More PCV Visits

     One of the pleasures of Peace Corps service has been becoming friends with some extraordinary American young people. Nearly all of them are less than half my age and younger than both our children. In some ways it recapitulates one of the great pleasures of our life, only this time with a couple dozen daughters. One can never have too many, I'm sure you'll agree.

     We get to know each other very well. We talk about  grim-looking bug bites; fevers; boys or the dearth thereo; snakes; bloody poop; scary men at the bus rank. I don't have solutions for most of these, but I think it helps to vent.  With one young volunteer towards whom I've felt a little protective we discussed reasons she may have stopped having her period – I think I held up my end of the discussion with some helpful views, and I was pleased when she WhatsApped me a few days later when it kicked in. It's family.

     So with classes canceled for exams last week and this we visited nearby PCVs. Two are at nearby schools for the deaf. Here is one outside her place at a high school, to which we rode our bikes.

The main road is narrow, busy with heavy trucks and fast drivers, and badly broken up in places, so we get to her school and back on dirt roads through the forest,

and explore single track winding paths that appear, at least when we turn off onto them initially, to be heading generally where we need to go.

PIC 1549

Fortunately Katherine has an excellent sense of direction.

      Another volunteer is at a primary school for the deaf, where she is frequently visited by another volunteer who lives on a remote, rural and very basic homestead about 20 kilometers away – which can take 2 to 6 hours. These young women can be very lonely and, with the way men here feel free to treat women, they are frequently harassed and sometimes genuinely frightened.  

The one in the middle, who lives at the School for the Deaf, has electricity, hot and cold running water, and a shower! She gets a lot of PCV visitors. Her housing is the near 1/2 of the pictured building.

     She loves these kids and they love her. Seeing her with these kids is one of the things we like best in this country.

(One step I've learned to make ourselves especially welcome with other PCVs who might not ordinarily seek to spend a lot of time with people older than their parents is to bring all our external hard drives loaded with everything brought from home or downloaded from other PCVs. The telling comment is “Nice-to-see-you-did-you-bring-your-hard-drive?” These young women spend a lot of nights alone in their tiny huts listening to the wind whistle in the dark and the mice in the roof thatch; Game of Thrones or the like becomes very important.)

     Both these PCVs at schools for the deaf have learned spoken siSwati and then Swazi sign, which is not the same as US sign, which one of them knew already. These women are really smart.

     The one at the primary school, whom we like a whole lot, has written a manual teaching the Swazi alphabet and numbers and basic words and phrases in Swazi sign, illustrated with pictures of the staff signing each letter, number, word or phrase. I took a copy home on my flash drive and I've been proofing it for her, prompting a memory of proofing grade school and then high school papers, some college, and just a very few graduate school papers for our children. This Swazi Sign Manual, with plenty of pictures, conversations and commas,  is an easier read than some other papers I've proofed.