Splashy Fen

These Mountains/hills were the back drop of the festival...they were so cool looking!
My friend Lisa and I trying desperately to escape the sun!

Sitting around the camp fire Saturday morning. Note my sneakers...I think I bought gum boots from a truck going into the festival about 5 min after this picture was taken!
Morgan, Myself, Louisa (friends in my program)
The volunteers/workers stayed about a 15 min walk from the rest of the festival, so this picture was taken from our camp site and you can see the rest of the festival in the distance (all the white dots).
A Zulu group who performed at Splashy (I think the only Zulu group actually).

Friday March 21st a big group of kids from my program went to this huge music festival in South Africa called Splashy Fen. We stayed Friday-Monday. Its nick name is the South African Woodstock. It was really fun, but the weather caused a few complications to say the least! It was in the mountains so during the day it would reach the upper 90's but at night it was FREEZING!! And it would rain every evening so there was ridiculous amounts of mud, but we still had an amazing time! By the second day we all had gotten our hands on a pain of rain boots (or gum boots as they are called here) which made a HUGE difference. Our Zulu teacher works at the festival every year so she volunteered us to work and we were given tickets and accommodation (tents) as long as we worked a few shifts so it worked out great. It was kind of rough though...we had to go straight from the festival to our third homestay! So we all arrived really muddy and tired!

Umfolozi/Uhluhulwe Game Reserve

Here are a few of my pictures from the Game reserve we visited on 3/12/08. We did a game drive from 6-10 am and then in the afternoon went on a Hippo and Croc tour.

Ohwebede Rural Homestay

Sanelle, Bongeka, Ayanda, and I
View from our yard of other homesteads
Sanelle
Ayanda
Carrying water on my head!
Pumping water at 5:30 am!
The little guys doing some Zulu dancing
Sanelle in my shades!
View of the beach
The four siblings on my last night. Bongeka and Sanelle in front. Ntokoso in the middle and Ayanda in the back on the right.

Sarah and I in our uniform skirts Gogo made for us
The family and I on my last morning
Sanelle and I after a looooong hike to the beach at the top of a sand dune.
Sarah, Sanelle, Ntokoso, Ayanda and I. You can see the main house in the background off to the left. That is where the kitchen, main room, and Gogo's room is.
Sarah, Gogo, and I at our braai on our last night

The house where Sarah and I stayed is the one in the middle. The house off to the left is the "ancestor house" because Gogo's husband died in 2003.
Playing soccer
Gogo packaging fireballs to sell the next day and cooking our braai


My rural homestay was in a town called Ohwebede about an hour and a half North of Durban. We left Saturday 3/1/08 and stayed through Monday 3/10/08. Everyone was assigned a partner to live with for the homestay and I was paired with a girl named Sarah who goes to George Washington University and is from Seattle.

My families surname is Mukhize. There is Gogo (Grandma, 53) Ntombi (Gogo's neice who was 19) Ntokoso (male, 10) Ayanda (male, 7) Bongeka (female, 5) and Sanelle (male, 4). Gogo's daughter Gugu (33) came for the second weekend (3/8-3/9). She works in Durban and comes to Ohwebede every other weekend. All four children were Gugu's.

Gogo raises all four kids. She has several different forms of employment. She sells fried dough balls (guine), fire balls, chips, scones, and other snacks under a tree at the high school to students at lunch time. She also made uniforms for the high school girls and charged 60 Rand for them. She also sells food such as popsicles, pologni, and other random goods out of her home.


The views from this town were absolutely amazing! It was right on the coast (some houses closer than others to the beach). The houses were spaced out quite a bit, surrounded by hills in all directions. Our homestead did have electricity (it would randomly go off) but no running water. We had to get it from a pump a little ways down the road...it felt like Montauk! The women taught us how to carry the buckets of water on our head (we were horrible at it, but it was still fun!).


Well I'm not going to lie the first few days were a little rough! The language barrier was extremely high, so we definitely improved our Zulu over the 10 days. We stayed in the circular house with the thatch rough pictured above, with Ntombi and Bongeka. Sarah and I made the mistake of spraying Raid insect killer all over our room the first few nights which drew out the bugs, especially cochroaches! Our Gogo was an exremely caring woman but she was also pretty tough so the first few days she definitely put Sarah and I in our place a few times!

As the days went on we grew to really love the family and each day we became more comfortable with them and vice versa. The kids were absolutely adorable! Sanelle (the four year old) was hysterical. He would constantly be chatting away in Zulu and we had no idea what he would be saying but he would just keep on going, giggling the whole time. All the kids were constantly in our room wanting to play and talk to us, none of them spoke any english at all though. Sanelle's nickname was Inguine (crocodile) which is perfect because he was such a little goofball!

During the week we walked to the primary school and met for class. I lived about 10 min away from the school but some SIT students had up to a 45 min walk. Each day we had a different theme...

