by Aaron Barlow
South African television cameras whirred, recording the news that the Peace Corps had arrived for the first time in the Northwest Province. Volunteers had been serving in two other provinces in South Africa for only a few years. Our mission as school and community resource volunteers and for a new project on AIDS education was eagerly anticipated in the Province. Although we would only remain in the village of Moruleng for ten weeks during training, the villagers were quite excited.
Dancing, singing, eating, and speeches filled the middle of a sunny winter day (the seasons are opposite those in the northern hemisphere). Then, it was off to our host homes to get acquainted with those who would be our families for the next few weeks. The village had conducted meetings long before our arrival to seek those who would like to have a Volunteer as a guest. Hosts would not receive compensation for hospitality, but instead a small biweekly box of food.
I greeted my diminutive hostess, Stella, a fifty-three-year-old widow, mother of four grown children and grandmother of four. One grandchild lived with Stella while his mother attended college.
I was to learn of the life of this amazing woman over the weeks to come.
“We didn’t think you would really come,” Stella told me. “And, we didn’t think you would really live with us. It is truly a miracle, to have white people actually staying in our village.”
After a ride on public transport, a fifteen-passenger van, I toured Stella’s rather surprisingly large home built of brick and cement. The home contained three bedrooms, living room, kitchen, and a sewing room. It also had space for two bathrooms, which lacked any plumbing whatsoever. But it did boast electricity, an electric range, refrigerator, television, and telephone. Most of the rooms had not been finished on the inside and there was no insulation or central heat.
The house was surrounded by an expansive yard of dirt that was swept clean each day. In the back yard was a spotlessly clean cement outhouse divided into two separate cubicles. The yard also had a covered area used for outdoor cooking and laundry.
The home had piped cold water into the kitchen, although the pipe was broken throughout my stay. We carried water from a tap in the back yard to be stored in a large plastic barrel in the kitchen. Water was usually heated with the use of an electric hot pot. Bath, dish, and laundry water was recycled to water the fruit and decorative trees bordering the yard. I soon learned to take a bucket bath and deal with the inconvenience of no indoor toilet.
The first evening with Stella and her grandson, Kele, was delightful. Stella and I bonded immediately and found we had the love of sewing in common. Stella earned her living from sewing, mostly clothing for other women in the village. She received no pension or social security.
Most of the younger Peace Corps Volunteers came to fondly refer to their host women as “Mom.” Stella and I felt that we were more like sisters, so she became Sister Stella. And I became Sister Starley, or Ausi Naledi. (Ausi is the Setswana name for sister and naledi the Setswana word for Star.) I also became Kele’s granny or koko in Setswana. Kele proudly told all his classmates at preschool that he “has a white granny now.”
Stella’s youngest daughter, Tsolofelo, mother of Kele, was home for a few days before she had to return to college, so she cooked dinner my first night there. We all huddled in the living roomed wrapped in wool blankets and ate our meal in front of the television, which came to be our custom during my stay. The meal consisted of chicken, beets, squash, cabbage slaw, and the staple food of most natives, a cornmeal mush called pap. I never learned to like pap, but I learned to cook it and occasionally ate some.
Our Peace Corps literature had warned us that it might be cold, but I hadn’t realized how bone-chilling it really would be. As a soon as the sun set, the cold began to creep into every corner of the unheated cement house. By bedtime, my fingers and toes were numb. I dressed in every layer of sleepwear I had brought, including socks. Then I snuggled underneath four layers of warm wool blankets.
I was up at 6:00 a.m., because I found it took me twice as long as it did at home to perform my morning chores. The Peace Corps van arrived at 7:30 to pick up the three of us in our neighborhood; we joined eleven others already packed into the van for a ten-mile trip to the college. Thirteen other Volunteers staying in a different village met us there for our joint training held one day each week. Other days during training were spent on language lessons and technical training at various locations.
Stella and I treasured our evenings getting acquainted and teaching each other of our unique cultures, fulfilling one of the goals of the Peace Corps. Stella spoke excellent English, sometimes to my detriment. We were so anxious to share our life experiences that we spoke mostly in English; I was not learning the Setswana language very quickly.
“Why did you want a Volunteer to stay with you?” I asked.
“I wanted to learn about Americans and I wanted to know more about white people. Our people have worked for white people, but we have never had the chance to really become acquainted with them. I’m interested in learning whatever I can about people and the world, and I just wanted to have an American live with me,” she said.
It seemed that nearly all of the people of the village were keenly interested in learning about Americans. Shortly after my arrival I walked to the post office during a workshop break. A young man tapped me on the back and then came around to face me.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said. “I just want to look at you. I want to look into your eyes.”
The man gently touched my gray hair, then my face, my earrings, and back to my hair.
“Very old, very wise,” he commented.
Then, apparently satisfied to have seen a white person up close, he walked away.
