July 30: Home

I got out of Dulles airport a little after 5 on Friday afternoon after spending about 35 hours in transit. The jet lag from gaining six hours has been horrible and I’ve only been sleeping until between 3 and 5 every morning, leading to very little productivity and a lot of sitting around being exhausted.

On Thursday, Univen provided a driver to take me and my roommate plus a UVA professor who had been working with another team the five hours to Johannesburg. He entertained us the entire way with interesting information about the landmarks and stories of how he used to drive armoured vehicles in Joburg and was hijacked multiple times by men with guns. According to him, the police would wait at least an hour before venturing to the scene of the shootout and robbery to avoid encountering the criminals.

It was surprisingly easy to get through the security at O.R. Tambo for our 8:15 p.m. flight (though not so easy getting through the awesome stores without spending money) and we got into London an hour earlier than our 6:55 a.m. arrival time. The flight from Dulles to London came in late, presumably because of some storms Dulles had, so our flight was pushed back from 12:15 to 1:30 and we had plenty of time to waste in our terminal. There was no Starbucks within my security area, unfortunately, but there was another coffee shop that offered white mochas and it was the best cup of a coffee beverage I’ve ever had. It's wonderful that I can use a credit card in another country so I didn't have to worry about exchanging dollars or rand for pounds just to get a cup of coffee. We were there the morning the Olympics started, so there were a lot of Olympics staff members and stores selling very expensive memorabilia that I considered getting just because it’s British. I think if the airport really wanted to take advantage of their Britishness, they’d set up a Harry Potter store next to the one selling Will and Kate wedding photos and little bears wearing guard uniforms. The flight back to Dulles and getting through customs were uneventful and all of my peri-peri sauce made it back unbroken.

I take the MCAT on Saturday and then pack to go back to school, so my summer adventures are over, though I'll continue to work on my manuscript for a few months. Thanks to everyone who kept up with my travels and for the comments and support – it helped me feel connected while I was so far away.

I’ll probably post some pictures and videos on here again once I sort through them all.

July 24: I’ll be home soon!

This is the last post I can write while here since I have to give the modem back tomorrow and will be without internet until Friday night.

We went to the field today with one of our advisors to assist with some quality assessment and check up on some children I pegged as not growing correctly from their data. The participants in the study are in several villages and we visited a good number of them including Pile, Tshandama, Dzimauli, and Tshibvumo. Instead of just observing this time, I got to help with all aspects except communicating with the mothers. I was even recruited by a mother to hold a smiley naked infant while she got him a diaper and one father tried to get his clingy little boy to transfer to my lap after we traumatized him by putting him on a scale.

As much as I claim to hate children and avoid them and their noise when I’m in the states, I can’t help but enjoy the children I’ve met here. They’re generally quiet and well-behaved, which is good because they are everywhere, and when they are making noise it’s usually because they’re excited to see a white person. We went to two creches (daycares) to measure some participants and at the first the children started crowding at the fence and pointing at us. They started chanting “Makuah!” and then made it a more elaborate song once I’d started filming it that was translated to mean “two white people and one just pulled out a camera.” They formed a semicircle around us and every time I looked down they were closer and jostling each other to be in front. We measured the children we needed in a room separate from the others, but there was always a solid mass of children pressing as far as they dared through the doorway and against the windows.

People keep asking me if I could live here permanently and one of my reasons why I don’t think I can handle much more than the time I’ve already been here is all the dirt.  All the children are dusty, the cows are dusty, everyone’s belongings are permanently stained red, and I have to constantly dig dust out of my ears. I can actually scrub my face clean before going to bed and find that my cloth is completely red again as soon as I wake up in the morning and my clothes are never clean. I’ve noticed that a lot of households try to keep their living areas cleaner by laying concrete or something I assumed was mud mixed with grass. We were chastised by one woman for walking too close to where she was spreading the mud when it was explained that the mud was actually cow dung. It dries to a decently resilient, but easily replaceable, solid layer over the dirt and can be swept clean. The source explains the fine plant particles that make it soft to touch. It’s also cheaper than concrete and easier to work with since it can just be spread on the ground by hand in the exact design one wants.

