Sawubona from South Africa

Hello everybody! I survived rural!!! We came back from a rural homestay about 4 days ago, I’d say. We said goodbye to our Cato Manor families last Monday morning, which was very sad. Mama Buyi was sad that I was leaving and she said that she was going to miss me very much since she’ll be all alone now :(. I said goodbye to Queen and Kopu (the other smaller girl), but I don’t think they really understood what was going on. Mama Buyi said that they would be crying if they actually found out that I was leaving them, so we tried to keep the mood light.

After saying goodbye to all of our families, we immediately left for a rural area called Amatikulu. My friend Jasmine and I were placed with a family in the neighboring area of Dokodweni. Our mama there was a community health worker, and while we were there we shadowed her while she visited patients around the area. All of the families in Dokodweni live in homesteads called imizi. Each homestead has a couple of houses on it for each family and then a large garden where they grow their vegetables like spinach, tomatoes, onions and sweet potatoes. I was lucky because my family had a banana orchard that was beeauutiful along with a couple of mango trees that were unfortunately not nearly ripe. The bananas though, were delicious..and I don’t even like bananas.

I was also really lucky because the family we stayed with lived on top of a hill that overlooked the ocean. The whole area was semi-tropical, with palm trees and giant leafy plants everywhere. It was very very green, which was a nice change from the essentially brown Cato Manor. The hill we were on overlooked a tropical forest on a neighboring hill and as you go farther downhill, lots of farmed land and other homesteads. The ocean was probably only two miles away max and it was sooo incredibly gorgeous.

Our mama spoke pretty good english, so once again we were lucky because we were able to communicate with her fairly adequately, and for everything else, we could kind of get the idea across in zulu. We ate phutu for dinner every day, which is mealie-meal but wiht the consistency of very sticky mashed potato. Seriously, phutu is everywhere and I have eaten it so many times. I remember the first time I had to eat it in Cato Manor, it was hard to get the stuff down..but then I discovered the trick of mixing it with sauce and other food, and now I’m a pro at eating it- sometimes I even like it. Also, I just discovered that the “porridge” that we eat every morning is actually just a big ‘ole bowl of grits. gross. no wonder nutrition is such a problem here…there is absolutely no nutritional value in mealie-meal, which is what everything here is made out of.

The worst part of the rural homestay was by far the outhouse. It had a tiled floor, which was very nice, but no matter which way you put it, youre still peeing into a dark hole in the ground. There was even a toilet seat and lid, but that does not help. The smell was pretty horrendous and I pretty much avoided the outhouse at almost all costs.

Otherwise, the homestay was great and I really reeally enjoyed being in the company of such friendly people in such a beautiful area. Our mama was really amazing- as a community health worker, she is responsible for checking up on about 300 families per year, and has to walk usually at least 15 minutes in between each family. She keeps her children very well fed and educates them herself about really important issues. Her daughter is the only young woman on the homestead that has not had a baby in her teens. There were so many little children running around on this homestead, and the only possible mothers for these children were the girls that were essentially our age or a little older. They have babies and then the gogos take care of all the children. 

Besides for eating phutu, we got to play with all the kids, walk around the area with our mama, go to the little town (that had one street), meet the induna of the area (which is like the chief’s headman), go to the ocean, and learn how to dance to African House music…

So now, we’re staying in a really nice hostel in a very nice neighborhood in Durban. There are wonderful, wonderful showers and soap that smells like lavender in all the bathrooms. Very lovely. I have not felt so clean in a very long time. We have another two weeks here, and then I fly to Cape Town on November 1st!

I hope everyone at home is doing well!!!

