A Small Breath of Africa: Gartenfest and Many a' Eisbein

A normal week and a lighter teaching load. My students are getting ready to go on "teaching experience" and my students are assigned a research project to do during the student teaching. The last two weeks of the semester before teaching experience, we're preparing them by discussing methodology and data collection, which they'll do in their classrooms. The assignment is a group research project where the students look at literacy through the lens of their grade and subject, comparing it with their group members. Aside from teaching, I've just been plugging along on my little projects: Johannesburg guide for next years' Fulbrighters, mobile literacy research, and "Teacher's Day" celebrations on campus…. and trying to find scholarships/a job.

My department is hosting two American scholars from New York and this week we had a roundtable discussion with the division (and the scholars) about language in South Africa. The discussion was really insightful, particularly the contribution from my colleagues in the department. Unfortunately, we don't time nor a venue to have intellectual conversations that relate to our division ("Languages, Literacies and Literatures"). One of the major themes of the discussion was language in South Africa - particularly in education (of course). My host professor, Leketi (a Sepedi speaker from Limpopo) discussed the origins of the 9 African languages in South Africa (with 11 official languages, with English and Afrikaans). There are two major families of South African, African languages: Nguni and Sesotho (see-sew-too). He explained that missionaries in the early settlement of southern Africa wanted to empower the tribes and started to alphabetize their language. In doing so, they didn't communicate with the speakers across the region, rather locally. Broadly speaking, what this did is it created many languages that are nearly identical in spoken form, but written completely differently. For example, isiZulu speakers mostly understand isiXhosa, Swati, and Ndebele speakers, but only in spoken form, not written. I found this to be a fascinating paradox. In the many "Englishes" around the world (and most other international languages), pronunciation is different, yet spelling is the same (think of Midwestern "bottle" compared to British "bottle). However, in the South African, African languages "bottle" would be said in a similar way, yet spelled completely different.

This weekend I helped Gerhard and family with their church's "Gartenfest" - a German festival to help raise money for the church (Lutheran Church of Kempton Park). I headed out to Gerhard's on Friday afternoon and we went to the church to help set up. It was a big production, with multiple tents, many food vendors, German beer, kiddie games, white elephant stands, et cetera. Exhausted, we went home with pizzas and realized that we still had to shred 20 kilos of carrots to make carrot salad (and the machine we had didn't have the proper extension). Gerhard and I went back to the church to get a different machine while the girls, in the meantime, worked on shredding with a smaller machine. We got home, finished the shredding, and crashed. The next morning, Gerhard and I left early to pick up the meat for the eisbein and schnitzel stand that we were running. A local German butcher donated 150 eisbeins and organized a 7:00am pick up. We arrived right at 7:00am, the bay door opened of the warehouse, and we loaded the eisbeins (talk about German efficiency!). After picking up the schnitzel at another butcher, we went to church to start organizing and cooking. The event was really well organized and our stand had plenty of help; we each had a specific job for the day and I was a braaier (griller). The charcoal was started by the time I arrived at the church and we threw on the eisbeins, which are less than appealing, particularly at 10:00am. We grilled and started filling the cookers, but it was still too early (the event started at 11:00). We braaied and braaied and people ate and ate! We finished just after 12:00 and by 1:30pm the eisbeins were gone (150 eisbiens / 2.5 hours!). I then helped around the kitchen, where Gerhard and Marlize were serving food and the girls were taking the orders/money coupons. We worked for the rest of the day and had a chance to enjoy some good food/beer too! At the end of the day, our stand raised R20,000 (profit) ~ $2,500. As the event was slowing in the late afternoon, Gerhard led a Gartenfest tradition of playing the accordion and leading songs, while children/parents followed with lanterns. His personality reverberated and the kids really enjoyed singing (and seeing how the accordion worked). Afterward, we packed up and head home, a long, 13-hour day! After enjoying some schnitzel, mashed potatoes, and sauerkraut (nothing like my Grandma's), I headed home. I really enjoyed helping out and we had a lot of fun!