Welcome to South Africa!

Sanibonani, everyone! Welcome to the inaugural posting of my Peace Corps blog experience! To those to whom I've written letters, please write me back--it makes me feel loved and like a real person. To those I haven't written yet, write me anyway. :)

So how to write an observational exposition on a topic such as this? I don't know, but for my reader's sakes I'll try to be brief (yeah, right). At the end of January, after a short staging event in Washington, DC, we took an 18-hr flight into Johannesburg, South Africa! Along the way, I and the other Peace Corps Trainees (PCTs) got to know each other a bit, and I have to say, for a girl from the deep South, it's refreshing, to say the least, to meet other young people who don't wonder why when you say that recycling is the most religious thing that you do, or that equal rights should actually mean equal rights, or that traveling around the world to live without electricity or water or basic sanitation is a valid form of existential experimentalism. (This is not to say that I didn't get fantastic support from home, but there are guys in this group who argue more for women's rights than I do. I mean, come on).

So after arriving in South Africa and spending a week of initial training at a college campus in Mpumalanga Province, we set up shop in two little villages about two hours outside of Pretoria (PC policy is that we don't give any specific locative details on here--wouldn't want some crazy stalkers flying to SA to knock off a couple of PC do-gooders). This was an experience, to say the least, for both ourselves and our host families. To give a bit of background as to my mindset when joining the Peace Corps, I thought I'd be going somewhere where race didn't matter and we could "all just get along." Then I found out I would be going to South Africa less than 20 years after the fall of apartheid. Needless to say, race is still an issue, and for the residents of these communities, having a white person living and working with them is like watching a three-headed dog walk on its hind legs. As for 40 white people (Americans, no less!)--well, you get the idea. But everyone was extraordinarily kind and gracious to us, and welcomed us wholeheartedly into their homes and communities.

The family I stayed with for seven weeks was the Masimula family, consisting of grandparents, several adult children and their spouses, and about six kids; they were all wonderful. They took me in and immediately treated me as one of their own, calling me Sisi ("sister"). The family's name for me, though, in their native isiNdebele, was Thembi, meaning Hope.

So I'll leave it here for now, and let you savour that little taste before posting again. Also, while I can access the internet (finally, after 2 1/2 months), it costs an arm and a leg to do so, so I would love to hear from everyone by old-fashioned snail mail--I'll post my address on Facebook so only friends can see it. Also if anyone wants to call me (yay!) you can call my new cell phone number from skype and it would be free for both of us (wouldn't work the other way around). Again, I'll post that on Facebook. Anyway, love you all and miss you! Salani kahle!