A little bit of catch up!

There has been so much that I haven’t been able to share with you guys! We have been so busy these past few months! We are now finished with PST (Pre-Service Training) and we are living at our permanent site. Be forewarned that Peace Corps is full of acronyms and I apologize in advance if I forget to explain any of them. When we first got here it was so annoying and confusing, yet after 2 months of 8-`10 hour long days of training, we’re just as bad with them as they are. PST is a crazy whirlwind. Everyone always says “oh PST will be crazy” or “PST is super intense!” and I never really understood what that meant until we lived it. By saying that what they really meant was PC will keep you ridiculously busy and bore you to death at the same time to the point where you might actually die. Haha! We’ve had so many sessions I’m not even really sure what we’ve learned. Our routine pretty much consisted of 2 hours of language in the morning starting at 8 and then we usually “knocked off” at around 4 or 5.  We had at least 50 sessions on Sexual harassment, Safety & Security, Lesson planning and Health! We had around 10 different vaccinations (on top of the ones we got before we came!) and we spent way too many hours sitting in one place! But overall it was a worthy experience. I guess when you don’t much that is nice to say you should just not say anything at all right?! Haha Let’s just say that Eric and I are very happy to be done with that part of our service! Let me give you a little break down of our group. We started with 45 volunteers, 37 of which actually made it to Staging. After that we had one girl that only made it 2 weeks through training before returning home (which coincidently enough was Oregon.) Of the remaining 36 volunteers 4 of them are men (poor Eric.) There are 4 older volunteers (2 are mid 50’s and 2 are mid 60’s) there are also 2 volunteers in their mid-30’s and then the rest of us are 22-30 years of age. Some of us are straight out of college however the majority of the people we spend our time with are a few years post college. We’ve made a nice little circle of friends since the start of PST. At this point it feels like we’ve known some of them for 10 years. PST really is intense and it’s definitely the people in your cohort who help you to get through it all. It’s funny how 2 months can feel like a lifetime when you are going through something so intense. I swear we’ve been here at least a year at this point. Yet like always its gone in the blink of an eye all at the same time!

During PST we stayed with the most lovely family. The Matjiu Family. They consist of 5 girl children and 2 couples. Don’t ask me the exact details because even after 2 months of living with them we still don’t really understand. Which is pretty normal for African families, different members of the family get absorbed  by different parts of the family and so on. I know that some of the girls are cousins and some are sisters but which ones and who belongs to who is still a mystery. All that matters is that we were all one happy family! We had our uncle who we called “malome” which of course means uncle in sepedi, who is engaged to a woman who works in Jo-burg. Then there was Rakgadi (aunt in sepedi) who was our main mom like figure. Her husband was rarely around because he works in the mines in Polokwane. Malome and Rakgadi are brother and sister. Then there were the girls: Ovina, Minky, Chantel, Lorraine and Junju. Ovina and Minky studied in a different city so we only saw them a few times as well, while Chantel and Lorraine were who we saw most. Rakgadi also works out of town and is only home on the week-ends. Junju stayed with her father during the week so she was gone all week long as well. So basically now that I’ve confused you I’ll explain it clearly. We were home all week with only Lorraine and Chantel. They are both graduating high school in December so they pretty much lead their own lives and we lived ours. We ate together every night (they cooked for us) and we truly enjoyed their company. Both girls grew up in Jo-burg so they speak perfect English.