The household complexes generally consist of a few round huts and one brick house connected by concrete or dung walkways. My roommate asked what the round huts were used for when there was an actual house available and we were told that they’re the original dwellings of the families. Apparently families will settle on a plot and use the round huts while they save money and prepare for the larger, more permanent house. A couple places we visited didn’t have a house, but had half-finished foundations for one. Once they move into the house, they can let other people use the huts, use them as sitting rooms, or keep their kitchen in one. In the villages, a lot of people still have outdoor “kitchens” which consist only of a place for a fire on the ground. Some are just out in the open or have a makeshift shelter over them. Then we went to a house that was furnished so richly that I couldn’t believe I was just watching a mother sit in the dirt in a dark unfurnished hut to feed her child. The gap between the average and the wealthy on the same road in the villages was astounding.

At the first house we went to I noticed a dog that was limping on two legs. He had a huge tear in his skin in the pit between his chest and one of his front legs, so deep that the muscle was exposed. My first impulse was to snatch him away and find a vet, but animals aren’t valued the same way here as they are in the U.S. and I wouldn’t have been able to find a vet anyways. Dogs aren’t considered companions and friends as much as they’re seen to be a part of the land or vermin. Some of the Univen students were appalled that people let dogs sleep in their beds with them and would never consider toting one around. Cats aren’t pets at all and exist as feral animals that we’re warned to avoid. The poor dog didn’t look like he’d been in a fight, so I guessed that he’d caught himself on one of the barbed wire fences that surround nearly every plot. He didn’t seem to be in any horrible pain and was getting around fine on two legs, so I begrudgingly left him. Nearly every house we visited after that had at least one scruffy dog sleeping in the sun, which was bad news for my advisor’s fear of dogs. They all seemed to be of the same breed and I could see some African wild dog in their faces. Most of them, despite looking like they’ve never been clean in their lives, were adequately fed. There were a few, however, that were legitimately emaciated, scrounging for bugs and scraps in the house’s trash pile. I’ve seen plenty of skinny strays, but I don’t understand keeping a dog around the house and not feeding it. One puppy, not more than a couple months old, was so wasted I could make out individual bones. It and its mother were so scared of being hit that when I gently put my hand out for it to sniff, they jumped away in fear. One of the last houses we were at had some particularly vocal dogs and the first I’d seen with cropped tails. When the owner was chasing them away from us by hitting them with rocks, I noticed that the tails had been recently cropped and the stumps were open wounds. It took a lot of willpower to just walk away from a lot of the animals and I was wishing desperately that I’d had a bag of beef jerky to hand out to the starving puppies. I’m going to give my dog extra attention when I get back.

My roommate and I are going to make no-bake cookies (the only “pastry” we can make with our one working burner and no stove) for the office tonight since tomorrow is our last day there. I expect we’ll spend most of it saying goodbye to people and then I want to knock off early to replace some of the chocolate that I’d bought to take back but ate already and start packing.

It’s hard to believe that the entire summer is gone already and I spent it living in South Africa. I know that trips abroad are common for college students, but I think that this kind of experience is a lot more valuable than the tourist trips that are usually available. Aside from the research I’ve been involved in, which is eye-opening in itself, I got a chance to live among the Venda people in an area that is radically different from what I know. Instead of staying in a tourist-friendly hotel, I stayed in a cabin where the kitchen is dark, the doors don’t close, and lizards live in the ceiling. Instead of sticking to “safe” tourist sites, I followed a man to a forbidden lake and wandered around in the bush with my knife out. If I wanted to eat, I had to cook it myself or hope that the restaurant food wasn’t tainted. If I wanted to get to work or the store, I had to walk and run across streets between moving cars. I was given the very unique opportunity to become part of a foreign community for two months and get to know the people as people just like me, but with a greater affinity for pap and Mopani worms, rather than seeing them as objects to be photographed and viewed from outside. I have a family half a world away, now, from whom I’ve learned so much. I definitely would not have given up this experience for anything.

