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!
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