(Apologies to Ray for stealing his idea)
So seeing as English is the one and only official language of this blog, I have decided that I need to make sure that my readers are linguistically competent by writing up a little vocab test of some common English phrases heard frequently here in South Africa (my mentor Dr. Perold is still trying to convince me that "English" and "American" are two separate languages). I promise that all of the following words and phrases are in fact English and not Afrikaans, so do your best to figure them out and the actual meanings will be along in a few days. Good luck!
1) dassie
2) joll
3) hooter
4) bakkie
5) kangaroo care
6) big five
7) wimpy
8) crazy store
9) matric
10) dop
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
The Tough Stuff
This weekend in Robertson all the local wineries opened their cellars for a weekend of free tastings, huge parties, and wacky events (complete with an entire swimming pool full of red wine, equipped with a slide and diving board for those drunken souls who plunged in to stain themselves fuchsia and gulp down the polluted beverage in one of the most bizarrely hilarious and disgusting acts I have ever witnessed). Since our program director happens to be cousins with the winemaker at one of the cellars, we received a VIP tour of Graham Beck, whose most recent claim to fame has been the production of the champagne of choice of the Obama campaign to celebrate on election night (South Africa’s new president, on the other hand, went for some snobby French stuff instead at 10,000 Rand a bottle—meaning each bottle was worth more than it costs to build an entire house in one of the townships here—when a bottle of his own country’s finest goes for less than 80 Rand, which is less than US$10). Although Graham Beck is a model of responsible community engagement, setting aside a large portion of its land for nature reserves and environmental rehabilitation as well as sponsoring schools for farm children and skills centers to help uneducated adults learn English and marketable skills, it’s definitely the exception to the rule, and the entire weekend really just showed the huge racial and socioeconomic divides that exist in this country, which continues to have one of the highest levels of income inequality in the world.
I touched on this in an earlier post, but I’ve personally been shocked by the extent to which racial issues touch every aspect of daily life here, and how difficult it seems to be for this country to move on. There are signs of progress, to be sure—Nelson Mandela is almost deified here, and countless South Africans have told me that he is the reason they no longer hate one another, one even saying that he refuses to leave the country now because he is too scared at the thought of being abroad when Mandela finally passes away—but the generation that fought for equal rights is growing older now and their children are struggling to find their own identity under the new system.
This weekend, it seemed like all the young chic white people in South Africa descended on Robertson to gaudily celebrate their wealth, status, and hideous pseudo-European fashion sense by engaging in socially acceptable alcoholism and idiocy. Maybe they’re trying to cling to what’s left of their superiority after the racial upheaval here, maybe they’re trying to find a new identity and distance themselves from their parents’ generation while hanging on to the socioeconomic success that their parents’ crimes bought them, or maybe they’re just out to get drunk and hook up. Whatever it was, it just made me really angry to see all these white folks being driven around to parties and wine tastings all weekend by colored chauffeurs (and there were definitely no blacks or coloreds at the tastings themselves), and then leave the next day without ever coming into contact with the real community here or dealing with the fact that and I honestly felt like I was just contributing to that dynamic just by being present.
On that note, I have to say that it’s a really tough dynamic to go about changing, especially for someone who just arrived in the country three weeks ago. In fact, most of the time it’s easier to feel like part of the problem: I live in a house outside of town where my meals are cooked for me each day by colored staff, I have to be driven around town in a nice car by another colored man (apparently so I don’t go careening onto the wrong side of the road or mistaking kilometers for miles and other American things like that), I stay at a volunteer shift for half a day where I’m only really able to interact with the white doctors because they speak English (my Afrikaans is coming along nicely though, in my opinion: I can now confidently ask you whether you’d like to help deliver a baby today), and on weekends I head out of town to places that most of the locals can’t afford to go—and I have the audacity to even suggest that I’m actually here to help, to understand the community and its issues, to make a difference? Honest to God, I would rather go live in the slums and walk into town for internet and laundry and eat the same food every day and sleep in a hut every night.
One of my recent reads has been “Into the Wild,” and this makes me want to be Alexander Supertramp and do something independent and rebellious and sacrificial. Maybe I’ll start by trying to grow a beard.
I touched on this in an earlier post, but I’ve personally been shocked by the extent to which racial issues touch every aspect of daily life here, and how difficult it seems to be for this country to move on. There are signs of progress, to be sure—Nelson Mandela is almost deified here, and countless South Africans have told me that he is the reason they no longer hate one another, one even saying that he refuses to leave the country now because he is too scared at the thought of being abroad when Mandela finally passes away—but the generation that fought for equal rights is growing older now and their children are struggling to find their own identity under the new system.
