Skip to main content

News: the road goes ever on and on

Image
By
This is a picture of the road to Heuningvlei.

Not much has changed here in my village. The students are taking their end-of-year tests, as the year is over the second week in December. I’m helping write the exams, as I’ve been teaching nearly all the English and maths classes for the senior phase (grade 7-9). I’m getting ready for the Thanksgiving celebration in town, which should be a nice get-together for us Northern Capesters. I’m also preparing for my Christmas vacation in Eastern Cape with a load of other Peace Corps. It will be nice to get out of the desert for a time.

I’ve been practicing my Setswana, which seems to be improving, albeit very slowly. Oddly, I’ve been practicing Afrikaans a lot, and improving very fast. I think this is mostly due to my possession of a good Afrikaans-English dictionary, and a couple Afrikaans books. I’m not quite sure why I want to learn—the language has a strange attraction for me. All the double letters, the harsh yet romantic sound of it (consider words like “belangrik,” or “Highveld”), it’s just cool. I've always liked the idea of speaking other languages in any case--which ones are of secondary importance. I think I’m almost alone in this pursuit—that and my obsessive blog posts are my most distinctive attributes amongst my cohort of Peace Corps. Though on the other hand, Afrikaans is very close to Dutch, which is very close to German and Flemish in its turn. If I ever turn up in Europe I may be glad for my studying.

I’m also integrating into the village, even more slowly than I’m learning Setswana. This weekend there was a funeral for one of my neighbors, so a whole bunch of my host family showed up to hang out and spend the whole weekend shitfaced. A local mentally ill guy with a crushed nose showed up as well, and he would not stop speaking to me in Afrikaans no matter what I did. That was a bit off-putting, but I also talked for a long time with a woman named Maletsatsi (my host niece technically, I think, but she’s 29) who is a civil engineer for the local government. It’s always interesting to talk to someone whose English is good enough that I can’t easily confuse her—with most everyone else I can drawl a bit, or talk fast, or use a few idiomatic expressions and become unintelligible.

As I speak to other volunteers I’m getting the impression that I am in a nearly unique situation. It’s definitely against Peace Corps policy for my family to sell alcohol, and living in what amounts to a tavern can be a little weird sometimes (like when I wake up on Sunday at 8:00 to find a couple guys already staggering drunk). Yet I like my host family, and I try to participate where I can, like helping brew some of their hooch. I’ve always prided myself on my ability to handle rough situations, to not be disgusted or scared by poverty. One of my few talents, if I can call it that. I might not be sophisticated, or have good taste, or be able to cook, or have sexy hair like Cary Grant, but I can handle indigence. Still, being a female here would be out of the question. South Africa is a rough place to be a woman.

One other thought: the power of English continues to amaze me. So adaptable, so plastic, so many different little dialects everywhere around the world—mostly I’m astounded at the how far the language has penetrated foreign countries, and how much it is embraced by different cultures around the world. Knowing English as well as I do gives me tremendous power, and I’m just beginning to realize the extent of it. (Of course, English might be as it is because it was the language of the world’s most powerful empires for several centuries, and we've made it a huge advantage to know English well, but that’s a question for another time.) I wonder if anyone will be speaking Setswana in 100 years.
Posted by Picasa
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

By
So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actually b
Post a Comment
Read more

The Basic Instinct of Socialism

By
This year I finally decided to stop beating around the bush and start calling myself a democratic socialist. I think the reason for the long hesitation is the very long record of horrifying atrocities carried out by self-described socialist countries. Of course, there is no social system that doesn't have a long, bloody rap sheet, capitalism very much included . But I've never described myself as a capitalist either, and the whole point of socialism is that it's supposed to be better than that. So of course I cannot be a tankie — Stalin and Mao were evil, terrible butchers, some of the worst people who ever lived. There are two basic lessons to be learned from the failures of Soviet and Chinese Communism, I think. One is that Marxism-Leninism is not a just or workable system. One cannot simply skip over capitalist development, and any socialist project must be democratic and preserve basic liberal freedoms. The second, perhaps more profound lesson, is that there is no s
6 comments
Read more

Varanus albigularis albigularis

By
That is the Latin name for the white-throated monitor lizard , a large reptile native to southern Africa that can grow up to two meters long (see pictures of one at the Oakland Zoo here ). In Setswana, it's called a "gopane." I saw one of these in my village yesterday on the way back from my run. Some kids from school found it in the riverbed and tortured it to death, stabbing out its eyes, cutting off its tail, and gutting it which finally killed it. It seemed to be a female as there were a bunch of round white things I can only imagine were eggs amongst the guts. I only arrived after it was already dead, but they described what had happened with much hilarity and re-enactment. When I asked why they killed it, they said it was because it would eat their chickens and eggs, which is probably true, and because it sucks blood from people, which is completely ridiculous. It might bite a person, but not unless threatened. It seems roughly the same as killing wolves that
4 comments
Read more