Home Stay

We are now into our second week of training and almost everyone agrees that it seems we have been here longer. That is probably because we have been so busy with all the activities and language learning. Our days are packed with mostly interesting work.

We heard an almost three hour lecture today on the history of Bantu education that was most interesting. The speaker was an older man who had lived through the pass system and had nearly been denied the right to study physics and chemistry (which he later taught) in college because they were disciplines Blacks were discouraged from learning.

This past Saturday we met our home-stay families. For home stay, each volunteer is assigned to a family that lives in the community near the college for the remainder of training. We were fortunate to be assigned to a lovely widow who is treating us so well. She has let us have the run on the house and is a great cook. In the evening she helps us with our Setswana vocabulary. I’m happier here than I was at the dorm. It is much more comfortable and our host has hot and cold running water – a nice luxury. Her house is quite nice and we have a large bedroom all to ourselves.

The house is in a sort of suburb of the rural village near the campus. The lanes are all dirt, and the houses are a mixture of very nice modern homes and tiny tin shacks next to each other. Other trainees are staying in houses near us and we took a walk around the neighborhood yesterday. People are very friendly. In the mornings we are picked up by a Peace Corps kumbi, a mini-bus, for transport to the campus where we have our classes.

Our mama's house and those like it in our area are brick with tile roofs, and they wouldn't look out of place in any American town. But the yards are mostly red clay, not much grass, and each lot is surrounded by a fence. You need a fence because there's a lot of livestock wandering around – chickens and dogs and cows and donkeys. Yesterday, the gate to the yard was open and donkeys came in. David chased them away. I don’t have any idea who they belonged to.

The yard is a combination of very nice parts and not so nice parts. There are some trees and bushes, but right now it's winter here, so the grass is brown and there are no leaves on the trees. Each fenced plot has a plowed garden area and some outbuildings. Everybody has an outhouse. Most of the new brick houses have a smaller place in back, cinder block or tin. Our host told us that the old shed in the back of the yard was a little house where she and her husband stayed while they worked on the house. We have seen others like that around here. That seems to be common for a family to buy land, built a little shack where they live while they are building the house themselves. It can take years doing it that way, but mortgages are not common, especially with people who do not have white-collar jobs. Some things never get finished: Some rooms in our house have ceilings, and some don't. We can hear about everything our mama says and I’m sure she can hear us. We try to be quiet and our mama is very quiet, so we cannot complain about noise.

Running water is a luxury. Most of the modern houses around have JoJos – big green plastic tanks on tall towers behind the house. An electric pump pulls water from a well and keeps the JoJo filled, and gravity does the rest. (JoJo is a brand name, but it's become generic, like kleenex: our first day back in class after we moved to our homestays, the standard question was, “Do you have a jojo?” The lucky ones did.)

(Hot water is even rarer. If you have a geezer you're really lucky. A geezer is a water heater: like “jojo” its a corruption of a brand name -- “Geyser” became “geezer.” In our house there's a 150-liter hot-water tank lying on its side in a big red plastic tray up in the rafters, and in the bathroom there's a huge sort of free-form bathtub. We are in heaven.)

The disparities are striking. One house may be like our mama's, up-to-the minute, with a jojo and a geezer and an electric stove and refrigerator, and next door there's a tiny shack made out of corrugated tin. Four or five 20-liter plastic drums beside it are the family's water supply (they're put in a wheelbarrow and carried down to the public pump for filling every couple of days), and while there may be electricity in the house, much of the cooking and water-heating are done over an open fire in the yard – and dry donkey dung is a standard fuel.

At least burning the donkey poo helps clean it up. There's not a lot concern for the environment. Litter is everywhere, and everybody disposes of their trash by throwing it in a hole at the back of their lot and burning it – not a pretty smell some days.