Farewell

This was the schedule for us this week.

Monday: Youth Day! Don't go to work.
Tuesday: Meeting with our professor 9am-10am, but that's enough activity for the day. Take the rest of the day off.
Wednesday: No planned activities...work on your project?
Thursday: Consolidation day- take the day to reflect on what you've accomplished this week.
Friday: Farewell! Please come into the office so we can properly say goodbye.

Africans are funny.

Despite being a tad stir crazy, this week was a nice reflection week. I completed a lot of my work that was due this week. If you are interested in reading my fieldwork reflection paper, let me know! It's riveting.

I can't believe this is my last day. I'm trying to soak everything in knowing that I won't see the beautiful savannah of the Limpopo province for a very long time. I hope you have enjoyed following along with my travels! I get home July 1st and then I will have my US phone =). I really do miss my iPhone.

Tomorrow at 6 am we leave for Capetown. At least, we told the transport to get us at 6 am. So we might actually leave at 9. Who knows. I'm not quite sure how I'm going to fit everything into one suitcase because I literally bought up the whole place. The problem with shopping in South Africa is that EVERYTHING is cheap, and it's hard to make yourself stop buying EVERYTHING.

And then I'm sure, I will go crazy in Capetown as well. On our agenda we have a wine tour, a visit to Robben island, the beaches and shopping, and of course going out. We can't stop screaming AHHH CAPETOWN. I think we all have a little cabin fever. I'm not sure if I will have internet access in Capetown, so to reach me, here is my south african cell phone number. +27 084 484 0141.

But don't get crazy, airtime is expensive.

Yay! Camping!

First, I apologize for not having pictures to go with this account of my weekend. All my devices were dead. This annoyed Lebo a lot. He likes my camera. 

This weekend, a couple of us wanted to break away from the group. Traveling in a group of ten can get pretty exhausting, even for an extrovert like me. Me-time is essentially non-existent here. We decided that to save money and to just rough it for once, we would go camping. At first, my friend Rachel and I were so excited, spontaneously screaming “YAY CAMPING!” whenever any silence in conversation happened. Lebo took us camping. Lebo has never camped before. He packed real glasses, ceramic plates, a tent that slept technically four but comfortably 3 and a tent sized for 2 children and a bunch of blankets instead of sleeping bags. He didn’t make any reservations at any campgrounds.  Our “YAY CAMPING!” became a little more tentative… like “yay camping!” but still, with enthusiasm.

We drove about two hours away to meet with a place he had to do business this and frantically tried to find a campground before night fell (around 5:30 PM, it’s kind of pathetic). We would pull up to the gate of the campsite and read the number on the sign and call and ask if there was space available. Three times we were turned down.

Yay …. Camping!

We were in an Afrikaans area. Afrikaans are the Dutch descendents that originally colonized South Africa and are notorious for their racial tensions with blacks during the Apartheid era. They are very tall and big bones. We, not so fondly, call them “the neanderthaals” or even less fondly, “the ogres.” If you can’t tell already, we don’t find them to be particularly friendly. We finally found a place that would let us camp. Lebo was the only black person on the entire campground. The old South African flag was up. No one spoke to us. Lebo said, “if anyone asks, I’m only your driver.” Our neighbor sat outside his camper and unabashedly shot us death glares for the next 2 hours.

Yay….camping…

The “bry” that they gave us (a fire pit), was very tall. It was more like a grill. So the only way to be around the fire was to stand. When it was time to go to bed, out of sheer desperation for more body heat, all five of us crammed into the four-person tent. Lebo got fed up with tent life about 30 minutes in and turned on the car for heat and slept in there. Nights in South Africa get down to about 35 or 40 degrees Fahrenheit.  The four of us spent the next 6 hours fighting over blankets and shuddering. I think I maybe got a good 2 hours of sleep.

Yay. Camping.

Lebo woke us up in the morning by playing Rick Ross on his blackberry. He seemed to think camping went really well.

