A Year of Firsts

Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday to me.

This will be my first birthday spent outside of the USA. Plans for the day: Prepare and eat lunch and dinner, read in the sun, sleep around 8 or 9pm. Every American-type person in the area has left to explore locations of various distances so I have just been doing a bunch of time passing these days.

Painting my house seemed like a pretty solid project so I went and bought 10 Liters of the cheapest white paint the store sold for 85 Rand and set to it yesterday. The claims of 1 liter for every 6-8 square meters were highly exaggerated as I ran short of covering my 50 square meters of wall. I had a bit of an outcry against the covering of the Ndebele paintings. One teacher who stopped by said that I was destroying the only piece of Ndebele art in the whole of Tjakastad. I told her it that since it was American who painted it that I had no qualms about covering it up. Besides in my minds eye I'm planning on painting it again in that style but more elaborate. Also the walls were turning into more grey cement than white paint. They needed a new coat.

I will have to buy another 10 liter bucket and give it another layer since the old paint is clearly seen through the new white. Also of note are the two sunflowers I have growing. They are the 'American Giant' breed of sunflower whose heights are regularly supposed to reach up to 15 feet. Needless to say these ones underperformed.

...In other news I have been hanging around with the kids exclusively these days. My oldest real friend in the village is an 18 year old born-again Christian guy who lives across the street. He has been off at some work internship thing in the mountains for the past few weeks so the average age of someone I have been spending time with is 12.

This is doing wonders for my siSwati skills. It also makes me feel like I am a kid on school break all over again. We watch videos, throw the football in the yard, and play monopoly. Nothing to do and nothing needs done. Carefree living.

At times it also makes me feel like Puff the Magic Dragon. There seems to be a pretty reliable age at which kids lose interest in the friendly neighborhood Peace Corps volunteer. I would say that age is somewhere around 15 or 16. Younger kids love hanging out with me. I think its partly because I have lots of good food in my house and partly because I am the only older person who will give them any attention and spend time with them. Raising kids here is a pretty hands off process. The 3 kids of my host family play all day in the yard or around the block with no supervision whatsoever. They return to the house when called for chores or to eat or bath, etc. No adult plays with them, reads to them, or as far as I can tell does anything with them whatsoever except smack them when they do something bad. I have also never seen a high school age kid play or have fun with a younger one.

One 18-ish guy told me on the bus that he always sees me playing with the kids. He said that the reason he doesn't bother with kids is that they say if you play with children then it means you yourself will not have any children of your own. So he said he is going to wait until when he has kids before he pays them any attention. I don't know if this is the dominant ideology amongst men in the area, but absentee fathers surely are. One 2o-something guy I know in the village had his child over to the family house on 1 single day in a year. As far as I know he doesn't see her much more than that over the course of 12 months. I have also never met any of the fathers of the 3 kids in my family. I think more likely that superstition is just an explanation for a behavior rather than the reason for the behavior. My theory is that raising children (until they can walk and talk) is seen as a woman’s responsibility and the men couldn't really care less about the task. After that the kids raise themselves in packs.

In any case the kids love the attention they get from me. When they color with the crayons I bought for them for Christmas (which stay in my house) they run back and forth to me in turn and show me their scribbles to see what I will say about them, running back to the table to tell everyone else what I said. Since they don't speak the language, it doesn't matter what I say if I say it in English...'Ah it looks like a house!' gets turned into "Garrett says 'loo likay how!'" when they proudly tell the other kids what I said about the drawing.

It is different for older kids. Once they hit that certain age mark, they start to have other priorities. They start trying to impress other people their age and they don't to be known as the friend of the umlungu (white guy). They worry about wearing nice clothes and having cool cell phones with features they will never use. And Garrett the Magic Peace Corps Volunteer gets left behind.

There is also an issue of the communication barrier. Kids in high school are usually embarrassed to speak English in front of me, worrying about how their mid-level abilities (which should be fluency by this point according to the national school system who says English only should be spoken in the classroom starting by grade 4) will sound to my perfect-English-speaking ear. There also is the issue of connection on a deeper level. How can you as a 16 year old village kid who has rarely been out of the village, let alone the province, who doesn't read books, only experiences culture through afternoon television shows and has no real opinions about anything relate to an advantaged 24 year old American who has probably experienced more of the world and accomplished more than you probably will in your entire life. The big fish in the village because of familial wealth or personal attractiveness has his or her bubble burst when I come into the picture. Again, this is my theory of my friendships drop off after maturity, unintentionally self-important sounding.

Sometimes I get a lot of stress through these relationships. I worry about these kids. I had a pretty tormented time a few weeks ago when I got a midnight phone call from the 2 14-year old girls who live across the street. They said they were at one of the local taverns (probably the one owned and frequented by one of the high school teachers) and were drunk like this was something to brag about. 6am comes and their friend is outside my house concerned because those two never came home and she’s worried about getting in trouble... Taverns here aren’t your laid back local bar in USA. They are usually dark, seedy 1-room brick buildings with blasting music. 4 guys for every girl. No carding so the age of entry starts around 13. Beer bottles are disposed of by throwing them in the parking lot. Broken glass everywhere. The mens toilet is the side of the building. Guys jump at the opportunity to feed girls drinks and take advantage of their drunkenness.

I called their mom. Doubt they were given the slightest reprimand. Probably are excited to go back as soon as the parents are out of town for the night. I lose sleep over stuff like this.

It can be a dangerous world to grow up in.