Last week, Adam and I attended yet another of our –ST’s in Peace Corps! This one, following PST and IST is “Life Skills Orientation Training” (as mentioned in a previous post, apparently the ‘O’ does not mesh well with the acronym, so it is conveniently left out!) LST pairs PCV’s with their counterparts, usually from departments of their organizations that focus on work with orphans & vulnerable children or education with adolescents. The purpose of LST is to train PCVs and their counterparts on the techniques associated with transferring critical, life-changing skills to youth – i.e., responsible decision making, anatomy and sexuality, myths & facts about HIV/AIDS, etc.
Thus, with Margaret (from Jeppes Reef) and Busie (from Thembalethu) in tow, Adam and I made our way to sunny Durban. Well, first of all, not so sunny when we arrived… but that’s okay, we were staying in a hotel with flush toilets, showers, and a 3-times-a-day free buffet!!! Ahhhh, civilization!!
As always, it was great to see some of our further-away-fellow-PCVs, all those Limpopo and KZN people that we only get to fraternize with on the rare occasion that Peace Corps pays for our transportation to get together! And, also as always, the training itself had its high points and its lulls, but unlike some other PC trainings we have attended, the counterparts at LST were surprisingly engaged, communicative, and questioning – oh my!! In fact, the majority of questions and input came from our South African coworkers, rather than our fellow PCVs, a rare and entirely surprising thing to witness! Nearly all the PCVs made some mention of this observation and all of us felt pretty excited to be a part of the experience!!
While the overall training was fairly informative, certain highlights stuck out:
For example, AIDS Soccer…beachside – hosted by our own Nkomazi-based Alex Tran – in which teams were divided into ‘HIV’ and ‘Immune System’. The ‘Immune System’ team was expected to play by all the regular rules of professional league soccer, while the ‘HIV’ team was (conveniently) allowed to push, hit, kick offsides, and in general, create all-out chaos on the pitch. Furthermore, team ‘Immune System’ was often given red cards for penalties such as “falling down when being pushed” or “unfair goals”… for absolutely no reason!! And finally, whenever an ‘Immune System’ player was escorted off the field for receiving these dubious red cards, they were also given a paper describing the type of stigma with which they had been assigned (i.e., ‘Prostitute’, ‘In Denial’, etc.) and another ‘HIV’ team member was invited to join the winning team. Slowly but surely, team ‘Immune System’ was down to only a handful of flagging players and team ‘HIV’ had increased exponentially in size to almost twenty players!!! (Are we getting the metaphor here??) Thus, it was a truly unique and fun way of providing a visual to the HIV vs. Immune System battle and, of course, also allowed for lots of trash-talking and laughs!! Thanks Tran!
The mid-week, Role-Play Teach-Backs were also pretty entertaining. These were performed by PCVs and their counterparts, in pairs or small groups. Each would be given a lesson to ‘teach back’ to the larger group in some type of engaging way. Busie & I were assigned “Decision Making” and decided to focus on the ineptitude of many youth to assist their fellow peers in making tough decisions in life-altering circumstances. In order to introduce this approach, we acted out the following – slightly stereotyped – skit, where Busie played the role of a young female in trouble and I played the role of an unhelpful schoolmate:
Me: Hello SesBusie [Sister Busie]! Howzit [how is everything]?
Busie: Hello sesi [sister], oh, not very good. Yesterday I found out that I am pregnant… And I can't tell my parents...
Me: Eish! Shame…
Busie: Yes, and now I think I will have to marry an older man to pay for everything…
Me: Oh my sesi, ooh…
Busie: And he will not let me go to school, because I will have to take care of his other children…
Me: Oh so sorry…
Busie: And I will have to sleep with him in order to get enough food for me and the baby…
Me: Eh! Shame sesi…
Busie: So I have no idea what I should do, I’m struggling.
Me: Yebo [yes], I see this. I do. So do you want to go to town after school today and look at the new skirts at PEP?
Busie: Ummm… okay.
The fact that Busie spoke in perfect English (with perfect grammer) and I spoke with a very heavy South African accent and utilized every physical gesticulation I could think of with all the ‘Eish’ and ‘Shame’ remarks had everyone quite amused, and yet, we also seemed to get the point across quite well.
And finally, while not entirely related to training, perhaps the best part of LST was witnessing the sheer joy of our counterparts playing at the beach. While it may seem entirely normal to any of us (especially those of us that grew up on or near the beach), the thought of running in the sand and, quite literally, frolicking in the waves was unsurprisingly foreign to our wonderful, South African coworkers. Thus, on the very few days when afternoon sessions allowed for free time on the beach, our counterparts were some of the first to strip down to bras, slips, and other undergarments and go rolling around in the tide! It was delightful to watch – as uninhibited PCVs and spontaneously free counterparts dove under white caps and got tossed onto the beach by every other wave. At one point, I sat beside Busie and Margaret in the surf and asked if they had ever been to Durban before. Both had, but at much younger ages, with family. And Margaret added with a huge smile, “But I don’t ever remember having this much fun!” Yeah, it made me smile too!
So all in all, I think our counterparts took back quite a bit of useful information from our LST lessons and sessions, but more so than anything else, I think we all got a rare chance to see eachother just having fun – acting like carefree kids in a profession and country where we (both volunteers and coworkers) do not typically get a chance to do so. It seemed to me that this was a true vacation.
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