When Things Get Physical

Today (8/29) I had a physical altercation with a learner, and it has shaken me. I was not hurt except for a scratch across my hand, but I still feel like something was taken from me. I'm not sure if I feel like I lost a little peace of mind, or if I actually feel unsafe at the moment, but whatever it is made me seriously consider going home for the first time in a very long time. I think sometimes being in a position of power over someone, like a teacher over their students, can give you a sense of security and maybe that is what I lost today, my sense of security in my school.

During a test today in my grade 6 class I caught one of the older boys cheating by using his phone as a calculator. My policy in class is that if you are caught cheating I take your paper and make you start over. In this case I was also taking his phone because my school has very strict policies about no phones at school. When I approached him and asked for his phone he hesitated. I expected this because I had dealt with this issue before. Learners are very hesitant to give up their phones, which I find amusing because it’s not like I'm just going to change my mind and walk away if they don’t give it to me the first time that I ask. After the third time that I demanded he hand over his phone he finally complied. I then went to remove his paper, and that’s when things got difficult. At my school kids write tests in specific books because making copies with enough room to show your work is expensive, so what I have done in the past when kids cheat is I rip out the page they are writing on, and then allow them to start over on the next page. This boy however decided that wasn’t going to happen. With his phone and book held in my left hand I attempted to rip out his page with my right hand, which is when he grabbed me. Apparently he thought that it would be okay for him to grab my right arm to stop me from removing the page, and then shove me away while trying to take his phone and book back from my left hand. In order to right myself and get the kid off of me I pushed back and was finally able to free my arm when he stumbled back into his desk. I was able to maintain my hold on his belongings, but received a nice scratch across my hand in the process. At that point I was livid, and will admit I imagined taking him by the arm and throwing him face down against the desk in a “you don’t know who the hell you are messing with” kind of way. Unfortunately in a class of 50 learners that didn’t seem appropriate, not to mention this kids is as big as I am and probably a lot stronger, so I'm sure it wouldn’t go as smoothly as I planned it in my head.

Instead I took him and his phone to the office so that the head of my department could deal with him. While I knew that it probably meant he would get the stick, I just didn’t know what else to do with him, because nothing I'm doing seems to make a difference to these older boys. My HOD then apparently handed the boy off to my principal who gave him a warning and then sent him back to class. A warning? Are you F***ING kidding me?! Of all the times this kid deserved a warning, this was not it! Give him a warning when he is late to school for the 10^th time this month. Give him a warning when he doesn’t stop talking during class no matter how many times you speak to him. Don’t give him a warning when he tries to forcefully keep a teacher from taking his phone and book away after he was caught cheating. This is not the time to hand out a pass, this is the time to do something!!! And to make matters worse, I still had another hour of class with grade 6 today. Once a week I get the privilege of having two hours a day with both of my classes, and today just happened to be my day with grade 6 twice.

When I had finally calmed down enough to not see red, the boy came to apologize to me. He had tried to come earlier but I had sent him away because I was still too angry to hear it and hadn’t decided how I wanted to handle things with him yet. In the time it took me to somewhat calm down I realized that the reason I was so angry was because I felt violated in a sense. Was I hurt, no, but did I feel like my authority and status as a teacher was challenged, absolutely. I felt like I had come to Africa to do something good, to help people that wanted my help, and I felt like this kid just threw that back in my face. He is only one of a hundred learners, but the fact that he was willing to go that far over the line made me feel like being here meant nothing. After almost 14 months away from everything I’ve ever known, that hurt. So when my learner made his way back to apologize I wasn’t hearing it. As he stood with me outside repeating “I’m sorry, I’m sorry” over and over again I just didn’t believe it, and I still don’t. I’ve spent three full terms accepting this kid’s apologies for his bad behavior, but today he crossed a line with me and I don’t believe he is sorry at all. Do I feel bad for him, yes, because I know he has had a hard life. At the age of 15 he has lived through the death of both of his parents and is being raised just by his grandmother, but I am past the point of letting him use that as an excuse for his behavior. Was it a little bit heart breaking watching him cry after I asked if he would have ever put his hands on his mother like he did to me, absolutely, but at the same time I see this as his last chance. I told him he has until the end of the year to prove to me that he is actually sorry for what he did. He has until December 6^th to show me through his behavior that he regrets treating me the way he did. I think it is about time that someone held these kids accountable for their behavior and forced them to change for the long run. Warnings and beatings are only temporary, and those are obviously not teaching these kids anything. 

How I Would Want My Parents to React

What would you do if you saw your daughter being carried home between two of her teachers? Would you panic and go rushing up to help, would you freak out and call 911, or would you casually sit down on the porch and ask how the teacher’s day is going? If you think that last option sounds crazy I would agree with you, but that is exactly how one of my learner’s mother reacted last week (8/9). On Tuesday of last week one of my grade 5 learners had a seizure while on her way to the pit latrine at school. I happened to be sitting in the staff room when a learner came to inform the teachers that a girl was “sleeping” by the toilet. Of course the only words I really understood in Xhosa were girl and toilet, so I had no idea what was happening when two of the teachers angrily left the staff room. A few minutes later though, I watched as they basically dragged this poor girl into the building while she was seizing and drooling all over. After working in a nursing home during college I felt that I had enough medical knowledge to assist the other teachers, so I got up to help. Turns out their idea of taking care of this girl was laying her on her back on the floor in an empty office, shoving a spoon in her mouth and then leaving. I was shocked to say the least, and decided that I would take it upon myself to make sure the girl didn’t swallow her tongue or hurt herself so I held her on her side for the next hour all alone. Occasionally my head of department (HOD) would come in and ask if she could be moved yet, but once she realized she was still having spasms she would close the door and leave again.

           

When the poor girl was finally still my HOD decided it was time to take her home. Not take her to a hospital or a clinic, just home. Another teacher helped me pick her up and transport her to a car, and then we drove her through the bumpy dirt roads to her hut up in the village. When we got to her small house we carried her to the house while my HOD went ahead to inform the mother that we were bringing her daughter home early. When we finally made it around to the front the mom was casually sitting on the front steps while her daughter was propped up between me and another teacher, and kind of looked like she was died. Her mom never even got up. She just pointed to the room to the right and asked that we lay her down in there. When I was done positioning her in the bed I went out to join the other teachers and try to explain why her daughter needed to see a doctor. She said some things in Xhosa that I of course didn’t understand, and then we were leaving my learner in the care of her seemingly unconcerned mother. To be honest, I was a little pissed. When we got back to the car I asked my HOD if the mom was going to take the girl to the clinic. Turns out the mom had said that my learner had been having seizures on and off recently ever since she had been raped a few weeks before. I guess at this point I shouldn’t be surprised by the lack of concern shown for this little girl, but I was still shocked that no one seemed to be remotely worried about what was going on with this learner, both physically and emotionally.

        

Two days ago she had another seizure. The same thing happened. I stayed with her alone in the empty office until she stopped seizing. We basically carried her home, and then left her all alone with a drunken old man, because he was the only one home. I don’t even know if he was part of the family, or if he just happened to be at the house when we showed up. I tried to talk to the teachers about how she really needed to see a doctor, but they seemed disinterested. They told me that the only way that the family would be forced to take her to the doctor was if a social worker got involved. Unfortunately my school was unwilling to call a social worker because “it’s not their place”. It seems like there is some unwritten rule around here that teachers and schools turn a blind eye to problems at home because kids are at the bottom of the totem pole in this culture.

To say that I am struggling with the callousness of the staff at my school and the learner’s family would be an understatement.  I can’t help thinking about how I would want my parents to react if I was in that girl’s situation. When I was her age it was always a big deal when I was sick. My mom would make me tea while I watched Beauty and the Beast in her room, my dad would take me to school with him so he could keep an eye on me and I wouldn’t have to be alone. If I had a seizure I would have expected a little bit of panic followed by a speedy trip to the hospital and then at least a week of being smothered with concern. I would even expect some of that from my teachers. It is hard to come from a culture that puts so much emphasis on the importance of children and then see how little children are valued here. I am keeping my fingers crossed that eventually someone will take her to the clinic and that she will be able to get some physical and emotional support. This is one of those times that being able to speak fluent Xhosa would be really helpful.

(Month Later Update: The girl has not had another seizure during school in the last four weeks. Her grandmother came to visit and apparently forced the girl’s mother to take her to the clinic to be checked by the doctor. Since then she has been doing much better at school and seems to be getting more social in my class (which is not always great while I am teaching, but I am happy to see). Hopefully as time goes on she will continue to improve.) 

Fat or Skinny: Who's the Judge?

