Category Archive

Help us win $1 million from Chase Community Giving. Send us your ideas and volunteer here.

The past few weeks have flown by with community members welcoming us with open arms and eagerly teaching us anything they can about life here. For two weeks we spent our mornings putting on a camp for the students while they were on a break from school. We passed the hours teaching lessons in English, math, and computers, and playing games like soccer, tag, and—the biggest hit—kickball. Camp was just as fun for us as it was for the kids who came, and it helped us get to know more of the kids in the village. Camp helped the kids get to know us better, as well. Now, it is almost impossible to walk down the street without hearing my name shouted from all directions. Camp wasn’t the only thing keeping us busy these past few weeks. It was, after all, over at 11:30 every day. Our afternoons were spent completing monitoring and evaluation reports of past SMRC projects in Dixie. To do this, we observed, surveyed, and interviewed community members involved in the projects. Though we found, as expected, that further improvements can be made, it was uplifting to learn that the projects thus far have had positive impacts on the community. In our downtime, we have continued to immerse ourselves in the local way of life and do things we would not normally do at home, like getting barrels of water and wheeling them home, doing laundry outside in buckets, and collecting firewood. A personal highlight from the past few weeks was the day we hosted a braai (similar to a barbeque in the U.S., only instead of using a grill, you cook over a fire) to celebrate Dena’s (one of the interns) birthday. This day was especially noteworthy for me because I had the opportunity to prepare a fresh chicken from kill to cook—something I had never imagined I would do. I am not sure how the experiences to come in the next few weeks will be able to top those I have already had here, though I do have a lot to look forward to. We are all busy planning a soccer tournament/health day event for all of the nearby villages and working to provide after-school tutoring to the students at Manyangana High School in Utha. Additionally, we are all beginning to work on side-projects for our villages. I will be working with Steffi to set up a girls group in Dixie, where preteen and teenage girls can form a circle of trust and discuss common goals. We all plan to be continuously busy, but are excited to get as much done as we can in the next few weeks.

–Alissa Schulman, intern

Arriving at the computer lab in Makropene, coming from youth choir practice at the preschool in Dixie (in preparation for church tomorrow), to sit down to write about my first week as a SMRC intern in the Manyeleti community is a strange task. We have spent the past seven days settling in with our homestay families and meeting the people with whom we will be working as we begin to formulate and propose our asset-based community development projects. The community of Dixie, my home for the next six weeks, is possibly the easternmost village in South Africa. About 1,000 people live there, in streets of concrete houses planted in the bushy savannah at the edge of the Kruger national game reserve.

Most men in Dixie work at the local game reserves as guides or managers, and many of the youth are training to follow in the footsteps of their fathers and uncles. Women may serve as chefs or housekeepers at the same locations, though many stay home to cook, clean, and care for the little ones. My homestay mother, Wanda, is the principal of the crèche – the preschool – and she is involved with regional community development forums that deal in job creation and education. He daughter, Amanda, is home for the winter from university in Pieterburg, Limpopo, where she is studying psychology. Lodisi (7) and Diana (2) are the two energetic children in the house who enjoy wrestling, playing games, and training me and my homestay partner Matt in shangaan (the local language). Lodisi is especially adept at acting out animals for us to learn and is particularly fond of “honchi” or pig.

The community as a whole is relatively poor, some more or less so than others. Another section of our group lives with the family of a manager at the game reserve, and they have the only house in the village with a flushing toilet. Water is a contentious issue: the Hananani Primary School has its own borehole from which they sell water to the community. There was a free water source, but some people dug up the pipes to sell the copper in the cities, and it is no longer working. Wednesday, two government trucks came to distribute free water to people’s drums.

For me, travelling far from Michigan, coming to Dixie and Manyeleti has been an amazingly welcoming experience. To walk the line of development and friendship with a community so vibrant and dynamic and so definitely in need in particular ways will be, in my estimation, the most daunting challenge for our group as we begin to brainstorm with our community partners. In Dixie, I am hoping to pursue a community-run training program for people interested in working at the reserves. Many boys are studying to become guides, but there is no organized program through which to connect them with the Djuma employment office. If the community could develop a system to train (male and female) guides, there could be possibly more certainty surrounding the possibility of finding one of the presently-coveted positions at the reserve. Preparation for this proposal will require interviews with current guides and brainstorming of ways to include interested youth with a way to prepare for earning a living. I am looking forward to meeting more people and finding out more about the systems of community organization. I hope also to share some American culture with my homestay family (tonight I will cook them pizza). For now, Fambakahle (go well)!