Punching the Time Clock

As you may have noticed, some time has lapsed since my last blog entry. The reason for this is simple: every time I sit down with good intentions to work on my blog, I just get completely overwhelmed. I have a thousand things I want to share, but getting them from my brain to the blog in a cohesive way challenges me to no end. Then I just post nothing, making it more difficult and overwhelming the next time I want to sit down and write something. It’s a vicious, perpetuating cycle. So instead, I am just going to pick a random topic for my blog post and talk a lot about it. Today the topic is work.

As I shared in a previous post, back in November I moved from a more direct volunteer role doing education activities with the children to managing the GGA Child Sponsorship Program. I’ll give some of the nitty gritties of the program. I manage the program with one other person, a German volunteer named Markus. Our program provides food parcels and educational assistance to children and families living in the impovershed valleys of Sankontshe and neighboring valley Mophela, Swayimane, Kwa-Ximba (the “X” makes a clicking sound in Zulu which is really hard/fun to pronounce), and Willowfontein. First, we provide the children and families with a food parcel each month. Before I came to South Africa, I always imagined food parcels in Africa as something dropped out of a plane by the UN. That’s not at all the way we do it. Instead, Markus and I plan a “food drop week”. For example, we go to Sankontshe and Mophela on Monday, Swayimane on Tuesday, and so on and so on in each of the valleys each day. We take either a big industrial-sized truck or a couple normal sized trucks, and load them up with all the things in the food parcels we distribute (corn “mealie” meal, rice, beans, and a plastic bag filled with living essentials). We do a couple of big drops at a community centers where approximately 70 people come to collect their parcel or we drive to individual houses or groups of houses to give out parcels. It’s a lot of hard, dirty, sweaty work distributing the 300 food parcels. After each food drop I’m usually covered in dirt and mealie meal and absolutely so exhausted I can’t move. I’ve taken some of the best naps of my life on top of leftover bags of mealie meal.

The second thing our program provides is educational assistance for children in the program, which are school fees, uniform and supplies. For the past three months we’ve been measuring children for their new school uniforms. In November we started the process by having measurement events where children in the program came to local community centers to be measured for their uniforms. Since then, we have been measuring the kids at the monthly food drops. In addition, we’ve been contacting local schools to identify school fees, which differ depending on the approximately 20 schools the children in the program attend. Then we also have the task of obtaining school supply lists from all of the schools and buying school supplies for all the children in the program.

Another big part of our job is profiling and updating families and children in the program. The way people get on the program is through the community health workers (CHWs) in the valleys. The CHWs tell us which families and children are in need of assistance. When the CHWs tell us that a child or family is in need, we go and profile the family with the CHWs at their home. We fill out a basic form with their situation, and then send this profile to a sponsor. Once a year (around Christmas) the sponsor gets an update about their sponsor child or family. For the last few months going to visit families and children on the program to get updates has taken up a big chunk of our work time. The update usually contains information about how the family or child’s situation has changed, and then other interesting information such as the family’s best moment of the year or the child’s favorite new game.

This volunteering thing is work. It’s a mixture of the most heart-breaking stuff I’ve ever dealt with and the most rewarding moments in life. The other day a family in the valley was driving back from a funeral and got into a car accident with a Greyhound bus. All eight people in the family died. It’s hard to even fathom, you know? In an instant, all of the sisters from one family are gone. Since families of the deceased are often responsible for feeding funeral go-ers in Zulu culture, we took some emergency food parcels to the remaining family members since they would essential be having eight funerals. We sat and prayed with the family, sang with the family and talked with the family. I cannot even imagine how the family will cope and come back from something like this. Situations like this, which sadly are all too frequent here, keep me awake at night.

There are also some things that I love so much about my job I can hardly stand it and make my cheeks hurt from smiling too much. I love riding through the valleys in the car with the windows down. Markus always has to slow down to not hit the goats and cows that stand in the middle of the road, completely indifferent to the fact that we need to get by. Also, at one food drop, one of the women there made everyone bow to pray. It was all in Zulu, meaning that I understood approximately 2% of it, but it basically was thanking God for the food. Even though I do not do this job to be thanked, it is amazing to see the amount of gratitude that some of the families and children have for the program.

While I love working in the valleys in our program, I also love working with the children who live at GGA. Every other weekend volunteers are required to work, and so every other weekend I work with the the “creche” children, ages two to four years old. Oh man, they are so cute I could eat them with a spoon. I really like how with kids that young, you can make ANYTHING fun. We eat apples, we play hide and go seek (they’re still too young to be good at hiding, so it’s pretty adorable), we read books, we roll in the grass, we dance (they have more rhythm at age three than I will ever have), etc. My favorite part of working with them is singing them to sleep, and perhaps it’s because they don’t care that I can’t carry a tune to save my life. My favorite songs to sing to them are Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head and Close to You. They really like to sing Jesus Loves the Little Children and Silent Night, even though it isn’t Christmas and it contains a note so high I can only dream of hitting it (the first “sleep in heavenly peace”).

So, that’s my work.

Art Museum

Today Tamea and I went to the South African Gallery of Art in Cape Town. One of the exhibits was about how children have been depicted in art through time. On the wall was a poem by William Blake which struck a chord with me so much that I began to cry:

The Little Black Boy

My mother bore me in the southern wild,
And I am black, but oh my soul is white!
White as an angel is the English child,
But I am black, as if bereaved of light.