In the United States there are some things that you just don’t say to people, regardless of if it is true or not. When a woman asks her husband, boyfriend, or friends if those jeans make her butt look big the only acceptable answer is a big Hell No. It doesn’t matter if those jeans make her ass look like a balloon; you lie, because you know it will hurt her feelings and her wavering self-esteem if you tell her the truth. Unfortunately, South Africans did not get that memo before I moved here. Since I have been here I have been told that I am too skinny (which I was excited about), that I am going to get fat, that I need to get fat, and that I am getting fat. People I have never spoken to will come up to me in town to comment on my weight and then walk away. I have tried to remind myself that the culture is different and that I shouldn’t take anything personally, but let’s be honest ladies. If some stranger came up to you and said “Wow, you are looking so fat today” and then walked away, how do you not take that personally?!

Now, the last time that I went to the doctor I was told that I had lost a little over ten pounds since I have come to South Africa. I know that I have not gained weight because I am still able to easily fit into the size smaller jeans that I brought from home in the hopes that I would lose weight while I was here. I told a group of my teachers once that comments like that make me feel really bad and that in the US you would never say that to someone. They seemed extremely confused and told me that getting fat means South Africa is good for me. So the fact that people have taken it upon themselves to inform me of how my weight is looking has made me really think about the idea of weight and beauty in different cultures.

Looking around at women in my community you will see variations of size to the extremes. There are women who look like they might blow away in a strong gust of wind, and then there are women who could crush me with their thigh alone. For the most part though, women are BIG in this country. When I am coming home from town and stuffed in the back of the taxi, I am usually the smallest or one of the smallest women in the truck. The trend seems to be that the older you are the bigger you are, to the point that many women have trouble walking by the time they are in their 40s. South Africans have serious problems with heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes, but if you ask them about it, no one mentions weight or poor diets as the cause of those problems. The average life span in South Africa is 52 years, but in this country it seems that bigger is better, regardless of the repercussions that that might have on your health.

When I watch my host mother, who is a very large woman, I am reminded of the idea that in the olden days being larger was a sign of wealth and higher social standing. My host mother makes a lot of money for someone in a rural village. She has multiple small businesses that she runs out of her house, and has a few properties in other villages that she rents out. She also has a few orphan girls that live at her house for which she collects grant money from the government for taking in. These girls are basically treated like indentured servants. They fetch water from the river, wash the clothes, mop the floors, and do most of the cooking. This allows my host mom to basically be sedentary and eat for the majority of the day. It is like being fat shows that she is able to eat and be lazy all day, which in this country translates to having the money and the means to not do any work. While I think that this lifestyle is not good and extremely unhealthy, most people seem very happy with eating fried chicken and a loaf of bread for lunch every day, but you never hear people telling them that they are fat.

So what does this mean for me? Are people telling me I am getting fat as a complement, or do they just not know that a comment like that is extremely rude? Do they think that because I am an American that means that I should have lots of money and therefore I should be very fat? Do they want me to be fat so they feel better about the fact that they are extremely obese, or are they intentionally being rude? I guess it doesn’t really matter. Being overweight does not have the same negativity associated with it here, and people have no problem commenting on my weight regardless of how much smaller I am than they are. Regardless of knowing that, the next time someone casually tells me that I am looking fat today I might have to smack them!

One Year

One year, 365 days. That’s how long it has been since I have been able to hug my parents, take Butch for a walk, or go to Starbucks with my friends. A lot can happen in one year, a lot can change. When I was preparing for this experience everyone told me that I would end up learning a lot about myself. They said this experience would change me, and they were right.

When I got on that plane a year ago to come to Africa I wanted to save the world. I think most of the 43 other volunteers on that plane had the same intention and naive expectations. It took two days of being in country before the first person realized this experience was going to be way harder than any of us expected, and she was on the next flight home. Over the next few months of extensive training more and more people said goodbye. Now, a year later 16 volunteers from my training group have gone home, and I'm pretty sure that all of us who are remaining have seriously considered leaving at one point or another. This journey is hard, by far the hardest thing I have ever done. It didn’t help that coming into all of this I had expectations that just didn’t add up when I got here. The world is a really big place and I'm just one person. Maybe saving the world was not the best goal to have, but maybe it was the disappointment of not being able to fulfill that goal that taught me my first major lesson here. Change takes time and sometimes, when you are the one who is attempting to instigate that change, you never get the chance to see the end results. I think the one year mark is often a time for reflection for many volunteers, and as I look back on what I have done this year I don’t see very much. I still have learners who can’t add, and others who still get in fist fights every day. There are teachers that still take sticks to class and others who don’t even bother showing up. Maybe being here won’t change them all, but maybe, just maybe some of them are learning something. Maybe by not hitting kids when I get mad I'm teaching some of them compassion. Maybe by showing up to class on time everyday I'm teaching some of them work ethic, and maybe someday, if I'm lucky they will be able to teach those lessons to someone else. If one person ends up having a better life because I taught them something, then maybe it will have all been worth it.

Right before I left a year ago my family and friends threw me a party. Family from up and down the west coast came to wish me luck and party it up in true Lynch fashion. In between the horse shoe tournament, the big bonfire, and consuming too many drinks my mom had everyone sign a journal for me. Before I got on the plane she told me to save it for when I'm feeling lonely and it would remind me that no one back home had forgotten me. Over the course of this year I have turned to their letters of love and encouragement to get me through some of the rougher days. When you are alone in a small hut for days on end without being able to really talk to anyone it tends to run you down emotionally. It’s at those points when I realize I haven’t spoken a single word in over a day that the isolation really sets in. I'm in the middle of nowhere! The closest American is over an hour away and everything I truly know is half a world away. My greatest fear has always been being alone, and here I am. I'm stuck in my worst nightmare, but what I realized last night, when I reread the notes from my friends and family, is that I'm still alive. I’ve spent a year completely alone and I haven’t given up. There have been days where I have been close, days where I’ve sat on the floor and cried thinking I couldn’t keep doing this, but in the end I battled through it. So many people wrote in their letters to me how brave they thought I was, how they were proud of my courage to go off into the unknown, and looking back on this past year I am starting to see what they saw in me. It’s one thing to be told something about yourself, but it’s another thing to actually believe it. I don’t think most people know what it means to truly be alone, and I think fewer people could handle the feelings that come with it. I'm proud that through all the really hard times I have found the courage to stick it out and keep moving forward. This has been my dream since I was 17, and even though there have been a lot of times I wished I had come up with a different dream, I have more faith in who I am now that I have accomplished part of this one.

While I have learned that I am a lot stronger than I thought I was before I came on this crazy adventure to Africa, I want to take this opportunity to thank my friends and family. Family here in South Africa is not the same as back home. Fathers basically done exist and mothers are never shoulders to cry on. Support is not something that is freely given and love is something that is hardly shown. Seeing people who have nothing shows you what you take for granted in your life, and after this last year I can say with confidence that I can live without running water, a car, electricity, and even Starbucks, but I would not be who I am or where I am without the love and support of my family. The number of letters and care packages I have received over the last year have made me feel so supported and cherished in a time when I feared I might be forgotten. It is hard to know that life at home is continuing when you are so far removed, but every time I start to feel left behind they have reminded me I am still in their thoughts. If anything has gotten me through this chaotic experience so far it is them, so thank you to everyone who has supported me! I love you all!!!

What Do You Say To That?

You know that moment when someone asks you a question and realize your immediate response probably isn’t the answer you should give? My time in Africa has been filled with answering the same questions over and over again, and the longer that I am here the more complicated those simple questions become. While on vacation this past week I realized that the answers that I want to give are not always appropriate, and that learning to filter my thoughts might be the greatest lesson from this experience.

No matter where we go everyone in this country somehow knows that we aren’t from here. Even in the big cities where there is a super high population of white people, people just know. Sometimes I feel like I have a flashing neon sign above my head that reads “Ask Me Why I’m Here”. No matter who is asking the questions, the first four are always the same. Question one, where are you from? That answer is always easy and people’s reactions are usually always the same excitement and people gushing about how they have always wanted to visit the United States. Question two is where things start to get a little complicated. This is always were people ask “How are you enjoying South Africa”? This is where the first filter pause comes in. My mind is filled with images of no windows in my classrooms, kids getting in fist fights in the middle of a lesson, and fetching water from the river, and I just can’t help wanting to blurt out that it kind of sucks most of the time. Unfortunately I don’t feel like that is an appropriate answer, so I usually go with the smile and say it’s great and leave it at that, but let me tell you, nothing about washing your clothes with river water full of cow crap is great.

