Riding the Kumbies

Public transportation is very different in South Africa is from what we're used to in the United States. Because so few South Africans can afford cars, most people travel by public transportation, which mostly means taxis – but not the U.S. kind of taxis.

A U.S. taxi is a car that is rented by an individual to go from one specific address to another. Here that is called a ″meter taxi″ and it's found only in big cities. Out in the countryside where we are there are a couple of other kinds of taxis – ″local″ taxis that run a more or less prescribed route, picking up and dropping off people along the way, and larger vans that run longer distances from one "shopping town" to another, or between a major city like Pretoria and a smaller town or village. (In small towns there are often no large grocery stores. The small stores that exist are ″tuck shops″ that are expensive and usually have a limited supply of non-perishable goods. So people who want to shop at larger stores with less expensive food have to travel to a "shopping town" to buy their groceries and clothing and furniture and fixtures.)

The local taxis in our area are uniformly Asian-manufactured copies of American mini-SUVs with a little added headroom. They look like Jeeps with high foreheads, and hold a nominal 10 passengers – or more if they can be crowded in.

The long-range vehicles, also Asian-built look like American minivans (Toyota Sienna, etc.) but they're larger, and hold more passengers. Factory-standard they have 13 passenger seats, and most are customized to carry another three or four people. They are called "kumbies." We don't know why. Maybe because they "come by" on an irregular schedule.

The schedule is irregular because no kumbie leaves with empty seats. It has to fill up completely before it starts out. The first time we went from our village to Pretoria we stood on the side of the road and when we saw a minibus we held an index finger up. It had room so it stopped and picked us up. Then it continued to go around on local streets until it is full. When it was full we started for Pretoria.

(The taxi gesture language in South Africa is much more sophisticated than just standing on a curb and waving your hand the way it's done in New York: if you're going "local" you point down and local taxis stop for you. If you're going "to town" you point up and kumbies stop for you. And in some places you point back toward where you came from in order to get a ride home.)

Once in the outskirts of Pretoria passengers would shout ″short left″ or ″short right″ to indicate to the driver that they wanted to be dropped off at the next left-hand or right-hand street, and the driver pulls over and lets the passengers off.

We ended the first part of our journey to town in at a ″thekisi renke,″ or taxi rank. That is a where kumbies congregate. In big cities a taxi rank can be an underground garage or an open parking lot where kumbies wait for passengers. A queue marshal controls the area. He is the final arbiter if there are problems. At the taxi rank we changed to a different kumbie for the final leg of our trip back to the training college. (The kumbie left the taxi rank full – we waited for about 45 minutes for it to fill up – but once it got out of the city and into the countryside and began to drop off a passengers the driver began to pick up passengers going ″local″ to fill the vacant seats.)

These kumbies are very snug when loaded with people and their possessions. When we traveled we had two flexible suitcases that fit in the small trunk and under a seat. One fellow Peace Corps volunteer had a large, hard-bodied suitcase, and had to pay for an extra seat for it – but it is unusual to have something that large on a kombie. On our trip people got on with babies and diaper bags, lots of groceries, big bags full of clothes, and more. One of the passengers had apparently been to a vegetable market and had about 10 separate bags full of produce. He had to sit in the very back row of the kumbie and when he left he handed his produce, bag by bag, to passengers in rows in front of him who in turn passed them on over the seats of the kumbie until they were up front near the door. A person sitting in the front somehow managed to hold onto them while the fellow struggled to climb over the passengers in front of him. We were so crowded and the spaces for moving in and out so narrow that it took him a while to extricate himself. This kind of crowding – and cooperation – is the way kumbies work.

The One-Month Mark

We have now been in Peace Corps Training for a month and so much has happened. We are kept VERY busy, Every day we have two to three hours of language training, then about five hours of lectures or classes on everything from classroom management to dealing with poverty to safety to cultural differences. It is all challenging, especially Setswana, the language we are learning. David and I are struggling with it. Some of the sounds are not ones we use in English and forming your mouth to make those sounds is difficult.

We began this adventure at a defunct teacher training college where we lived in dorms for our first week here. It is winter here. The weather was SO cold when we arrived and central heating is not common in rural South Africa, so we just had to endure. Fortunately, the Peace Corps provided a couple of very heavy blankets that kept us warm at night, but getting ready for bed or getting up in the morning was very chilly. The temperature in the morning was about 50 degrees and it took some time to get used to it. We both wore our coats, sweatshirts, scarves, gloves and hats whenever we went out. The classrooms were very cold too. In the last week I’ve noticed that it is getting slightly warmer. Winter is ending here, but I’m not too sure I welcome summer as they say it is very hot.