Rakgadi (our aunt) gave us our first African names. My name is Mankeleu (pronounced mahn-kuh-lay-ooh) and Eric’s name is Lesiba (lay-see-ba.) While both of our new last names were Matjiu (mah-Chee-Ooh.) This is how everyone in the village knows us. We may not know everyone but let me tell you, they know us. Haha.  I am named after Rakgadi’s mother who has passed and Eric after her father who has passed as well. It is a great honor in African culture to be named after a deceased parent. Anyway, we love our names. We were living in a village called Magongoa (mah-hone-wa) which was located about 20 minutes outside of Mokopane (moh-koh-pahn-ee). It’s a pretty urban village so some volunteers even had indoor plumbing. (Not us obviously) So I’ll go ahead and break it down for you guys just so you can picture what its really like here. We wake up in the morning at around 6:00 so that we can go running (that’s right, yours truly runs at least 5 days a week now!) And at 7 I would come back home to start heating water. We eventually got our own electric kettle so that we could heat water in our own room. We use on average 5-6 kettles worth of hot water (1.5 liters each) and then a separate bucket of cold water. We use large buckets (metal and large enough to sit it) to bath. We would have one large cup and dip in each bucket to get a mixture of hot and cold water and then bath like that. We got it down to a science pretty quickly and came to love our bucket baths! After bucket baths we would have 2 hours of language without language group and instructor. Our instructor’s name was kgaugelo (khow-hello) and our language group consisted of us and a guy named tom (who is from Vermont/Washington/Montana) we had a different subject everyday such as HIV/AIDS vocab, to Noun classes and so on. This was my favorite part of the day! After language (which was held in our spare garage) we would all walk together to the local church where we our training sessions were held. After training sessions we would head home and hang out with Chantel and Lorraine while they cooked diner. We always watched the SA soap operas each evening. After diner it was time for some music/journal writing/reading time and then off to sleep at the ripe hour of 8. For those of you that know us well, you know that we don’t sleep early or wake early so this has been a nice change of pace for us and thanks to jet-lag it was never torturous haha!

Our language classes were to prepare us for what we call the final LPI (Language Proficiency Interview) which we had our last week in PST. The idea is that to pass you need to receive a “Intermediate-Low” rating. The way it works is: it starts with Novice-Low, then Novice-Mid, then Novice-High. As you can tell then it moves on to Intermediate Low and so on. After Intermediate comes Advanced and then finally Superior. Eric and I did very well on our Final LPI’s and are very proud to say we both passed! I received “Advanced-Low” and Eric got “Intermediate-Mid.” We’ve learned a wide array of vocabulary and can communicate basic needs and wants easily. (Thank god because our new host family speaks NO English… but we’ll get to more of that later.)  After our final LPI we had our swearing in Ceremony which wasn’t all we expected it to be. By the time it rolled around Site announcements were much more exciting to us! The swearing in ceremony was more of a graduation than anything else. We were soo happy to FINALLY find out about our site! We had heard rumors that we would find out early because we were a couple (especially since we’re the only couple) which were true, however the site they had in mind for us was not exactly what we were hoping for. So after an honest conversation with our APCD (Assistant Peace Corps Director) we were given the opportunity to express what we really wanted (like everyone else.) It was a bit unfair since we were the only couple they had already placed us without knowing who we were at all whereas the other volunteers get ample opportunity to help decide their sites. We were very happy to hear that our old site had been given to someone else. We got our site announcements on Sept. 5 and swore in on September 6^th. Our new village is called Mashegoane (mash-ay-ho-ahn-ee.) which is located about 20 minutes outside of Jane Furse. We are in a rural village that has easy access to our shopping town. Our shopping town (Jane Furse) is a small place with only 2 groceries stores and a KFC to speak of haha) Its definitely the smallest of shopping towns for anyone in our cohort (by far.) So far we love it here!

Eric and I will be working at two different schools. My school is called Semashego Primary School (say-mah-shay-ho) and Eric is working at a school called Mokale Primary School (moh-kah-lay.) We have great principals (at least what we know of them so far haha.) My principal who is called Malope has a doctorate in Sepedi Language and is a staple figure in our community. He has been teaching at my school since 1981. Even Eric’s principal was one of his students! So naturally my principal is Eric’s Principal’s mentor. They are close friends and work well together. My principal is quite amazing (from what I’ve seen so far) everyone knows him no matter where we go. He took us to town the other day to buy some things and everyone we saw knew him by name and came to greet him. The people at the restaurant, the people at the electric store, the hardware store, the grocery store… they all know him! (and they respect him) It’s pretty awesome knowing we have him on our side! He’s very protective of me (in a good way) and has told me many times that his many job is to make sure that everyone gives me all the support and help that I need. This is fantastic to hear considering how hard it can be in this country to get anything done in the school systems. He took us to the post office yesterday to see about getting us a PO box and the people in the store wouldn’t allow him to wait in line and just allowed him to skip to the front to ask his questions. It’s like traveling with royalty! Hahaha. Eric’s principal seems great however to give you more detail you’d have to ask him. Lol He seems very nice and Eric says he does a good job, but struggles with respect within the school because of his age. He is a motivated man and has recently started a driving school on the side of being a principal.