So once the pleasantries are exchanged we get down to the real questions. Question three is usually some form of “How long are you here”? If I could just walk away from the conversation at this point I usually would. Unfortunately, most of the people asking are taking care of me in some manner whether it is the taxi driver, waiter, or the cashier at the supermarket, so for the most part I am trapped until they are done with the inquisition. So at this point I can either lie, and say I am here for holiday if I want to get out fast, or I can tell the truth, that I am living in South Africa for a little over two years. The latter answer then involves an explanation of what I am doing here and where exactly I am staying. This inevitably leads to question four, which is often delivered in a tone of shock, disgust, or concern.

“Why?” It’s such a small word, and you would think that the answer would be so simple, because in my mind it always was. I wanted to go somewhere that I could give back. I wanted to help people that could really use it, so I packed my bags, said goodbye to everything I have ever known, and shipped off to Africa. Apparently when you tell that to a South African they just don’t get it. Volunteering and giving back just isn’t a thing in this country, so there in lies problem number one with that answer. No one understands why I would leave home to come help in a different country, and they sure as hell don’t know why I would essentially work for free. They all want to know what I am getting out of this experience, and I have absolutely given up trying to explain that it isn’t about what I get out of it, I didn’t come here to get anything. So now my go to answers are about growing as a person and that it looks really good on job applications. I usually still end up getting looked at like I have lost my mind, or like I am a child that just doesn’t understand life.

Once people somewhat wrap their head around the idea that I am making no money for teaching we move on to their main concern of where exactly I am working. Strangely enough I thought the concern about this topic would only come from the white South Africans, who have most likely never set foot in a rural village, but the black South Africans have shocked me here. Turns out that most of the black people living and working in Durban grew up in the rural villages, and they have no intention of ever going back. I don’t really blame them there, but I find it funny that they are so shocked that people would choose to go there to help. The black people cannot fathom how we survive living in the rural villages as white people. Initially I thought maybe they were talking about safety issues, but no, they are concerned about how we live with no running water, whether or not we do our own laundry, and how we don’t die of boredom. It’s like they don’t see the two hands attached to the end of my arms and they think that I am a baby lost in the big bad world. I forgot how much I hate being treated like a little kid who can’t get dressed by herself yet. It actually starts to make me mad, and that is usually when the filtering starts.

Aside from the four main questions that literally every single person asks, there are a few others that are fun to try and filter before I say something super offending. My favorite is when people ask how the people are treating me. What I really want to say is that the men here are pigs! I have never wanted to tell more people to f**k off in my entire life put together. Anyone who thinks it’s ok to grab someone as they are walking down the street, or make inappropriate sex noises when they walk by should get hit by a car (I’m a little bitter about this subject, in case you couldn’t tell). Sadly, I don’t think that would go over very well and I defiantly know that is not the answer that most people are looking for. So normally I smile and say that people have been very welcoming, while in my mind I'm envisioning kicking a whole lot of people in the nuts.

My other favorite is people asking about how I enjoy South African food. The first thing that crosses my mind is the image of a dead cow laying in the dirt and covered in flies for multiple days at a time. Then I think about walking through the meat section at the super market and coming across a full cow head, hairy ears and all. At this point I'm trying not to gag as I come up with a reasonable answer. How do you politely tell someone that you would rather eat anything other than traditional South African food?  I have enough stomach problems here as it is, I don’t need to combine meat that has been out of the refrigerator for multiple days into the mix. 

My Africa Coping Mechanisms

Recently I was asked what I do to cope with stress and rough days here in Africa. Off the top of my head I couldn’t come up with an answer. Over the years of being in college and being an athlete I learned how to deal with my emotional ups and downs, but the level of stress that I experience on a daily basis here is extremely different than anything else. When I was asked how I’m dealing it made me really think about how I handled my emotions at home versus here, and I thought the comparisons were quite entertaining.

At home I would say my number one coping mechanism was food. That whole idea of eating your feelings is pretty valid. Is it the healthiest thing, no, but is eating an entire carton of Ben and Jerry’s fulfilling, absolutely. During college my go to bad day cure was either Starbucks or an evening ice cream run. Based on my bank account those trips happened more often than I care to admit. Here in Africa, neither of those options are possible. First of all, there isn’t a single Starbucks in this whole country, I checked. Second, a trip to town takes at least three hours, regardless of how long you want to be there. In college my roommate and I would frequently take trips to Safeway at 8pm just because we were too lazy to cook something we already had. There is was easy to stop at a store and pick something up that you had been craving. Here you have to plan that out days in advance, which kind of cuts the craving part out of the mix. Then, even if they had Ben and Jerry’s here, which they don’t, by the time you spent an hour to four hours waiting for a taxi to fill you would get home to some soupy sweat cream mixture that probably spilt all over your bags.

My other favorite bad day remedy was Beauty and the Beast. Yes, I am 23 years old and my favorite movie is still Beauty and the Beast, and that will never change. Anytime my mom would call and I would tell her I was watching that movie she automatically knew I was either sick or sad. Normally I would turn it off before the Beast turns back into the creepy blond man-woman because he just creeps me out, but something about those songs could always put a smile on my face. So of course I brought a copy of the DVD with me to Africa, and watched on average once a week for the first 9 months or so. Then disaster struck, the DVD broke! In a panic I informed my mother of this heart breaking event and begged her to send me another copy. Come to find out Disney really likes to just stop all over my hopes and dreams and had already put the DVD back in that stupid vault of theirs. Why they only release the classics for a limited time is just beyond me, but I’m starting to think it’s because they are just mean. You can now buy the movie on Amazon for like $40! I love the movie, but seriously $40 is pushing things a little far.

So now that both of my favorite stress release strategies are out of the picture, how do I handle the daily emotional roller coaster that is my Peace Corps service? Strategy number one, I hide. I spend some quality time in my hut, because sometimes I just can’t handle seeing people or trying to figure out what on earth they are saying to me. Once a week I get to have a face to face conversation with my closest volunteer when we meet up to get groceries. Once a week I get to talk with someone in person that actually understands what I’m saying and how hard it is to be here sometimes. As much as I love the fact that I can text my friends and family back home through WhatsApp and Facebook, it’s not the same as talking with someone, and having broken conversations with people who always ask me how much I’m loving Africa is pretty stressful. So since it is basically impossible to go outside and not have to interact with someone, I just don’t go outside, like ever. Like most volunteers in South Africa I have even stopped going outside to pee. When I first arrived in my village I was informed that it is unsafe to go to the pit latrine at night and that I would need to get a pee bucket. At first I thought that was gross and did everything I could to not have to use it, but over the past few months it had become my new best friend. Some volunteers have taken it to an extreme and even go number two in their buckets, but that’s a line I’m not about to cross. I like to think of it as just a different form of indoor plumbing and it saves me the super awkward moments while I try to explain to my neighbors that I don’t want to talk right now, I just want to go to the pit latrine. So now rather than being an emotional eater I just hide in my room like a hermit.  

Previously I would have filled my time hiding in my room with happy upbeat Disney songs, but since that dream was crushed I have recently been filling my time by day dreaming. I think a huge part of surviving the emotions of being extremely homesick, lonely, and pissed off is being able to mentally escape sometimes. Recently I like to escape by thinking about all of the delicious food I'm going to eat when I get home! Ask any volunteer, the number one thing on the list of things we want to do when we get home has to do with food. Family and friends are always involved, but it usually revolves around going to this restaurant with them, or having your mom make a full Thanksgiving dinner in the middle of August just because you can. When you eat the same five meals every week you end up fantasizing about food…a lot. The second thing I'm going to do when I get home, after I go to Starbucks, is get a gym membership, because I my plans for the first month of being home all involve eating. So when I'm super homesick or pissed off at my school for starting exams three weeks before the end of term, I come home, pee in my bucket, and lay in bed thinking of all the amazing food I'm going to consume when I get back home. It’s kind of hard to be mad when you’re thinking about Cassie’s warm homemade cinnamon rolls, or sushi dates with mom and dad. Hell, at this point I would even take deer tacos over the quarter jar a peanut butter I ate for lunch today! In college I was able to actually eat my feelings, in Africa I fantasize about eating my feelings, it’s possible that there is something wrong with me, but after almost a year of being away from home I'm relatively ok with where my coping mechanisms are.

So the next time anyone is wondering how I'm dealing with missing my friends or family, or how I'm handling the stress of being in Africa know that I'm probably either on the floor or in my bed thinking about pumpkin curry and endless Olive Garden breadsticks so that I can distract myself from how hard this experience is sometimes. 

When is it No Longer Boys Being Boys?

