May Update


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May 21st 2009
Published: May 21st 2009
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May update

Next week will be four months since I moved to South Africa. I cannot believe it, time has gone by so fast! I am enjoying every moment but at the same time I was in my study carell the other day thinking Gosh I wish this would never end! I am excited I am in the one year program, partly because I couldn’t afford two years, but at the same time I am so jealous of people who get to spend two years studying in this amazing program! I love my study carrel, the weekly seminars by experts from around the world, and our brilliant lecturers.
I am learning a lot about life here in Africa, and while the last thing I want to do is put down the US, it is such a wonderful opportunity for me to live here and see life from a different perspective. People keep asking me why I want to live here, our librarian the other day told me she always wonders why Americans come to South Africa. She does not understand why we would leave our safe country for the more crime-ridden South Africa. She told me another American professor once told her he felt more alive here, like he was really living history. I can understand that, I know I have tried to verbalize how I feel here so many times, and I will probably continue until I leave, but here I go again. I keep saying things just seem more raw here, the good and the bad seem more in your face. I feel like in America I am more separated from things, and here I don’t have a choice, its more hands on I guess. Maybe that makes sense, maybe it doesn’t. I am trying to say a lot of things that seem to escape my words but the one thing I am NOT trying to say is that the US is terrible and South Africa is perfect, both are far from it! I definitely still have my “what the heck am I doing in South Africa” moments!
Anyways as I said time is flying by I am just about finished with my 2nd quarter of classes. I will have 1 month off before I start my winter school HIV/AIDS class. I am planning to spend a weekend in Johannesburg in the beginning of June as well as maybe a weekend up the North Coast with some friends around the beginning of July.
I am working on my thesis right now which is somewhere in the realm of micro-credit. It is so much fun studying something I am so passionate about! It has been a learning process since micro-credit is a bit different here in South Africa than other parts of the world. I am looking into Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that offer credit to groups of women who have no collateral. There are so many different ideas and success stories it is wonderful. I am really interested in the organizations that use education as a part of their loans. A group in Latin America requires basic education as well as health education classes of the loan recipients. I do not know what my specific research question will be, but it will be somewhere in this field.
In the past couple weeks I have gotten out of Durban a couple times, once to Pietermaritzberg for our Rotary District Conference, and another time on a drive into the midlands. The rotary conference was good for the most part. We had some issues with the actual conference and the lack of recognition of Ambassadorial Scholars. Also some past issues of organization came to a head during these chats, but it was good to get things out in the open. The social part of the conference was amazing! My friend Andrea and I stayed with a couple and their two college aged kids. It was so great to be around a family, have family meals and just chat. We also met the Group Study Exchange team from Hong Kong and Macau. This is an incredible rotary program that takes young non-rotary professionals on a 4-6 week trip to another area as a cultural exchange as well as to get them interested in Rotary. We had so much fun with this group, they were really great people. At one point I was teaching King Yue from Hong Kong to line dance. This was not something I ever though t I would do in South Africa, but we all really enjoyed ourselves.
This past weekend I left Durban again with Richard and Anisa to go on the Midlands Meander. The midlands are an area west of Durban that has lots of farms, hotels and craft markets that you can visit. It’s a beautiful area and you just enjoy the drive and the scenery and stop off at all of these different places. We went to incredible old hotels, a cheese farm, a school and random others. They also offer wine tasting, leather and bead crafts. The area is not your stereotypical African scenery, actually it reminds me more of Eastern Washington with its pine trees and rolling hills. It is so relaxing to be out in the country and enjoy the fresh air. The sky is so much bluer and just seems so vast. This is what people were talking about when they told me about South African skies! It was also just really nice to be with Anisa and Richard, Anisa is a friend of mine from Australia and Richard is South Africa, and together the three of us get on really well.
So that is what I have been up to lately, I have one other story that I have to share because things like this seem to only happen to me! The other night I went to bed early so I could get up and work on my thesis, but I woke up around 12 with terrible nightmares. I got up and made sure all my doors and windows were locked and tried to forget what I had been dreaming about. About an hour later I woke up to an ant biting my leg. I have no idea how this thing survived the mass extermination I had the day before, but it was huge and darn it hurt. So I got up to sweep my bed out and make sure he didn’t have reserve forces hiding in the covers. I made it back to sleep until I heard the sound of large wings flapping over my head. Now I’m the type of person who gets woken up in the night and I am out of bed dressed with a flashlight in seconds, so I do this crazy army roll out of bed and away from the noise and I have the lights on and a magazine to protect myself in the blink of an eye. What I saw would make your skin crawl, a huge winged cockroach is now running across my pillow. Now I have dealt with roaches before but this sucker was huge and not only that he was aggressive. I swear the thing was flying at me and chasing me around the room. I had no idea what I was going to do, my magazine did not seem like a large enough weapon until I remembered I had a can of raid in the other room. So now I am chasing the roach around my room with raid and holding socks over my face to protect myself from the fumes. Thankfully raid is a scary product that kills everything and soon the monster roach was dead. So now its 3 am and not only am I surging with adrenaline but I am also standing in a fog of bug killer, which by the way I am deathly allergic to. The bright idea would be to open a door or window but after my nightmares that was not going to happen. So I took my comforter out into the living room and hid under it still using the socks as filter. I tried to sleep but by 4 am my eyes were almost swollen shut and I could not stop sneezing. Finally I gave up and made some coffee and got into the shower to wash the raid off myself. The bugs are the worst part of Africa, usually I can handle the chongololos because they don’t go anywhere fast, but roaches run at warp speed and fly, it’s just not fair!
Some of the photos I put up include the midlands, the rotary conference, and then just another photo I knew my family would appreciate. It doesn’t matter what continent I am on, I still can fall asleep anywhere! That sleeping photo is at a picnic we had in the Botanic Gardens, I had gone dancing the night before and only slept a few hours. I have no idea how that book became a pillow, but I guess it works! I hope you all are well and I really enjoy your emails.
Take Care



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21st May 2009

I couldn't help...
... but laugh out loud at the image of you, my dear, chasing giant roaches in a killing spree at 0300 AM in a South African dormitory. I guess that was one of those "What the hell I am doing here" moments. Still, memories are (also) made of this and you seem to be enjoying yourself so much there that it even seems worthwhile. I can't wait to learn what will happen next in your world. Keep'em coming!

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