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.