May 26th-a week's worth of life!

Hello all!

Sorry it has been so long since I’ve written-I went to Cape Town and then I got sick. I have so much to catch up on!

Cape Town was unbelievable. We (me and 3 of the other girls) left last Friday morning and we stayed until Sunday evening. We stayed in a gorgeous hostel built into an old Victorian home with 3 floors and a beautiful veranda on the front. We stayed on Long Street which is the party central of Cape Town-basically any bar worth visiting or restaurant worth eating at is on this huge street. On our way to the hostel from the airport, we noticed all these people dressed in red walking in one direction. When we asked the taxi driver about it, he told us that there was a “football” (aka soccer) game happening in a little while at the World Cup stadium. So, we dropped off our stuff and rushed over to the stadium, only to find that they were sold out. However, we found a way in by talking with one of the ticket sellers, who tried to rip me off by pretending that I hadn’t paid him when his boss came around. Anyway, we got in eventually and it was PACKED. We ended up snagging really awesome seats and getting to watch a game between Ajax Cape Town and Maritzburg United for Johannesburg was definitely an experience to remember.

That night we went bar hopping and got to meet lots of locals and even a group from Toronto! However, we ended up needing to sleep in after getting in at 3am, so we didn’t do Robben Island in the morning. Instead we went to Table Mountain because it was clear and the view was breathtaking. I really don’t feel like I can do what we saw justice with words. If you want an idea of how beautiful it is, google “Table Mountain” and then imagine legitimately seeing that. It was a 10 minute cable car ride and then we wandered around on the top for a few hours. It was amazing to think that hundreds of years ago, the Dutch East India Company saw this mountain in the distance and were like “Cool! How about we set up a refreshment station over here?” So, I was a fan. Then we used our tickets for the tourist bus (which is the most stereotypical bus you have ever seen in your life! Including it being a double decker) which took us on a tour all along the coast and let us know a bit about what we were seeing. At certain points, there were trees which were bent in half because of the power of the wind off the ocean. It blew my mind. I am totally not going to be able to cover everything we saw and experienced, but I decided that I like Cape Town a great deal more than Durban and that I would love to live there some day. The only thing that really sucked was that it was too windy on Monday, so we didn’t get to go to Robben Island (which was my entire goal of going to Cape Town). However, I got to see a football game, go up Table Mountain, hear live jazz music on the waterfront, and go to an apartheid museum, so overall I am very satisfied.

Tuesday we had a tour of a muthi market, which is a marketplace which sells traditional African medicines (barks, herbs, dead monkeys, alligator skins...pretty much anything you can imagine). It was definitely an excellent learning experience. I feel like I finally experienced what I had expected of Africa. Our group stuck out like sore thumbs (since we were the only white people there and we wanted to ask lots of questions and take photos) but it was a really cool learning experience. The woman who led us is named Mama Dudu and she is training to become a sangoma (which is a traditional healer). It is believed in Zulu culture that you are ‘called’ to become a healer-usually through having serious medical issues and persevering through them or by having unusual dreams. She was really great at answering our questions about the properties of the different things we saw and she sat down with us afterword and told us her story of being called and the struggles she has faced, especially coming from a Christian background. Muthi is interesting because it is directly translated into English as both ‘medicine’ and ‘poison’, so it can be used in medicine or in what is traditionally considered ‘witchcraft’. Not really my area of interest, but it was a really good way to learn about indigenous beliefs, especially since it is crucial to understand spirituality when trying to understand a people.

Wednesday we had a lecture with the research fellow for the Centre for Civil Society named Shauna. She lectured on Social Movements which was really interesting since that’s pretty central to our conversations at home and to the history of South Africa. The ten of us were a bit uncertain of what to expect from her because she was very disdainful of our lecture last Thursday about traditional medicine and she was outwardly condescending toward the lecturer. Despite what we feel about her personality, she was an awesome lecturer and I feel like I learned a lot. We looked in depth at social movements fighting for the right to water (called the Anti-Privatization Front), the right to electricity (which is localized in Soweto) and my favourite, the Treatment Action Campaign which called for access for all to free ARVs for those with a CD4 count over 200. Ok, for those of you confused by my AIDS-jargon I will clarify. ARVs are Anti-retrovirals and they are the treatment which is provided to people who are HIV positive in order to prevent the virus from progressing into full-blow AIDS. There are 3 different drug regiments with ARVs and one must follow their prescription very carefully in order to make sure their body does not build up immunity to it. If your body builds up immunity to one, you move onto the next. There are also different ARVs tailored to the different strands of HIV. There has been a great deal of problems in South Africa with getting people access to ARVs because their second president after the end of apartheid, Thabo Mbeki argued that they were toxic (and also took a stance that HIV did not cause AIDS and was not infecting 7000 new people every day, which was obviously inaccurate and very dangerous). CD4 count is associated with your white blood cells and the level of infection in your body. I hope that this provides some clarity. I am particularly interested in this stuff and I will be writing my paper for this class on AIDS under Mbeki and how social movements (like the Treatment Action Campaign) were able to affect change when Mbeki was not creating any.

Today we had our second field trip and we went to an HIV centre called Hillcrest in the Valley of a Thousand Hills. It is a holistic centre created for respite and support for people with AIDS. Created by the Methodist Church 20 years ago, this centre has been a beacon of hope for many in the townships of surrounding areas. We were led around by the executive director Judy who was able to talk to us in great depth about the various projects which have been created to make the centre self-sustaining. There is a workshop for making crafts including quilting, sewing, intricate beadwork, and pottery and then a store to sell it in and a nursery for selling plants to the rich people in the surrounding area. They have their own water tanks which are fuelled by the rain and are used for irrigating the plants but also for providing water to the respite building.

This organization was fascinating to me for several reasons. It receives a great deal of its funding from the Stephen Lewis Foundation which is Canadian and amazing. Also, they have several things in place to help the people who work there from burning out, including a policy that after 3 years of work, you must take 8 weeks off. They also have “Tea for Compassion” events once a year for the staff to give them something fun to do. Most of the staff who works at the centre are people who have gone through rehabilitation and are on ARVs or are nurses. There is also in home care available-the respite centre is only for those who are ill enough that they are going to die.

The respite part was the most amazing part for me because they refused to make it a hospice since a hospice implies that you are going to die. This respite centre is focused on wellness and love, which is clearly successful because it will have 58% of people admitted who are ready to die, but by the end of the year, 58% of the people will be well enough to go home. It is not a religious centre (they do not preach to the people there and they are focused most on acceptance) but they believe in the physical manifestation of the things which Jesus preached, like living out unconditional love. Judy said that she believes that if Jesus were alive today, she thinks that He would be doing something like this. This message of love was very hard-hitting for me and it was so unbelievable to experience something so centred around the principles which I try to live my life by. I was brought to tears several times throughout the experience out of sadness for the loss of life suffered in that place (7 people died there last week). There was a beautiful wall out back with little pieces of pottery with names on each one which were to commemorate all the people who had been through the centre and died. It is incredibly poignant to put people to the statistics which I have been studying. But, the tears I cried at that moment were mostly because of the hope that it filled me with for people who are in need. The dedication of the people in this centre to empowering those in need was truly amazing. I will look back at today for the rest of my life with the understanding that what I saw is a motivator for who I want to be. I know I will definitely be back and I hope to bring some of you with me so that you can also see what I did and be moved to see the world in a different light.