The Benefits of Bronchitis

So it turns out that getting bronchitis less than two days before my scheduled Peace Corps departure might not prove so tragic after all. Waiting for me when I arrived home on Thursday night was a large, brown envelope from the Peace Corps with an invitation to serve in... South Africa!

Although I had eventually come to see The Gambia as a great assignment, my initial reaction to my first assignment drew a sharp contrast with the impromptu dancing that followed reading that my new assignment would be in South Africa. For sure, my assignment in South Africa is going to be no picnic--physically or, especially, emotionally--but I can imagine little that I would find more rewarding than working to build the capacity of a local NGO in South Africa to fight the spread of HIV/Aids. And from a more selfish perspective, I must say that the (relatively) affordable flights to and from the US and the presence of some of the continent's best rock climbing certainly do not hurt either. When combined with the opportunity to spend the holidays and a few more months with friends and family and to work in the Governor's Office during a time of transition, I'd have to say that a week of struggling to breathe was well worth it ;)

As for the details of my new assignment, there are not many at this point. I know that I will live and work in one of four eastern provinces: KwaZulu Natal, Limpopo, Mpumalanga, or NorthWest Provinces. I also know that my primary project will consist of both formal office work and outreach work in and around my host community. And I know that my staging event (i.e. pre-departure orientation) is planned for February 2-4. What I do not know at this point is whether I will be in a rural or urban area, whether I will be living on my own in an apartment or with a host familiy in a traditional village home, whether my work will involve youth outreach, support services to people living with HIV/Aids, and/or income-generation activities for caregivers, whether I'll have consistent access to internet and other communications technology, or which of South Africa's eleven official and nine non-official language(s) I will be expected to learn (at least English is one of these twenty languages). The answers to these questions (and many more) will depend upon the judgment of the Peace Corps staff in South Africa who will be evaluating my performance during my 8-9 weeks of training.

That's really most of what I know at this point. I'll be spending much of the next 2.5 months learning as much as I can about South Africa's history and culture (with Jenn's help), especially focusing on the HIV/Aids pandemic and the legacy of apartheid. I'm also planning to volunteer with a local nonprofit that runs an HIV/Aids outreach and prevention program here in Durham. While there's nothing I can do here to adequately prepare for what's to come over the next two years, even inadequate preparation should prove to be quite valuable.