This Week

Well, my clever attempts at avoiding the flu by getting the vaccine unfortunately landed me with, you guessed it, the flu. So I spent the last few days laying in bed whining to myself (because my mom wasn’t there to listen) watching movies and eating toast. As if having the flu wasn’t bad enough, it’s UNBELIEVABLY boring having the flu alone by yourself in your hut. My head was pounding from looking at the little screen of my laptop, and I couldn’t concentrate on a book, so I literally laid around, slept, and waited for it to be night so I could sleep again. Thankfully, it was a quick bug and I’m now feeling top notch.

So nothing too exciting has happened since Pension Day (woohoo!)…I got together with the four other volunteers in my area got together to celebrate one woman’s birthday over lunch in town one day. The only problem is, there isn’t really anywhere other than KFC of Chicken Licken (pretty much as tasty as it sounds) to ‘get lunch’, so instead we bought some fries and some beers and hung out in a secluded area. Drinking alcohol is a very interesting and complicated concept here in rural South Africa. It is only really appropriate for males to drink, and when they drink, they drink. There isn’t so much of a ‘social drinking’ notion, people tend to either abstain completely from drinking (at least in public) or proceed to get completely wasted, sometimes starting at 9 in the morning. As if this was appropriate, for women it is simply not appropriate to consume alcohol, and if you are going to dare to defy the social norm, you cannot drink beer and you absolutely cannot drink from the bottle. So, in the spirit of destigmatization, we sometimes like to get one drink to show that social drinking can be just as fun, or that buying a bottle of wine at the grocery store doesn’t mean I am going to finish it by myself on the taxi ride home. Usually though, we just get a lot of strange looks or ‘what are you doing’ comments. What I have yet to understand a society would tolerate men getting wasted at the taverns from morning until night but all hell breaks loose and everybody finds out when the American girl orders one drink at lunch. I’ve heard a lot of interesting comments at churches or at other NGOs that the community needs to act against the abuse of alcohol, but I haven’t seen anything done about it thus far.
Other insignificant highlights of my week included playing my awesome new purple guitar, making guacamole (and eating it for every meal) ,and baking a DELICIOUS cappuccino chocolate cake. I can’t decide if I’m more ashamed of the fact that I baked in on Tuesday and had finished it by Friday, or that I actually hesitated before offering some to my host family. It’s the simple pleasures that keep me going, ya know?

As for my work, it’s going. I go through days where I get completely overwhelmed by the gravity of the work that needs to be done and I wonder what I can do, and then later in the day I’ll get a surge of optimism and hope for the project ideas that I have. We had a meeting with the nurse at the clinic last week, where she basically chastised them for 2 hours about how they aren’t doing their work and their community is suffering, how the management is not being tough enough, and how they have great ideas for projects but they never follow through. I thought it was great because I was having a difficult time figuring out my place in how I would say those things (clearly in a more lighthearted tone) but the nurse (who oversees the HBC) just shouted it out and BAM, that was that. Some of the caregivers seemed angry, but everyone showed up the next day at 9 am sharp in their uniforms, so here’s to hoping it lasts. We are going to start doing health talks in the clinic, going at 8 am to talk to the patients about various things (HIV, TB, hygiene, healthy living, etc) while they wait to see the nurses. That will give me something to work on as I also start the grant application to start our OVC center.

And finally, in the midst of my pounding headache and nausea, my host brother decided to bang on my door one morning to have me take a picture of the little baby sitting in the drivers seat of the taxi (both my host brother and father are taxi drivers). Here in the village every malady is called the flu, so even though I didn’t think they fully understood how much I didn’t want to get up and take this picture, I sucked it up and did it anyway. After taking the picture, I sat down in the sun and watched the family interact. I really enjoy picking out the cultural differences and then despite those seeing how similar we really are. As my host father was getting ready to leave in his taxi, the 4 year old started hysterically bawling because he didn’t want him to leave. How many times have I seen that happen in America, myself included (the picture of my first day of Kindergarten depicts me with bloodshot eyes and a forced smile because there was nothing in the world that seemed worse than having my mom abandon me in an unknown place that morning). The father picked up the little boy and swung him around, giving him a big hug and a kiss and promising him that everything would be okay. As I watched this, my bout of homesickness combined with my actual sickness made me spontaneously burst out in tears as well, and my host father turns to me and says, “Ungalili Sbongile, ngiyabuya”, meaning,, “don’t cry Sbongile, I’m coming back”. All I could do was laugh and say ‘okay, see you soon’.