Limpopo--Training Week 1

Tobela!

Dumelang!!

 Light pours through the upper windows onto the concrete floor of the Thusanang training center. It is officially winter, and we are freezing, even when, as today, the sun is shining brilliantly outside. We all have blankets wrapped over us in our seats. Of course we sing and pray before doing anything, and that does seem to help––beginning each day, meal and learning feeling a part of the rich and multi-layered songs we sing together, loud, and in harmonies.

We began our first 7-day training last Monday here in Haenertsburg, Limpopo, one of SA’s northern provinces. Limpopo boasts orange and avocado groves in the northern parts, and mountains where we are. Further south, near Polokwane—site of one of the huge stadiums being built for the 2010 games– looks more like our U.S. southwest landscape.

Who are we? Some of you know that Faith Lamb-Parker and I are the partners in crime, and we have a wonderful Mailman Public Health graduate student named Erin Wheeler who is working with us to roll out the training. The other two members of our team, Folashade Ajayi and Sara Abbas are already in the Free State getting started with a community team, a Working Group, such as the one that named themselves Sisuvukile. You can see all our team members by double clicking on the partial photo up top.

We have chosen a new and different model of working, and instead of the “train the trainer” model that is so popular here, we are working with trainers, practitioners of the birth-to-three children, parents and other community stakeholders such as government officials and sangomas, using a community based participatory model of research and advocacy, and integrating HIV/AIDS education and prevention.  Overall, this first week of the training has gone very well. We see spots to cut and others to better integrate. The NGO Thusanang has already put out a proposal to take the training forward beginning in July, so we are thrilled.

We stay in a simple by lovely guest house–– certainly number one in our minds out of our many trips here. Our host is an amazing cook and has a sideline of making cakes for a butcher shop in Tzanen, the nearest town. She mothers us in a way that we love, such as bringing us hot toddies in bed when we are sick or just exhausted from the day. This little village, however, is a throwback to the 1950’s—an all-white population on a magnificent hillside, surrounded by evergreen mountains. The black local population is about 30 k away, and nearby is the Zion HQ, the largest black church in Africa, I believe.

We invited one of our star participants and her daughter over for breakfast this morning, and she (age 27) had never been into the village, much less the home of a white person. Her 3-year old daughter really had no idea what to make of it all and let us know by wetting her pants.

Wednesday we leave for Katlehong, in Jo’burg—part of the East Rand to begin the training all over again. I see how the first few days are incredibly stressful, as we learn everyone’s name, sort out how to find the resources in that particular site, and work hard to engage everyone in what is for many, a new way of learning.  Hopefully the transition will be smoother than the one from Ethiopia to SA, as we were turned back at Passport Control for not having Yellow Fever shots. Eighty bucks and sore arms later, we were in South Africa, feeling right at home again.

Hope to write from Jo' Burg next week-end.

xxoo to all, 

Va