Language, Cultural and Technical Training

Language and Cultural Training
Approximately half of our 7 weeks of training consisted of language and cultural instruction. For these sessions, we met in our respective villages in our small groups. During the second week of training, our language instructor, Lucky, was offered a permanent job and had to resign her position with the Peace Corps. (PC only employs the language instructors for the duration of our training). Therefore, we joined the other Ndebele language group of 4 for a grand total of 8. Our new language instructor was Baregile, an incredibly gifted man, and our new group members were Michael, Kendall, Nicolette, and Geetanjoli.

Baregile, besides being the best language instructor on the planet, is a native South African born with the gift of music who wants to one day own his own construction company. Michael is a recent graduate from a San Diego university where he studied Physics and played a lot of cards. He helped us keep boredom at bay during long training days by teaching us many new and entertaining card games. He also makes us feel better about our wrinkled clothes because he refuses to iron anything. Kendall is a recent graduate from St. Louis who also shared our passion for books and board games, although she frustrates Kelli by accepting Joe’s made-up words in Scrabble =). Nicolette is a recent graduate of Berkely who was an active member of the debate team. Geetanjoli is a recent graduate from NYU with whom we have reminisced about New York and who has been placed in the Nkosi house for her permanent site. Needless to say we had a lot of fun in our language classes and even learned a thing or two!

We met in a small ‘garage’ behind a tuck shop in Bundu (only about a 5 minute walk from our house). Besides the daily game of musical chairs (we were constantly rotating as there were only 7 comfortable chairs and one torture device / bench), a source of constant amusement was the pit toilet, which we fondly refer to as the volcano. A pretty accurate name since it actually looked like a concrete model volcano and the ground around the opening was unstable, making you believe that it could ‘blow’ at any time. It was already pretty full at the start of our language training and we lived in fear that it would fill up, an event that thankfully did not come to pass during our stay.

Ndebele is mainly spoken in the Northern provinces and is the native language of a small 1.6% of the total population (the least amount of any South African language). Thankfully, it is a phonetic language with only a few clicks and letter switching - for instance q = click and k = g sound. A Ndebele greeting is as follows:
A: Lochani (low-cha-knee): Hello
B: Yebo: Yes
A: Ninjani: How are you?
B: Sicona: We are well.
Nina Ninjane: And how are you?
A: Sicona: We are well.*
* the plural tense is used to show respect, as you are asking how one’s entire family is doing

Baregile worked tirelessly to get us acquainted with his native language and kept us going with games, role-playing, homework and lots and lots of practice. His enthusiasm, positive energy and dedication resulted in all of us passing our exam at the conclusion of training! (The exam was given by professional language facilitators in which we were interviewed and taped individually). This was no small feat as only about half of the education volunteers passed the exam. It helped that our group studied religiously, even when exhausted, because the thought of letting Baregile down by not passing our exam was unbearable.

Besides almost daily language lessons, we also met in slightly larger groups of about 20 for cultural sessions. During these sessions we discussed the similarities and differences between South African cultures and U.S. cultures. It was a lot of fun to reflect on our own traditions, myths, holidays, weddings, funerals, family structure, work atmosphere, schooling system, health care, foods, and time management and to learn about the South African equivalents. One of the highlights of the cultural training sessions was a visit to a traditional Ndebele healer, a sangoma. We witnessed traditional dance and singing along with a reading of the bones. The unwell visitor will be asked to blow on the bag containing the bones (taken from the goat sacrificed at the graduation ceremony of the sangoma) before the sangoma ‘throws’ them onto a mat. The sangoma then reads the bones in order to identify the visitor’s ailments and recommends treatment. For a better visual, check out the powerful movie ‘Yesterday’ about a South African family’s battle with AIDS. Our language instructors told us that although Christianity denounces these traditional healers, many villagers still secretly visit sangomas, traveling to other villages to do so as to not be seen by their neighbors.

pictures: Our language group. Left to right: Nicolette, Michael, Baringile, Angie, Joe, Kelli, Kendal, Katie, Geetangoli.; Language class in the garage; The volcano: our beloved toilet; The sangoma reading bones

Technical Training
Technical training took up the other half of our training sessions. During these sessions we met at the youth center with the entire education group (it was fun to see everyone and catch up every few days) to lean about safety and security procedures, PC medical care, and the South African school system. We were also visited each week by two current PC volunteers who often lead workshops and were a great help in answering the hundreds of questions we had about our upcoming service. We sat through many long lectures given by the Department of Education, where we began to realize and appreciate some of the difficulties of an education system governed at the national level. The highlight of our technical training was a 2 day workshop on internalized oppression. The speaker was a white male South African and was great at challenging our assumptions and stereotypes on power and oppression. It made us think a lot about this country’s complex history and its effect on the present society.