Rachel turns to me and drearily mumbles “camping” …without the yay.

The Fortune Teller

I officially have 4 days left in Polokwane and in Eltasha. How did this happen!?

Right now we are finishing our group projects and writing a reflection paper for the entire experience. We all just realized how little time we have left to complete our assignments and I think some of us are starting to get stressed out. I know I am. I also know that as it comes nearer for us to go home, making arrangements regarding things in the United States is also a problem. I’m starting to organize my work schedule, decide when I’m going to babysit, and plan trips to visit friends in NYC. On that note, if you’re in NYC, let me know because I’m hopefully going to make a mass visit sometime in July or August.

This past week held a lot of really valuable experiences. We visited two different Traditional Healers. The first that we visited seemed to really believe in her form of medicine, was very willing to work with western medical facilities, and was an accomplished professor at the University of Limpopo. While I didn’t fully understand or, frankly, believe in her style of medicine, she did full heartedly. The man pictured below was a traditional healer in a village located just off the main road, but felt like it was hours away from anything. We refer to this man as “the fortune teller.” Despite having talked about so frequently in our global health classes about making peace between traditional and western medicine, I had a very hard time garnering up much respect for him. The things he told Morgan about herself were a) not true or b) applied to almost every woman on the planet.

According to the fortune-teller, here is how you cure HIV positive patients.

1. Take a very hot steam bath and sweat out all of your toxins.
2.   Take a special laxative he gives you to excrete the rest of the toxins.
3. Take the medicine he gives you to replace everything that you lost during the de-tox.
4. Take the next medicine, which lasts for one week, to cure you of HIV.

And wah-lah! In just one week, you will be cured! To me, it sounds like a bad American fad diet, except for that it promotes the spread of an absolutely deadly disease. 

Another blog post on my weekend is coming up. It was…interesting.

Hey friends! Want to hear a funny joke?

This is what I thought Sun City looked like:

You know, like a City. Like a city with streets that you walk around in and go into shops and stuff. 

Sun City is actually a gambling resort with fake rocks and stuff. 

So we paid an entrance fee and then had to pay for everything else we did. It was kind of weird. We traveled 5 hours to not even stay at the resort- just to go in it for  day. We were very confused. We probably should have looked it up before we went... oh well. 

It was still a blast! We managed to have a fantastic time. 

We went on another safari!! It was at 6:30 am. Some of us looked like this: 

But, those of us who were awake saw some pretty amazing things!! 

One of the main attractions was this elephants penis, which is not pictured here. It literally dragged on the ground. One of the more impressive things I have seen in South Africa. I'll be sure to share it on facebook when I get a chance. 

Here are some things I miss about the Sates: 

1. Ketchup: it tastes weird here. Like sweet. 
2. The Waffle Shop: residents of state college, you have no idea how good we have it. 
3. Not being groped by men: I miss my freedoms as a woman in the United States and being able to make my own choices and travel by myself. 
4. Driving: I'm not allowed to drive here and I really miss driving the manual Honda Accord around  town with my own music at a bearable volume level. Watching these people drive stick all the time is making me jealous. Also, just being able to rely on myself for transportation would be nice. It gets annoying that I can't just get up and go anywhere- a lot of organization is needed to get transport. 
5. Predictable food times: I usually have no idea when I'm going to eat next. The rotation is to be starving and then so full you can't button up your pants. Its a vicious cycle. 
6. I miss State. I really do love my school and wish I could just bring it to South Africa. PS. Mom, on that note, can you get my student section football tickets for me? I don't think I will have internet access at the right time :(

I can't believe I only have 2 weeks left of fieldwork and only one weekend left in Limpopo. I get all sad and stuff when i think about it. Like I can't listen to some songs for fear of getting too sentimental. I really do love it here and I've had one of the best summers of my life. I will miss Lebo and Mmaphefo and Amma and Auntie Martha so much. 

gregory.emma@gmail.com 

Send me an email if you want to check in! I'm missing some contact from the outside world. 