We had some issues figuring out how my roommate and I are getting back to Johannesburg on Thursday for our flight, but Univen is kindly providing transportation. We’re flying out of O.R. Tambo on Thursday night, will layover in London for a few hours Friday morning, and then I’ll reach Dulles around 3 p.m. Friday afternoon. I hope the night flight will make adjusting to regaining six hours easier and I know the triple venti white mocha I plan to get at the first coffee shop I can find in London will definitely help.

July 21: Happy Birthday, Madiba!

I’ve been meaning to post since Wednesday, but every time I get on the computer I either have an assignment to do or I get distracted with Spider Solitaire.

July 18 is Nelson Mandela’s birthday, which has always warranted unofficial celebration and as of this year is an official holiday. The purpose of Mandela Day is to honor his service to the country by devoting oneself to at least 67 minutes of community work. I asked about the significance of 67 minutes and was told that it was his prison cell number, but the official Mandela Day literature says that it’s because he devoted more than 67 years to the country. A lot of people refer to him as Madiba, which is his clan's name in the Xhosa language.

To do our own 67 minutes, we joined a bus full of people to go to Matangari village where there’s a drop-in center for orphaned youth. The director of the center arranged a number of service activities, from filling a dangerous ditch with rocks to irrigating green beans to helping clean a disabled man’s house. I discovered just after it was too late to turn back that I’d left my camera at Acacia on the day I was most likely to get great photos. My roommate gave me permission to use her camera, thank goodness. We joined two Univen students and went to Ndidivhani Primary School to give a motivational speech to the 6^th and 7^th graders. As we walked in the gate, the children were on a break and were milling around. Most of them just looked at us and laughed and pointed, but one little charmer named Furuzhan came up and asked us where we were from. He couldn’t have been older than 7. The other boys his age were making fun of him and kept coming over and hitting or pulling him away to keep him from talking to us, but each time they’d pull his sweater over his face or knock him down, he’d run and catch back up and continue talking.

The 6^th and 7^th graders were uncomfortable using English, so one of the Univen students translated for us and we talked about what careers the students were interested in. There were the generic teacher, policeman, soldier, pilot answers that every child gives, but I was surprised that we also got answers like electrical engineer and automobile designer. The Univen students left halfway through and left me and my roommate to answer the rest of the questions with the help of the teacher, but we couldn’t give adequate answers about the requirements to become a doctor or lawyer in South Africa.

Just before we left, the teacher asked us to explain to the girls that they need to stay in school through Grade 12 instead of dropping out to have children. Apparently there’s a government program that gives R250 per month to mothers per every child they have and the promise of a decently steady, though small, income without having to work for it is huge motivation to just start having children early and forget about school. My first impulse was to tell them how having children at 14, 15, and 16 will destroy their bodies, but I stuck to the “if you don’t finish school, you can’t get a job” track. I’m not sure how seriously the children took anything we said since it was such a novel thing to have two makuah in their classroom struggling to answer questions, but if the teacher recognizes the problem of girls dropping out, I hope there are more tactics in place to discourage that course.

A group of women was working in the courtyard of the school complex cleaning the sidewalks. Since the red dust is everywhere, the sidewalks need constant sweeping to keep them from accumulating mounds of dirt. The ladies took it a step further and were sweeping the sidewalks with soapy water and brooms. It seemed very inefficient and the bricks were dirty almost immediately afterward, but it was hard work. I was sweeping incorrectly, I guess, and ladies kept taking my broom away from me and doing it themselves until someone saw me standing there and gave me another broom until someone took it away again. We were a big hit an account of us being American and someone too my phone to pass around so everyone could get my number despite my warning them that I was leaving soon and my phone would be disconnected. One lady named Eunice was particularly delighted in everything I did and gravely embarrassed her daughter by making her shake my hand and say hi. She asked me to come back next winter and bring her a “fancy” jacket like the dirty $20 one I was wearing. At one point my roommate pulled out her camera and Eunice spotted it from across the courtyard and immediately started posing me and gathering more ladies and urging my roommate to take pictures. They made me pretend to sweep and piled around my back, more and more coming to the group once they realized there was a camera. A couple of them asked us to take pictures of just them making funny faces.