I found that people were often totally fascinated with my gray, curly hair. The children, especially, seemed to enjoy touching it.
I usually arrived home exhausted after a day of language classes, workshops, and guest speakers. Some days I walked the two miles home, scuffing my feet in the red dirt pathway beside the only paved two-lane highway running through the village. By late afternoon the brilliant sun in a cloudless blue sky had warmed the winter day. I brewed two cups of rooibos (red bush) tea, which Stella and I sipped as we visited in her sunny sewing room. She nearly always stitched busily until darkness enfolded us.
As a chill invaded the house, I gathered the teacups and returned to the kitchen to make dinner, the chore I inherited when Stella’s daughter returned to college. Stella delighted in eating such creations as tuna casserole and spaghetti with tomato sauce, which she had never tasted before. Our conversations continued during mealtime; then I washed the dishes and prepared each of us a two-liter glass coke bottle filled with hot water to warm our beds.
Throughout the next several weeks, Stella wove the threads of her life as serenely as she stitched the beautiful blue-and-white cloth symbolizing village traditions. By the time she completed a traditional cloth skirt for me to wear to a wedding celebration in the village, she had seamed together many stories of her life as a black woman in South Africa.
She had come as a bride to the village. They had met in Johannesburg, where Stella was reared in a family of seven children. As a young adult, Stella had lived in fairly comfortable surroundings, and she found married life in the village to be a challenge. “I had to carry wood from the mountain and cook on an outdoor fire. I had to carry water from the river for cooking, bathing, and laundry. And I had to learn the many customs of the village and how to fit into a family that really didn’t want me.”
The couple had four children and eventually built a home. But before the home could be finished, Stella’s husband died. He had led something of a clandestine life outside of their marriage and left her penniless. Stella had always valued learning and insisted that the children be educated. Her husband did not share that ideal, and so she put much of her own earnings into s
ending three of the four children through college. In addition to being a seamstress, she had worked at the nearby resort of Sun City for many years.
This small and tireless woman made her entire living as a seamstress for several years. At one time, when there were factories employing many people in the area, she had eight seamstresses working for her. But now the factories are closed and she is only able to employ one seamstress, part-time. She spends several hours each day stitching on one of two modern sewing machines in a spacious room with southern windows. A clothing rack holds the many colorful costumes of the village including church uniforms, aprons, and festival clothing.
Stella holds no grudge against white people, even though discrimination still seems to prevail in some sectors of post-apartheid South Africa. She recalls the kindness of her mother’s white employer during some of the worst atrocities of apartheid.
“My mother had a beautiful home in Sophiatown in the 1950s and a good job cleaning for a white woman. My father had died, but we were doing fine. Some of the older children were working or living out of the home. I was home watching my three younger siblings when an awful day unfolded.”
According to history, the white people of Johannesburg decided they wished to live in Sophiatown. Black people were forced to relocate to the Southwestern Township, later known as Soweto. Most of the homes of black people were bulldozed. Stella’s family home was one of the last homes left standing in Sophiatown.
“Mother had been looking for another home for us, and that day she had again left to look for a house. While she was gone, the bulldozers came to take down our house. I was ten years old and my siblings were ages two, five, and seven. The men took some of the furniture out into the yard. I sat on the couch with the little ones. While they cried, we watched the big machines tumble our home into a pile of rubble.”
Stella didn’t know what to do, but eventually some friends saw the children and went to find their mother. Stella’s mother returned and was able to get the younger children to relatives. Stella and her mother went to the home of her mother’s employer.
“That kind white women took us in and hid us in her home for some time. It was illegal to do so, but she did it anyway. She had always treated us kindly. We ate from the same dishes as the white family, slept in their beds and used the same furniture. Often, black people could not even so much as take a drink from the same cup a white person used.”
Stella learned from that experience that not all white people were cruel. She took every opportunity to learn as much as she could and was diligent in learning English. When her children attended school she studied their books at night and read everything that was available. She was open to learning anything and especially interested in learning about hygiene and cooking.
I attended church with Stella, not understanding any of the sermon delivered in Setswana, but basking in the warm and enthusiastic music. It seems that nearly everyone has an ear and voice for singing.
On one Sunday we attended a traditional wedding with mixed-in Western flavor. I was embarrassed to receive as much attention and rousing greetings as the bride. As I strolled amongst the nearly five hundred guests at the outdoor reception at the groom’s family home, I was greeted with the familiar loud voice trill. It sent chills up my spine. I took my turn stirring the huge black pots of porridge, serving homemade beer, cutting up vegetables for a myriad of salads and inspecting the sides of beef being prepared for the barbecue grill. South Africans love to barbecue (braie, as it is called there, deriving from a Dutch word).
After the bride and groom arrived to sounds of a brass band and marched to the wedding feast held in a large orange tent, I partook of the meal. I astonished people later by dancing a lively jitterbug with another wedding guest.