I’ve said more than once that being at my school is like being in Lord of the Flies. Everything I have seen so far has been mad chaos where learners are left on their own to handle things that should be dealt with by authority figures. This becomes extremely apparent before school and during breaks. When 500 learners aged between 6 and 20 are left unsupervised there are bound to be problems. If a child comes to the staff room crying because of something that happened during break, they are often turned away while the teachers laugh because it is absurd to them that they should be disturbed during their break to deal with petty issues among children. I recently learned that at my school breaks are meant for the teachers, not for the learners, and that means that they will not be bothered with school issues during said breaks. This complete lack of supervision and rules in general has left the learners to create their own ranks among each other, most significantly among the boys.

I have seen the evidence of this in my grade 6 class, where I have two boys who have recently turned 18. I now have boys and girls who are 11 in the same class with boys literally twice their size, and almost twice their age. I’m sure you can guess where the 11 year olds rank in the hierarchy created among the boys throughout the school. In my class I have seen more fist fights in the last five months than I have seen in my entire life. These are fights occurring in a room, with a teacher present, so how many do you thinking are happening outside when there is no one around to even try and break them up? When I have brought this issue up with the other teachers and the management at my school I have been given the same generic answers of “our learners are naughty” and my all-time favorite “boys will be boys”. I agree to some extent that boys will be boys. I grew up with two older brothers, and I have seen how they like to handle altercations, but I also believe that at some point that excuse is just teachers, parents, and authority figures being lazy and not wanting to monitor and discipline their children. The boys at my school have taken it upon themselves to be the judge, jury, and sheriff, and for all the people who have read Lord of the Flies what does the mad chaos escalates into, violence.

Last week was when the petty fights and arguments escalated past the point of boys just being boys. A 19 year old boy brought a knife to school, waited until classes were supposed to be starting, walked into a classroom and stabbed a 17 year old boy in the back of the neck. He knew that the first ten minutes of first period are when teachers are in the staff room “preparing” for the day. He saw this as the perfect time to corner the boy inside a small room, and that there would be no teachers around to interrupt his plans. The packed staff room was alerted to a problem when students began to pour out of the classrooms screaming as the boy was trying to escape his attacker. After a few minutes chasing around the school yard, that boy with the knife was finally tackled by our school security guard, and promptly locked in the principal’s office. The boy who was stabbed had a laceration on the back of his neck that demanded stitches and medical attention. Unfortunately emergency services such as ambulances are pretty slow to get out to rural areas, so some of the teachers strapped a bunch of gauze to the wound, put the boy in the back of a car, and rushed to the local clinic. The rest of us had the privilege of staying at school and trying to figure out what on earth caused this, and how the hell to get 500 gossiping learners to calm down and go back to class.

After the police showed up later to take the older boy into custody the story came out as to why he felt it was appropriate to stab another boy. Apparently on the previous Monday there had been a fight during lunch between the same two boys and a few of their friends. This fight was reported to staff members after the fact, but the two who started the fight simply received a slap on the hand with a stick for being disruptive. Nothing was done to figure out the reason for the fights or to help resolve the issue. So as retaliation, a few days later a knife was brought to settle the dispute. The fight eventually ended with one boy in jail and one in the hospital.

While the boy who was stabbed is now fine, he did have to spend three days in the hospital. The knife was shoved far enough into the back of his neck to reach his vertebra. As he was running to escape his attacker blood drained from his injury into his lungs, so a shunt had to be inserted into his left lung in order to drain it, so he was kept in the hospital to monitor for infection. He is now back in school and doing perfectly fine.

I realize that violent outbursts happen in schools all over the world, and that this is not just a third world problem. However, this incident really got me thinking about how differently we monitor and discipline students in the United States. When I had my first fist fight in class I sent the boys to the principal, only to have them sent right back. Discipline here is at the end of a stick, but pain only lasts for so long. Learners here aren’t afraid of getting in trouble because there are no lasting consequences. Getting suspended or expelled isn’t a discipline tactic used in this country, and even if it was, parents are so uninvolved that kids would probably welcome a few days off at home. There are no consistently enforced rules at my school, so the learners have made up their own and enforce them themselves. While most of these learner imposed rules are regulated by school yard fights and bullying, it seems that eventually they escalate to something more extreme. It makes me really curious what has to happen in order for the staff at my school to realize that this is beyond boys being boys, and that they need to do something in order to insure the safety of the learners. Obviously a boy getting stabbed and spending three days in the hospital wasn’t enough, because it took less than one day for the teachers to migrate back to the staff room leaving the learners unattended. 

Vacation Photos

Hungry Hungry Hippo

Growing up I thought I had heard all the reasons not to walk around alone after dark. As a child I got the warnings about how it’s harder for cars to see you at night and it’s easier to get lost, and as a girl I got all the warnings about it not being safe because creepers walk around at night. Then when I got to college I got the warning about how nothing good ever happens after midnight (which looking back, I would have to agree with). Over the years I thought I had heard them all. Then I showed up to the beautiful coastal town of St. Lucia, South Africa, where I was given a new reason not to walk around at night. Here you don’t have to worry about drunks stumbling around, or murderers lurking around dark corners, it’s a pretty safe place. That is, until you are walking back from dinner and come face to face with a 5000 lbs. hippo in the middle of the street.

The town of St. Lucia is located right on the edge of the St. Lucia estuary, home to the largest hippopotamus population in the world. I always imagined hippos kind of like the dancing ones on Fantasia. Even when you see them on the Discovery Channel they look so cute with their wiggly ears as they float around in a big muddy pond. I’m just going to add this to my list of things Disney lied to me about as a child. I’m pretty sure any animal loses the cute factor when they are bigger than a minivan and have teeth longer than bananas, and just to set the record straight, they don’t dance around in tutus.

My week long vacation started by meeting up with my friend, and fellow volunteer, Monica in Durban. From there we made the trek to the town of Manguzi, near the Mozambique boarder to spend a few days at another volunteer’s site. We met up with Briana, got some groceries, and then hopped in the back of a caged pickup truck to head to her village. Briana’s village could not be more different than mine. First of all she is in the tropics, and it is HOT. Being close to the boarder and only about an hour from the ocean her village is situated among sandy dunes and is infested with every creepy crawling bug known to mankind. I use the term infested because even after nine months in Africa I would rather never see an ant or dung beetle ever again. It’s also home to two of the most aggressive snakes in the world, the black mamba and the puff adder, but we were fortunate enough to not run into any of those.

Our big adventure in Manguzi was paying a local to drive us through the back roads to the beach. We were going to spend the day soaking up some much needed vitamin D with Briana’s host family and their friend (who was our driver). We assumed that since they were all locals that they would know how to get to the beach we were aiming for, but unfortunately we were wrong. The driver kept leaning out the window of the truck to ask us if we knew how to get there. It apparently never occurred to him that the white girls from out of town would have no idea where we were going, hence why we paid him to drive us. So after a few wrong turns, and a few sandy hills that we got stuck on, we made it to the beach…just not the right beach. Being the easy going Americans we figured a beach is a beach and the one we were at would be just as good as the one we were aiming for, right? Wrong!!! We hadn’t even had time to get out of the truck bed when we were approached by three men in uniform, carrying very large rifles. Nothing says “you are not welcome here” like an automatic rifle. Turns out that we had unknowingly entered a protected wildlife area that was not open to the public, and that was being monitored by South Africa’s equivalent to park rangers. Except these park rangers carry big guns rather than flashlights and radios. Fortunately they believed the obviously foreign white girls that we were just lost and were looking for the public beach a few dirt roads over. They were kind enough to not shoot us and even gave us directions on how to get the hell out of there! Looking back it is an entertaining story to tell, but in the moment nothing makes you want to pee your pants more than big guys with guns in a foreign country where you hardly speak the language.

So after that fun little detour we finally made it to one of the most beautiful beaches I have ever seen. It kind of reminded me of the scene from the beginning of the second Jurassic Park. All you could see where miles and miles of undeveloped beaches with huge hills covered in tropical jungle plants rising up behind the sand. The Indian Ocean is a beautiful blue and so refreshing after spending two hours riding in the back of a truck on a hot day. We spent the day playing with Briana’s host siblings and lounging on the beach. Of course I got sun burnt  again, but this time I blame my friends because I only got burnt on my back where it was their job to apply the sun screen. Apparently it is impossible for me to go to the beach and not get burnt.

So after a few days of lounging around and an amazing day at the beach, we left Manguzi to spend a few days back in the land of restaurants and showers in St Lucia. The first thing you notice when you enter this little town are the road signs. Who would have thought you would ever need a hippo crossing sign, especially in the middle of town. When we finally made it to the backpacker that we were staying at we were greeted with another sign. On the back of every door leading out of the building there was a warning about hippos roaming free after dark. No joke, hippos walk up from the estuary at night to find a nice little grass area to chow down on. It just so happens that many of these hippo dining areas are people’s front yards. Who needs a lawn mower when you have a herd of hippos?

