June 15: Univen and field work

I spent Wednesday and most of yesterday at the University of Venda meeting the people with whom I’ll be working and becoming familiar with the scope of the project I’m joining.

The university is 30 years old this year and was constructed to serve the people of this area. It’s fairly huge, has undergraduate through post grad programs, and is continuing to expand rather rapidly. I got a chance to tour the newly constructed life sciences and chemistry building that made me somewhat jealous with its roomy labs, huge picture windows, and the beginnings of an indoor garden flanking the staircases. There was even a specific room devoted to DNA extraction. Everything is still covered in red dust, but the trees on campus are beautiful and there was a pack of baboons that scurried across the road as we drove through the front gate.

My project falls under the Malnutrition and Enteric Diseases (MAL-ED) group, which has been collecting regular data on children in nearby villages for a couple years. I will be contributing to the work that the very devoted researchers and nutritionists have done by analyzing their data through any filter that I choose. The end result will hopefully be a greater understanding of the numbers that the field workers are gathering and what they mean for the children that they’ve been following and the area. I’ll likely get a chance to write my findings into a publication so that the info can be disseminated beyond this group. Doing actual research work is wonderful and I get to use human data without having to go through the painfully long process of internal review since this project is well established.

Yesterday I did a pretty thorough literature search for information on my topic (on very slow internet) so that I can narrow it to a manageable focus. I’m interested in looking at the diseases that the children have and might just focus on diarrheal diseases caused by parasites. I found myself leaning towards connecting it with water purity, which is my fallback topic in nearly all research I’ve done, so I want to keep thinking and branch out to something with which I’m not so comfortable. 

Today we went to visit some of the collection areas and see exactly how they get data and the environment of the children whose stats I’ll be analyzing. It was my first visit to a more rural area, so I was excited and pretty apprehensive that I’d break one of the social rules that I learned earlier this week. My Tshivenda is still very rudimentary, as I can only say “hello,” “thank you,” “I don’t eat meat,” and “I don’t speak Tshivenda.” Turns out that people understand that we don’t know what’s going on, think it rather funny, and will try to help us respond correctly.

The road to the villages was what I’d imaged most of the area would be: dirt, rock, and surrounded by ditches and weeds. It was uncomfortable to ride on. There were herds of cows wearing bells that walked around and many emaciated stray dogs. I saw something that looked like a prairie dog, but nobody knew what it was. Unfortunately no tortoises yet.

We visited the homes of two children so the field workers could some physical data from them and speak to their mothers. All of the younger children I saw were absolutely adorable. The homes are modest and constructed of cement or mud somehow so that it was considerably cooler inside. There were a lot of round huts with thick thatch roofs, many of which had satellites sticking out of the thatch for TV, and a few houses with attached garages that could pass for a quaint retirement home in the states. I couldn’t tell what the boundaries between villages were, but I was told that we passed through several, including Tshilamba and Tshapasha. Apparently there was a conflict between brothers in one of them over who could be the chief after their mother died and they had houses right next to each other. There was some debate over which chief to ask permission of to look at something in the mountain behind the house, but we ended up not trying either.

One of the children we visited was at a daycare center called a creche. While the field workers measured the boy, my roommate and I went next door to see the other children, who are all two-four years. When we walked in, the little brick room packed full of children sitting on blankets on the floor became completely silent and the children just looked at us. They waved when we waved and as soon as we left the whole room exploded with laughter and little voices screaming “makuah,” which means white, but basically, foreigner. My roommate put her head back in and they all shut up again until she left. A child that we couldn’t even see was yelling makuah at us from across several yards at one point, too. People are definitely interested in the two foreigners and will watch us drive down the road. We were stopped at one point and a man reached through the window and requested that I shake his hand. He greeted me in Tshivenda and found it hilarious when I didn’t understand too much.

There are always people on the roads and they’ll wave back and smile if you wave at them. It used to be custom in the area to greet all the people one passes, but the professor who taught the language session on Tuesday said that a mixing of cultures has changed a lot of the norms. Still, there have been several people who insist on shaking my hand, saying hi, and having a short exchange on how we each are doing nearly everywhere I go. Particularly in the village areas, it’s just good form to greet everyone by a wave or even a “hello” since I’m not in the habit of bowing, saying “Aa” (hello in Tshivenda when you’re a woman), and exchanging a brief “how are you.” 

English is spoken with at least a basic level of mastery by most of the people I’ve run across in Thohoyandu (which reduces the culture shock tremendously) and is used nearly exclusively in economic situations, but there are several native languages besides Tshivenda spoken as well. A lot of the signs will have what looks like Dutch translations of the English, too, as remnants of a former empire.

My roommate and I had some spare time to watch TV after I successfully prepared rice and garbonzo beans in our kitchen with nearly non-existent lighting (had to use a flashlight to see the stove!) and no measuring cups. We started with a dance program that we couldn’t understand that appeared to be similar to American Idol and then found a soap opera based in Johannesburg that was in English. After that, The Soloist came on in English, so I got to see Robert Downey Jr. and some cello. 

Right now we’re watching The Big Bang Theory. There’s a surprising amount of American stuff here. There was even a hut in the villages blasting a mix of modern American pop music and African music. The radio plays random 80s music and some modern stuff. The only thing South Africa hasn’t taken from America, it seems, is food. Even brands we have in the states have different spellings, ingredients and flavours. I’ll definitely be eating a lot of rice and canned beans, since they’re familiar and easy to make on the stove. A microwave finally appeared for the first time at the college today and I’m tempted to dish out R450 for a microwave for the next month and a half just because it’s a pain to try to get the already narrow selection of vegetarian food that I recognize down to what can be made in a pot on a bad stove. Also, I just really hate cooking. I would love some good coffee, toboulleh, and McDonalds french fries, but no prospects of those until I get back in July. Maybe I’ll just get that veggie burger from Nandos every night. The veggie hot dogs are surprisingly good and contain a quarter of the ingredients of any that I can get in the U.S. If only I could find veggie bacon with fewer random additives.

This weekend the other UVA students and I are going on an overnight trip to Kruger National Park. We’re going to join a night safari, stay at a lodge, and then take an extended day safari. I could potentially see elephants, giraffes, rhinos, water buffalo, zebras, cheetahs, etc. in their natural habitats, which will be awesome. The animals are comfortable with the safari vehicles, so they will hunt nearby and get really close if we see them. It makes me wish I’d brought my DSLR and my zoom lens.

I have a modem for Internet now and will likely be able to update nearly every day after I get back from Kruger. It’s really a wonder how much I took consistent internet and phone access for granted before.