“Did you teach her to dance?” several guests asked Stella, as they formed a circle, clapping and laughing.
“No, she already knew how to dance.” Stella replied.
I already knew how to dance, but I didn’t know how much caring and generosity could be generated between our different cultures. Toward the close of my adventure in Moreuleng I asked Stella a question and the answer will always bring a smile to my lips and a tear to my eyes.
“How do you feel about having a white American guest in your home now?”
“Oh, it is like having a delicious meal,” Stella said with a broad smile on her beautiful face.
Only a few short weeks later we hugged and said goodbye for the last time. I had to leave training and South Africa due to a medical problem. I wrote a poem for my fellow Peace Corps Volunteers, ending with these lines:
From South Africa I had to depart
Fly back to America with a sad heart
Carry on dear friends, up the steep slope
Peace Corps has bound us forever in hope.
Starley Talbott, aka Starley Anderson, served in South Africa in 2001. Starley’s stint with the Peace Corps, training group SA VII, was shortened due to a medical problem, though her philosophy and spirit are forever connected to the ideals of the Peace Corps. She resides in Wyoming where she is a freelance writer and recently released her fifth book.
Late Evening
Lenore Waters
Sometimes the best of romance comes from the banal.
I walk down the middle of a West African road. This is the road which, during daylight hours, the women of the town use to gather wood for cooking fuel and tend to their small vegetable gardens in the forest. They walk slowly, basins on their heads, babies tied to their backs with colorful bits of cloth.
This is the road on which trucks bring cacao and coffee beans to the town center.
This is the road to the Child Health Center, where mothers and teachers bring the children for vaccinations, each child screaming every time a needle goes in, no matter whose arm is stuck.
This is the road the Boy Scouts march along, practicing parade techniques. But tonight the road is quiet, very quiet.
The night is black. Of course there are no street lights, and there is no moon, which is why I can look at the sky and see so many stars. Can I recognize any constellations, I wonder. Of course, I am very near the equator, is it a southern sky? Oh, what the hell. Does it make a difference? There are about a million stars up there; I won’t be able to navigate my way through them. I wonder if the Africans, like the Greeks, found their legends in the stars.
Suddenly I become aware of the sound of a flute, an ancient shepherd’s flute, perhaps.
Am I hearing things? Is it an illusion brought on by malaria pills? Am I star struck?
The music stops. The road has ended. Beyond is the forest. I turn back, back to my cinderblock “professor’s house,” my home for two years.
But what am I doing here, in a small African town? I have left my grown-up daughters, my job, my aged mother. Am I fulfilling a dream of the Kennedy era, do I think my being here will make a difference in anyone’s life? Is it just for adventure? Or is it because I once promised an African friend I would some day come and “help his people?”
Am I here to look at the stars?
As I’m almost home, I see the elderly gentleman who is guardian of my neighbor’s house. Efu looks after me, and everyone on this road. We greet each other with a “bonne nuit.”
A few weeks later, I find out the night music was a French neighbor playing his recorder.
Lenore Waters was born in 1925 in New York City. She was an ESL teacher in Ivory Coast 1980-81. She has lived in Berkeley, California, since 1976 and has been a member of the Northern California Peace Corps since 1981. She has two daughters who are very proud that their mother served in the Peace Corps.
The Forty-Eight Hour Rule
Martin R. Ganzglass
The role of the policeman in an unruled land.
I am one of the fortunate few lawyers who joined the Peace Corps
and was able to serve as both a Volunteer and attorney.
When I arrived in Mogadishu, Somalia had been an independent nation for less than six years. The Somali Republic consisted of two former colonies, the northern part of the country on the Red Sea, which had been British Somaliland; and the southern part along the Indian Ocean from Cape Guardafui to Kismayo, which had been Italian Somaliland. On July 1, 1960, the two became one country, with a five-pointed white star on a field of blue as the national flag. Each point of the star symbolized a Somali population divided by the colonial powers in the late nineteenth century: French Somaliland, (now the independent country of Djibouti), the Ogaden Region (then and now part of neighboring Ethiopia), and the Northern Frontier District of what was the British East African colony of Kenya (and remains part of Kenya, despite the British Colonial Administration’s promise to hold a referendum). We used to joke that if there had been another Somali population deprived of uniting with Somalia, the flag would be the same as Israel’s.
Somali, at the time, was an unwritten language. All laws were printed by the Government Printing Office in English, Italian, or Arabic. The Somalis desperately needed legal translators, primarily to translate the laws from Italian into English and vice versa.
Somewhere in the process of applying for our group of Peace Corps Volunteers, the Somali government thought they had asked for lawyers qualified as legal translators. Yet we were neither told of nor trained for this job description. We did attend rudimentary Italian classes. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest language proficiency, we were probably slightly above 1 by the time we left for Somalia.
