Zulu church singing
Sunday, March 28, 2010
(no image, just sound)
Posted byValerie at 3:28 AM 0 comments
If my hair is any reflection of my state of frazzle
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Then call me Valerie Frizzle, because it's getting more African by the day: curls are tightening and expanding horizontally. No wonder my grandmother called me Shirley Temple as a kid.
Monday morning I played social worker: 30 minute bike ride to work, 30 minute drive into community, 30 minute wait for Gogo (grandma of those kids: a social worker gave temporary custody to her Friday and told us all to return early Monday for a food voucher), Gogo says she thought she should go get her grant by herself (aka she doesn't trust us), 30 minute drive into town, 3 hour wait for social worker (who came in and ignored us until her supervisor saw us sit there so long she made everyone in the office look for the voucher book), 1 hour grocery shopping and car-loading (no way Gogo could've gotten those groceries home alone in a crowded taxi), 1 hour driving Gogo and my coworker into community, resulting in being 30 minutes late for lunch. Apparently when I came in I was cranky. Sometimes I need to vent. Without much company around to listen, I've been turning more and more to kicking my own butt with exercise. It does feel good to be getting back into shape! (Photo: local Zulu dancers)
It's on my mind that we're losing our almost-trained pre-school teachers left and right and getting reports many aren't working and some are lying about the number of kids they're teaching. Do you pay more to keep the good ones who leave for higher paying jobs in the fast food sector in town? Do you suck up the training costs and find new people to train who are more committed? Keeping in mind we're operating on a small seed fund and it's just running out. Really, I need to focus on fundraisers, like the Eco Saturday event I'm trying to plan in April, or designing and building toys to sell . The beauty (and beast) of NGO work is, you are everything: social worker, lawyer, mediator, toy designer, garden planner, event planner, manager, trainer, therapist... And speaking of therapist, last Friday as I dropped a Zulu coworker home we had something resembling the following conversation:
"I miss my son. He's in school in Wembezi [township nearby] with my sister." This woman seems to have an unlimited number of sisters. She is forever doing something for some sister.
"Why is he in Wembezi?"
"There was corruption between my son and his teacher. He didn't do anything. Many children are leaving. It is a problem." No contractions in Zulu, always "I am" and "it is."
"What does she do?"
"She is just causing trouble."
"And does the headmaster not do anything?"
"He is afraid of her. In the last 3 years 3 principals have died. We think she is a witch doctor and she wants to be principal. I am scared. I sleep alone at night without my son. I don't have money to take the taxi to see him every day. She lives very near to me."
"Shame, that sounds bad. I think some parents maybe need to tell the Department of Education what's happening if the principal isn't doing anything."
Eager face. "Can you call?"
"Well, I don't even know that teacher, so I think it's better if parents call. I can find a number for you." (Photo: local doctor's sign in town)
PS Maybe it's payback for all the hitchers I've been toting around lately: thank you lovely lady who sent me home with a huge container or biryani when I went to visit her creche and said something smelled good and made me miss India!
Posted byValerie at 5:07 PM 1 comments
Did you run into the rhino on your way in?
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Thus my boss greeted me yesterday morning. Actually biked the long non-hypotenuse path into office, so I did not run into a rhino. I suspect if I had I wouldn’t be here to tell. Cycling strengthens the legs, sure, but you’d be surprised how fast those fatties can chase if they want to do. Thankfully they don’t chase. Lately the bush pigs have taken to poorly stalking me when I cycle. I see their busy little tails bobbing in the grass just ahead of me, then they scurry across the road with a grunt as if oops! I caught them and run along the other side. The tips of their tails look a bit like a lion’s with a cute little tuft. They’re so fast they’re hard to photograph. Hope this will do.
Meanwhile, there’s drama with the family I got the emergency grant for—the mother is still not making an effort to care for her kids, and her uncle who is the adult on the grant since the mother is unreliable, has locked the food in his room and is feeding his wife and children and still starving the kids we got the grant for. I could tell when I saw one of the kids—she was listless and when I was alone with her she quickly scarfed down the bananas and egg I brought. So, we’re having an emergency meeting with the community leaders tomorrow. These poor kids are getting it from all angles! I am getting too attached to the more ill twin—I want to take her home and love her. I want to hug her when she’s in pain instead of watching her to lean on someone’s legs. I want to kiss her head and hold her and feed her fresh food every day. Good thing I’m in no position to adopt. Gotta be careful I don’t turn into the next Angelina Jolie, picking up kids instead of souvenirs when I travel.
