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But we were the exceptions. There were probably
only about 10 PCVs with some form of motorized
transportation. The rest used the largely unscheduled buses but mostly they hitchhiked. Hitching
was dead easy and usually faster and more reliable
than the buses. Most of the time it involved sitting
in the back of an open pick-up truck or if it was
really crowded, standing up! That’s an experience
not to be missed. I won’t even attempt to describe
how this worked managing to keep people from
falling out while bouncing over rough dirt roads
through the bush – it was a joint effort.
Out of Site/Out of Country Policy: Say what?
More like an “out of site, out of mind” policy.
There was no policy that we were aware of so we
pretty much went wherever we wanted whenever
we wanted. Like any other job, we had to get approval from our work supervisor, but Peace Corps
didn’t figure into this equation at all. Given the
absence of any kind of communicatio n system, if
the Peace Corps Office had tried to contact all
PCVs it probably would have taken a week just to
find half of us. They could have found another
25% of us quickly if they’d thought to enter South
Africa and check the beaches and a few more if
they scoured the red light district in Johannesburg.
Ahhh, for a return to those innocent days before the
threat of global terrorism, the surveillance of cell
phones, and the proliferation of truly dangerous
communicable diseases.
Site Visits from Peace Corps Staff: I’d heard
rumors of these but never actually had one myself.
We figured if you got a site visit you must have
done something really, really bad like stolen a cow,
insulted a chief or eaten with your left hand. The
staff members were happy to stay in the capitol and
we were generally happy to have them stay there.
This leads me to the subject of “Spooky
Volunteers.” With the advent of mobile
phones, email and site visits, they seem to
have disappeared. A “Spooky Volunteer”
was the weird guy who surprised us by
actually making it out of Staging and getting on the plane. He then survived PST,
was sworn in, promptly disappeared into
the bush (his job site?) and was not seen
again by anyone until the COS Conference
(if he showed up at all). By then no one
recognized him because (a) we’d forgotten
that he even existed and (b) he’d lost 40
lbs., grown a beard, was wearing a wildebeest skin and 10 lbs of beads and had
P A U 3 A !
dreadlocks smeared in animal fat and red
mud. He now answered only to the name
Nhlanhla Maphanga.
Housing: All Volunteer housing was provided by the Government of Swaziland which
meant nothing could have been more inconsistent. A few Volunteers lived in traditional
mud huts with thatched roofs and no amenities whatsoever. Most lived in “government
housing” which consisted of a small concrete
block building with a cement floor and a corrugated metal roof. There were usually 2 bedrooms, a main room and a kitchen. More often than not there was neither water nor electricity. The stove burned wood and the house
was shared with another government worker,
occasionally another PCV. All bathing and
clothes washing was done in plastic basins
with water hauled from a community well or
standpipe.
And then there was my house, a threebedroom two-bath ranch style house with a
flagstone patio, and fireplace, on about 2
acres. It had a guest cottage, hot water, a gas
stove, electricity and a small swimming pool
that had been hand dug and built by Peace
Corps and IVS Volunteers about three years
earlier.
For part of my service I shared the house with
an Irish volunteer and for the rest I lived alone
- that is if you don’t count the endless stream
of PCVs who came to visit, some traveling for
several hours just to get a hot shower. Now
you can see why I was so happy not to receive
any site visits.