Love, LIa

P.S. The chicken sacrifice did not really work and Mama Buyi’s daughter-in-law had to go to the hospital to get an injection near her eye to clear it all up, and it’s slowly getting better.

usually when i get home, i sit down on the couch, have some dinner and watch like 3 hours of tv with my family. so nothing strange, not too dissimilar from what i do at home in America. 

but last night was so bizarre. i get home to a house filled with incense smoke. apparently Mama Buyi’s (my zulu mama) daughter-in-law has been having trouble with seeing out of her right eye. So Mama Buyi went to the sangoma (traditional healer) and was told that in order to solve the problem, they would have to communicate with the ancestors and then sacrifice two chickens. 

So when i get home everyone’s praying the bedroom. when they come out, i go in and there are two chickens running around. where they got the chickens from, i have no idea. then, Mama Buyi’s son took the chickens outside, where he put them in a big pot. Then he used an itty bitty STEAK KNIFE to cut off their heads. I didn’t actually see him do this, but I heard it and let me tell you I am a little scarred. Then, while we went back to watching TV as usual, he cleaned out the chickens and plucked them. Apparently the last step of communicating with the ancestors was to sleep in the same room as the dead chickens, so the chicken carcasses were left in a big pot in mama’s bedroom all night. And guess what’s for dinner tonight.

Last night was the first night that I have felt like really really weirded out since i’ve been in mama buyi’s house. this was definitely something i had to share with you all haha

On Saturday, some friends and I went to downtown Durban to see the Jima mosque, the largest mosque in the Southern Hemisphere apparently. It’s really huge, it spans the entire area of a city block. It can hold 5,000 people and has multiple floors. It was really nice to leave the bustle and noise of downtown Durban and step into complete peace and tranquility. The outside was slightly disappointing because it rents all of its outdoor space to shopkeepers, so you can’t even really tell where the mosque is from the outside. The entrance is an unobtrusive little gate that we missed the first time we walked by. It was pretty, but I think it’s best feature was that it was so big. Otherwise, nothing really spectacular about it.

Afterwards we went to get chicken tikka at an Indian restaurant where we waited, as usual, about an hour for our food to arrive. Seriously, food service here is SO slow. I’ve gotten used to it, but the first time I ate at a restaurant here I thought something had to have gone wrong in the kitchen for it to be taking so long. I had chicken tikka masala which was delicious, and then lots and lots of fresh naan sooooooooo good.

Probably the most exciting part of our journey was taking the taxi there and back. We took minibus taxis, which are white minivans essentially that go along certain routes throughout the city. They have no markings on them and there is actually no way to distinguish between them, so you have to somehow magically know exactly where each taxi is going. So us figuring out which taxi to take home from downtown was interesting. We got a lot of strange looks, as were literally the only white(ish) people in the entire downtown area that day. And then the 9 of us squished into a minibus taxi along with 6 other africans and got into a taxi that turns out took us to the wrong part of our neighborhood. so we asked him to take us to the right part and he couldn’t, because there is intense taxi warfare among the managers that own the different taxi routes and he would get in very much trouble if he strayed from his route. The government actually has a taxi patrol (men in uniform with guns) to keep an eye on the taxi owners and to keep violence between taxi gangs under control.
but don’t worry, we got home safely..we just walked from the closest point our driver could drop us off. also, the 15 minute ride cost us 5 rand each, which is about 75 cents. so not bad.

I can’t put pictures up yet, because the internet here can’t handle it, but next time I go to an internet cafe, I promise to put up pictures so everyone can see.

So we just got back from a long weekend out in the country. On Friday, we left for the Drakensberg Mountains, which is north of Durban. We spent two nights in a camper’s lodge..so without electricity, but WITH plumbing, thank god. On Saturday we went hiking through the mountains. My friends and I spent 6 hours trekking through valleys until we reached a plateau that had the most amazing views of neighboring mountains and plateaus. One of the interesting things is that some mountains are really green and some are really brown, and the green and brown parts are literally separated by a line going down the mountains. While we were hiking, we also came across a band of baboons that were leering down at us from a ridge in the mountain. It was sooo cool, they were totally perplexed by us and were just checking us out. That is, until the big daddy baboon started glaring at us very menacingly and we decided to get out of there to avoid the soon-to-be monkey attack.