This weekend, it seemed like all the young chic white people in South Africa descended on Robertson to gaudily celebrate their wealth, status, and hideous pseudo-European fashion sense by engaging in socially acceptable alcoholism and idiocy. Maybe they’re trying to cling to what’s left of their superiority after the racial upheaval here, maybe they’re trying to find a new identity and distance themselves from their parents’ generation while hanging on to the socioeconomic success that their parents’ crimes bought them, or maybe they’re just out to get drunk and hook up. Whatever it was, it just made me really angry to see all these white folks being driven around to parties and wine tastings all weekend by colored chauffeurs (and there were definitely no blacks or coloreds at the tastings themselves), and then leave the next day without ever coming into contact with the real community here or dealing with the fact that and I honestly felt like I was just contributing to that dynamic just by being present.
On that note, I have to say that it’s a really tough dynamic to go about changing, especially for someone who just arrived in the country three weeks ago. In fact, most of the time it’s easier to feel like part of the problem: I live in a house outside of town where my meals are cooked for me each day by colored staff, I have to be driven around town in a nice car by another colored man (apparently so I don’t go careening onto the wrong side of the road or mistaking kilometers for miles and other American things like that), I stay at a volunteer shift for half a day where I’m only really able to interact with the white doctors because they speak English (my Afrikaans is coming along nicely though, in my opinion: I can now confidently ask you whether you’d like to help deliver a baby today), and on weekends I head out of town to places that most of the locals can’t afford to go—and I have the audacity to even suggest that I’m actually here to help, to understand the community and its issues, to make a difference? Honest to God, I would rather go live in the slums and walk into town for internet and laundry and eat the same food every day and sleep in a hut every night.
One of my recent reads has been “Into the Wild,” and this makes me want to be Alexander Supertramp and do something independent and rebellious and sacrificial. Maybe I’ll start by trying to grow a beard.
Medical Update
Things at the hospital were pretty much business as usual this week—a lot of abscesses needing drainage, a lot of broken bones, one kid with bubble gum stuck down his ear, and a lot of pregnant mothers. I did get to spend some time in the ARV (anti-retroviral: the drugs that fight HIV) clinic, which was a fascinating experience. With any medication that a patient has to take on their own over a very long period of time, you’re going to have issues of people missing dosages or neglecting to take their meds or other adherence problems like that; with ARVs, these are especially serious because failing to take the drugs for any significant period of time often means that the virus becomes resistant to them and the drugs are then worthless. It actually turns out that in terms of all conditions requiring long-term medication (like diabetes, hypertension, TB, or HIV), patients who are on ARVs are actually the most adherent to their drug regimen, and TB patients who are also on ARVs usually do a better job of adhering to their TB medication than patients who aren’t on ARVs. The reason is that any ARV patient is required to undergo counseling before they are put on the drugs, and there is an intensive process including a home visit and designation of a “treatment buddy” who will be responsible for making sure the patient takes the drugs at the right times and comes in for all their appointments—with other conditions, they basically just send you out the door with a prescription and don’t check on you for another six months. There are still a ton of adherence issues, especially with alcohol abuse being such a huge problem around here, and any time a patient stops taking their pills they have to be switched to a new regimen because the virus will quickly become resistant to their previous one (a lot of times, patients see their condition improving when they start taking the drugs and they feel so much better that they assume they’ve been cured, so they stop taking their medication, which is tragic because it means that they have to be taken off a regime that was working and put on a new one which may or may not work as well—if they fail both first and second line ARVs, their only option is to stay on the second line drugs and hope that a spot opens up in a clinical trial for some experimental drug).
In other news, Dr. Perold has moved on from referring to me as “colleague” to “my sexy American friend”—this is traditionally one of the ways South Africans indicate that you have been accepted into their tribe or culture, and I consider it a tremendous honor.
World's highest bungee? Yeah, jumped that.
True story: all 216 meters of it, off a bridge near Knysna along the southern coast. It’s difficult to describe the sensation: at the top they’ve got all this pump-up music playing for you and you’re not sure whether to be nervous or to join in with all the crazy African guys who are having a dance party and pretending to flap their wings and then all of a sudden you’re strapped in and off the edge and it’s just…quiet. I can honestly say that I didn’t scream at all, though there may or may not have been some awkward-looking swimming motions on the way down. The whole experience was absolutely worth looking like an idiot for though. And no, I absolutely did not tell my mom beforehand.
The rest of the weekend we spent touring the “Garden Route” down along the southern coast, an outdoorsman's paradise with beaches and surfing and seaside cliffs and ostrich farms and caves that are absurdly warm on the inside and forests and baby cheetahs and albino lions and hostels with random fun Brazilian and German guys who got shafted by their car rental agency and spend their days spray-painting their broken down Beetle as payback. Good times.
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