This is Unis. He would like me to be his wife. This may just be because he's impressed with the exchange rate between the dollar and the rand... anyways, there are some conditions.

1. I must agree to him being the “head of the household.” Otherwise, he is allowed to cheat on me.
2.  I must have 11 babies.
3. If one of our children turns out gay, we must disown them.

Don’t we sound perfect for each other? Apart from entirely disagreeing with him on every topic, he’s perfect!

This past week we have been with Unis and his fellow student dietitians, Clinton, DeeJay, Charlene, etc. I’m pretty sure those aren’t their real names, just their “pronouncable” names. For example, Unis is actually Maunatlala  Tebogo. They are therapeutic nutrition students and prescribe diets to people in the hospital. We did some rounds with them the first day, but then after that we kinda just screwed around and got to know them. Yay for making friends! Finally people our own age! 

Also, we went ZIP LINING IN CANYONS!!! The really good pictures of me were taken by other people, but I have some to give you an idea of how amazing and beautiful the experience was. Also, it was 410 rand-- about 43 dollars. That's NOTHING compared to what zip lining costs in the States. 

It was truly breathtaking. And as always, if I'm anywhere cool, I gotta throw my diamonds up!! 

In all seriousness, THON has taught me to never let a moment go to waste. These beautiful experiences of life could slip through my fingers at any moment. If I didn't take advantage of every second of my ONE LIFE I would be disgracing the kids and all the people who have lost their lives. I'm so grateful to be in South Africa. I am making friends that will last, and I am making memories that will last even longer. 

It's all good news here!! I'll post more after we go to Sun City this weekend!! I'M SO EXCITED!! 

Beginning my third week...holy poop

Hello friends.

I think the group is definitely easing into life in South Africa. Like normal life. There isn’t a bon fire at Eltasha every night, we don’t find ourselves sitting around and having extremely deep talks. As a group we are starting to like our time apart as much as we like it together.  We travel less as a pack of 10 and more in small groups. We have a routine of how we like to make our sandwiches for the day, make dinner for each other, etc. We hail our own mini-busses (the equivalent of a taxi here), and can finally figure out whether we should signal with our hands downward (local), or upwards (out of town) when we hail them. We know when we are being ripped off and when something is a good price. We have a slew of inside jokes that get us through the day when we are just sitting around the health promotion unit in our little conference room waiting to be told what to do.

I can speak some spedi now. Very little, but enough to impress people. Christin, who the eltasha management calls “Terabyte” shows us all up because she soaks up the language like a sponge. Hence the name terabyte.

I’m not saying that I have South Africa in my pocket, but I certainly do feel a little more at ease. Everything isn’t as much of a puzzle. For example, I know that I have to turn left and then right to get to the Pick N Pay (the supermarket) in the mall, I know that I have to be asked to be seated at Mugg n Bean (the coffee shop we like). All of these things are great improvements from our first week.

It’s kind of funny because our professor showed up this week and is following us around to our field sites and accompanying us in our daily activities. She keeps saying things that we already know, as if she has forgotten we have been here for like 2 weeks.

This weekend we went to an “open air museum” which is a reconstruction of a traditional village with people who reenact weaving, fire making, etc. Except, when we visited “all the employees got paid the day before and didn’t come to work today.” So we had a lone tour guide show us around an empty village. It was still pretty cool. He showed us how the huts would be arranged according to the number of wives the chief had.  He showed us that there were separate huts for cooking, sleeping and storage. We were quickly escorted into the van and driven to down town Polokwane where we were supposed to see a museum. When we entered the museum, we were told that the event for the day wouldn’t be ready until later in the afternoon so we all piled into the van again.