Like most Americans none of us had ever seen a hippo outside of the zoo, so our first adventure was to go on a hippo/croc tour that evening. Briana was a little hesitant to get on a small boat with mesh railing to get right up close and personal with some hippos. Turns out some people in her village had recently been attacked by hippos, and one guy was killed. Once again, Disney lied, wild animals don’t always want to be your friend, and hippos are super mean. You don’t ever want to piss one off, and you especially don’t want to get between a mom and her baby, unless the idea of being skewered by a banana size tooth appeals to you. However, after a little reassurance that we would not get eaten by any wild animals we got on a little boat to find some hungry hungry hippos, and it was amazing! This two hour boat ride at sunset was by far the coolest thing I have done in Africa so far. I set out thinking I would see maybe a few hippos here and there, but they were everywhere. Turns out hippos hang out in family type clusters usually with multiple females and their babies with one or two big males depending on the group size. The guide was careful to not put the boat between the moms and their babies, but we were able to get right up next to them. While the babies were super cute, the big males kind of still scare the crap out of me. They are huge, and they make some super strange noises. They kind of sound like Butch when he snores really loud. They like to grunt at each other as a way to show dominance. I didn’t find it a very attractive noise, but based on the number of babies we saw the female hippos sure liked it!

We unfortunately were about two weeks too late for crocodile season, but we were able to find one female still hanging out on shore. Turns out she built her nest a little too close to the water’s edge, and her nest flooded during the rain. Most other nests hatched a few weeks earlier, but this mom was still guarding the nest and trying to keep it warm in the hope that her babies would hatch. It was super sad hearing the guide tell us the story while watching this croc just sit there above the water line. I’m pretty sure it was the first time I ever wanted to cuddle a crocodile.

After this epic first night of animal watching we spent the majority of our time in St. Lucia eating real food, taking a lot of showers, and attempting to avoid running into two ton hippos on the sidewalk. It was a pretty fantastic vacation and I was able to add a bunch of animals to my list.

Animals seen in Africa

Ostriches

Peacocks

Zebras

Baboons

Monkeys

Mongooses  

Water buffalo

Springbok

Wildebeest

Hippopotamuses  

Crocodile

Exam Schedule

Sorry it has been so long since my last update. This will be a catch-up post, and then my next one will be about my amazing vacation.

There are only two words that can adequately describe the end of term routine in South Africa: mad chaos! Imagine 500+ learners running wild and unsupervised while 60 learners are stuffed into one room trying to take an exam. That’s how I spent the last few weeks of my first term teaching. Sometimes I would wonder how it is possible that South Africa is ranked 144 out of 145 countries in math and science education since they are one of the most developed African countries, but then I got to experience firsthand how exams are conducted in this country and I am no longer surprised at all.

The current curriculum in South Africa runs on a 10 week schedules. To me that meant 9 weeks of teaching and 1 week of exams. Unfortunately at my school that was not how things played out. During week 6 I was informed, out of the blue, that my end of term exam was due the following day to be approved by my HOD. Seeing as I was still in the middle of teaching I was a little confused as to why my exam needed to be ready when I still hadn’t covered many of the topics supposed to be covered in term 1. I was not surprised however, that they would tell me about something like that being due the next day. I have sadly come to expect that I will be informed last minute about everything because all the other teachers are using the same lesson plans and exams that they have been using for the last 10 years. But I digress, so after a quick conversation with my HOD I was informed of the exam schedule that would be starting the next week. The general schedule was there would be one exam per day during week 7, with two exams on Monday. Exams would start at 9am and end at 11am, except Monday that had another exam from 11:30am to 1:30pm. When learners were finished with their exam they were expected to leave the classroom to go eat, and then would be dismissed when the exam time had ended. Teachers were required to remain at school until the end of the school day at 2:45pm. Apparently as long as teachers are at school for the full day, it can count as a full day of teaching even if the learners are not there.

At first I was confused as to why we were doing this during week 7 when we still had three weeks to go, but then I got that answer as well. The current curriculum has six subjects for grades 1 to 6, but nine learning areas for grades 7 to 9. This meant that those three grades needed to continue their exams into the next week, because heaven forbid they schedule more than one exam per day throughout the rest of the first week. To say I was super annoyed would be a drastic understatement. I couldn’t really understand how the majority of my grade 5 class can’t subtract correctly, but now that I know only 6 weeks of each 10 week term is used for teaching I get it.

So there went two weeks of teaching. It was suggested that if I wanted to continue teaching after the exams that I could request having my classes stay while all the other learners left at 11am. That lasted for about 15 minutes before I discovered it was the worst idea ever. I thought my learners were loud and out of control before, but when you force kids to stay at school when all their friends just got to go home, they turn absolutely crazy. I’ve had to break up enough fights in my classes as it is, I was not going to watch while they rebelled, so they were sent home pretty fast that first day.

Unfortunately that left us with two more weeks still. Week 9 was taken up by the Annual National Assessment (ANA) for grades 3, 6, and 9. The South African government has schools take the first ANA last September, and then realized just how bad the rural schools were really doing. This year they decided that for all the school that averaged below 25% in English and math needed to take the ANA every term as practice. However, only grades 3, 6, and 9 had to take them because those are the transition grades where kids either get held back (until they are 18 in my grade 6 class) if they continue to fail. So week 9 consisted of administering the ANA exam to those three grades, while the rest of the school ran wild outside waiting for their free lunch. It was horrible. But once again the exams were between 9am and 11am, and then all the learners were dismissed. The one good part about this week was I now actually had things to grade to occupy the rest of my time stuck in the staff room.

Week 10 was the absolute worst. This was the week grades were due. Since we are in rural Africa, this meant that grades were all due by hand. A report was submitted by each subject teacher to the class teacher, who is in charge of a specific grade. The class teachers must then compile all of the grades into a class mark sheet, and then hand write individual reports for each learner. Imagine if all the report cards you got while in school were hand written. It takes a lot of time, but only one teacher is allowed to do it, so the rest of us basically sat there for a week. No learners came to school, there were no free lunches, and there were just 18 teachers crammed into one small room with nothing to do. In South Africa having nothing to do means free time to sing and dance! Something that was cute and cool when I first got to site, but after about two songs it now makes me want to go hide, which is exactly what I ended up doing for a week. I decided that I would go “lesson plan” in the grade 6 classroom so that I could get away from the singing, eating, and yelling going on in the staff room non-stop. The whole thing was just too much for me to handle.

As a teacher it was extremely frustrating to teach for only six weeks and then have four weeks of doing basically nothing, but I think that I am the only teacher that felt that way. 

My Africa Doctor Experience

If you think being sick in America is bad, I can promise you being sick in South Africa is a million times worse. Over the last few weeks I have been suffering from pretty bad allergies. Of course I wasn’t too worried about it, I had suffered from allergies before and this was nothing new, or so I thought. Turns out after three weeks of coughing and sneezing, your body starts to get mad at you. In my case, my body got super pissed off, and I ended up with a really bad sinus infection. This is far from my first sinus infection, so I was able to self-diagnose my problems pretty quickly. Feeling like my head was a giant balloon and that I had just been punched in the jaw a couple times made it pretty easy to tell what was going on, but unfortunately being able to self-diagnose gets you nowhere in getting prescription antibiotics. As much as I really didn’t want  to go to the doctor in rural South Africa, I also didn’t want to feel like crap for another week or two, so I gave in and called Peace Corps medical staff. Of course they are located 10 hours away in Pretoria, so my only option was to have them set up an appointment for me at the doctor’s office two towns over for the following day.

This is where the fun part really began. The doctor’s office is located in the town of Ixopo. If I had a car it is maybe 30 minutes from my village, which isn’t bad at all. However, I don’t have a car, so I had to brave public transportation to get there. It takes two different taxis to get from my village to the doctors. I walked up to get the taxi from my village to my shopping town of Umzimkulu at 11am. Even though my appointment in Ixopo wasn’t until 2pm, I had to take the 11am taxi out because the next taxi usually doesn’t leave until school gets out, at 2:45pm. We waited 45 minutes to get the other 13 people needed to cram that pickup truck full before we could head into town. Those 45 minutes taught me an important lesson; when you are sick, nothing makes you feel worse than being stuffed in a taxi with 13 other people who are all yelling at the top of their lungs in a language you don’t understand. I spent the majority of that drive praying I wouldn’t throw up all over the person across from me because my head hurt so badly. I kind of wanted to kiss the ground when we finally got out in Umzimkulu, but then I remembered I was in a 3^rd world country and I probably shouldn’t be putting my face anywhere near the ground in town.

