Cages

I’m starting to have fun with this blogging thing; it gives me a great feeling of power to think that when I write things, people read them, and even take the millisecond to hit the “like” button. That being said, getting past the title of this post has taken me a long time because I can’t really think of anything amusing or witty to say.

On Saturday, the new international students (a group comprised of a pile of Americans, two Frenchmen, one Frenchwoman, and one Zimbabwean) went on a bus tour to areas surrounding Pietermartizburg. Our first stop was at this beautiful waterfall.

I think these people at the top were doing laundry and hanging it up to dry.

I wanted to hike to the bottom of the falls rather than visiting the surrounding extremely tourist-oriented shops (especially after our tour guide told me I wouldn’t be safe without some boys), but there wasn’t time. Instead I talked to Andrew, one of the UKZN students who works for the international office doing things like picking international students up from the airport and making sure we know that we need to get temporary swipe cards when we arrive. Andrew is from Nigeria, where mangoes taste much better than the poor imitations they have in South Africa. In Nigeria, there’s no age requirement for driving because many people don’t even have birth certificates to prove their age. Andrew was surprised to hear that I also had a hard time getting my student permit to come here, because the hard part for him was getting a court affidavit certifying his age. There’s an election coming up in Nigeria, but he doesn’t expect Nigerians living abroad to be able to vote by mail anytime in the next 50 years, besides everyone already knows that the current president is going to win, and even though he hasn’t done an impressive job, he’s still the best candidate among those running.

Next the bus took us to a place called World’s View. This was apparently named by very inexperienced people who weren’t aware that the world in fact extends a good deal beyond Pietermartizburg in several directions, but it was a nice view.

We got back on the bus and headed to Haniville, one of the extremely poor areas of the city.

The houses are tiny.

They have no running water.

The HIV positive rate is 60% and many households are run by children because both parents have died. We visited Walk in the Light ministries, an organization that helps the people of Haniville by driving those who are sick with AIDS or TB to the clinics each morning and driving them home at night, caring for people who have no family member that are willing and able to care for them, and teaching computer classes to put people in a better position to get jobs. As we walked around, people stared at the troupe of foreigners; some waved from their doorsteps, some ignored us from their clotheslines, a drunken man asked how we were doing, and little boys redirected their games of tap to chase along beside us. I had imagined that seeing such poverty first hand would be some sort of epiphanic experience in which all those pictures I’d seen in National Geographic suddenly because real and poignant, but I think the reason I came to South Africa for a whole semester is that nothing you do in an hour with a tour guide can make you understand another person’s life.

Every time some appliance doesn’t work or some process is made overly complex due to a shortage of computers, I’m a little bit more grateful for the wonderful life I have in the United States. Now I understand why the South Africans on my floor don’t complain when one burner on the stove doesn’t heat up. At least I have a stove to cook on. At least I have clothes to wash. At least my parents made it easy for me to go to college. At least my parents are alive. Still, the kids playing in the streets seemed just as happy as the ones in my neighborhood in Bloomington.  I hope I get a chance to go back and talk to some people so I can get an idea of what things make their lives so hard, and what things make them happy anyway.

Our last stop on the tour was a little zoo-type place called the Crafty Duck. While we were waiting for our lunch to be made, we talked to the student from Zimbabwe. I would spell his name Tunga if it were English or Thunga if it were Zulu, but since it’s neither, I can only guess. Someone asked him if Zimbabwe is a lot like South Africa. He said they are very different, but it’s hard to explain, “It seems like in South Africa, people who don’t have an education are struggling, but in Zimbabwe, all people are struggling.” While he’s coming to school in South Africa, his dad is working in Uganda, his mom is working in Mozambique, and his little sister is still in Harare because the primary schools in Zimbabwe are actually quite good. And I thought being on another continent with malfunctioning Skype for one semester was hard...

I had samp and beans with lamb curry for lunch. Later I saw a bag of samp at the grocery store and it looked like coarsely chopped kernels of white corn.

  

  Most of the animals were farm animals, including things we see all the time in the U.S. like bunnies and ducks. There were also some cool parrots and a number of snakes, which became quite frightening once our tour guide explained their various abilities to rear up several feet in the air, shoot poison in people’s eyes, make you go unconscious before the ambulance has time to arrive, etc.

Then we got to hold a boa constrictor. This is Thunga (however you spell it).

  Here’s Andrew.

And here’s me!

Then we went back to campus and thought about everything that we had seen.

