Saturday 25 Feb 2012
Saturday Mama had to go to a funeral, so after breakfast,
Smu and I helped Mama by cleaning the house. Actually I had to force Mama to
let us help out, but we swept, mopped, scrubbed, and dried the floors, put away
all the dishes from the drying rack, and tidied up. When Mama left for the
funeral, Smu had me break out my lap top and blast Beyoncé as we danced around
singing until I forced her to take a bath.
After bath time we got ready and went to Pavillion with
Smu’s friend Mandisa (I think I’ve mentioned her in previous posts). Also, side
note, they spell pavilion here with two l’s, which has thoroughly confused me
since I’m bad enough at spelling as it is. And another side note to that side
note, my spelling has gotten worse since learning Zulu since everything is
spelled phonetically. I spelled laughing lafing and phrase frase the other day…
slight struggles.
Anyways, back to my Saturday. Mandisa’s family was going out
for the day, so I was in charge of her. We grabbed a minibus to the Pav and
headed to Mr. Price! Mandisa found a dress, a cute little denim jumper, but Smu
didn’t find anything she liked, so we bought Mandisa’s dress and went to some
other stores. Smu didn’t have much luck there either, so we went back to Mr.
Price. Smu remembered that it was her cousin’s birthday and she was turning
three, so she wanted to use the money I would have spent on a dress for her on
a present for her cousin instead. I wanted to get Smu a present (she wanted a
new dress to wear to our goodbye party this coming weekend), so I ended up
getting a present for her cousin AND a new dress for Smu! She finally found a
fancy purple dress as we were leaving Mr. Price, so we bought that for her.
After shopping we went to Wimpy’s for lunch to get some
burgers and soda. We then caught a minibus taxi home and I went to Becky’s with
Seth to work on our assignment that was due on Monday. We ended up getting
hungry, so we made some fries. Then Thando and Scooby came over and sat down with us. We ended up
asking them some questions about health to help us with our assignments, but it
turned into a very informative conversation about the stigma against HIV/AIDS
in the townships.
It started to get dark, so I headed home for dinner, watched
some TV with my siblings, and went to bed.
Sunday 26 Feb 2012
Sunday I got to go to Chesterville! Smu wanted to give her cousin the present we
bought her, and I wanted to see their other house. Stef was kicked out of her
house because Mama was going to church all day, so she ended up tagging along.
We ended up walking to Chesterville – its only a 10 minute walk or so, but it
was extremely hot. We played with the kids a little bit, and then decided it
was a good idea to get ice cream. After we all just sprawled out on the couches and
watched the first disk of the first season of The Big Bang theory. It was
wonderful. After a few hours, we walked all the way home in the heat.
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| The cow tail from last weeks slaughtering! |
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| The Chesterville Girls |
Back in Cato, I did some work on assignment, although not
much progress was made, but then I met with my Zulu song and dance group so Smu
could choreograph us a dance! Smu and Owami helped to teach us some simple
dance moves (sorry, no over the head kicks in this dance) and we did a mini
rehearsal before going to for dinner. After dinner I watched a little bit of TV
and then tried to work on my assignment again, but it was EXTREMELY hot. Like
too hot to sleep, hot. I was so tired, but was lying in my bed dripping sweat.
(sorry if that’s too much detail for some of you).
Monday 27 Feb 2012
Monday morning in Zulu class, it was time to present our
songs and dances! Thanks to Smu’s help our two Zulu songs were a success! We
all wore our green amaZulu jerseys and sang Shosholoza and Buya Nomathemba.
Another group wore traditional Zulu skirts and beads and danced to some pop
songs, and the last group to perform did The Circle of Life as well as a song
by Zahara, a hit South African Pop artist. It was a nice break from Bev’s
lecturing, although we did have a small one before the dances. It was as
unorganized, poorly explained, and frustrating as any other.
After Zulu Clive talked to us about our upcoming assignments
and such. I used lunch to finish my assignment that was due, and then at 2 we
were supposed to have a discussion about our clinic visits and other
experiences, but Zandi split us up into two groups and had us write songs to
describe the things we have observed… Yes, more singing and dancing. Her excuse
was the it is because Africans express their feelings through song and dance. I
totally agree with that, but I think she just didn’t want to have to engage
with us for two hours because it was hot and she was tired. We were all
frustrated with the assignment because we felt like we were back in 5th
grade or something. In the hour she gave us we came up with a song about what
we saw in the clinics to the tune of Ke$ha’s Tik Tok, which we were all ashamed
of. The other group did Celo Green’s Forget You, so that made us feel a little
better, but we all felt badly about using a Ke$ha song do describe the
hardships of public health care.
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| Drawing Mandisa made me that I used for my project. |
I finally managed to hand in my assignment. It was a
creative one where we were supposed to describe our learning process, so not
your conventional kind of paper… I wrote a bunch of short story type things
from different points of view and on different subjects all having to do with
health, and included some pictures to go along with it.