The next leg of my journey was to catch the taxi from Umzimkulu to Ixopo. The positive side of this part is that the taxis are actually vans rather than pickups, so you aren’t quite as smashed in. The negative side is that the taxis I needed are located in the sketchiest part of Umzimkulu. On a normal day I am extremely rude to people in that area for safety reasons. South African culture is that if a woman tells you no nicely she doesn’t really mean no, she means try harder. Obvious that is not the message I am ever trying to convey, so I am normally downright rude to men hanging around the taxi rank. Unfortunately for the men who tried to yell at me yesterday, I was already in a bad mood, so rude might be an understatement. In America I’m sure I would have been classified as a bitch, but here I’m betting they would say I was just being feisty. Once I made it through the obnoxious drunks, I only had to wait for about 20 minutes for the taxi to fill and head off to Ixopo. Now, since I had to take the 11am taxi out of my village, I ended up getting to Ixopo around 1pm for my 2pm appointment. At home I would normally go sit in the closest Starbucks to burn some time, but coffee shops don’t really exist in the rural areas, so I went to my next best option, KFC. South Africans love their KFC, in fact most towns have signs telling you to turn around and go back the 2km to the closest KFC, just in case you didn’t see it when you drove by. It wasn’t exactly where I wanted to sit for an hour, but there are far worse places in these towns to hang out than KFC.

Eventually I felt it was an appropriate time to head to my appointment across the street. Surprisingly the doctor and the receptionist spoke flawless English, and I was checking in without a problem. Unsurprisingly they were a little behind schedule, and I had to wait for a little over an hour to be seen. Once I was finally taken back it took less than five minutes for the doctor to confirm that yes I do have a sinus infection and that I needed antibiotics. As glad as I was to hear that I had been right all along, I was not that happy that I spent four hours suffering while waiting for a doctor to tell me something I already knew. My frustrations, however, were substantially lowered when the doctor just started handing out medications. Turns out in South Africa some doctors write you prescriptions and send you to the pharmacy, while others act as a pharmacist and just hand out drugs like candy. The last time I had a sinus infection in the US I was just given your standard antibiotics and told to rest for a few days. In South Africa I was given everything I could possibly need to make my life more comfortable during my recovery, and probably some things I really didn’t need. I got the usual antibiotics, and on top of that I got a probiotic supplement so the antibiotics don’t upset my stomach, and over the counter decongestant, cough syrup with codeine which worked wonders helping me sleep last night, pain meds just in case (of what I’m not really sure), and a nasal spray to try and help my allergies. It was kind of like getting a gift bag for coming to the doctor. The excitement did wear off a little when I realized I had at least another hour of travel time in order to get home, and then wore off completely when my last taxi back to my village was filled with 13 other people and 6 live chickens. I was having problems breathing enough as it was, but adding a bunch of chickens in the back of a packed truck just made it so much worse.

So, the next time it takes you twenty minutes to get to the doctor, where you have to wait for another twenty minutes in a spacious waiting room that’s full of magazines and the smell of cleaning products, don’t complain. The experience could be so much worse. My new goal is to not have to go back to the doctor for the next 18 months that I am here. Unfortunately that might be a little hard with my allergies because I am too much of a baby to take the stupid nasal spray. I don’t know what it is, maybe it’s the 12 years I spent getting water up my nose when I was swimming, but nasal sprays freak me out. I have spent all day trying to get up the courage to just do it, but every time I get that little bottle even close to my face I panic and can’t do it. I’m going to call this one of my 1^st world problems in a 3^rd world country. 

Don't Believe Everything You Hear

Have you ever wondered if your teacher or your boss was just making crap up as they went along? Have you had the moment where you think to yourself, hmmm no that doesn’t sound right, but then just let it go because an authority figure said it was true so therefore it has to be true?  After being a teacher for eight weeks with absolutely no teaching credentials, I think it is time we start teaching our kids to question basically anything a teacher says in this country. I have recently discovered that in South Africa information takes the back burner to personal opinion and mythology, which I often find entertaining but also worrisome. I have taken note of this week’s information blunders and hope you find them as enjoyable as I did.

Turns out South Africa has come up with its own answer to the age old question: is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable? While some people argue the science and say it is a fruit, others argue the fact that they are gross so therefore it has to be a vegetable; South Africa takes a different approach. They just make up their own category. According to a poster that I recently found in the staff room (published in 2010) there are fruits, vegetables, and vegetable fruits. What is a vegetable fruit you ask; well no one could actually give me an answer to that. Maybe people just got tired of arguing about it here and decided to name it both so no matter what you call it you’re only half wrong. Here 50% is way above passing, so now kids can pick either answer and they will be close. Strangely enough avocados and green peppers were also thrown into the vegetable fruit category. I’m not really sure why green peppers would be classified different than red and yellow peppers, which were shown under the vegetable category, but I’m just going to go with it. So now if someone ever asks you if a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable, you always have to option to tell them that in South Africa it is both.

Soon after my discovery of the vegetable fruit poster I began to sneeze due to the two years of dust sitting on top of said poster. After third sneeze the other teachers in the staff room became very concerned for my health. I had a minor cough all week and now I was sneezing, so clearly I was dying. Although I tried to explain that I just had allergies, the concern didn’t end there. Apparently, as I was informed by three very concerned women, there is no such thing as allergies. That’s right people, all those times the doctor told you that you are allergic to pollen, cats, or nuts, they were lying. It’s shocking right, all these years of taking antihistamines was a waste because I obviously have asthma, or maybe pneumonia, or possibly bronchitis, but definitely not allergies because those aren’t real. Luckily for me, it doesn’t really matter what I have because there is some traditional Zulu medicine to cure just about anything. While I stuck to my story of having allergies and not needing to see a doctor or a chemist (pharmacist), the older teachers decided that they knew better than my young naive mind, so today a was greeted with a little home brew to cure all. I know some people out there will swear by traditional medicines, but I am a firm believer in not drinking things if I don’t know what’s in it. I’m also a firm believer that you should never drink something that looks like sludge, and this stuff fell under the unknown and sludge category, so there was absolutely no way I was drinking that crap. Unfortunately it is rather hard to explain why you won’t drink something that looked like a Harry Potter potion gone really wrong to a group of people who truly believe it would cure me. So going with the theme of the week, I just started making shit up. Apparently I am now a firm believer that medicine should not be used unless you are extremely ill, and that Americans believe it is better to just let illnesses run their course so your body can learn to fight it. Turns out lying is a great way to get out of taking the scariest medicine I have ever seen.

This was about the time that I started thinking that maybe teachers aren’t as smart as students think they are. This thought was confirmed after school when I was walking home with a group of grade 8 learners who have decided that I am a walking encyclopedia. These kids don’t exactly have access to the internet so they can’t just Google thinks when they have questions, so obviously the next best option is ask the white girl. Today’s questions focused on pants and animals for their Natural Science class. The questions started off pretty normal about what types of plants can live underwater vs. plants that just need water to live. Then they took a turn for the weird when one of the girls asked what plants can fly. Turns out they were informed during class today that some plants can fly. I wasn’t exactly sure how to respond to that, so I told them I would ask their teacher about it tomorrow, but right now there are 42 grade 8 learners who now think that plants can fly. Maybe my next lie will be, “No mom, Butch didn’t trample over all your flowers because I threw the ball in the garden. The flowers simply flew away”.  A teacher told me it was possible, so obviously it’s true.

The progression of information this week concerns me. In the US we teach kids to at least use critical thinking, so hopefully by 8^th grade they would not buy into the flying plant information, but that’s not how things work in this country. Kids here are taught not ask questions, and to never talk back to an authority figure, so how are they ever supposed to figure out some things people say just aren’t true? 

A Love Story

As I’m sure you noticed, last week’s post was filled with some pretty strong emotions. Sometimes it surprises me how stressful this experience is. Before I left for Africa people told me over and over again that this will be the hardest thing I ever do, but no one can prepare you for what it’s really like. You might be able to prepare yourself for the physical hardships that you will face living in a small village, but there is no way to prepare yourself for the emotional roller coaster that is your Peace Corps service. The smallest thing can make me feel like I own the world, or it can bring me to my knees; I kind of feel like I’m losing my mind sometimes. Last week I was really struggling with the idea that some people obviously don’t want us here. My desire to help people within this area is tainted to some because of the color of my skin, and emotionally that is hard for me to comprehend. Sometimes I look at my classroom and wonder what the hell am I doing here? Kids on one side of the room are hitting each other, while kids on the other side are sleeping, and it makes me wonder if these kids are getting anything out of me being at the front of the classroom.