I’ve been enjoying doing conflict resolution workshops with another NGO and with employees here, and they’ve been responding and participating well, although it seems there’s so much distrust between employees and management that now there’s some suspicion I’m trying to influence employees in management’s favor with these trainings. At least I’m teaching conflict resolution and negotiation skills so when employees meet with the union or with management they can choose to use the skills and think about issues in a deeper way, think about interests instead of positions, for example. I’ve just come from India, a country known for castes, yet it feels much more caste-like here. The other day someone said it’s so nice I treat blacks and whites the same, and please keep doing it. I’m glad people feel that way, and it’s distressing that’s not the general attitude. I wonder how much race plays into issues and negative assumptions here. Maybe it helps that in India everyone is brown!
Sorry, this seems like
a heavy post. I think I have been taking too much in. As people here say when something's too spicy or just too much: it's too hectic. So on a lighter note let me add that I spent Saturday with my boss’s kids playing cards, reading comics, making sushi, feeding fish and geese and bunnies, taking funny trampoline photos, sipping fresh juice, and drawing pictures. It was very fun—and then I spent Sunday doing pretty much nothing: reading and relaxing and chatting at home, mostly alone. I needed to refuel-. Definitely not ready to take on three kids full time. I do love borrowing them, though! (Photo: kids playing in psychomotor training at our Resource Centre)
Posted byValerie at 8:47 PM 0 comments
Yaebo, Life is Lekker
Monday, February 22, 2010
Fueled on an egg and a banana, I spent 12 hours getting that family in crisis medical care, food and an emergency grant sorted out. It was quite a bureaucratic push (thank goodness for the nice director at the social security agency), and there were a lot of stumbling blocks (like hospital chains of referral after hours of waiting so no one would have to actually serve these families). It’s tough to be a teenage mom anywhere. It’s astronomically harder to be in rural RSA with no income and no education, and when you finally get your positive children to the hospital, instead of trying to treat them, after a day of pushing (me) and waiting (all of us), the doctor says, “She’s positive and pregnant again. And these other kids’ growth has been stunted by not getting TB or AIDS treatment. What’s the point?” I wanted to hit that Indian doctor in the face. Is it race? Class? Education? The general rule is: whites are upper and middle class, they hire black nannies and workers, and Indians are middle class and generally in the service professions or own small shops, and they hire black workers. Blacks who work hard shake their heads and say to me, “I shouldn’t say this, but it’s the Blacks. Theft, laziness, selfishness, jealousy—it’s a big problem to get people to work together. We say the right things in church and forget it outside.” The typical analogy I hear is whenever someone lifts himself up and sticks out his head (be it better job, school, responsibility), everyone tries to chop it off and bring him back down. (Photo: one of our kids playing)
One theory is starting in 1994 with all the talk of people’s people gained a feeling of entitlement without responsibility behind it. Another is that getting through high school is seen as such a prize, people don’t see the point when so many get through school and can’t find jobs. Still, in India or the US instead of not working or constantly griping about low pay, I think people would be more inclined to go back for more school or professional training than sitting around in desperation begging neighbors for food (granted the system here is hard to navigate and usually costs money to get yourself to the right office and may take a couple days of waiting once there, there IS a system of free medical care and need-based grants!).
Still, I find many Zulu do work very hard, are quite strong community leaders and very inspiring. My translator (who has officially dubbed me “a reliable driver”) went off to help his sister last week when she was robbed. They suspect it was an inside job, and since the police aren’t investigating, he gathered a group to collect muthi (traditional medicine) and meet with a medicine man so that the muthi would essentially act like a truth serum: you smuggle it into the suspect’s house and its presence makes him want to confess.However, when they went to gather the muthi the first time, a group of five men all saw a big green car perched atop an impossible-to-reach cliff. They did a double-take and it was gone. Then they thought, maybe it was a snake, because one of the men in their group is a twin and the son of a twin, and snakes are scared of twins (because two can overpower them), which is actually considered good luck. Plus, they smoke and grow a lot of weed. Maybe I should've started with that. (Photo: sunset view from the reserve, the mesa on the right is Giant's Castle)
This weekend I went to the beach, which was beautiful and massively hot, and with families who oriented their day around feeding an army of children. A bike ride netted me not one but two flat tires, and so an upper body workout instead pushing the bike back along the beach and lifting it up over rocky outcroppings. A couple hours in a bookstore (a bookstore! you have no idea how exciting this was! and how poor I am so I mostly browsed and didn't buy), an evening theater comedy (thanks to a friend of a friend's sister), and then home. For 5 hours. Then picked up our volunteer pre-school teachers and drove them to another town to training, where they trained me for half a day and I spent the night at one of their houses in the countryside where I followed a terrier named Chester through fields and flowers and around a river feeling like I was in a Jane Austen novel. Although oddly they never mention picking off ticks when you get home.