 Then we drove an hour to a neighborhood just to pick up two pieces of toast stuffed with ham, hot dog-like meat, fries, cheese sauce and an egg. This was wrapped in saran wrap into a tight little pocket. It was a pocket of pretty much the most unhealthy things I’ve ever put into my body at one given time. It was a brick of fat. I could only eat half. We ate at 1 pm and I didn’t eat again until 9 that night. Then we were driven to the museum and dropped off by the drivers. No one told us what this event was, no one told us how long it would be, no one told us what the museum even was about. I mean, this was a pretty typical African day. I just feel like we are always swimming lazily around without much direction and then Africans gently push us in a different direction and we float along that way. I wake up in the morning assuming that everything I have anticipated for the day will probably not happen.

Also, I’ve gotten used to instant coffee. For everyone who knows me as a coffee fiend, you know what a feat this is.

Today we began work in our clinics! I’m excited to get settled into our field sites. Already I have seen a dog bite and a scorpion bite and a lot of diabetes hypertension patients. My group mate and I decided that for our group project we would investigate the relationship between nutritional status and their access to food through case studies. So hopefully that with informal interviews, we will be able to get a better understanding of their food situation and determine their main source of food. Then, we will hopefully go to that source of food and profile them as well. It’s not exact science, we aren’t exactly authorized to survey people and do real research here. I’m just really excited to engage with people in the community.

Well, on that note, I shall leave you. Hopefully I will provide more details about my clinical experience in the future!

Week 2!!

Hello friends!

Meet the new and laid back Emma who is TOTALLY down with African time. I’ve never been this relaxed in my life. It’s awesome.

This week has been kind of interesting because we have hung around the health promotion unit a lot. Tea time will run into lunch time and before you know it we would have had a 2 hour break. We bring a Frisbee for us to play with in downtime. They also have lemon trees and we take walks around the premises often to get lemons for our tea. It’s really beautiful there, I’ve never read so much in my life.

Because things have been rescheduled a lot- we haven’t been to a lot of places. We have a lot of classroom conversations. We have been sitting on the health promotion module classes of a masters level education program. Those conversations have been interesting and eye opening. Visiting places is even more eye opening. We went to the main campus of university of Limpopo and saw there student health clinic. They gave us a little educational talk about HIV/AIDS and other safe behaviors and explained all the materials they used. We went to a private hospital and saw how they run things there. The private hospitals here are state of the art- funded by patients who pay for medical aid- the equivalent of our insurance. The hospital doesn’t employ the doctors- the doctors are paid by the medical aid of the patients who subscribe to their private practice. The doctors simply use the hospital as a place to practice in. Because doctors don’t simply work at a hospital 8 hours a day making rounds, nurses are a very respected profession here and they have more responsibilities than nurses here.

We do the Insanity workout program every day in our little court yard. Yesterday we all did Insanity and then ran and jumped into the pool. The guesthouse management (Mmaphefo, Lebo, Auntie Martha) all thought we were crazy. It was like 70 degrees out and they were all wearing wool coats and long pants and hats. The pool was ice cold and I was just in my sports bra and shorts. So then I ran into their house and hugged all of them after I was soaking wet. They were laughing hysterically and asking me to get off of them. They thought I was nuts. Amma, the little ten year old girl that is the daughter of the manager, follows us every where. Even though she was freezing as soon she saw that we were getting in the pool she ran in the house and put on her bikini. She was the one that led me to Auntie Martha and Mmaphefo when I tried to get them all wet. We have a pretty good relationship. 

This is me and Nala. She is always trying to get into my room. 

This is a picture of the scenery around the Health Promotion Unit where we work (my face is included as scenery):

Amma is wearing my clothes because she put on her bikini and immediately regretted it. She looks adorable. Honorary morale captain! 

This is our little conference room that we hang out in when we do work in the health promotion unit. I think mostly we are just watching funny youtube videos right now... 

Me Amma and Ashley making dinner. Amma likes stealing my camera more than she likes us taking pictures of her. She also filled up Andrew's shoes with sand as a prank. She's sassy and hilarious.