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| Quick drawing that I also used in my project. |
After school Smu and I bought some fries (I have eaten more
fries here in Cato Manor that I think I have my entire life, but they are so
good! The seasoning they put on them is addicting). Smu wanted to play with
Rato and Owami, so I went to find Katie. She wasn’t at home, so Rato suggested
we go find her at Becca’s house. Sure enough they were both there to get some
peace and quiet (Becca doesn’t have any siblings), so we said hi. It turns out
that Becca was leaving in a few minutes to have dinner with Dr. Karim, who is a
leading HIV/AIDS researcher here in South Africa. He pulled up in his Lexus SUV
while Katie and I were still there and invited us to come to dinner with Becca!
What an opportunity! So, we ended up tagging along.
First of all, his car was the nicest vehicle I have been in
in a long time, not to mention the first automatic vehicle since leaving the
US. We pull up to his house, which has a large wall (apparently there is an
electric fence?) and a gate. Their house may in fact be the nicest house I have
ever been in, not to mention had dinner in. Their sitting room has an entire
wall of glass, through which you look out onto the rest of their property with
a pool and patio as well as an amazing view of the city of Durban. When we got
there it was still light out and you could see all of the buildings and the
water starting to have a pinkish orangy glow. After dinner when we went back
into the sitting room for desert (more details to come), and you could see all of
the city lights along with the lights of the boats out at sea.
Before dinner they brought out some delicious samosas and
fruit juice as we talked to Dr. Karim for a little while. Then it was
dinnertime. There was potato curry, chicken curry, roti, salad, vegetables,
mushrooms, bread.. SO MUCH FOOD! It was all delicious, although slightly too
spicy for me. Luckily the fruit juice was thick, so that helped. For dessert
there were orange wedges, Turkish delight (from turkey!!! – their son goes to a
Turkish school), chocolates, cupcakes, donuts, Portuguese pastries, you name
it.
Anyways, so like I said, Dr Salim Karim and his wife,
Quarraisha Abdool Karim are two of the leading HIV/AIDS reserachers in the
country, not to mention the world. I’m serious, you should google them! They
have two clinics, one in a rural area and one right in Durban, where they do
all sorts of research and clinical trials. They mentioned that in the urban
clinic they do a lot of work with co-infection of HIV with TB and to clinical
trials of different treatment regiments. One of the things they do in the rural
areas is education based research, where they have 14 different schools that
they give money to and run different programs to motivate students. Students
must get tested once a year for HIV as well as maintain their grades, but the
program promotes sports, involvement, and also provides like a life coaching
type of thing in order to help motivate students and develop life skills.
Quarraisha was also one of the people who developed the Life Orientation
program to be implemented in schools post apartheid! Crazy. It was such an
amazing experience getting to talk to them, not only because their house was
incredible, but also because they are very intelligent and well connected people.
Hopefully we can use that connection in the future! They already invited us to
visit the rural clinic if we so desire!
Tuesday 28 Feb 2012
Todays Zulu lecture was absolutely infuriating. Bev was in
rare form. Maybe its because I haven’t slept well the past couple of nights so
I’m extra cranky, but I think we all agreed that Bev was pushing it this
morning. Hence the title of the post. We have a test tomorrow, and a lot of it
is on stuff that she has just mentioned in passing, hasn’t covered in depth, or,
my favorite, that SHE JUST TAUGHT US THIS MORNING! There are like 11 different
noun classes in Zulu, each that usues different concords and prefixes, etc. The
first two are distinguished by people vs. things, but then the others all have
animals, things, people, etc… so basically anything can be a part of them. Bev
happened to briefly mention all of them today and expects us to know them for
the test tomorrow. It would be one thing if she could adequately explain them
to us, but we have basically all had to teach it to ourselves and explain it to
eachother. And she asks the most annoying questions and is just generally…
annoying. She gave us these 10 fill in the blanks to help us review, but then
proceeded to give us about 45 seconds to do all of them before yelling out the
answers at us, which confused us even more. I’m going to stop ranting about
Beverly now before I get myself all worked up again.
Other than that we’ve had boring lectures about methods for
our research and how to cite in APA format. Its currently lunch time and I’m
typing up this post while waiting for the ancient scanner to scan a bagillion
documents into the computer. We have to send copies of our passports and stuff
to OverlandingAfrica to reserve our trip to Zimbabwe and Botswana at the end of
the trip!!!!!!!
Spoiler alert for
the rest of the week:
Tomorrow night we are going to a Bafana Bafana vs. Senegal
soccer match! So we get to go to the world cup stadium again. (also, fun fact,
my computer just tried to change that to Banana Banana…)
Saturday is our goodbye party for our families.
Sunday we leave Cato and head to our rural homestays!!!
Goodbye civilization….
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