Then something small happens. Something I wouldn’t have thought twice about in the US, but here it was different, and it showed me just how much these kids will get to experience by having me here. The 14^th of February was Valentine’s Day. As a kid I loved Valentine’s Day. Back when you got to spend the day at school doing crafts, and everyone got a valentine from everyone I thought it was awesome. However, kids here have never gotten to experience the joys of getting little cards from everyone else in their class, or from anyone for that matter. Valentine’s Day was just another day of school with a ten minute lecture about the history of Valentine’s Day before school. There was no bright colored cards, no shy smiles as people tried to sneak notes to each other, no love in the air, until today. It might have been a few days late, but today my grade 5 and 6 class got to experience a little bit of American culture. My wonderful Aunt Nancy surprised me by sending a huge envelope filled with handmade Valentine’s Day cards from the students of Pine Ridge School. There were enough cards for each of my 100 learners to get their first American Valentine.

I went into class as if it was any other Monday. I started both my classes off with their warm-up questions, and then went into continuing my lesson from last week. Twenty minutes before class was out I had everyone put their books away, and explained that today I had a little surprise for them. I explained that in America my aunt is a teacher, and that her students sent a little something for Valentine’s Day. When I pulled out the stacks of red, purple, and pink cards the kids went wild. I never thought a 16 year old boy would get so excited about a heart shaped card that said “Be Mine?” on it, but every single learner couldn’t wait to get their hands on those cards. Some learners wanted to show the whole class their cards and brag about them to everyone who would listen, while others didn’t want to let anyone anywhere near theirs. They opened their cards, read them, and then slid them into the protective plastic cover of their notebooks where they would be safe. It was by far the cutest thing I have seen here. To see the look of pride on their face as they read the cards and put them somewhere safe was heartwarming. To most of us a handmade Valentine would mean nothing. We would look at as if it was cute and then probably not think of it again, but for them you could just see that it meant so much more. It was theirs, someone made that for them and that meant so much more than I can really comprehend. One small act of love and kindness showed these kids that other kids half way around the world know about them, and are thinking of them. Maybe it will help them see that they aren’t alone, and that the world can have some really great things to offer them.

So, thanks to the students and teachers of Pine Ridge I got to spend the day watching kids show their friends their first Valentine’s Day card and trying to explain what “cutie pie” and “U R GR8T” meant. I couldn’t have asked for a better Valentines gift. 

Grade 6

 Grade 5

Hey, You're White!

Has anyone told you that you’re white today? Has anyone stopped you in the middle of the street to tell you the color of your skin, as if you didn’t already know? If not, you should feel blessed. If you can walk down the street and not have everyone yell out “white person, white person” and watch your every move, then you’re lucky. Everywhere I go the word mhlungu is close behind. It is the Zulu term for white person, and no matter where I am or who I am with, it follows me like a shadow. It’s whispered between students, yelled within groups of women, and slurred by drunken men. In rural South Africa I am not Kelsey, I am not a woman, I am not an American, and I am not a sister or a daughter. Here, I am a white person. For the first time in my life I feel defined by something I had no control over, and let me tell you, it is one of the worst feelings I have ever experienced.

I have been in rural South Africa for almost seven months. I have been in my current site for four, and I have yet to go a day without being reminded that I am white, that I am different from everyone else. Like most people out there, I have never been part of the minority. I am a middle class, college educated, white girl. I was basically the queen of blending into the crowd. Then, all of the sudden I chose to get dropped off in the middle of nowhere South Africa, a country that is still in the depths of fighting a brutal battle for equality between blacks and whites. Everyday a new protest breaks out, another union goes on strike, and as volunteers we are in the heart of the communities struggling to rise from the years of oppression. To say some people have developed a little bit of resentment towards white people would be a huge understatement, and with only a little preparation we were sent to live in the middle of it all. It doesn’t matter who I am, or why I am here, the first thing that anyone notices about me is the color of my skin. I can’t hide that I am different; I don’t think I should have to, but I never knew until now how hard it is to be singled out because of one difference.

There are four different types of reactions that I get from people in town. There are the people that are thrilled that I am here. Students and gogos all seem to think I am the greatest thing that has ever happened to my village, but outside my village things get a lot more complicated. The increasingly less common reaction I get in town is curiosity. People want to know what a young white woman is doing in a black community. Curiosity I can handle, I expected it. I expected people to wonder why I am here, but I didn’t expect people to question my sanity because of it. I came half way around the world to work in a rural village, to help where I can, and people think I am absolutely crazy for it. Black South Africans are shocked that I would even consider living in a village. They tell me it is not safe to live where they live, that it is too hard of a life for someone like me. They offer to wash my clothes, clean my house, and haul my water because that’s not something I should have to, as a white girl. It is so ingrained into these communities that as a white person I deserve better, they don’t understand why I would ever choose to live as they live, or to be a part of their community. Even the teachers at my school have told me they don’t understand how I handle living without running water even though all of them handle it just fine. Unfortunately time hasn’t really decreased the number of people who think I am off my rocker, but it has decreased the level of curiosity. People know why I am here, they might not understand it, but they know. For many people this is enough. Their curiosity has been dealt with, and they leave me alone.

For other people it doesn’t matter why I am here. All that matters to them is that I am white and they either resent me for it, or feel that I owe them something. Of the two, resentment is the easier to handle. Hell, sometimes I feel like I deserve their resentment. Last week was the end of the month. It is by far the worst time to go to town because it is when everyone gets paid. People flock to the ATMs to pull out all the cash they can, and then the buy, buy, and buy. Gogos are hauling around 25kg bags of rice and corn meal, while kids are carrying racks of fresh bread loaves. Basically it is the African equivalent of Black Friday, every month. I unfortunately was out of food, and decided to brave the chaos in search of a few cans of tuna and some produce. My friend Krista and I were in the extremely long line to check out when we were approached by another cashier, a black cashier. He quickly apologized for the time we had to wait, but offered to open another line just so we could go through. There had to be at least 100 other people waiting to check out, but we were the only ones offered a shortcut. The two white girls with small baskets were being handed a break while black men, women, and children were left to carry their huge loads in line. After we politely declined the offer, the cashier simply nodded and walked away. I suddenly felt like I was in that nightmare where you show up to your high school assembly butt naked. Everyone was watching the white girls who were offered something they weren’t. As if we weren’t embarrassed enough ten minutes later the store manager, who is a white Afrikaner came up to personally apologize that we had to stand in such a long line. If people weren’t judging us before, they sure as hell were now. Not only were we offered special treatment, but we were apologized to as if having to stand in the same line as everyone else was some horrendous burden. I was mortified! Here I am in a country where I am trying to help kids see that the past should not dictate their future and that skin color should not decide ones value, and within ten minutes two different people just told everyone around me that I am better than they are. That because I am white I was singled out as deserving special treatment over every black person in that store. If people didn’t resent me before, they had every right to now. At times like this I understand their resentment, which makes it harder to fault them for it.

What I cannot understand, handle, or deal with are the people who think I owe them something. Somehow this is usually the reaction I get from the drunken men, which just makes it so much worse. They treat me like I am the one that wronged them, and that it is my job to right that wrong. Whether they want money, a job, or my body, they act like what is mine should be theirs, no questions asked. They yell at me, follow me, and try to touch me as if I am a payment rather than a person. To them my skin color is all that matters. No one cares that I am their granddaughter’s teacher, or their son’s neighbor. I am white, and I owe them.

I am white. It’s a fact, but I am so much more than just the color of my skin. I am a teacher, a volunteer, a friend, a sister, and a daughter. I am a person, and if I have learned anything from my time as a minority it’s that no person deserves to be judged by one characteristic. Our differences should not have to define us. We should be able to walk freely without fear of judgment for what people can see on the outside and things we had no control over. Be careful how you categorize people. We all do it, but remember that even by internally defining someone based on what you can see you are devaluing everything else about them. You have no idea how bad that feels until someone treats you like you are worthless based on one small aspect of who you are. 

Show A Little Support?

According to my friends and family back home, my little blog here has developed quite the following. Who would have thought a little small town girl from Washington would have a following?! I’m a little surprised people would want to read my random thoughts about my experiences down here in South Africa but it’s kind of exciting. Sometimes I like to think of myself as a little small town celebrity, and then I come back to reality and remember that I live in a hut in Africa and haven’t really washed my back in who knows how long. I’m pretty sure even small town celebrities are at least clean. So for whatever reason you are reading this, whether it’s for my witty humor or if you’re waiting to see if I get eaten by some wild animal, I appreciate the support. Many of you have been asking about what you could do to help me and my cause, and this post is for you! I’ve got two options for you, one is far more important than the other, but I figured I would throw them both out there anyways.