In the afternoons the weather warms up considerably and when you are in the sun you don’t need the extra clothing, but as soon as the sun goes down it gets very cold again.

It is also very dry and some of us have had minor breathing problems because of it.

After our first week here we were moved to host families in the village. We lucked out with a lovely widow who has a nice house with running hot and cold water, a nice kitchen and bathroom and even a washing machine. It works differently from an America washing machine, but it is easier than hand washing. Of course, when we go to our permanent site we will probably have to haul and heat water and wash clothes by hand, but for now, I’m enjoying a little more luxury.

The one thing that is very different is that many houses like our host’s are not completely finished. Our bedroom has no ceiling. We just look up at the rafters and the tin roof. She has drywall to put in a ceiling but has probably never felt like she had enough money to hire some one to do it. David thinks it may also help keep the house cooler in the summer by not having a ceiling.

The food so far is good. Other than the bogobe (see previous post) we have lots of vegetables—cabbage, green beans, Swiss chard (they call it spinach), beets, carrots, potatoes, etc. The apples right now are small but very crunchy and delicious. Many families have orange and lemon trees in their yards.

We have learned to take a minibus or “kumbi” to town. In the smaller rural towns the kumbis are the main means of transportation. They hold 15 passengers and as a rule do not leave for their destination until all seats are filled. This can mean waiting a few hours for a kumbi to be ready to leave. Since we are not supposed to be out after dark, it means we have to plan well and make sure we leave with plenty of time in case a kumbi is slow to fill up.

There is a lot of reference to “Africa time” around here. It means that things to not always happen in the punctual way things often do in America. It is more relaxed here but that can drive an American mad. It takes some getting used to.

After the first two weeks we were allowed limited use of a computer lab that has very slow access to the Internet. It can take 20 minutes to load a page. Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. It also is fussy about the type of computer. My Macintosh has no trouble connecting, but David’s PC and some other PCs cannot connect.

We have attended some interesting events with our host families. I went to church with our host mama and her sister-in-law. The service is much different from the one I am used to. It lasted about three hours. I really enjoyed the singing, but I did not understand the preachers.

We had a field trip to the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg. It is really well done. The entrance recreates the building entrances during Apartheid when whites and blacks had separate entrances. There are large displays of the hated passes that all people had to carry on them at all times. If blacks were caught without their passes they could be sent to jail. The passes also had to be filled in correctly. Then there are film clips of incidents that occurred while the blacks were trying to get the right to vote. It was a very moving experience.

We Go to a Wedding

Today we attended a traditional African wedding. We left for the wedding at 11:30 and Sara’s mother (Sara is another trainee who lives near us) got into our Peace Corps kumbie (minivan) and directed us first to some relatives of hers who were bringing some food to the wedding. They lived on a farm and we me their old grandparents as well as the rest of the family.

Then we drove a long way to the wedding. It was in someone’s yard and a big tent had been set up for the guests of the bride and groom. We were not invited into the tent except to dance briefly as we left in front of the bride and groom. However, we were definitely part of the celebration.

The wedding was quite elaborate. First we sat around with a very loud sound system blaring out music. People danced and we were served bogobe and meat. Then the bride and groom and their attendants came dancing into the yard. The dance to their wedding tent took quite a while. The groom did not actually dance. He walked with a cane and I was told he had been injured in an accident. His bride walked in with him and them danced with another member of the wedding party.

The wedding party changed costumes three times and each costume was quite elaborate. Apparently the bride pays for all the costumes and it can cost a lot of money. They were quite beautiful and varied for each dance.

After the second bridal dance, we were served a big meal with lots of dishes to choose from.

The dancing is largely a kind of line dancing but folks can get up whenever there is music and dance. A couple of quite old folks days a lot during the day.

Peter, our language trainer, is quite a dancer as is Sarah’s mother. Her son said she is a party girl but very kind. David drew quite a crowed when he and Sarah’s mother started to dance. He let loose with the kind of dancing he and his sister Patricia often do (jitterbug) and he added a little Michael Jackson. The crowd really loved it and the guy who was filming the wedding insisted he do it over so he could get it on video.