The next day I ran a conflict resolution workshop with the management staff there, which was so rewarding ("I can't believe I've gotten to this age and never thought about preparing not just my side of an argument, but from the other person's side!"). I want to do more of that! Because I need more work to do! Ruminating on being a professor and establishing an NGO-like program from the uni where I teach, research and train students to be free labor to help run it...which could mean getting a PhD in... education? NGO management? conflict resolution? child development? Clearly, I need to ruminate more. And to look for a job that pays something in a few months so my wonderfully supportive parents don't have heart attacks.
Posted byValerie at 6:41 PM 0 comments
Nissan Karma
Friday, February 12, 2010
Saturday I finally got a break (from driving, politics and church), and went on an amazing hike to a world heritage site and state park called
Maybe it’s all that giggling the mosquitoes find so attractive. I’m continually impressed by their ingenuity in covering me in welts. Maybe they’re in cahoots with the Nissan. Well, it’s not gonna work. I woke up Thursday morning and took an extra-long bike ride in the mist with the
Today we found a family in crisis: two-year-old twins without birth certificates, but with TB (no birth certificates generally means no social welfare grants). One little girl was full of sores and so listless she could barely keep her eyes open, and both were in shirts only, no bottoms. The father said there is no food and he wants seeds to start a vegetable garden and they are quite far off the beaten path (45 min drive on rural “roads”) winding up and around and through the Drackenbergs. Luckily we made a great contact at the social welfare agency last week, and when I called today she said she’d help them get an emergency grant on Monday. I even finished the last minute presentation for India today so it looks like I get the weekend off (hooray!—or maybe I should start translating that book for the other NGO…) and Monday at 7 am I’m off to pick up the family in crisis to take the mother and children to hospital (people outside the US don’t say “to the hospital”), and the father to social welfare.
Posted byValerie at 8:23 PM 0 comments
Zebras Neigh, and Zulu Love to say, “Okay!”
Friday, February 5, 2010
I thought driving through a second coming of Noah’s ark-style flood-inducing rains in a U-Haul through the armpit of Texas (aka Amarilla) was difficult. Today I drove a small manual Nissan pick-up to meet with another NGO, LETCEE, who’s working with us in a town an hour and a half away. It might’ve taken me a smidge longer than that to get there, due to: avoiding avoid potholes in fog I could only see five meters ahead in, shaking my head at and passing both an overloaded taxi van and an eighteen-wheeler who passed me and promptly slowed to half my previous speed as they huffed up the Drackenbergs, all the while battling with my newly-acquired poor manual driving skills on my way back trying hard not to stall or stop because before I left the car’s battery went dead, had to be jumped twice and a friendly LETCEE employee drove me around town to pump the battery back up, and another employee followed us.
Sunday morning after hours of translating Zulu (which makes about as much sense to me as typing random letters), I drove my self-educated Zulu translator/interpreter to a Catholic church in one of the communities the Trust serves in an effort to build community, do outreach, get feedback, etc., while he told me which gear to shift into and when to use the clutch or accelerator (I’d had a slow start because I hadn’t been introduced to the choke), I asked what he’d done the day before, because when I called it sounded like he was at a party.
“Oh, no, no party. I was gambling. There were horse races in Cape Town.”
“Horse races? Do you have a TV?”
“Oh, no, no. I have two wives and eleven children. When you’re young you think you know so much, and you don’t listen. If I could go back and do it over, I would plan and do it all different. We’re so many, and that’s why we barely get by, so I was at this place where we get tapes of old races and we watch them and bet on them. I think I lost 200 Rand ($25). I’m bad, I don’t usually go to church. I have to go into town after church today and gamble more.”
“Races in Cape Town—have you been to Cape Town? Have you been outside Zulu-Natal (the state we’re in)?”“Yes, of course outside, I have been to Johannesburg (four hours northeast). Not Cape Town (six hours southwest).”
“Did you like Jo’burg?”
“No, I’m not used to cities. Maybe then I would like it. The boss took us to Durban last year and we went to the ocean. That was good.”
Actually, the boss took some senior management on their first trip to the sea (two hours south) and forgot to tell them to bring bathing suits, so the men ended up splashing in the waves in their underwear. Someday I’ll ask my interpreter why he’s missing three fingers and so many teeth.
