Stoddard shares South African adventure

By Rose Hooper

Stoddard, 70, of Barkers Creek community, closed up her house, loaned out her car, arranged a cat-sitter, and flew off to Africa recently, alone, to begin her fourth tour as a Peace Corps volunteer.

In her first communique back home, Stoddard, a former VISTA worker at the Family Resource Center, shared some of her adventures.

"We hang on the cusp here, between modern technology and a vanishing, simplistic culture; between autocracy and democracy.

"The county, in the wake of the abolished Apartheid regime, is an amazing mosaic of contrasts. The urban sophistication of Johannesburg and the genteel life-style of upper-class Cape Town seems continent removed from the deeply rural areas where the provincial ways of a 100 years past continue.

"At this time much effort and money is focused on the developments of infrastructure and improvement of quality of life in rural areas. Progress is creeping, but the country is struggling with the transition: A 40 percent unemployment rate, an alarming rise in consumer prices, new ideas and old beliefs in conflict, and an incredibly ambitious program to remedy the damage sustained by the Apartheid educational policies. These are policies that effectively prevented the black population access to math, science and English language training.

"This is where I come in. I function as a resource and trainer for 48 teachers in widely separated schools where the teachers themselves never gained a working knowledge or fractions or geology.

"The schools are decrepit, no supplies, not one set of encyclopedias, even in the area secondary schools. I had to travel two-and-a-half hours by foot and two 'combie taxis' to find the conversion rate of calories to kilojoules.

"In my remote corner of the Limpopo Province the promised electricity and water systems and telephone access and paved roads and public transport are still a ways down the road.

"This isolation results in a naivete that does not seem believable. 'Did a man really walk on the moon?' 'Are the United States and South America one country?' 'When boys in circumcision school die it is because they were witched' 'There is no such thing as AIDS, that's just America's invention to deter sex.'

"So, am I suffering withdrawal symptoms from loss of first-world amenities and mental stimulation? Do I endure the primitive culture only as a necessity to performing my duties?

"Sometimes, a little bit.

"But once the lack of physical comforts (no hot bubble baths, no red wine) cease to matter much, I discover a more-than-adequate trade-off. Time, silence uninterrupted by traffic or telephone or television. A wonderful empty space to clasp an idea and explore it completely. A gentle, persistent need to listen to little inner voices that were submerged in first world hustle and bustle.

"I can think of not a single thing I would rather be doing with my life just now."

Back to Archive: 08/29/02.