Before I Leave The Township

.. I've got to show you all some photos of the place. Here are some random shots of characters around the Berg. I leave tomorrow (!) and I'm trying to get good shots of everyone before I go.

Miya, Sofi's daughter, bouncing around to Paul Simon on the stereo.

Sofi's son! Lungelo. I like this one, don't know why.

Lungelo and Miya, along with a pair of visiting kids.

My sweet, sweet truck.

The toolshed outside where I work when I need electricity.

Miya again, wandering around. This was at a creche (preschool) we visited
while it was being blessed; it just opened the middle of the
township, and people have high hopes for the neighborhood now.

Opening day, same creche.

Pabel, left. Sofi (my boss), right. These are our
biggest-hearted home-based carers in the Berg.

More photos coming soon! Now I have to jump on a ride back to my farewell barbecue. It's gonna be sweet.

News from the Township

I hate to post so sporadically — it bumps the pretty photos down. If you haven't seen the second batch of Durban pictures (or the ones of my house-sitting), check 'em out below!

I wrote this letter to a friend about driving in Durban:

"Oh, and I took to left-side driving like a catfish to cooking oil -- it's been a delicious time. It took me half an hour to adjust, and I'm good at navigating the cities without getting nervous -- people here drive like bipolar thespians on the run from body image disorders. The police do nothing unless they think you'll give them money. Right-of-way in this country is legally whichever car is bigger. It's SO MUCH FUN."

Bad news from work the other day. One of our people is dead. Sofi and I called an ambulance for the woman as soon as we found her lying in her bed. It was my first day of work, February 18th. She had all the symptoms of menengitis. I didn't know much about it at the time, just that Sofi had left a note for the meds asking for a Lumberg Puncture to test.

By the way — ever heard of a Lumberg Puncture? If you've ever watched House, probably. All I knew about it was the massive needle they stick into people's spinal columns to drain fluid. But as it turns out, the fluid they take tests for many things (and Lupis is only one disease among 'em). One of them is menengitis. It's supposed to take half an hour to test the fluid once it's out of the spine.

Well, in the US it takes half an hour. This is South Africa; and the local hospital she was taken to is among the worst. It took them two tests and nine days to get any results, and then the nurses tending her didn't bother to check them. They put her on anti-retrovirals (for her late-stage AIDS), which took two days of training before they could treat her. The first day of training went fine; the second, they complained that she was "too sick to train" and sent her back to her bed. So after ten days, she died in hospital of menengitis and AIDS. We just found out Monday.

The news hit Sofi hard. She knew the woman; I didn't. I'd barely seen her. But Sofi railed for hours. In the States, negligence like this would be impossible, but here they probably won't even investigate it.

That doesn't, of course, mean we're going to try. Sofi and I are writing a case study now; we'll send it to the government, and if they don't do something promptly, we've been talking about sending it to the newspapers.

But it's hard to write about; we're still too much in shock to remember dates and facts. It's really too twisted.

Three Days

This post was written yesterday. I'm taking a day off because I've decided to have Valentine's Day a week early, so I can do something nice for my girlfriend. But I do have time to post this. See y'alls tomorrow!

Second-to-last day of class today. I had to write down what I'm going to do in Africa because we are all supposed to present it in class today in a two-minute speech. I jotted a couple of paragraphs down in my notebook, but I never had to present it. It jumpstarted me, though, to write it down here too. It's past time I laid out the real parameters of my trip.

The internship works like this. When I first started class this fall, we had a guest speaker who surprised us during lecture to tell us about a unique opportunity abroad. Her name was Lynn McMullen, she said, and she wanted to set up a team of students to do foreign aid work in South Africa. She told us all the gory details: her plan was to recruit a small team from the class. We'd live together near Johannesburg, and we'd each take an internship in any kind of field we wanted to; she offered to set up her team members with local NGOs in the area. She already had a few options for us to consider.

But the first thing she said was "if you're wondering what Africa really feels like, it's actually pretty close to the Wild West." I could immediately see the similarity.

There were a few internship options I could have taken right away: Humana, a childrens' education and gardening NGO, and CLAW (Citizens League for Animal Welfare), which is basically a pet clinic, were hungry for any interns they could get. In the end, though, I settled on what Lynn called the Advocacy internship. Advocacy is run by a tiny NGO known only as AIDS Hospice. I pushed hard for the Advocate position and wound up selected for it.

As an Advocate, my job will be to basically help out the AIDS Hospice ferrying supplies and patients from the little township I'm staying in to the big city of Johannesburg. One day a week I'll don a pair of slacks and a button-down shirt and spend a few hours in the local school, teaching kids English. I'm told I'll also teach some basic sex education. But my biggest role sounds a little peculiar: I'm helping AIDS patients get birth certificates.

Most of them don't have any, which prevents them from getting things like disability grants. So I'm going to jump around between local government and the people as their "advocate," helping them get the papers they need together. Then they can receive IDs and birth certificates, and hopefully get a government welfare check for their condition. It hasn't been ironed out much, but I'll figure it out when I get there, I guess.

So that's what I'll be working at. Later, I will lay out the academic side of things. Stay tuned.