I like to think of ‘Louis Trichardt’ as Makhado

Most big cities here have two names: the Afrikaaner name and the ‘African’ name (whatever that means). So it’s not uncommon to have signs with two names to designate the same place. I’ve referred to Polokwane before… it’s also known as Pietersburg.

As a rule, I prefer to refer to places by their ‘African’ name.

Here’s why:

Thula – my roommate and coworker – and I visited Makhado this weekend. We were in need of supplies for our home and for our recent Christmas party and it is the largest town nearby. It was also a town designated for Afrikaners-only under apartheid. The town continues to have a substantial Afrikaner population though a lot of Venda people live, work and shop there now as well.

After a couple hours of shopping and walking around, Thula and I were pretty bushed. We stopped in the town café for some coffee… errr “coffee”. There were pretty much only Whites – I’d wager Afrikaners – in the café. Now, Thula is Zulu and Xhosa but speaks a fair amount of Afrikaans. Thula was sitting at the booth, with her back to an Afrikaner family, and the daughter keeps popping her head up over the booth to say stuff to Thula. I ask Thula what the little girl is saying and Thula casually says, “oh she’s telling me to get out.” As Big Brother Peace Corps may be watching, I will not enumerate on the expletives I let rip the next time I saw that ten year old's face. I don’t think she told her parents or maybe she didn’t understand, but the family ended up moving outside when a group of Black people sat down at the table beside them.

So… Makhado.

* * *

But the Christmas party was fun, aside from the inevitable “dance, white girl, dance.” Naheed and I spent 6 hours cooking and cleaning in preparation. We made Mexican food, mango lassis, and sugar cookies for Christmas decorating. We hand made our tortillas, which was time consuming, squeezed about a dozen mangos, and managed the very nasty process of using homemade frosting for the sugar cookies in the Venda summer heat. I had to stop several times to refreeze the frosting so that I could work with it. No one likes to be reminded that frosting is just butter and sugar. When you’ve got this colored oil slick coming off on your hands, it’s impossible to deny the fact. Anyway, the below picture is my attempt at reconciling my Peace Corps service with a holiday separated from my family.



Notice the American flag is green. Inexplicably, there is no blue food coloring in South Africa, at least not where I am. I suppose American flags are atypical subjects for food coloring. Also, the colors, namely, red, yellow, orange and green, are sold separately – there’s a societal metaphor there I’ll let you interpret.

* * *

This will be my last blog posting for 2005. Thanks to everyone for the well wishes, the holiday cheer and the what not. I miss you and hope you all enjoy a happy non-denominational holiday and new year with friends and family.

I’ll be sharing Christmas with my Muslim friend in the warm glow of our Christmas tree.



Shout out to Tom… who sent me a whole Christmas tree! I like the way it was placed inside the box. It’s got that robot-maker, some-assembly-required touch.

Random thought for 2005:

DON’T LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOU. Accepting an African name is one thing –



– this is an entirely different thing. Naheed took the braids out maybe two days later. This is her half-way through the process. We took two days taking them out. It was very unsexy sleeping next to her that night.



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22 Months Left!

I celebrated my two month anniversary at site yesterday. I romanced myself with a candlelit dinner of pesto and a glass of wine. The candles provided excellent atmosphere and in no way had anything to do with the fact that it was one of my triweekly blackouts. I had to completely strip my little basil plant of leaves to make one serving, but it was worth it. I can’t wait til my 14 month site anniversary when the leaves have grown back and I can indulge myself with have another pesto dish.

The holiday season is upon us and supermarkets have become a source of great depression for me. Without the buffer of Thanksgiving, Christmas decorations start cluttering grocery store shelves in October. My brain has habituated to the tacky red and green decorations and dismisses the Christmas tree boas as background noise, but the music is a December addition and a particularly salient assault on my senses.

I think of Christmas with the Pops. I think of Track 16, the totally eerie “Walking in the Air” song from the Snowman, that my mom and I love to put on repeat as my brother wails that something so terrifying has no place in Christmas tradition. I think of Willie Nelson, which, as a rule, resurfaces at all family functions to the accompaniment of my father’s (unfortunate) butt dance. I think of the Tran-Siberian Orchestra and that one folky song about the little boy in the bar – my mom likes to stop to listen to the words of the song. I am not too fond of the selection of holiday music available here and sadly my iPod died a while ago so I can’t supply my own.

This is my first Christmas away from my family. My strategy for coping (because the Peace Corps is all about ‘strategies for coping’) has been pretending that it isn’t happening…like I’ve fallen into some vortex where time stretches for me but when I pop out – boom, it will be Christmas, it will be Halloween, my family and friend’s birthdays, graduations, wedding parties. It will be everything I’ve missed and am missing. This is a decidedly poor method of coping. Because every time I buy my groceries I’m reminded of where I’m not.