Many of the men tended to sit in corners of the yard drinking and smoking marijuana. Some of them were annoying but for the most part we could brush them off. I can see why alcoholism is such a problem in SA.

We finally left after the third dance. We had been at the wedding about seven hours and even though we spent a lot of that time sitting, it was warm and we were very tired when we returned.

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.

Bogobe

We awoke at 5:30 to HOT showers. What a treat!. It was a heavy day for language training and we got the first of three rabies shots. Victor, the medical officer, gave another talk on health and discussed what would be in the medical kit.

The morning was cold. The temperature in our room was 52 and the rooms do not warm up during the day.

The language is coming slowly. I don’t feel confident about it at all. Today Lydia and Morgan came to talk about the area where we would be located and what we can expect. It sounds pretty rural. It was even suggested that we might want to purchase a donkey and a cart to get around.

Meals have been good but a little on the starchy side. South Africans' staple food is bogobe (pronounced “boh-hoh-bay” and also called pap, pronounced “pop”), which is made from cornmeal and looks and tastes like grits, but cooked very firm, so you can pick it up with your fingers. I don’t particularly care for it, but it is not awful. We have had a sliced beet salad that is very good, and for lunch there is usually a piece of fruit. Breakfast has been oatmeal or sorghum bogobe – sort of whole-grain bogobe, but made like Instant Ralston. It's pretty good on these cold mornings.

Pre-Service Training

The flight to South Africa was the longest we had ever taken. We were in the airplane about 18 hours. The flight was an hour late due to bad weather. We flew to Dakar, Senegal in 7.5 hours, stayed in the airport about an hour and then flew another eight hours to Johannesburg, South Africa: 15.5 hours total.

After we left the airport we traveled by bus for another couple of hours to the site where we'll have Pre-Service Training before our service begins -- eight weeks of introduction to South African culture, language, and the educational system we'll be working in. It is a former teacher’s college that has been closed since 1994. Some of the buildings are used by the provincial Department of Education, and some by the Peace Corps.

A good dinner was awaiting us and then we were assigned to our rooms. We are in the married couples dorm -- there are five other married couples in our group of 43 volunteers, of them much younger than us. (We do have some more senior single women in the group.)

The weather has been unusually cold and we crawled into our beds and covered ourselves with the heavy, warm blankets they had provided.

On Day 1 we awoke at 5:45 to a very cold morning and no hot water. We were not brave enough for a cold shower. We wore our warmest clothes. There is no central heat in the buildings (there is apparently no central heating anywhere in South Africa) and it was SO cold. The dining room was not too bad, but the classroom was very cold and we sat with coats and gloves on. By afternoon it had warmed up enough so that we did not need heavy coats, but as soon as the sun went down it was very cold again.

The activities of the day were lessons in Afrikaans and Setswana and introductions to the Peace Corps Country Director and the training staff.

The medical officer came and talked about keeping healthy and we also got shots for MMR and typhoid. We were both very tired and had a slight reaction to the shots. We came back to our dorm in the afternoon and took a two-hour nap and felt much better. Then we had dinner and crawled under our covers and slept. We both feel better today.

Already we have lost three people who started with our group in Washington. A young couple dropped out the day we were flying to South Africa, and a man dropped out on Day 1 of training. So far we are still here.

"We Don't Know"

For weeks, when we tell friends and family we're going to the Peace Corps we've been besieged by questions. "What town will you be in?" "Where will you live?" "What will you do?" The answer to all of them has been pretty much the same: We don't know.

(Most of what we know is that our bags have to be less than 107 inches in total height, width, and length, and less than 80 pounds. Sally is having trouble imagining how to live for two years with less than 80 pound of stuff, but it's David who's more overweight at the moment.)

But pretty soon we're going to begin finding out. This Wednesday, July 22, we fly to Washington for "staging," our introduction to the Peace Corps and the other members of the group we'll train and work with in South Africa. Thursday we take off from Dulles for Johannesburg.

Where do we go next? We don't know.

But we do know we'll be in training for 10 weeks or so as a group. We don't know where. We do know it's referred to as "lockdown" for its intensity. (We don't know what Internet access will be like, so you may not hear much from us.) Part of the training involves living with a family. And when it's over, we'll finally have some answers.