When we left the school to walk back to the drop-in center, the younger children had just been released. We had a tail of little girls who would laugh any time I looked over my shoulder at them. Once the boys joined them we had a sizeable group and I stopped everyone to ask them for a photo since it’s nearly obligatory to get at least one photo surrounded by children when you travel out of the country. They were hesitant at first, but once they realized what was happening, the group around me started growing rapidly. I signaled that the photo was done by giving a thumbs-up and saying “sharp,” which is a word used all the time to indicate that something is understood or fine. The children then started running after us yelling “sharp, sharp!” They were walking home, so as we passed different roads, our group grew smaller and smaller until only three children and a woman named Gloria, who was acting as our guide, were with us.

The children followed us to the drop-in center and I realized that they were orphans coming for homework help and food. The director of the center, a very kind and smart lady in a wheelchair, sat with me and talked briefly. She saw a need for a place that offers the orphans of the village support and also saw an opportunity to provide jobs for women since there are few things the women could do otherwise. She hopes to be able to build a place for the orphans to sleep in the future, since the center is only one building with a kitchen, bathroom, and open room right now and the children eat outside. I asked where the kids stay otherwise and she said with the “granny” but that it’s not an ideal placement since the grandmothers don’t have the authority to make the children stay in school. The center provides help with homework, at least one meal, a place to play and connect with maternal figures, and even birthday parties and help getting uniforms for school.

A group of ladies who work at the center and some volunteers surprised us by providing lunch for the people doing service as well as the orphans. Besides pap, the staple food, and meat, there were mashed potatoes with green beans mixed in (brilliant idea), sauce made of vegetables, sweet potatoes, and Chinese spinach. There were also huge bowls of boiled peanuts and I got a little too excited, but they were just boiled in water. No salt at all. I still liked them a lot better than dry peanuts, but not nearly as much as the boiled peanuts that I usually eat.

After everyone ate, we were asked to get into a circle so we could all touch, which meant hold hands. We all prayed, sang happy birthday to Mandela, and then they sang a gospel song that I tried to pick up. As everyone was preparing to go, some of the school children brought out a plastic bin to use as a drum and took turns drumming, singing, and dancing to native beats. I was so preoccupied watching the dancers that I left the water bottle that I’ve been using on a chair and didn’t get it before we left. It was getting somewhat dirty since a flaw in the design of the filtering apparatus is that I couldn’t get into the tube to clean out dirt that had accumulated between the filter and the mouthpiece, but it was purple and I liked it. I’d taught one of the boys to say “water” when he’d asked me what it was, so I hope the orphans can get some use out of it.

I was upset that I didn’t take my camera, but I’m actually somewhat glad I didn’t. I’m one of those people that usually have their eye to the camera constantly, filling a memory card every other day. I’ve been somewhat uncomfortable taking photos of people here since I am living among them and getting to know them as people rather than objects to study like I’m wont to do in a new environment. This has led to a lot of photos of food and dirt roads and very few of people despite the people being the most interesting aspect of the area. There were so many cameras out at the volunteer event that it would have been just fine for me to take 80 photos of everyone I saw. Instead of spending my time doing that and trying to find the child eating lunch in the best light with the best background of mango trees, though, I was talking to people and flirting with the children and taking in all of the social interaction that was happening. I’ll be able to get some photos from my roommate, so it worked out.

