10 Unexpected Findings

10 findings from this trip- may or may not be unexpected, but the manner in which I came to each realization (or affirmation) definitely were surprising. This will clearly take more than one post to get through!

1.     Food unites or divides.

When you think about specific foods, you generally think about a time of year or people that you tend to eat or drink it with. When I think ice cream, I think of a pier, the pool in summer time or just before bed sharing a spoon with Scott. When I see plantain, I think of Uganda and my home-stay family where I ate Matooke many nights and gaining my Senior 15 during undergraduate. When I think martinis, summer break with the Arizona lovelies comes to mind. Spaghetti sauce- Hannah; bagels- Charlottesville; cast iron grilled cheese sandwiches, Dad; Turkey, Thanksgiving, and for here in Vhembe, pap. Maize meal porridge- nearly tasteless and yet is unimaginably common. Mopani worms? You guessed it- Vhembe.

The past 2 weeks have flown by with some Indian food, Pakistani food, interesting takes on cheese burgers, the neighbor’s fabulous from scratch challah and of course the traditional braai foods (anything you’d grill). Here in Limpopo, braai’s are common. Charcoal grilling is one of the easiest ways to cook, so we do it often! We’ve eaten with our University of Venda counterparts only once, but it was quite an experience, an all-day roller coaster. Beginning with making the shopping list in the morning (and killing the two chickens that our guests had brought), everything was much like a negotiation of what is normal, what is expected, and what was affordable. Quite a juggling match when you don’t know how many people you are truly expecting and fabulously complicated, but by the end of the night as things wound down things had turned out alright. We’d all tried Mopani worms, pap, cooked-down spinach, potatoes, mac-n-cheese, chicken feet and goodness knows many other dishes including a peanut sauce by Meg (an American nursing student with my group) whose recipe came from the Congo. It was quite the multicultural experience, and everyone had a fabulous time! Singing, dancing and grilling were the most common of activities, but cooking fresh ginger tea in a large vat over the still fresh coals was the last step to winding down the night. 
 

  

 

Our dinner experiences here at Acacia have all been self-prepared and from Sid’s delicious and spicy dishes to Hannah’s brave ones like coal cooked pizzas, falafel and her beautiful braided challah bread, it’s been such a fun food experience! Every meal has brought people closer together, and the preparation periods have kept everyone working together. Milk and sugar goes into tea, and in the end this metaphor for life is that life and energy can be found in everyone, and in this crowd, the excitement was clearly visible.

2.     People may surprise you. 

It’s not that people do not hold surprise parties for family and friends, but here everything is a surprise (your schedule, tire pressure, wake-up call, new friends, rain, shine, and even monkey’s plotting to take over the chalet kitchens). You did not want to bother with a car wash- surprise we will wash it while your gas tank fills up! You wanted to just go to the fabric market, 30 minutes later, you will have tried eating the largest variety of insects you could see, bought a scarf and be on your way to finish vegetable shopping as the experience comes to a close, or maybe just begins.

Plans for work have been in constant flux, and so flexibility has been critical yet again in my travels. In some ways, this has been one of the most challenging of dynamics to juggle. Working with the ministry of health, the University of Venda, and my UVA counterparts has meant negotiating many different personalities. The quietness of individuals is misleading from time to time – one minute you are practically begging people to participate in a workshop or to give you feedback on a project, and the next moment you hear their voice alone above the crowd. Passion rings out, but only when and where it is culturally appropriate.

Since coming to Venda, the only days that have gone as planned are those in which the plan was understood as not an actual plan for the day, but a hypothetical one. This of course provides a plethora of challenges, but in some ways, the surprises have been good: in making friends, in hearing the frankness of new acquaintances, and in the warmest of welcomes by complete strangers (American and Africans alike). Even our first day of orientation led us from an empty meeting room to an auditorium lined with more than 150 nursing students singing us a welcome song. Hard to believe it, but in many ways, this exemplifies the surprises along the way.

Not all the surprises have been good. There is a lot of false health information being propagated, and many people who are unable to reach their potential because of knowledge gaps or bureaucracy. We have been lucky to hear some of the surprising information about causes of mental illnesses, home remedies for serious chronic diseases, and seeing the community health workers and nursing students in the field doing work. Keeps me wanting to stay as far away from a hospital as possible, but then again, this is the slowness of growing these systems- it cannot happen overnight and yet without the home-based care model, there would be little way to reach most of the people in the region.

3. Polka Dots are universal.

Patterns can be found everywhere, and not just in the fabrics used by people across the globe, but also in the way they act and they rhythms by which they function. Today, I ordered a traditional skirt (I guess slightly modified, but still lovely). I had the striped fabric and was totally ready to go have the seamstress the fabric, but then she goes, “OH! We must get the dots!” and runs off back to the counter getting pink fabric with white polka dots (totally killing the more mild vibe of the darker fabric I had purchased to make this wearable back home…). I was able to switch her mind from pink to green, but I am think she thought I was crazy haha! All I could think was…not polka dots, but we will see how it comes out! One thing I am fairly certain won’t happen is that I will need “satellites” (a necklace of plastic colored beads and white satellite looking things out the back, they represent one’s youthfulness at any age. 

This week, I saw the celebration of Mandela’s Birthday. Our team went to celebrate our 67 minutes of volunteering by driving to rural areas to give lessons in health, hygiene, substance abuse, teen pregnancy, and attempting to motivate each student toward futures outside of their current box of possibilities. The charge was that Mandela spent the first 67 years of his life fighting for others, so each year spending 67 minutes volunteering should be done. The idea of celebrating the life of a great person through community service is not unique to South Africa. While MLK day has become “a day on, not a day off” in the USA, there are other places with similar traditions globally. This pattern of encouraging service to others is one that I hope spreads like wild fire and yet, I hope that it does not also result in the destructive outcomes of false information spreading.

I’ve also come to see patterns in behaviors and conversations. Have you ever wished you could just change languages in order to make sure only one person in the room could understand you? I’d say everyone’s probably wished that at some point, but though the time here, it’s been entirely available to our Venda partners. The code-switching is incredibly common. By having such drastically different levels of language skills locally, there is an understanding that speaking in native tongue is effective at keeping the foreigner out of the conversation. This method is an old one, but still stings when I see it occurring. I always want to hear what is being said, but this trip there has been more deliberate lack of filling in than I have experienced before. A desire to be “in” on conversation versus being left without understanding of anything more than the basic idea of what the hand motions might have implicated is incredibly isolating, and makes me give even more kudos to those who have come here to do work long term.

Lastly, the commonalities in awe-filled moments have been immensely beautiful! The natural surroundings, the animals, the waterfalls, savannas, trees, pools, the calmness: all of them have just brought peace to my relatively chaotic experience. They have brought me home and comfort for a few moments, and to other places I have seen or experienced.