Program HIV/AIDS Capacity Building Project Component: CCB (Community Capacity Builder)
- Do you have electricity in your house? In your village? Is it reliable?
I have electricity in my
house and village and it is pretty reliable. There are power outages every once
and awhile though.
- Where do you get your water? Is it reliable?
I have a tap in my house,
which supplies cold water. I do not have a geyser (geyser is a small water heater that is mounted on the outside of the house. It is run off of electricity, so volunteers who have them usually only turn them on a little bit before they want hot water and then turn it off when they are finished bathing). During winter time it is reliable
but during the summer the water in the village goes off multiple days in a week
or will be on for only a few hours a day.
- Do you have a refrigerator? Gas powered?
I have a refrigerator and
it is electric powered
- Do you have a stove and oven? Gas or electric?
I have a stove and oven.
Both are powered by gas.
- Do you have cell phone coverage? What networks are available at your site?
There is cell phone
coverage. Orange, Mascom, and Bemoblie are all covered here.
- Do you have internet access at your site? How do you access it?
There are two internet
cafes in my village. I also have an Orange Dongle that I use for my internet.
- Do you pay for a dongle (for internet) or any other type of internet connection? If yes, which provider do you use?
Yes I pay for the Orange
dongle (the orange dongle is a USB stick that plugs into my computer and runs off the cell network. It has 3G+ coverage, but being that I am out in a rural village, my internet is pretty slow, some days it works well and other days not so much. It's really hit or miss. I have noticed that it seems to work better at non-peak cell usage times. I got this so I would be able to Skype and keep in touch with friends and family back at home. Going to internet cafes seemed like it would be more costly than paying for a monthly plan to have internet at my leisure. I pay for 5G a month of loaded information, which seems to be fine. I rarely go over that.)
- Does your workplace have internet? If yes, is it a school, NGO, clinic, dist. Office, etc,?
My workplace (clinic) does
not have internet
- Do you have a computer?
I have a personal laptop
from home. (Mines a Sony VAIO Laptop with 64-bit OS, 4G RAM, and Intel Pentium CPU P6100 @ 2.00 GHz. This is also the second laptop I have been through since being here, my first one got over heated, which fired the motherboard)
There are also 3 computers and two printers at my workplace (the
clinic).
- Do you have a smart phone?
No (the phone I use is a very basic Nokia 1280. It's simple and durable and has a flashlight! When I go back to the states and get a phone I won't know what to do with myself when I have all the options available for phones these days haha)
- Are there stores in your village? Are they chain stores and do you do the majority of your shopping there? How far do you travel to get to major grocery stores and how often do you make the trip?
There are no stores in my
village, only general dealers. I have to go to Mahalapye to shop for groceries
(typically SPAR) which is 70km away.
 |
| Outside of the big General Dealer/Butcher in my village |
 |
| Inside of the big General Dealer/Butcher |
- Is your village accessible by public transportation? If not, how far are you from the nearest public transport?
My village has a bus that
goes to it pretty regularly. (There are times I do hitch, due to the fact that my bus only comes a few times a day, typically 8, 9, and 3 from Machaneng and 11, 2, 3, and 5 to Machaneng)
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| My bus stop..spend a lot of time here trying to hitch a ride :) |
- How far are you from the nearest PCV? How often do you see other PCVs?
I am 40km from the nearest
PCV, but she is harder to get to than the ones that are 70km away. I see other
volunteers a few times a month.
- Have you or do you plan to make a trip home to the US?
No
- How many visitors have you had or will you have (best estimate) from the US, family, friends, or otherwise?
My family came to visit
for a few weeks (4 people).
- Is there anything that I’ve left off that you want to add or any additional comments about your site?
Nope Machaneng is a nice small village that I enjoy living in for the time that I am here :)
Regarding her first laptop, the motherboard overheated partly from seting it on soft services while leaving it on but mostly had to do with extreme Africa heat while sucking in very dry desert sand while trying to cool off. Appearently laptops weren't designed to stay cool in very dry, very hot, sandy conditions. Who knew??
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