WHAT IS GARY DOING HERE?

First, an apology to those who were planning a short flight to visit us in the Caribbean (site of our Nomination). If you want to hear God laugh, tell him your plans.

Our “Invitation” brought us to Swaziland where the incidence of HIV continues to be the highest in the world. Every PCV in the kingdom falls under the sector of Community Health. Debbie is in Community Health and Education; Gary was invited to work with Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). Group 8 is the first group in SD to include NGOs. In all of pre-service training, we had thirty minutes of discussion about NGOs; for another half-hour, we 14 NGOs asked our APCD questions about NGOs, and his response was, “I’ll get back to you on that”. Group 9 will include educators, though still in the Community Health sector, not the Education sector. Stick with me here.
(Debbie just got back from a planning and strategy meeting and learned that there will be no NGOs in Group 9. Read on.)

At placement, we accepted the offer of our palace on this campus. Obviously, this falls under the Ministry of Education which means I’m not technically NGO (although PC still considers me NGO). Debbie was assigned an NGO to work with (somewhere along the line they began considering her NGO, also), but her counterpart would never play ball, and through various connections and some serendipity, Debbie is now firmly entrenched at the hospital, which is a Faith Based Organization, not an NGO. It is my elevated pseudo-NGO status and my Very Important Work that puts us on this campus. If not for that we would likely be rural health workers somewhere in the bush, living in a hut or a rondeval with a tin roof, perhaps being cooked in the lowveld, and without running water or electricity.

So in exchange for our palatial setting, I ‘pay the rent’ by agreeing to take on the tasks and chores of helping in the campus library. Shortly after we were placed here, the teacher-librarian was promoted, moved away, and I was told, “It’s your library; do what you want with it.”

My Very Important Work consists of registering the ‘new’ books, reinforcing them, getting them ready for circulation by pasting the date slip and the book plate pocket inside the back cover. We have no card stock, no paper cutter, and not even a tape dispenser, so everything is done by hand, double pasting photo-copies and cutting tape with scissors. It is tedious, menial, labor intensive and time consuming work that could probably be done by a trained monkey. On top of that, the donated books are cast-offs that have been colored in, scribbled on, pages torn out, and the batteries are dead so they no longer “talk”. And how much time should you put into a six-page book with cardboard pages that has no plot or conclusion? “Albert the duck is happy on his pond”. So? What is in the mind of an author of pre-reader books? I often wonder what my major professor would think of me now; or are my kids really proud to say that their father pastes slips of paper into old books? However, I take pride in pasting them straight and in having the cleanest glue pot in the kingdom, and at the end of the day, I go home singing, “I polished up the handle so care-fully, and now I am a Captain in the Queen’s navy”.

Debbie has told me I’m being too negative, so a few positive words: I’m developing meaningful relationships with some students; I’ve started an open door policy at the library that provides the students a place to go after school lets out; we accomplished the application process to obtain a thousand books from Books for Africa; I am mentoring a new Swazi Librarian; I’ve just been made an assistant in the health club (Very Important Work); I’m starting to create an HIV class (there is none extant); I have organized the non-fiction by Dewey classification and the fiction by reader level, and I’m learning to sign. And, I maintain the image of the one and only mlungu mkhulu (white grandfather) in the community. Hardly leaves time for my Very Important Work. Perhaps if there is anything to learn from this, it is to bloom where you’re planted. And I hope that answers Kathy’s question.

Next question, please.