The ProGroup Foundation

Hello everyone how are you doing? I am currently at my organization's office in Tzaneen and decided to write about what we do.

The organization was created to provide human right's information at no cost to the people of Tzaneen and the surrounding area. People can come to our organization for gender-based violence counselling and can also get PEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis). There are also volunteers here who can help clients obtain birth certificates and other important legal documents. Other people can go to court with clients and help them solve cases--the most common cases are maintenance conflicts. In these situations, a woman has had a child and is suing the father of the child for money to raise the baby. These cases are quite common, as many men father children and then leave the mother with the baby.

Like every NGO in South Africa (and all others, come to think about it) the foundation has many funding problems. There just is not enough government money to go around, and, as a result, NGO's must rely on funding from international organizations and foundations.

So what is my role here in this organization? It's hard to say, since I just got here! I definitely cannot provide counseling, since most of the clients are women who have been abused. They will not talk to a man, especially one who cannot even speak their native tongue. I do believe that I will be able to help with funding proposals, since they all must be in English. I'm sure that there will be other opportunities for me to help at ProGroup.

I was thinking about how to describe this Peace Corps experience in words and I remembered an exercise we did during training. Our facilitator, a current PCV, told us to take ten slips of paper and write on each piece something that identifies us. Most people wrote down words like "friend," "son," and "father." Then, the PCV asked us to take away one, then another, and another, until we were left with 5 left. This, she told us, is what it is like to be a PCV--since you are away from your home and everything you have known for your whole life, your sense of identity and of who you are is really changed. Now that I am beginning my service I can see that this was a good example (at least in my case). The lack of Asian-American and Chinese things here in SA means that it is so hard to identify with that part of myself. But, I think that once my kitchen is fully stocked I will be able to cook quasi-Chinese food. PCV's do struggle with their identity, along with many other lifestyle changes.

I don't think I saved those last five pieces of paper but I can be pretty sure of what they were. They were: son, brother, friend, Asian-American, and family member. One sure thing about being in the Peace Corps is that, in the absence of your friends and family, you really realize how important they all are to you.