Types of Food and Availability

Linda from California asks:

"Do you have access to our types of food, I don't know if food is flown in to you or if you have adapted to local ingredients?

We shop for our food in the community with a stipend Peace Corps deposits directly into our bank accounts. Some ingredients and spices are hard to come by, like fresh milk, mozzarella cheese, and other dairy products. But for the most part we're able to eat a similar menu to what we had in the United States.


We haven't quite adapted to the local diet. The food is good, but sometimes can make us sick. This isn't a problem when we're cooking for ourselves, but at weddings and funerals we are careful not to eat too freely.

Recipes from Africa - Tsakalaka

This spicy vegetarian dish is usually served on the side here in South Africa, but makes a tasty main course for us.

Ingredients:
1 white onion
3 small green chili peppers
3-4 large carrots
1 can baked beans
1 tbsp cooking oil
sliced bread (optional)

1. Dice onion and chili peppers.
2. Grate carrots.
3. Sautee onions and peppers in oil.
4. Add carrots and sautee until soft.
5. Add can of baked beans and stir until everything is heated.
6. Serve alone or with toast.

With 3 peppers it is pretty spicy, but you can use 1 or 2 and a brown onion for a milder version.

Twitter and the Last Set of Photos

Because it's so hard to update the blog from the cell phone, we've also signed up for Twitter, a site designed for mobile updating. We'll publish very short notes about what's going on our page.

Also, I thought I could add captions to pictures from the cell phone. Turns out it didn't work. So the red building in this post is an outhouse.

Language Barriers, Part II

While we don't yet speak fluently, we are able to say where we come from, why we are here, introduce ourselves, buy produce and so on. And when we are not understood, we can communicate with hand gestures and by rephrasing our statements a couple different ways.

One of the best parts of learning the local language are the reactions we receive. Few people have seen or heard a person with white skin speak their language. In a country still recovering from apartheid, we hope our attempts to learn Sepedi will have some impact.

Children fun and easy to converse with. Our six year old host sister will carry on a conversation with up just by saying our names using different tones.

While there are benefits to living in a country with many English speakers, the disadvantage is we have to work much harder to learn the language. We don't have the immersion to help us.

Thanks for your questions, we'll keep answering them, and feel free to keep sending more.

Language Barriers, Part I

A reader asks:

"I know you have been learning the language and customs me the region, but I wonder if the language barrier is a problem, or do you find other ways to communicate?"

Compared to Peace Corps Volunteers in other countries, we probably experience less of a language barrier. Students are taught in their home language only through third grade, after which all instruction is given in English (though legally, students can receive instruction in their language of choice). So the younger population is fairly proficient and many working in the professional fields are also fluent.

However, older members of the community may only speak Northern Sotho (Sepedi) and others may speak Sotho and Afrikaans, which was the language of instruction for all grades during apartheid. While we are quickly learning Sepedi, "ga ke kwešiše" (I don't understand) and "ke bolela Sepedi sa nyanne" (I speak a little Sepedi) are common phrases in our everyday speech.

First Pictures of Our Permanent Site

Here are some pictures to accompany this post.



We've been receiving lots of great questions via email, and we haven't forgotten about them. We'll answer the first question, about language, sometime this week.

Pictures from Training

In theory, above this text is a slideshow of photos from this post. I can't see if it worked on the cell phone.

(If you get this through e-mail, you might need to visit the blog to see the pictures.)

Our Permanent Site

We now live in a village near Nebo, which is south of Polokwane and east of Pretoria. We have a nice room outside the main house where we usually cook for ourselves though sometimes sit down to a delicious dinner with our host family. We have one brother and two sisters. Our host mother is a teacher at one of the nearby secondary schools and a gracious host.

Jennie is working at a non-governmental organization (NGO) that supports 28 different local non-profit organizations (NPOs). She works with 11 of these organizations on programs supporting HIV/AIDS victims or orphans and vulnerable children (OVC).

I'm working with three primary schools to improve education practices and on a USAID project called mindset, which provides technology to suppliment classroom instruction.

We have regular access to e-mail now, so feel free to send us a note. If you e-mail us questions or leave them as comments to this post, we'll post the answers here for everyone's benefit, if you're okay with it. Our e-mail addresses are benbleckley at gmail.com and jennie_bleckley at yahoo.com.

Hope things are good where you are.

We Are Officially Volunteers

Sorry it's been so long since we last posted. Jennie and I drafted a
post a few days ago and were transfering it to the phone, but the
phone cut me off at 1294 characters. Then we were going to break it
up into multiple posts of 1000 characters or so, but I lost the
notebook. That's okay though, because so much has happened in the
last four days.

We've finished what Peace Corps here calls Phase I Training, which is
basically all the classroom sessions. The next three months are Phase
II, where we begin to integrate into the community and complete
assignments that apply the skills we learned. Phase III is in January
where we come back together to share our experiences and successful
practices.

The exciting news is on September 20th we were sworn in as Peace Corps
volunteers at a ceremony at the ambassador's house. We also have a
new address:

Ben & Jennie Bleckley, PCVs
PO Box 870
Nebo
1059
South Africa

More about our new home, jobs, and host family in our next post.

Teal Rondaval

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Teal Rondaval Here are some long overdue pictures of the rondaval we've been living in during training.

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