Thursday we went to the microbiology lab again. We’d hoped to run PCR on the DNA we’d extracted last week, but we ended up helping a bacteriologist named Alone process stool samples that had just arrived. We labeled some tubes for him and he explained how each of the samples is aliquotted and why. I refused to aliquot stool samples, not because it was an unappealing task, but because I really didn’t want to handle them without more substantial protective wear. I didn’t mind running a swab of sample on a dish to culture E. coli, though. The medium they use is a red colour and once the dishes are incubated, the bacteria and media are very pretty. I listened to Alone’s explanation of how the samples are divided so well that I corrected him at one point in the process, saving him from an error that would have meant lost samples. We ended by helping fill out some forms verifying the receipt of the samples.

The other UVA students at Acacia invited their Univen partners for dinner, so my roommate and I volunteered to bring some food. I’ve wanted to try to make beetroot since I tried a beet salad at Univen and I used this as an opportunity to do it. I had no idea how to make beets and no internet to look, so I improvised. I boiled the beets for close to an hour until they became soft. The water started out purple, but as I boiled it started looking more and more like old blood and splashed all over the stove and wall, looking like I massacred something. The skins were super easy to just push off once they were boiled, so we peeled them all, cut them up and I added some chopped up spring onions, which are just big green onions. It was beautiful and tasted so good. All for only R14, not even $2.

Today we walked up to the markets again to pass time. It was unbearably hot and crowded and we didn’t explore as much as we usually do before coming back. We’d followed one of the groundskeepers at Acacia to the market, following his example to cross streets. He warned us that we needed to be very careful not to get hit because nobody knows us here and it’d take a very long time for us to get back to the U.S. once we’re in coffins. Good advice.

We were supposed to go to church with one of our advisors tomorrow, but that might have fallen through. Church is an experience that I was hoping I’d get to do here, so I hope it still happens. Tomorrow’s the last chance since I go back home on Thursday. Only five more days! Where did my summer go?

June 15: Don’t need the gym when you don’t have a car

Acacia was booked solid for yesterday night because of a wedding party staying here so we had to vacate for a night. The other group of students went to Kruger and my roommate and I got reservations at another lodge in Thohoyandou. Lacking transportation, we left our suitcases in the laundry room of Acacia and walked down to Vhueni Village Lodge, maybe 4 kilometers away.

The lodge is set up like a village with round huts in the traditional style of the Venda, though made of brick instead of mud. It was a cool thought to stay in a round hut, but it doesn’t seem like round is very space-efficient. The curtain rods, the fridge, and the bed were all made for a flat wall and left a lot of empty space between the wall and the furniture. The bathroom was also pretty cramped and we had to walk through the shower to get to the toilet. Real round huts probably have less furniture and no internal plumbing and make the space work a lot better.

Since we had to leave Acacia by 10, we were at Vhueni by 11 and had a full day with nothing to do. Vhueni is even further out of town than Acacia is, so the only place within walking distance was a small shopping complex. We walked there for lunch, figuring we’d order from a pizza place that offered delivery for dinner. I was quite excited to find a chicken place that claimed to have vegetarian options but they actually didn’t. Instead I ate chips (fries) covered in hot peri-peri sauce. The more I eat of it, the more desensitized my tongue gets. They had some simple salads, but I’m hesitant to eat raw vegetables unless I know they’ve been thoroughly scrubbed/peeled in filtered water. While we were eating I looked out to see a man standing on the sidewalk with a huge semi-automatic gun and several more men wearing gun-proof vests. I was wondering if there was some sort of conflict the news wasn’t reporting, but they turned out to be guarding an armoured truck that was collecting money. There were some riots at a lecture given by the president in Limpopo last week and tear gas was thrown out, so I wasn’t jumping too far to think that something crazy was happening.

We spent the rest of the day watching whatever we could find on the four channels at the lodge (different channels than the four we get at Acacia). Around 6:30 we decided to order food, so I called the pizza place that delivers in Thohoyandou and they told me they don’t deliver, though he might have meant they couldn’t deliver at that time. We tried to call Nando’s because we saw that they deliver too, but they weren’t listed on the national Nando’s site and all phone numbers we could find were wrong. No other restaurants in town deliver and it was too dark to walk anywhere. I was almost resigned to eating a granola bar for dinner when the man at the front desk said that he had a microwave. We’d brought a package of veggie burgers, some bread, and a bottle of ranch dressing with us so we could keep them cold overnight, which was the perfect combination for a good dinner. We were able to use a microwave for the first time in a month, toast the bread, and borrow some plates from the lodge and made ourselves some ranch veggie burgers. Quite good.