My mother taught me underneath a tree,
And, sitting down before the heat of day,
She took me on her lap and kissed me,
And, pointed to the east, began to say:

"Look on the rising sun: there God does live,
And gives His light, and gives His heat away,
And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive
Comfort in morning, joy in the noonday.

"And we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love
And these black bodies and this sunburnt face
Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.

"For when our souls have learn'd the heat to bear,
The cloud will vanish, we shall hear His voice,
Saying, 'Come out from the grove, my love and care
And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice',"

Thus did my mother say, and kissed me;
And thus I say to little English boy.
When I from black and he from white cloud free,
And round the tent of God like lambs we joy

I'll shade him from the heat till he can bear
To lean in joy upon our Father's knee;
And then I'll stand and stroke his silver hair,
And be like him, and he will then love me.

Happy Holidays

So it's Christmastime here, and it completely does not feel like it.

I've been trying to set the Christmas mood, but so far nothing has helped. Playing the two Christmas songs on my iPod on loop (Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas by James Taylor and Merry Christmas, War is Over by John Lennon...in case you were wondering), baking delicious baked good with lots of cinnamon, making ornaments for our tiny volunteer Christmas tree, wrapping presents...it doesn't matter what I do, it still doesn't feel like Christmas. I think the fact that it was 90 degrees outside yesterday doesn't help.

Tamea (friend from college, for those reading this who don't know her) is in town and we are planning to celebrate tomorrow by hanging out with the 2-4 year olds here at GGA and then eating steak with two other volunteers. After Christmas Tamea and I will be traveling to Cape Town and the Garden Route for a little sightseeing and relaxation. Pray for us for safe travels!

Wishing you ridiculously happy holidays...

New Cell Phone Number

If you feel like calling me (and probably spending $2 a minute), I have a South African cell you can call me on. The number is:

011 27 72 987 0487

I plan to phase out my American cell phone eventually, so program the new number into your phones!

Priceless

Five chickens because turkeys aren't very common in South Africa: 175 Rand

Shipping for four boxes of Stove Top stuffing from America: $17

A bottle of cinnamon, pumpkin, and pecans to make the most delicious side dish ever: 40 Rand

Ten pounds of mashed potatoes: 30 Rand

Shipping for a box of autumn leaves sent to one of the American volunteers that were then used as centerpieces: $10

Crayons to color in the hand turkeys I made: 10 Rand

Cooking Thanksgiving dinner for two Norweigan, one Dutch, one South African, one British, four American, and fifteen German volunteers in a rondavel in South Africa: Priceless

Cheese, Wisconsin

Hello again. I have about 30 minutes on the interenet, so we'll see how much ground I can cover. Here are some of the ways my mind has been wandering.

As many of you know, my volunteer role at GGA my first few weeks was tutoring and planning evening educational activities for the children. However, a couple weeks in I was approached to take on a new role and I accepted the position. Basically my new role is to help coordinate GGA's Child Sponsorship program as well as with the food drops it does for individuals in the valleys surrounding GGA. Unfortunately, this means I spend less time with the children directly and more time in front of Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. I have just completed my first week and I'm really excited about the new role. Though spending time with the children is fantastic, I feel the new position also suits me well. Since as a volunteer you must work every other weekend, I will still spend time with the children then and I can help with evening homework and programming activities anytime I want.

On a slightly different note, I've been really surprised by how Westernized parts of South Africa are, but first let me tell you a related story. So when I was about 5 or 6 years old I went to a Christian camp with my church in Kerrville, Texas. I had been told all these great things about camp. There would be campfires and swimming and somehow, in all of that, my 5 year-old self imagined bunking in a log cabin, chopping our firewood, and taking baths in the river. So when I showed up to this camp I began to cry because there was electricity in the rooms, new showers in the cabins (which were nicer than my house), and food cooked by a kitchen. I know it sounds silly, but I felt a similar pang of disappointment when arriving in South Africa. Before coming, I was really hoping that I would obtain some new, mandatory, Africa-imposed simplicity in my life because admittedly I thought that South Africa would be undeveloped. While it's been a comfort to have some of the things I love from home (hot showers, a good cheese selection, a Time magazine every now and again), I will admit I am a little sad that I don't have to "rough it" more.

One advantage of being here at GGA, however, is that I love the fact that sometimes I am bored. I think it's really good for me. Anyone who knows me knows that I am a RIDICULOUS busy body, so having large, unstructured units of time is both very challenging and very rewarding. I'm reading lots of books and doing other things. For instance, the other day I made a stab at writing down all 50 states and their capitals. While I am proud to say that I was successful with the states, I had a lousy showing with the capitals and ended up writing down things like "Cheese, Wisconsin". But in all seriousness it's been wonderful to have time to sit, think, and relax.

Also, in thinking about Halloween just being a couple days away, if anyone wants to post what they plan on dressing up as I would thoroughly enjoy reading it. :)

A List of Things I Wish I Knew:

1. Zulu
2. How to drive a standard well (no automatics in South Africa!)
3. The lyrics to every Chris Brown/Rihanna/Omarian/High School Musical song ever, so that the kids would think I am cool
4. How to make tortillas from scratch (I really miss them)

...this is a growing list.