I experienced my first holiday office party in South Africa last Friday, after which our office is closed for one month. This is fairly customary for small businesses as the celebration of Christmas coincides with summer vacations, school vacations and the holiday “festive season” as we say here. The party was held at 10 AM at a guest lodge where our organization holds trainings and accommodates out of town guests who have traveled in for meetings. Familiar Christmas carols were blaring away as we sat outdoors on the patio next to the lodge’s pool. The day warmed up to about 90 degrees and at 10 AM, the African sun was brilliant and powerful. The tables were set with party favors, including those English “crackers?” We were given 3 drink tickets which entitled us to “cold drinks” and beer. The 28 staff members were rather shy about getting up from their seats and strolling inside to the bar for their drinks, so, of course, it took the two PCVs (Peace Corps volunteers) assigned to the organization, me and Aasta, to get things started. We were both looking forward to a beer, especially one of those great 5% ciders. I haven’t run into a lot of alcohol drinking from co-workers or those I live with, but alcohol abuse is a very serious problem in South Africa (and incidentally with PCVs). So many of the PVCs are located in remote, rural locations that they end up drinking more than usual to deal with loneliness, isolation and other needs not being met. Speaking for myself, a drink or two takes the edge off constantly being the center of attention and feeling so vulnerable in a new environment and making mistakes But, in fact, what most staff did with their drink tickets was to exchange them for 3 unopened sodas and took them home. The party ended at noon after a buffet of five different kinds of meat dishes, “chips” (fries), several pumpkin dishes, two salads, and dessert, a fairly typical nice meal. South Africa is a meat eater’s paradise. I’m even turning carnivore-ish. Needless to say, Aasta and I were the only ones left at the party, nursing our ciders, as everyone else left in a cloud of dust for home i.e. Zimbabwe, Durban and many other towns in central South Africa. And in fact, I will be doing some traveling to this great country as well during my month off. After spending the next few days assisting my supervisor (the director) at the office, I will be picked up a PCV friend and begin a road trip that will take us to Maifikang where we will spend Christmas and, perhaps, New Years with another PCV. We’ll get a chance to visit Botswana and maybe some game parks in that area. Then, she will deliver me back home where I will prepare for the second leg of my holiday….flying to Capetown for a week with the friend from Maifikang. Capetown is known as the “mother city” and is located at the tip of the African continent, where European colonists first arrived as well as many immigrants from Asia.
I want to share my first tangible accomplishment that concluded just before the office closed. Peace Corps training emphasizes that one needs to redefine their definitions of success in order to have a satisfying experience as a volunteer in a foreign country. Many PCVs complain that they are not “doing” enough or feel that they are wasting their time doing clerical work or twiddling their thumbs waiting 2 hours for a meeting to begin. We share this kind of angst all the time. It is difficult to switch from our American type of concrete objective achievements to trying to remember that perhaps greeting an aged black man stooped-over walking down a dusty road in his language can be a success. It may possibly be the first time in his life that a white person has shown him any kind of respect, let alone attempted to speak his language and, lastly, happens to be walking in his neighborhood to begin with. I think orienting my thinking in this direction has helped me a lot and has made my experience here very satisfying in spite of the normal difficulties of settling in. Anyway, what brings a smile to my face as I write this is that I was able to get 2 and ½ tons of mealie-meal donated from the millers in town to our orphans and vulnerable children in the “location” (another horrible legacy from Apartheid is the terms for poor black communities) for a Christmas gift. Out of 85,000 residents in the location, community volunteers have identified 280 orphans. This number is a drop-in-the-bucket compared to the actual number of OVCS that we anticipate we will find as we move with the community to help them establish an OVC drop-in center (a longer term project of mine). Mealie-meal is the staple food of southern Africa. It is processed maize and cooked into a cream of wheat-looking dish. So, delivered to one of the volunteers’ homes in the location were 90 bags, 25k each, of mealie-meal, which is a little over 50lbs per bag. As awful as it sounds, food is the number one need of these children, so for them, more “pap,” as they call it, will be a welcomed Christmas gift. As I write this, I am reminded how horrible the situation here is for children. Acknowledging the pain of these children, for me, happens when I least expect it. Working every day with them, I see their resiliency and joy, but, behind that is another truth; crumbling families, sickness and death, due to AIDS.
