. Thus, we’re team-teaching a lesson on South Africa next week. Should be interesting…

Pit Toilet Chronicles

This is a current depiction of my pit toilet:

It’s full. I know that this is something I’ve complained about before, but there’s a reason. It’s really, really full. Just how full you ask? Well, when I use it I worry about the “splash effect.” So basically it’s beyond disgusting and just plain out unsanitary.

Summer time is not a good time for a pit toilet. It’s hot and I have learned that heat plus feces equals creepy crawly critters. Thus, there are a lot of flies. In order to emphasize what a lot of flies means, allow me to paint a picture: fly bidet.

Now the flies I can handle. If you wave something over them long enough they tend to scatter. Yet, they are not the only ones who have made my pit toilet into a summer retreat: so too have the maggots. The maggots are happy to stay in the bottom of the pit toilet: that is until someone throws water down it and then they try to escape to freedom. How do they escape? By creeping up the side of the pit toilet until they reach the seat where they can lounge in multitude. Not appealing and somehow, I’m guessing here, not very sanitary.

My host family bathes in the pit toilet (don’t ask me why, I don’t think you can get clean in there). Thus, they drag the hose into it and flood the area while they are cleaning themselves. Unfortunately, the pit toilet is built on a slant, one that leans away from the door. Meaning we have standing water in the pit toilet for hours after each bath only adding to the fly and maggot problem.

The Smell: I’ll let you imagine this one…..

My host father also dumps his used motor oil down the pit toilet. Yet, for whatever reason I can not explain, he can’t manage to pour it down the hole. So it’s all over the seat. Unfortunately, oil doesn’t clean up easily (just ask the seals) and thus the seat is more or less permanently contaminated with motor oil.

So what does all this mean to me….while to be blunt, I have to time when I use the bathroom so I can use the school ones instead of my own and frankly I use my chamber pot a lot more than I should. I finally decided I was fed up with all this. One of my housing requirements as a Peace Corp Volunteer is to have a usable, sanitary toilet and I just can’t see how mine fits these requirements, (the other volunteers voted mine “worst pit toilet” to let you know just how bad it is) so I finally complained to my principal and she said she’d work on it. We’ll see.... It’s interesting that the highlight of the next six months for me would be to have a new hole dug in the ground.