It took me how long to post something?

Blog 2

Prologue to blog post number 2 goes as follows. Did you actually know that they made an apartheid musical? There’s this one scene in which all these little kids are getting shot at by a bunch of white dudes and the kids turn around and bust out into song and dance. I can’t really explain it except that every time someone hits me I scream, “Sarafina!” and dance everywhere. I’m glad that made sense to all of you reading this.

Holy snap I’m finally here in South Africa and now putting up my first blog post in this country! Okay so maybe I’ve been here for 35 days or 5 weeks, but seriously who’s actually counting? I’ll start off by saying the people here are actually pretty cool. There are 25 peace corps trainees in this group, 7 of which are men, 2 married couples, a person over 50, 2 African Americans, 2 of Latin American descent, and a Vietnamese guy. Oh wait that’s me. Hooray for diversity. One dude says he’s Russian but he grew up in New Jersey so he doesn’t really count. We are all “CHOP”(Community HIV/AIDS Outreach Program) volunteers. We work with various NGO’s to help out with problems in the communities we are staying in. When we get out of training that is. Rumor has it the peace corps reads these blogs and if they see something they don’t like then I get a one way ticket back home to America. So these will be pretty tame till I see what I’m allowed to write here.

We’re currently in our 5th week of training. What’s training like? Other than listening to a bunch of people drone on about mission statements, how community outreach is all about sustainability and empowerment I guess it’s okay. We don’t get that much free time. We have language classes starting at 8 am, everyday. Yeah including Saturday and sometimes Sunday. It’s been cool though. My team of Siswati learners (the language we are learning is Siswati, one of South Africa’s 11 official languages. It is also the official language of Swazi Land. The language is also called Swazi) have worked diligently to master the various lisp sounds and clicks. There are 2 types of clicks, one is a soft click and the other is a real hard click in which you have to make the “kah” sound while clicking. So try it with me “c” which is actually kind of a kissing noise is for the soft click and “ch” is the harder click (remember to get the sound “kah” every time you do the hard click or people here will just think you’re silly.) So say the sentence “Cha Ngicolisa, Ngicela chama. ” (No, I’m sorry, may I pee?, at least I think that’s what it means or things probably got a little awkward) 5 times fast. We definitely have the youngest group. There are 5 of us, 4 of which are straight out of college. A pretty solid group in my opinion. There are 3 other languages that are being taught: Setswana, Sepedi, and Sizulu. Swati is very similar to zulu (the most spoken of all the native languages in South Africa) Swati is spoken primarily in the eastern parts of South Africa close to Swazi Land.

After language classes we usually have some sort of cultural session and practice all things that are respectful. In other words if you buy a beer you have to chug 5 of them, if you don’t go to church for five hours a day then you’re going to hell (or purgatory at best I hear), and if something bad happens to you it happened because a witch bewitched you. Okay not everyone believes all that but hey it could happen. We hold our training sessions in a place called Marapyane somewhere in the state of Mpumalanga. I hear this state/province/whatever you want to call them has the highest illiteracy rate in all of the country and it also has the 2nd highest HIV/AIDS rate in the country. Crazy stuff. After we have our training sessions we usually go on to some technical details such as how you run a proper needs assessment of your community and organization, blah blah so on and so forth. And afterwards we have language again. Yeah 2 language sessions a day pretty much every day doesn’t make Alex Tran a happy and cultural relativist Peace Corps trainee.
We finally go home around 5 pm. I’m staying in a homestay in a small village called “@#$!$%^*”. Not sure if I’m allowed to say the name of the village, so first one to decipher that gets a prize. It’s a nice little village. Estimated population of 100 or so people. My host mom is pretty cool, she helps me out with some language homework despite not speaking the language that I’m learning. Oh yeah I forgot to tell you that out of all the language groups we’re the only ones in which their host families don’t speak the target language. Whoopy, we’re on the fast track to ace this language examination I’m tellin ya it’s gonna be crazy. I have a host sister who is away at college. She has a daughter around 1 ½ years old and I also have a host brother aged 29. They’re all really nice people so everything has been great so far. The people around the village are pretty nice too. Sometimes I have a hard time explaining to people what part of China I’m from (you know that province called “Northern Virginia”). And that I don’t know the numbers to next week’s Chinese lottery drawing. My Swati teacher lives near me as do the other Swati trainees so we hang out a bit. I could write more, but I’m getting tired. So I’m peacing out. We discover where we get permanently placed next week. So I’ll post that when I know.