Mtwalume

It’s been a busy three weeks, but I’m finally back in Durban and gearing up for my Independent Study paper that’s due this time next week… yikes! All in all it’s probably going to be 30-40 pages long. Just as a refresher (it’s been a while), I spent the last three weeks in Mtwalume, a rural village an hour south of Durban where I volunteered teaching at a primary school and also a few days at an HIV clinic. I lived with a family that consisted of a Mom, a Gogo (granny), an uncle, and 8 kids. Yep, 8. Plus myself and Hilary, another student in my program. It was a full house to say the least. Not to mention that we also had no running water, and had to perfect the art of bucket-bathing and using a long-drop toilet. Let me tell you, running water is a beautiful thing and we ALL take it for granted. We would wake up every morning and meet up with Sipho, the little boy who lived up the road who would walk us to and from school every day. We’d spend our days at the schools and then afternoons at the clinic or talking to community members for our projects. It was a pretty awesome experience, and our family took the best care of us. Here are some of the highlight lessons I learned over the course of the last three weeks, which I figured would be entertaining and worth sharing….

1. How Little Water You Actually Need to Adequately Clean Yourself:

So I can officially call myself a professional bucket-bather. While this is not my preferred method of bathing, I feel confident that I can now bathe under just about any circumstances. Here is my official routine in case any of you ever find yourself in a drought or water-short circumstance.
1. Fill up a bucket or basin about 2 inches high with water… that’s right- only 2 inches.
2. Take a small cup and fill it with the water (you will save this for later.)
3. Wash your face off with the clean water
4. Get on your hands and knees and dunk your head into the bucket, getting your hair completely wet. You probably want to put something under your knees though, since the floor is made out of cow dung!! ☺
5. Shampoo hair sparingly and dunk your head back in the bucket to rinse
6. Step in the bucket and use a washcloth and a bar of soap to wash your body and rinse, then dry off with towel
7. Remember that cup full of water? You are now going to use that to brush your teeth.
8. Spit out the toothpaste into the bucket you just bathed in.
9. Dump the bucket outside…. And you’re clean!

2. You Can Eat ALL Parts of a Chicken:

For all you chicken lovers out there, good news! You can eat pretty much eat all the different parts of a chicken. Since I’ve been here, I’ve been forced to eat chicken necks and chicken feet, neither of which I’d ever recommend to anyone. One day Hilary and I were doing the dishes and my little 11 year old brother Abongwe casually walked in from outside with a tray soaked in blood and feathers, which he then proceeded to leave on the counter for us to clean for him. Hilary and I both looked at each other before calling Abongwe back into the room. “Abongwe, what’s that?” I asked him. He just smiled and said “chicken.” “Abongwe, did you just kill the chicken?” I then asked. He looked at me, smiled, and then looked down at the ground and said “Yes,” then walked away. It was classic.




3. Zulu’s are Deathly Afraid of Lighting

I had heard that Zulu people generally hated thunderstorms but I never realized the full effect until being out there, where storms were pretty common. Every time it stormed, our Gogo (Granny) would cover all the mirrors in the house in order to prevent the lightning from coming into the house, which apparently is a usual custom in Zulu culture. I thought it was interesting.

4. You Can Indeed Get Pulled Over By the Police While Running

Twice, actually. Hilary and I were running on the side of the main road our first week here and proceeded to be pulled over by the police two separate times. The first time I think they were legitimately concerned for our safety, and also curious as to who we were, but the second time I think they were just trying to pick us up, insisting that we take their numbers “just incase”. I actually felt more threatened by the police than by any other members of the community, which was kind of unsettling.