Conversations with Zulu usually end with some sentiment about “this crazy world” as they are continually full of amazement that I “came from so far to help.” It seems to be a good selling point. I came from US/UK (often they say UK, because UK or US don’t really have much meaning except as faraway two-letter lands full of white people), so surely they can get a committee together to find a place for a new crèche, go with me to have their handicapped children evaluated to try to get them into school, or come together on a weekend to build a playground and food garden at the Resource Centre where the NGO PEISA and the local women they’re teaching (and we’re employing) do weekly psychomotor training with the children.
As a side note, I think the Catholic church is genius with its rising and swaying, sitting and listening, kneeling and praying (keep moving = staying awake), calm candles, beautiful melodies, comforting tunes, and the whole song and dance of a typical service—even with an assistant priest in a church too poor to afford to build a toilet or fencing with chipped paint and so musty and dusty inside I almost passed out until I moved near an open window. And wow, can these Zulu women sing. (Will try to upload when I get better internet sometime) (Photos: the reserve on the left, one of the communities we serve on the right, Ezindikini)
Meanwhile, life on the reserve is fantastic. I’m working my butt off (besides long days and weekend work here, I’m still working for Childline India via email) and loving every minute of it (the work is great, the volume could decrease...). I’ve gotten into a routine where I wake with the sun by six to do yoga, ride my bike or hitch a ride to the office to start the workday at seven, break at one for a management lunch (last Friday was our first brie, and this week we had bobotie minus the bread), and head home around six to do a little more yoga/exercise (my shoulders are more thankful by the day), cook, watch Friends (stolen from a friend in India) and crash. The zebras, eland and antelope are getting less finicky when I bike by, I saw a one-week-old water buffalo babe enter the herd, and one morning there was a rhino traffic jam as three of the fattest bums waddled on and off the road, with a jiggle even Atlanta and LA KFC-over-eaters couldn’t rival. (By the way, KFC seems to be gaining on McDonald’s in worldwide popularity. That man’s white beard and red and white stripes are everywhere from South Africa to Dubai to Cambodia.) (Photo: Water buffalo classic pose that makes me think 'whatchoo lookin at?')
Speaking of exercise, buying a bicycle was such a good decision. I don’t think I’m ever as happy as when I am on a bicycle in nature taking a break from (hopefully!) positively impactful community building and conflict resolution work with families and children.
And speaking of happy, I had not one but six bottles of champagne and flowers brought over for my housewarming dinner party last weekend. The theme was Greek: salad, fresh from our garden (lettuce, tomato, cucumber, chives, feta, lemon, pepper and olive oil), roasted potatoes (onion, garlic, salt, pepper, oregano and lemon), my version of moussaka (eggplant, our own venison, onion, coriander, cinnamon, anise, parsley and melted mozzerella), and grilled bananas (cinnamon, ginger and carob) with walnuts and yogurt for dessert.
People here keep asking how I’m doing with such a big change, going from eighteen million neighbors to six (plus a few cats and horses); from sharing a room plus another five flatmates to my own apartment with a veranda overlooking the mountains; from eating out daily due to minimal cooking capabilities and eagerness to escape the apartment to a happily home-cooked fresh-from-our-farm dinner alone (or occasionally with a kind coworker); from Maruti Suzuki taxis and playing Frogger with my life crossing a street to slaloming, slipping, skidding and sliding down an unpaved muddy mountain road in a pick-up I am surely slowly winning over. That battery dying thing was just payback for my rough shifting. I think we’re even now. I figure it’s like a friend said: you gotta be a turtle and carry your home with you wherever you are. I wouldn’t trade one (possibly permanently deafening) traffic-ful night or one moths-that-sound-like-helicopters and toad-ful night for anything.
I love my life. And I’m so glad you’re in it, and care enough to read this.
Posted byValerie at 10:49 AM 2 comments
In India I’m Madam, In Thailand I’m Miss, In Cambodia I’m a Lady
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
“You know the capital of Burkina Faso?”
“No.”
“I tell you, you buy!”
“Can you point to Burkina Faso on a map?”
Guilty smile. “No. You know the capital of Madagascar? I tell you, you buy!”
Back in Bangkok I paid $15 and spent a day a the Indian embassy to make sure I could get back into the country for just enough time to say some goodbyes, meet with my boss and pack before landing in the fanciest airport ever, aka Dubai (oil money, like drug money, will buy you some niiice things), and finally in Durban. Describing Angkor Wat is like trying to type out a rainbow bursting through a sunset over elands and zebra grazing on an African savanna...oh wait, that’s my next entry. Stay tuned.
Posted byValerie at 11:18 AM 0 comments