So on Sunday, we went to Impendle, a village in the middle of nowhere. It was so rural that people let their cows graze along the highways and you have to watch out when you’re driving so you don’t hit one of the millions of cows crossing the road.

We stayed with families in Impendle that had never had foreigners stay with them before. My friend Brianna and I stayed with a Gogo (grandma) that did not speak English and her two granddaughters, who did not really speak English either. So communication was very limited, but we still had a really good time. Every morning, our Gogo would wake us up with a tray of coffee at 6:30 and give us a basin of hot water to bathe in. For breakfast we each got like a potful of porridge-and porridge here is NOT oatmeal, it is this white goop made out of some sort of mashed starch. Gogo also had a couple cows, a bunch of sheep, a baby goat + mama, and a whole lot of chickens. We had electricity and running water, but no plumbing. So we had to use an outhouse that consisted of sheet metal walls roped together and a wooden seat with a bucket underneath. That was interesting.

While we were in Impendle, we shadowed a couple of women who are home-based carers in the community. They go to all the sick people’s houses in the village and bathe them and make sure that they are being taken care of by their families. They also offer comfort and support..a lot of it is religious support..and as someone who is not religious at all, I could completely understand how important it is for these women to pray and sing for their patients. Their singing and praying is so beautiful and uplifting..it’s really really emotional and amazing. One of the students took a video of the singing, hopefully i’ll be able to share it with all of you.

So anyway, now we’re back in Durban, and coming back here I had major culture shock with all of the modern stuff. I can’t even imagine how bad it’s going to be coming home to america. 

by the way, i’d appreciate your posts and feedback to know if theres anything you want to know that im not telling you or to let me know what’s going on at home!

The only thing I don’t love about this country is that apparently no one uses soap. There is no soap in my homestay and no soap in the hostels that we’ve stayed at. I have a little bottle of hand sanitizer that I keep with me at all times. Also, I don’t know if I’ve said this already, but bathing is so difficult here. There is a shower here at the SIT house where we have our classes, but our homestays do not have showers nor do they have running hot water. Taking a “bath” goes something like this:

Boil a kettle full of hot water. Stopper the tub and put cold water in. Pour in the hot water. Get in and splash some lukewarm water on yourself. Don’t even think about washing your hair.

All of us on the program agree- THAT is something they should have told us before we left America.

But seriously, it’s not so bad, it’s just given me a new appreciation for showers.

Hi everybody!

So I’ve been in South Africa for about a week now. We spent a couple days in Johannesburg, which was very dirty, and then made our way to Durban. I’m currently living with a family in Cato Manor, a township in Durban. A township is like a suburb, but poor. It’s all government housing that has been allocated to the mainly African people that have applied for it. I’m learning zulu, which IS a clicking language. It’s so hard to learn! Words that are only one syllable in english will be five in zulu, and will be different depending if the word is plural, who is talking, what you are talking about, and your relation to the thing/place. 

My “mama”’s name is Buyi and her granddaughter Ntombikayase (don’t worry I can’t say it either) lives with us. She’s 7 and also goes by Queen. Yesterday I went for a walk around the neighborhood with Queen and all of the neighborhood kids started tagging along..soon I was walking with about 8 little African children..I felt like a page right out of National Geographic or something.

Anyway, sorry, no really interesting food here. The restaurants here are really similar to ones at home, and serve mostly American style food. KFC is really popular here and there are more here than in the US. Yesterday, while Mama Buyi and I were visiting her mother and brother, I was served goat meat! It’s actually not so bad. Although I don’t really like lamb, so I definitely wasn’t about to love goat. I was also served avocado…they have these avocados that are the size of small melons..i was served a fourth of an avocado that was the equivalent of an entire avocado at home and expected to eat the whole thing like a piece of melon. 

I’ll keep everyone updated and try to get some pictures up!

Much love to everyone at home in the states, I miss you all!