Contact Info

A lot of people have been giving me advice regarding contact information, so I thought I’d pass it along – especially for those of you who are parents of fellow Peace Corps Volunteers.

Mail

The address I’ve left on this web site is for the Peace Corps office in Pretoria. I will eventually receive anything sent there, but I’ll get mail faster if it’s sent to me directly in Sibasa. Email me if you’d like that address. I’m a wee bit reluctant to post my real address on the internet.

If you feel inspired to send me a package (and nothing says I haven’t forgotten you like a package) and you are currently in the United States, I’ve been told that a good route to take is the flat rate Global Priority Envelope, which you can fill with bricks, assuming they fit, and send for $9. A larger envelope is $21. A friend of mine who lives in a city received one in a week, so it would probably take longer to get to me.

Telephone

I am available by cell phone, which is the same number I sent out in that mass email a while back. Email me if you need the number. My phone has rung a couple times from the states and been disconnected, but I assure you it will work eventually. My homestay was in the mountains and I got crummy reception, particularly on rainy nights.

I’ve been told that the company to go with on calling cards is called MobileCaller. They have 4 different plans for calling cell phones in South Africa (see the link below). Mobile Clear, has no maintenance or connection fees and rounds to the nearest minute. It says it costs 18.9 cents per minute, but according to Tom it has cost less than half that ($3.60 for 40 minutes, to give you an idea).

http://www.mobilecaller.com/rates.asp?GUID=C8EC67C43DCACE439058A681E1881BBD

Email

You can make comments here which will get to my email account or email me directly. Emailing Christmas JPEGs would make me smile.

“Screw You Guys, I Got It”

I’ve been living in flux for the last couple of weeks. Stuff got ugly at my homestay (for details, I’m accepting written inquiries), and I moved out. I’ve been staying with Fabienne, a friend and coworker at TVEP.

Her home is in Thate Vondo, an area in the mountains by the dam that waters Thohoyandou. I am currently hoping the real estate market up there improves so I might find a home where I will happily end my days.







Seriously.

It is that beautiful. Red dirt roads wind through rows of tall, thin evergreens and then past lemon and mango trees. The dam, which would more appropriately be called a lake, is nestled in green rolling hills that kind of make me think of Scotland - not that I’ve ever been. Its waters have been receding, uncovering the tops of trees that grew to maturity along the dam’s banks when it was much shallower. There’s also a small community of flooded rondavelds a little offshore. In my state of homelessness, I was hoping I could squat in one, lengthen the stilts a bit, bail out the water, take it on as a little fixer upper. After my morning jogs, I’ve been walking along the banks of the dam, scheming about how I might ultimately settle here. It would not take much for me to happily embrace hermitage.

My actual Thanksgiving Day was relatively nondescript. I went to work and returned to Thate with Fabienne. We had a braai, barbequed some veggie burgers, baked some potatoes, roasted some vegetables and had some wine. The dessert was the all-American S’More. I belong to the Torching school of marshmallow toasting - made unpopular by an unfavorable portrayal of one of our ranks: ‘Verno’ of Stand By Me. I flinch every time I see that scene. In any case, family holidays are not to be celebrated without families.

For Thanksgiving weekend, all the Venda volunteers trekked our way to Omar’s place out in the sticks. Omar is an education volunteer having the stereotypical Peace Corps experience. He lives in a tiny village with around 80 households. He has no electricity or indoor plumbing. When his water tank runs low, the Principal of one of his schools orders school children to bring buckets of water by wheel barrow to fill it. His outhouse is of an absurdly shallow depth; when you sit on the toilet, your feet stick out off the platform of the outhouse, making it impractical to try to close the door when you use the toilet. Inexplicably, he has a huge telephone pole in his yard.

Our Thanksgiving feast was awesome. Someone managed to find turkey, there was marshmallowy sweet potato (which mango somehow found its way into), stuffing, and pumpkin pie. I contributed, in lieu of my annual tofurkey, a purkey - that is, a pap turkey. It was an excellent substitute, perhaps better than the original and certainly easier to make. The pap is an excellent medium for molding. I will include it on my Christmas menu.







I moved into my new place this week and so, for those interested, I will be available by telephone for the first time in a couple weeks (there was no phone service in Thate).

My new living situation is sweet. I’m staying in a rondaveld and there’s a big garden ready to be planted. On one side of the yard is a mango tree, on the other a grape vine. I really hope this will be my last move for the next two years. I’ve been shuttled around more times than I care to think about in the last three months. I can’t help but be a little pessimistic though. Based on my own experience and the stories I’ve heard from Peace Corps Volunteers past and present, I can expect to move several more times if I live up to the average - the sad fact of what happens when you rely on the kindness of strangers to determine your housing situation.