No more malunghu, I'm bhuti Matewu

It was really hard leaving my last village. I stayed in a small community called Machipe during training and the warm welcome the village gave 14 of us from the training group was astonishing. I was not taught the local language during training, and even with only the greeting in the local language, I was able to make friends and become somewhat of a local celebrity on my side of town. My African name was Thabiso, it means happiness, and I couldn’t walk anywhere without someone yelling it to me. I felt welcomed by every person in the village and it was a sad day when I had to walk away from my host family’s home and know that there was a chance I would never see them again.

Today, I am in a new village with new faces and all the same confusion of who I am and what am I doing here. But I no longer have 13 friends to deflect some of the stares from the glare off my white skin. I’m an outsider, a foreigner, a malunghu (white person). And as friendly as I can be, and as much Xitsonga as I can try to speak, it is really hard to become accepted. Peace Corps has set up very specific tasks to make that happen, and the three month period that volunteers call “lock-down” due to our lack of travel ability, is much more what the PC calls it, Community Integration. Luckily I have an organization that is not only committed to seeing change in the community, but also very committed to helping me achieve my integration and full exposure to the community.

I will admit that the first week was especially hard. Everything was new, and not having one familiar face outside of work was often intimidating and disheartening. The lady I stay with, I call her Magogo (its slang for “granny”), was a huge help with this because her laughter and fascination with me helped me to get through many hard days. She has no formal education, but her English is remarkable despite this fact. The warmth she has showed me and acceptance into her home has given me strength when my head is hurting and I just need a hot meal and someone to sit with to enjoy each other’s company.

After three weeks in this not so tiny African oasis, I can see progress being made. I may not be the “famous man”, as deemed by my last host brother in Machipe, but I find myself being called “Bhuti Matewu” (“brother Matthew”) more these days than malunghu. I visited the local secondary school today to introduce myself, and I was thankful that not all the laughter was at me, but also with me, as I introduced myself in Xitsonga and English, as well as presenting the new campaign that is slowly starting to take shape in my organization. I never wanted to change the world when I signed up for the Peace Corps, I just wanted to give myself to those who could use it the most, and those faces that looked back at me gave me more strength that I could ever imagine. The covered smiles of the boys in the back of the classroom that may not know that I am a mere 4 to 5 years older than them and the girls in the front who are still in shock to see a white man speak their language are the ones that make me know this is where I want to be. Now I just need to show them that they are the future, and there is an end to HIV that isn’t about one white man coming to a poor African village, but is about all of us, working together to know that we can see the end.