let the learning begin!

Sign at Cape of Good Hope

 I’m sitting in my bed in a funky little backpackers place in Cape Town, listening to a band in the bar below me play “Ride Sally Ride” (do you remember that one from New Orleans Kelley?). I imagine in an alternate universe, where I’m in my 20s with dredge locks backpacking around Africa I might stay here. I should be grading the exams I gave Friday morning but instead I’m writing to you since I haven’t blogged since the start of the study away program and need to do so before I turn my “dongle” back in at the airport when we head for Namibia which will leave me with only sporadic internet access.

The last couple of days have been a run of amazingness beginning with tickets purchased to a U2 concert about 36 hours before it actually happened. A slight panic was caused at the airport when half of my students successfully got ticketed and through security before the other half of us got stopped and almost bumped because the plane had been oversold. It would have been tragic because even though some of the concert goers had gone through and would have made it to Cape Town, I had all the tickets in my purse so no one would have gone. Fortunately when the 12 seats that remained were “released”, I had managed to persuade the person behind the desk to give 8 of them to the remainder of my group. Phew… that was a close one. 

Penguins at Boulder Beach

 

The concert was awesome! Bono and crew are still rockin’. The 360 degree tour takes place in all outside venues so we were in the soccer stadium built specifically for the World Cup last year. An estimated 75,000 people were there (counting all the people in the standing room only section). I think the 11 students I went with were a little shocked that I liked U2 but I had to remind them that the band actually came out when I was in college! I don’t feel that much older than them but they clearly see me as “that much older than them.” This year’s group affectionately calls me “Mama K” and while I realize I technically “could” be their mother, I feel way too young to even imagine having a 20 year old. At least they’re not calling me “Gogo K” – which would be grandmother!

Stellenbosch Wine Country

I say that having just ridden 22 kms on a bike through wine country with five of them and, except for the rather large hill we started with, I kept pace with them the whole time and really excelled at the “wine tasting” part of the “bike and wine” adventure. The Stellenbosch region is really beautiful and if you ever get a chance to visit, I urge you to do so.

View of the floor of the Vortrekker Monument 

It’s hard to believe we are almost three weeks in of our nine weeks of travel for the Furman Study Away 2011. We have been very busy from the moment the students arrived on the evening of Tuesday, February 1. Our lectures, site visits and classes have primarily focused on History and Sociology as I was first joined by the Historian of the program. We’ve made several visits to museums including the Apartheid Museum (which I’ve now seen four times but am always impressed by the amount of information and layout of the museum), Hector Pieterson Museum (commemorating the death of a 13 year old boy, the first to be killed during the 1976 Soweto uprisings when students protested against the proposal to change the language in schools to Afrikaans), and the Kimberley Diamond Mine “Big Hole” Museum.

For my Global Health Inequalities course we have visited the Wit Medical School Museum (seeing old medical equipment like the “iron lung” used to treat polio), heard a lecture on Ethnomedicine (focusing on the scientific research currently being done to try to capture the medicinal qualities of plants that the Bushmen have used for years), talked to activists from the anti-privatization movement about water rights, and went for a tour of the muthi market in Durban (where they sell plant and animal products used in traditional medicine) – just to name a few of the things we’ve done.

We’ve also added a few new activities this year – some have worked well, others have been challenging. On our first Friday we took a bicycle tour of Soweto which was quite a success. As our group of helmeted students trekked through the garbage riddled and water eroded dirt roads we saw up close and personal some of the poorer areas of Soweto still in need of improvements. This was a powerful lesson on the absence of the “fundamental pre-requisites of health” that we had been talking about in class as many residents do not have access to clean water, rubbish removal, safe housing, electricity, etc.

One of our harder emotional experiences was the day we spent at Central Methodist Church in downtown Johannesburg. Last year we had visited Bishop Paul Verryn who has opened up his six story inner city church to thousands of refugees (primarily from Zimbabwe) and decided this year to return but also try to do a service learning project while there. We had hope to help out in some was after seeing the great need last year. We thought we might help play with the kids in the day care center, cook a meal for the soup kitchen, offer some advice in the computer class. Unfortunately, we ended up being asked to lead a “workshop” for single mother refugees. We only became aware of this when we entered the large sanctuary of the church to find thirty plus moms and their kids only to be handed an agenda that said we, the group of Americans would be leading this workshop. It was a bit of a disaster – after all…what advice can one give to illegal single mothers without proper papers to work, a place to live and enough food to feed their babies? It was overwhelming.

Hiking at Giant's Castle

From Kimberley we set out to Giant’s Castle for a day of hiking in the Drakensburg Mountains. One of the most beautiful areas I’ve been to. Afternoon thunderstorms put a bit of a damper on our hikes but we all made it back safely and in one piece. Our time in Durban was probably our one and only stop of luxury where we were located right on the beach and the students had a bit of free time to enjoy the Indian Ocean and roof top pool. This contrasted nicely with the South Durban “toxic tour” we took looking at all of the environmental pollutants caused by the oil refineries.

Skyline of Durban (notice the new soccer stadium)

This week we’re in Cape Town. One of my favorite cities. My colleague from the Economics department joins me tonight. We’ll be visiting Robben Island (where Nelson Mandela was held in prison for 27 years) and several museums (Slave Lodge and District 6 Museum) as well as some more touristy things (like the top of Table Mountain). It will be a busy week. We head off to Namibia on Friday. 

I still wake up some days and think, “Wow, this is my job!” Thanks to all of you who contributed to making that possible. I can’t imagine doing anything else.