5. The Failures and Downfalls of the Education System Here

Teaching at Bangbizo primary was both a very rewarding and very frustrating experience for me. There is a definite lack of education in both the students and the teachers. I was given my own classes to teach without any teacher supervision (which was pretty scary at first). It was really amazing to see just how far behind these students are compared to students in America. Granted, this school is in a very rural area and this education can not be generalized for all of South Africa (many parents, including my homestay family, send their children to private school, and the differences are remarkable between those children and the children at my school). The first lesson I taught was how to plot points on a chart for grade seven math students. I couldn’t help but think back to my grade 7 math experience at home, where I was already doing pre-algebra. The reason I had to teach this lesson in the first place was because the teacher didn’t understand the material herself, which was really sad in itself. It’s also pretty horrifying how little is actually learned in a given day. I didn’t once hear an actual “lesson” from a teacher to the students, come to think of it. They mostly just gave the students busy work. Sometimes the teachers simply would not show up, leaving a class completely unattended and unsupervised for an entire day. If I hadn’t been there to entertain the class and teach them random English lessons, the would have just sat in the classroom for the entire day doing nothing. It scares me to think of what’s going to happen when we leave. It definitely has made me appreciate the education I’ve been given.



6. How Difficult the English Language Really is to Learn

I figured that teaching English would be a piece of cake, but I quickly learned how hard English really is to both learn and teach. With French, Spanish, and even Zulu, there are patterns and the conjugations which are pretty standard, with only a few exceptions. In English, there is no logic and pretty much everything has an exception. Trying to teach present and past tense to a class of 4th graders was a disaster because every verb we chose had a different past tense form and I we were confusing the students more than teaching them. I give a lot of credit to primary school English teachers, and I feel fortunate enough to have learned English as my first language because it’s definitely hard to learn. The students did improve their English a lot in the 3 weeks we were there though, mostly in attempts to communicate with us.



7. The Influence of HIV on a Rural Village

The part of this experience that was directly related to my research project about HIV came with volunteering at the local HIV clinic. I spent a day doing intakes with a doctor who prescribed ARV’s to a new batch of patients bi-weekly. There are hundreds of patients on the wait list, and the doctor only does an intake of 10 patients once every 2 weeks. So basically, people are dying because they can’t get the medication they need soon enough. The doctor had an incredible amount of paperwork to do, and I was able to help her with it. She would talk to the patients and then give me the information to fill in including the patient’s weight, age, ID, CD4 count, the TB status, what stage of HIV the patient was in (most were stage 4, the final stage), and some other observations. We literally saw patient after patient for six hours straight (most of them were either getting ARV’s, applying for welfare grants, or switching to different ARV’s because they were experiencing side effects). It was a very hard and emotionally draining day. There were girls younger than me coming in. The youngest girl we saw was only 15 and had never had a sexual encounter in her life. It’s so sad.



8. The Spirit of Ubuntu… Once Again

I wanted to copy down the description of Ubuntu I found in a grade 5 life-orientation book:
Ubuntu- “We need each other to become wholesome individuals.”

I really got an amazing sense of ubuntu from this three-week experience. Hilary and I were the ONLY abalungus (white people) living in this village, and the only ones who ever had. It was definitely interesting to see how people reacted to us, but for the most part everyone was incredibly welcoming and accepting, (and in some cases, over-friendly.) I learned some good tricks actually… such as moving my ring over to my left hand so it looked more like an engagement ring. If you tell someone you have a boyfriend they don’t care, but the minute you say you’re engaged they for some reason back off real fast, most of the time with hands in the air. I was actually proposed to as well and offered 12 cows for the lobola, (which is like a dowry). From what I’ve been told, 12 cows is pretty much unheard of, but I had to say no.

But in all seriousness, these three weeks taught me a whole new side of the meaning of Ubuntu. Mandela described ubuntu as “A traveler though a country would stop at a village and he didn’t have to ask for food or for water. Once he stops the people give him food, entertain him.” We were travelers through this village and our family opened their arms to us wholeheartedly, and gave up their beds to accommodate us. People saw us walk to and from school each day with their own children and quickly learned that we were “good.” Once we were in a minibus taxi on our way to the clinic and the driver didn’t want to accept our fare just because we were “visitors and we were here helping people,” and for that he was thankful. Minibus drivers are also known to be some of the skeeziest people around, so coming from him that says a LOT. I hope to return to this village again some day in the future, although I’m sure not much will have changed.