I had a horrible night’s sleep, though. We retired around 10 due to lack of things to do and watch, but people outside were playing music, talking, laughing, and driving past our window until well after midnight. The rectangular door didn’t fit well into the round house, so there was a sizeable gap between it and the door frame allowing wind to shake the whole door all night long. Then the maintenance guys in the village started working around 6 to lay a brick wall right outside. It would have been a great place if it had been slightly quieter.

We checked out around 9 this morning and walked back to Acacia. It took about 40 minutes, so it was way too early to check back into Acacia. The two cleaning ladies had their hands full cleaning up after the rowdy wedding party that left bottles, cans, and chairs everywhere. To pass the time, we walked up to the markets. Sunday is church day and there was basically nobody around the markets, unfortunately. It was nice being able to walk without having to navigate through crowds, but there were also no stands open for business. We ate cheese pies for breakfast (an acquisition from the British?) and took a tour of every open store within two square kilometers. The stores always have manikins wearing comfortable-looking coloured pants outside so I went in search of those, but there were none. I was able to find a school uniform sweater in my size. The different schools have the same style uniforms in different colours, most of which are various Hogwarts house colours, so there are sweaters, pants, vests, track suits, socks, ties, and scarves in Gryffindor colours everywhere and much cheaper than getting official Hogwarts stuff. All the ones I’ve found until today were sized for a child and I looked in several stores before I found one even close to my size. The rest of the market venture was uneventful. We definitely walked 15+kilometers this weekend.

We were able to check back into the park around 12:45 and I studied for the MCAT for most of the afternoon. There was a group of guys sitting amongst a minefield of empty beer bottles that kept yelling “Baby! Baby!” at us when they saw us. They vacated and left a full bag of charcoal just sitting on the grass with all of their trash. I borrowed a braai-full from the bag and we decided to try making potatoes, carrots, and onions on the braai. I successfully got the grill going by guessing at how to do it and we were just over halfway done when the whole braai collapsed because of excessive rusting, spilling glowing coals and potatoes all over the ground. We scooped the coals back into the pan and dusted off the potatoes and I had to improvise finishing the carrots and onions. It didn’t turn out as well as I’d hoped it would and we definitely can’t use our braai again. Just as well, though, because it’s pretty tedious cooking on a braai and it’s needless since we’re not making any meat. Also, I feel bad adding to the constant smoky haze in the area due to bush fires, trash fires, and warmth fires.

I need to clarify something about the breastfeeding I mentioned in my last post. Those mothers at the discussion were breastfeeding, yes, but a huge problem in the area and the aspect of the MAL-ED project that my advisors are most interested in is that mothers don’t breastfeed correctly if they start at all. The WHO standards say that a baby should be exclusively breastfed for six months. This means no other substances ingested, including water. After this period of time, breastfeeding should continue with other foods until two years. No mothers in the area breastfeed exclusively for six months, and in fact regularly introduce solid food as early as three or four months. Several researchers and clinics are involved in figuring out why (a huge reason we had that meeting with the mothers) and changing it. The babies at the discussion were being breastfed to keep them quiet, but were also given juice, soda, and cookies in the time we were with them.

Part of the value of the MAL-ED project is identifying area-specific deficits in health education. Breastfeeding long enough is one of those. My project has more to do with things the mother can’t control, but it also will hopefully shed light on some of the intergenerational factors that affect the growth of a child and might explain predisposition towards several developmental problems.

It’s hard to believe that I only have one full week and a few days left before I go back home. I’ll be quite glad to get back to many conveniences that I never thought twice about before. Like microwaves and places that say they deliver food and actually deliver food and clean air.