Where the water spins clockwise...

Goieiemore, good morning, ladies and gents, one and all, welcome to the ridiculous ramblings of Andrew in the unreal world of the Western Cape of South Africa, where the mountains are majestic, the wineries are wacky, and the people have some of the most beautiful, aching stories ever told. I'll try to keep this updated as often as I can, but no promises (and no pictures! Sorry, but down here they've got this thing called bandwidth rationing, which basically means they buy internet usage in chunks and uploading photos devours those chunks like whoa, so tough luck. Gut it out for six weeks. It will be worth it.) To give you a bit of an introduction, I'm just going to do a little scene-setting and a few brief intros here so you'll know where and who and what I'm talking about later on:

The setting: Just picture the most beautiful place on earth you can possibly imagine, and then multiply that by like eleven. And that's just the view from the front door. The Western Cape is famous for it's rolling mountains and green valleys, which offer perfect soil for the millions of rows of grapes that grace their slopes and stock their wineries. The villages (including Robertson, where I'm staying) are quaint and rustic and basically adorable, although like everywhere in South Africa they've been severely tainted by the racial issues that have torn this country apart. Even now, each town is divided into a "township" (basically a slum, where the blacks--mostly descended from native tribes--were forced to live during apartheid), a "bo dorp" (for people they call "coloreds", which is basically anyone of mixed race or non-European descent other than blacks), and an area where the whites live. You really can't overestimate the extent to which apartheid and the resistance to it and the rebuilding in its aftermath continue to shape the lives and worldviews and literally the geography of how people relate today in South Africa. But if there had to be a place to deal with hard lessons and deep-rooted issues, you couldn't ask for a more gorgeous bit of paradise. Personally, I'll be working at the hospital here in Robertson and visiting various clinics in local townships and areas as well as driving out in a mobile clinic to serve some more rural areas.

The cast of characters:
The CCS Team (CCS = Cross Cultural Solutions, the NGO that I'm working for):
--Adrienne, a 19-year-old Canadian student who just finished her first year at McGill University, working at the high school in Robertson township (called Nqkubela, and the "q" in there is a tongue click on the palette of your mouth--seriously, isiXhosa might be the coolest language on earth)
--Audrey, an MBA student at UNC, also working at the township high school. She's also kind of the mom for our little family of volunteers, as well as a sassy Southern wine connoisseur and hard-core pilates drill sergeant.
--Li (aka "Bruce", for the huge popularity of her fellow Asian Bruce Lee among the kids here, aka "Swine Flu Li", for reasons to be discussed later), who graduated from Skidmore in '05 and now works for CCS in New York--this is her 4th CCS program.
--Josee, another Canadian, about my age and training to be a respiratory therapist, working at Vrolike Vinkies (pronounced FRO-lick-uh FUN-keys in Afrikaans), a local day care center.
--Kayla, the grandma of our group, also from New York, where she is retired but volunteers as a librarian at a school in Harlem. She is working at a care center for disabled children, and I'm always scared that one of these days she's just going to get blown away in the huge winds that come rushing down the valley.
--Emre, my roommate, the only other guy in our group, just graduated from Texas Tech and hopes to go to medical school, so we've definitely got a lot in common and he's a pretty awesome guy.
The supporting cast:
Lynda and Luann: the program directors for CCS here in South Africa, both with fantastic accents and permanent smiles
Graham: our driver, who takes us to our placements each day, used to be an official chauffeur for the South African government and once drove Nelson Mandela and Jesse Jackson together around the country. The man is capable of all that high-speed tire-burning spin-busting stunt-car driving stuff you see in movies, but he does it all with impeccable manners and formality--if you're going to leave someone in the dust, you may as well do it properly I guess.
Dr. Perold: my supervisor at the hospital, a superbly nice man and an excellent physician, he always refers to me as "colleague" and is the inspiration for this blog's title--before a procedure or a meeting with a patient, he'll turn to me and ask, "Now colleague, tell me, how would they deal with this on House, M.D.?", and every time I'll reply very seriously that we're going to have to operate right away, which he gets a real kick out of. Then after we're done, he turns to me with a huge grin and goes, "Just like House M.D., right?" Honestly, the cases and issues he deals with every day are so huge that they could probably give him his own show, and hopefully I'll have time to fill you in on some of the more interesting cases and counseling sessions and observations on community issues that we come across (spoiler alert: There will be a lot of childbirth stories. As in, I've already scrubbed in on 5 c-sections in my first three days at the hospital, which has fewer than 50 beds, only 4 doctors, and one "theater," the South African equivalent of an OR. Unbelievable.)

That's probably enough for a first post. If you're among the approximately 2 people that stuck around to read this far (thanks Mom!), feel free to post any questions or comments and I'll do my best to get to them--internet's a little spotty but I should be on a couple times a week. Thanks for reading, hope all your own summers are coming along gloriously, and I can't wait to share this experience with all of you!