...the very first thing I would do is send half the women in parliament packing.
There are too many, they should be home cooking anyway." ~my key school principal (followed, of course, by a healthy debate. Dana, if you're reading this, that one's for you.)
Its just a good season for quotes or something in the village, I don't know.
The village that I'm living in is a little bit of an anomaly. Its considered 'deep rural' (can you believe I asked for that? In the US I think I've been camping all of 3 times my whole life, and then one day in training I find myself requesting a super-rural village. Where did that come from? But I love it) however it is fairly large -- I think at least 10,000 people, judging by the primary schools. It is in the middle of nowhere though, and I guess thats where the designation comes from. The nearest village to it is about 5 or 6 miles away, through pretty much scrub and nothing. My official 'shopping city' is 45 minutes by car on a good day, 2.5 hours by taxi on a bad one. We have half a tar road and no bodies of water anywhere nearby. There are donkey carts and lots and lots of cattle that parade past my window every day like clockwork (they are quite possibly they only living things in the village that seem to pay attention to any sort of schedule). The sangoma (traditional healer) lives next door, and while apparently she is semi-retired I still hear drum beats every now and again coming from her rondavale. Never on sundays, of course, because thats when the church on the other side of my house has their services. Professional courtesy and all that.
The people here speak 2 languages (well, the people here speak 2 home languages. They probably actually speak at least 4 a piece and smatterings of a few more.). Fortunately one of those languages is the one I learned/am learning -- siSwati -- and the other is tsonga/shongon. (Tsonga or xtsonga is the language, shongon is the culture group but they're used sort of interchangeably. Sort of.) Anyways, people speak siSwati because we're near Swaziland. They speak Tsonga for a couple of reasons. We are pretty close to Mozambique (where tsonga is spoken) and there are refugees who have crossed the border over the years and through the various political upheavals. But mostly, well, my village is like a moment in time. Apartheid's leftovers, one of those messy little things you can't really clean up now.
Nothing where I live dates from before 1954. Thats when the oldest church was erected, when the first school was founded. When I was told this, I thought, "hmmm..." and thought back to my days in Mr. Gray's world history class. Reading through some of the school's files, though, there it all was in neatly printed black and white. So matter of fact.
"The village is a result of the group areas act. Families were uprooted from rich farmland of Komatipoort and the outlying areas and moved to this area, approximately 40k from the nearest town-center."
In komatipoort they speak shongon. All the older people in my village speak shongon. And there's the Group Areas act in its stark simplicity. I'm living in something I read in a textbook nearly 7 years ago.
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