Sawubona! Ngigu Molly. Translation: Hello! My name is Molly. That’s about as much Zulu as I have learned so far here in South Africa. And that is pretty good, if you ask me, considering I lack the ability to form most of the clicking sounds required to speak the language. I am in Durban, which is located on the eastern shore, with a program through the School for International Training called “Community Health and Social Policy.”
As much as I love Wes, we don’t have a whole lot of classes that focus on public health. I am majoring in MB&B and also completing the International Relations Certificate, but, in all honesty, those don’t really add up to a public health major. So, I thought South Africa would provide a nice change of pace and be ideal for studying community health. At 11 percent, South Africa has the highest incidence of HIV/AIDS in the world. Within South Africa, the province I am staying in, KwaZulu Natal, has one of the highest rates of any province.
I am living in Cato Manor, a township outside Durban. The town is entirely African, so you can imagine what it’s like for a group of 22 mostly white Americans to just drop in. Needless to say, we stick out. Children run up to me in the street and shout, “Mulungu,” which means “whitey,” and then start jumping and screaming. My host mom is a lovely Zulu woman who lives with her mother and has one son who now lives in Cape Town. Her house is small but nice, and, despite lacking Internet, a showerhead, or warm running water, provides everything else one would need.
The house next to me has 12 kids who run in and out of our living room. It is also physically impossible to sleep past 5 a.m. because of the crazy loud roosters (who like to walk around on the streets with lots of chickens and adorable little chicks), dogs, and other random noises. Waking up at five is fine with me though, because it’s difficult to leave my house after the sun goes down unless I am in a group, so it’s easy to go to sleep around 9:30 p.m. every night during the week.
On the weekends the hotspot is a local shebeen. Formerly speakeasies from the Apartheid era, shebeens now are sort of like bars. The one near me is in a shack, has no bar, and only serves beer and meat. It’s a fun time, especially when you figure that with the exchange rate a beer only costs about 85 cents. Oh, and there are lots of locals offering various amounts of cattle to marry you. There’s actually an entire rating system to determine how many cattle a person is worth. I won’t get into the details right now.
On a different note, South Africa is an insanely complex country. I don’t think one semester is enough time to even begin to understand how a democracy as young as this one (only 17 years old) is able to function as well as it does. There are major societal problems to be sure: poverty, HIV, crime (though, as I just found out, you can buy tasers at a local flea market, which is pretty awesome), just to name a few. But, considering that so many South Africans have lived through, and are still affected by, apartheid, I find it amazing how little animosity I have observed. I stick out in Cato because of my skin, but no one harasses me or seems to be angry that white students are living in the neighborhood.
Anyway, I hope the snow at Wes is still nice and white. I’ll think about it when I’m lying on the beach this weekend.
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