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?