Option One: The Important One

In March, many of the South African volunteers, as well as volunteers from Zambia, Swaziland, and Mozambique will come together in the Drakensberg Mountains to run the Longtom Marathon. Fortunately, for those of you who have seen me run, I will not be participating in the actual race. However, I will be heading up the BBQ team, which let’s be honest is way harder than running an ultra-marathon. The marathon was actually started by a previous Peace Corps volunteer, and the proceeds go to support the KLM Foundation. The money is used to help send kids from rural villages (like the one I’m volunteering in) to college. In order to participate in the race or the BBQ, participants have to raise $100 by the day of the race. This is where you, my “fans”, come in. Although I run like a duck, and would die before ever making it close to the finish line, I will be going to the race to support my fellow volunteers and to support this fantastic cause. I am asking that anyone who is interested in helping, log onto www.klm-foundation.org/ At the top right hand corner there is a tab to Donate Now. You then just follow the prompts, and put my full name, Kelsey Lynch, in the participant box for the Longtom or Lake Geneva Race. Any amount that you are willing to give will go a long way in helping me fulfill my duty as BBQ Captain, and will go further than you can ever imagine in helping change the life of a learner who never thought college was possible. Most of the kids I work with have never even considered a future outside the village, but with your support we can help show how bright their future can really be.

Option Two: The Less Important, But Sill Important One

Send me mail! Nothing brightens my outlook on life like opening that PO Box every Friday to find a little note from someone. It reminds me that people back home still remember me, and that forgotten out here in my little rural hut. For those of you over achievers out there, and want to make your letter extra special by slipping a little something something in with your card, I have a few suggestions for you. There are three things that can easily be slipped into a letter sized envelope and that are vital to my daily sanity. 1. Coffee. Those little instant Starbucks Via packs make me want to sing in the morning. Then I go to school and usually want to cry, but for at least 30 minutes in my hut before school I am over joyed with the delicious smell of heaven (aka Starbucks). 2. Crystal Light. I don’t know if you have ever tried drinking rain water collected from your roof, but it’s not good. Add 5 calories of delicious sugar flavoring and you can’t even tell the difference, well until you hit a chunk of god knows what, but I like to try and just ignore those. 3. Hollandaise Sauce packs. When I am stressed I do two things, I either don’t eat, or I carbo-load, and what better way is there to carbo-load than by eating butter. If you haven’t seen the movie Julie and Julia, you should definitely watch it because Julia Child knew that butter just makes everything better. Unfortunately hollandaise sauce is hard to make in a real kitchen, so it’s basically impossible on my two burner hot plate! For some reason I just don’t think my one pot, two bowls, and fork would be up to Julia Child’s kitchen standards for making delicious butter sauce. However, those instant packets you can buy by the taco seasoning will do just fine for my African standards. There is nothing like coming home from a hard day at work and having a gourmet meal, and hollandaise sauce makes any meal gourmet. Just pour that stuff over my normal boring rice and veggies and it’s a good day. I figure the calories I get from that one meal will make up for the fact that I didn’t eat more than a few apples the two days before, right?

   So first, you should log onto www.klm-foundation.org and help me support those awesome people who don’t run like ducks out there, and then you should get out that pen and paper and send me a letter. J

PO Box 994

Umzimkulu 3297

South Africa

If you send me a letter, I will write you back!

Week 2: Better or Worse, Who Really Knows

It is amazing how different it is to be the one in front of the classroom, rather than the one behind the desk. To be honest it is terrifying. Being the one in charge of fifty learners who are watching every move is more pressure than I think I have ever experienced. Even as an athlete all I was ever responsible was my individual performance. If I screwed up coming off the blocks, or had a bad day keeping pace the only one that ever suffered for it was me. When I walk into that class it’s no longer just about me, it’s about the fifty kids looking up at me expectantly. Unfortunately for them I still have no idea what I am doing. Two weeks in and I have broken up two different fights in my class, and watched a 16 year old boy grab a 12 year old by the back of the head and shove his face into a chalkboard all because he lost at a simple math question. I’ve laughed, cried, yelled, and wanted to rip my hair out. There have been good days, and days that I ask what on earth I got myself into, and this is only week two!!!

Every morning, as I wake with the sun and the evil roosters that sit below my windows and crow, I have to remind myself that today I am at least showing up, which is more than a lot of teachers give them. For at least two hours every day I am there and I try to work with them, and that is something. I have a feeling that this job is going to be about the little things, the little victories that happen every day, and for now most of those victories have to do with me making it to my classes and getting through them. I had no idea what it meant to have control of a classroom until I came here. Kids are sneaky and I feel like they are just waiting for me to misstep. They watch my every move and are ready to go wild the minute I make a mistake. Sometimes I look around my room and all I can see is scenes from Lord of the Flies. It is like I am the last adult alive trying to reign them in, and they are just biding their time until I fall and they can take full control. To be honest it probably isn’t really that bad, but that will be my reoccurring nightmare for the next 19 months.

This week I tried to introduce two different activities into my class. I did my first group assignment, and my first game day. I have no idea if my learners learned anything from these lessons, but I learned three valuable lessons.  Lesson 1, the minute students can’t understand what is happening is when they start acting out and disrupting the rest of the class. I have six boys in my class that have obviously been pushed through the system because no one wants to deal with them. They have serious behavior issues, they are older than the rest of my learners by at least two years, and everyone else in the school has completely given up on them. I discovered this week during my group activity that some of them don’t even know how to spell their own names, let alone how to write numbers correctly. While trying to help some of them through the assignment I watched the way other students interacted with them. They all spoke Xhosa when explaining directions, but when it came to starting on the actual numbers they just stopped trying to explain anything. From primary school on up, numbers are only taught in English, because numbers in the home languages are ridiculously hard. 30 translated to Xhosa is amashumi amathathu, and it only gets worse from there. No one uses numbers in home language, but the learners who can hardly speak any English are completely lost still when it comes to the numbers. Somehow these kids made it all the way to 6^th grade and can’t read any numbers bigger than 100. It’s both shocking and heart breaking, and for someone who has never taught in a classroom before it is extremely overwhelming. Especially when you realize that these kids start talking and messing around when they can’t understand what is happening, which is basically all the time. I can’t even really talk to them about it because they can’t understand what I am saying when we sit down one on one. I totally get it too, because I start doodling when I can’t understand what is being said at staff meetings. I understand where they are coming from, but at the same time I don’t have time to start from the beginning with them, or allow them to disrupt the whole class or cause harm to other learners. It is a vicious cycle!

Lesson 2, competition in this country is taken way too seriously. On Fridays I have decided that I want to play an educational game with the learners. It will allow them the chance to win some prizes, which is a very new concept for them at school, and for them to review and practice some basic math skills that they were never really taught correctly. I divided that classes into four teams based on their seating rows. Each row had to come up with a team name, and then we played Around the World with basic addition flashcards, sent to me by my wonderful mother. The game was played where one learner from team one and two would come to the board. I would show them a card and they would have to write the equation and the correct answer on the board. The first person with everything correct would win a point for their team and remain at the board. Then a player from the next team would come up and the process would continue. You would think that at a grade 5 and 6 level this would be fairly simple and would go pretty quick. Unfortunately 90% of my learners still need to count on their fingers things like 4+5 or 10+2. They were also never taught to add down, so that was interesting to watch. I have never heard so much smack talk and insults during a simple math game in my entire life. Kids were mean! It got to the point where in my grade 6 class they are no longer aloud to talk (yell) during game day. They can now only snap their fingers, or do jazz hands to cheer for their team. It got so out of control that the teacher next door came over to check on me to make sure they weren’t rioting in my class. I have never been so embarrassed in my life. One the bright side, the fact that another teacher came over it gave enough of a pause in the chaos to communicate that what they were doing was unacceptable. It was a learning moment for both me and my learners I think. But I guess we won’t really see how much they really understood of that discussion until this Friday when I try again.

Lesson 3, every day is a new day. It doesn’t seem to matter if Monday went awesome, because Tuesday is a new day, and it might go great or it might be horrible. One day my learners might act like the perfect students and not act out at all, and the next day someone’s face might be shoved into the chalkboard. Some learners are easy to predict, while others are like out of control wildfires, you just never know what way they might turn. One day you might think you’re the best teacher in the world, and the next you just want to wander off and die somewhere. Every day is a battle, I just have to keep reminding myself that this is a battle I chose to fight, and even if I don’t see it, every day might be the day I make an impact on one of the kids sitting in my class. Who knows, maybe that day will be tomorrow.