Physio Conversations

I already knew that South Africa and my body don’t get along. This was a fact of life I grudgingly accepted and found solutions to- rough times with food poisoning were solved by a no-egg vegetarian diet, the all-too-frequent cold was fought off by a daily multivitamin, mysterious GI discomfort was held at bay with a daily probiotic. I’m proud to say that I’ve now been free of all these ailments for nearly 4 months now (knock on wood), but of course, my body and South Africa still find things to fight about. For the past month-ish, the cause of the dispute has been my feet. Somehow I’ve developed plantar fasciitis in both feet- basically the painful inflammation and calcification of the plantar fascia tendon that runs along the bottoms of the feet. In my case, I’m guessing it has developed from lots of walking around in bad footwear. At first when I noticed it, the only symptom was sharp pain in the bottoms of my feet in the mornings with the first steps of the day that would go away after a few mintues, and a dull ache after going for a long walk. However, lately it’s progressed to the point that the sharp pain from the morning never really goes away. Before it reached this point, I mentioned it to one of our PCMO’s (Peace Corps Medical Officers) and she set me up with bi-weekly physical therapy. The physical therapy doesn’t really seem to be working so they’re sending me to a podiatrist next week, but one plus-side to physiotherapy (as they call it here in SA) is some great conversation with my physiotherapist. She’s quite an interesting woman in fact- she’s a middle-aged Afrikaaner woman but quite possibly the most open-minded and diversified Afrikaaner I’ve met so far. Usually when I tell an Afrikaaner, or any other white person in South Africa for that matter, that I’m volunteering in a rural village (read: with black people) they give me a wide-eyed look of horror and mutter something about it being unsafe or how they would never do that. When I first mentioned this to my physiotherapist, however, she gave me a nod of understanding and proceeded to tell me about her 8 years of volunteering in a rural black community in Zimbabwe. This is really impressive since there is very little culture of volunteerism in this country. She also tells me stories and history about many of the different black cultures here in South Africa and seems to be a particular expert in the Zulu culture. Her father apparently grew up in Zululand on a farm and was thought to be a weak child. His family didn’t think that he could handle learning two languages at once and they wanted him to be able to communicate with the black farm hands so they had him learn Zulu as his first language! He only learned to speak Afrikaans years later after he had already become fluent in Zulu. His wife knows some Zulu as well and they taught it to their kids! I found this to be completely astounding and heartwarming. She also tells me that South Africa shouldn’t have to bring in volunteers from America to work in the rural areas, but that the better-off citizens of South Africa are more than capable of doing that work. Something I definitely agree with.

It’s so easy here to see everything in black and white (literally and metaphorically) and to assume that most white people are racist, but a good conversation can really avail you of your pre-conceived notions (yes, even I as an American am plagued with bias). Although race is such an in-your-face topic here and impossible to ignore, I really appreciate how open people are about it. There’s none of this tip-toeing around the topic as we do back home- people will openly acknowledge their stance on the subject. Of course that doesn’t make it all easy to deal with- I deal with being treated differently because of my race every day here- I get constant harassment and disrespect from men at the taxi ranks and more often from the drunk men in my village or at Tswana functions. Or I’ll receive the opposite treatment- I might be invited into a Tswana household to find someone breaking out the camera to take pictures of the white girl with random relatives, or taken to the front of the food-line at a wedding of people I’ve never met. I get taunted and teased by the middle schoolers in the village and find swarms of little kids embracing me in a hug at the primary school. I also encounter the white South African who is afraid of black people or the black South African who thinks all white people are rich and racist. But occasionally I’ll hear from someone like my physiotherapist who is fascinated by different cultures and embraces different races, or from someone in the village who observes that we all breathe the same air and have blood running through our veins and that blacks and whites can live together. Dealing with race on a daily basis is not easy for me, and I don’t imagine it’s much easier for anybody living in South Africa, but keeping the conversation going about it is certainly a good thing. In fact, in a unique country like South Africa, I think the primary benefit of Peace Corps here is the presence of diversity in the rural areas. Peace Corps brings in all colors of Americans, each with their own set of challenges, but each has a great opportunity to change the conversation about race and take it in a new direction.