I thought about cages. In the little zoo, the animals lived in cages. I’m sure they’re fed every day and cared for, yet living in a cage can never really replicate their natural habitat. They are surrounded by people starting at them, but at the same time are isolated from others of their species. The homes in Haniville were each surrounded by a fence, and as we walked past them, it gave me the impression that these people too live in cages, but a very different sort of cages. Cages with no washing machines or internet, that house too many people with not enough food. Cages that are increasingly difficult to escape because of the plague of AIDS which tears apart so many families. I thought of Andrew and Thunga who escaped the cages they were born into by coming to study in South Africa. I hope that Thunga is able to get a job in the United States like he wants to, and I hope that something will bring down the bars that enclose Haniville.

Queues

3 February 2011

In South Africa, they say plate instead of burner, robot instead of traffic light, and module instead of course. In South Africa, they have queues instead of lines. In the United States (or as they say, “on that side”), I have often found myself waiting in line behind several other customers. In these situations, I know how many people are ahead of me, and I know the average rate at which these people are moving, so I can calculate the approximate time remaining until I will arrive at the front of the line and accomplish my planned business. Sometimes I determine that the required time is not worth the benefit, but even at the BMV, these waiting times are finite.

In a queue, there is no such calculating. You may wait in a queue for ages, and then learn that the service you’re after is not available until Monday. You may wait in the same queue four separate times to get a form, then another form, then a key, then a card. You may wait in an unmoving queue for the staff’s entire lunch break. You may wait in a queue for no clear purpose and when you’ve finished, still not know what the stamp on your form accomplished. You may wait in a seemingly sensible queue, only to find when you reach the front that you should’ve weighed your cheese, and then dash to another queue at the weighing station only to find that your cheese can’t be weighed after 5pm. At this point, you must give up on the cheese entirely and dash back to the original queue to finish your transaction so you don’t become the cause of an eternal queue. You may wait in a single queue at the post office that feeds into six counters, all with complicated labels that have absolutely nothing to do with purchasing stamps. On the other hand, you may wait in a queue that (based on your previous experiences) is likely to last all day for just a few minutes before a phone call or a man in uniform informs you that international students don’t have to wait in the queue at all but can leap ahead to a different much shorter process.

The amazing thing is, this system somehow works. South Africans mail their letters and buy their food, if not the barcode-lacking cheese. College students manage to get into their rooms, register for their modules, and activate their ID cards. I guess while I’m here, I’ll wait in queues and it’ll work for me too. But I think I’ll bring a book when I go to get my ID activated.

Wow

2 February 2011

When I heard about a nature preserve not far from campus, I decided that in spite of not knowing where it was nor having internet access, I must go there. After sketching our route based on the map of Pietermaritzburg hanging on the wall of the library, disentangling ourselves from two extremely chatty 70-year-old Jehovah’s Witnesses, and eating sandwiches at Braai and Bakery, three friends and I set out on the trek. Roughly 4km later, we reached the park. We learned from a passing driver, who unlike all the other South Africans we’ve talked to assured us that we’re quite safe here, that we should turn left to find the park entrance. The first animals we saw after entering the park were …horses! Not very exciting. A worker sent us back the way we’d come but inside the fence to find a pedestrian entrance to the game reserve, and within just a few minutes, we spotted a zebra, and soon a group of several more zebras. Then I saw a pair of very long legs, and as we looked more closely, several pairs of very long legs.

 It’s amazing to see five zebras run across the path in front of you.

 

This was designated as the picnic area, and there were giraffes and zebras everywhere!

We also saw many beautiful butterflies, but these were the only ones that understood that they should stay still long enough for us to take a picture.

These grasshoppers seemed too cool to be real.

I have to include a fungus picture.

 We also glimpsed three monkeys moving in the trees a little way from the path.
In this picture, you can see woven inhlokohloko nests across the pond and another woven nest hanging from the cattails in the foreground. There were bright red birds presumably chasing potential mates across the pond, and a couple types of duck-like water birds swimming.

 When we circled back, we got really close to a giraffe. There are no fences between me and that giraffe.

It was awesome to watch it grab a branch with its long, black tongue and then jerk its head back, making the boughs shake as it pulled off the tiny, tough leaves. After every few chomps, it would move its head down toward us as though it was making sure we weren’t a threat. Don’t come away from this video (if it actually works) with the impression that you know what it’s like to stand five meters from a grazing giraffe; it’s much more breath-takingly amazing in person.

 

The zebras tend to stand paired up like this. Maybe on the long-awaited day when I get my hands back on Wikipedia, I’ll learn why.

As I watched the seemingly awkward legs of five giraffes run swiftly and gracefully to a new cluster of trees, I couldn’t help thinking of what the Jehovah’s Witnesses had told us that morning about God creating the creatures on Earth for people to enjoy, and I wished that I had some way of explaining to them how much more deeply a knowledge of evolution allows us to appreciate these creations.

Important lesson #3: When you're near the equator, the sun is almost directly overhead. Wherever you are, the sun is very hot. Wear sunscreen.