Monday- Health, we visited the local clinic and a tradtional healer
Tuesday- Tribal Court
Wednesday- Education, visited primary and secondary school
Thursday- We spent a day a local eco-tourism project discussing development with students from the University of Zululand.
Friday-Zulu Final and beach!

Friday (3.7.08) I got some sort of allergic reaction all over my face. I think it was from the water because that was the only morning I didn't put antiseptic in the water. I went to the clinic after our Zulu final and got medicine and it cleared up in a few days. For the most part no one got any major illnesses. Several students got tick bite fever, different rashes, and basic intestinal "issues" most likely from the water.


Our second weekend with the family Sarah and I cooked spaggheti and meatballs for the family on Saturday night. To get the ingredients we piled in the back of a truck with our Gogo and drove for about an hour to a town with a supermarket. The trip back to our house was ridiculous because our Gogo bought enough groceries for about a month and it was Sarah, Gogo, and I and about 8 other people and a million groceries packed in the back of a pick up truck bouncing down the dirt roads! Sunday (3/9/08) we hiked to the beach with Ntombi, Gugu, Sanelle, and Bongeka. It was an hour through waist high grass and enormous sand dunes, but once you got there it was absolutely gorgeous! The people in the town never really go there though because of the distance. Sunday night they had a big braai (BBQ) for us.

It was so sweet...one of our Gogo's forms of employment is sewing uniforms for high school girls. So she measured Sarah and I and made us each a skirt! (see picture)

We left at 7 am on Monday (3/10/08). It was really sad to leave because I'm most likely never going to see them again. The beginning of the week it felt as if we would be there forever but by the end we wanted to stay longer. It was really hard for our Gogo to watch us leave. The day before she called our teacher at 6 in the morning to tell him that she loved the dinner we cooked for her and that she didnt want us to leave.

End of February

At the NGO in the Valley of a Thousand Hills
At the Rugby Game
Giant Sea Turtle at Ushaka
Botanic Garderns

Okay so I've done about a million things in the last week or so but I will try and summarize the most exciting things!

2/20/08 The president of World Learning and SIT (My School/Company is called SIT-School for International Training) came to visit us for the day. Her name is Carol Bellemy and she is the most amazing woman! She was the Director of the Peace Core later on of UNICEF.

2/21/08 My class spent the afternoon and evening at an informal settlement at Kennedy Road which is located on a landfill. There is an organization called the Abahlali Informal Settlement Movement run by young men who live at Kennedy Road who came to speak to us about the organizations goals. They are constantly battling the city of Durban who want to move them to a more rural area...actually a few days before our visit the city dug up their power lines and disconnected everyones electricity. .We spent about an hour walking through the area then, were served dinner, and had a performance by a male acapella group which was one of the most amazing performances I have ever seen/heard.

The Weekend of 2/23-2/24 I visited the Durban Bontanical Gardens which were unbelievably beautiful (see picture). There was a wedding going on while I was there as well! I also went to a rugby game...The Durban Sharks vs The Capetown Stormers and the Sharks won which was exciting! On Suday I went to a place called UShaka with my friend Morgan and her little sister (her homestay sister). Ushaka is a waterpark and aquarium.


On 2/2708 we went to visit an NGO in a place called the Valley of a Thousand Hills. It is about 20 min outside of Durban and it had the most amazing scenery! My picture above does not caputre it at all!

Today 2/29/08 we went to visit Durban North College. The school used to be exclusively Afrikaaner but now all different students attend, with Afrikaaner and Indian being the majority. The school is split into "mother tounges" so half the kids learn in Afrikaans and the half learn in english. We were broken into groups of three and assigned to a class. There is one Afrikaans class and one English class for every grade and they stay together all day rotating through their various subjects. My class was English and 10th grade. It seemed like an average high school class to me and I felt like I was back in high school again and all the kids were sitting together and hanging out. Its funny...I got asked about 25 times if I know 50 cent and Beyonce as soon as I tell them I'm from New York! Some of my friends were in Afrikaans speaking classes where they had a much different expereince...and were shocked by the blatent racism. Although others in English and Afrikaaner classes experienced similar and much different points of view. So it was interesting when all our mini groups of three came together and we all heard how everyone else's day went.

Well tomorrow morning 3/1/08 I leave for my rural homestay! I will be there through 3/10/08 and then we go to a game reserve. Our teachers set up the program in this way because they want to experience the drastic transition from living with a Zulu family with no electricity and running water straight into a wealthy primarily white setting.

Weekend at Wild Coast

Hello!

The weekend of 2/17-2/18 our whole class went on a weekend excursion to a place called Wild Coast. We got picked up Sat (2/17) at 7 am and it took us about 2 hrs to get there. Once we got there we began a 5 hour hike which started off along the beach for about 2km. There were tons of caves, fossils and just cool things in general!


Then we went up this huge hill to a rural village for lunch. The views were AMAZING! Parts of the movie Blood Diamond were filmed there and one of our tour guides was in the movie! For any of those who saw it the place where Leonardo DiCaprio dies, and when Leonardo and another guy are walking along the beach at sunset with a guy with dreadlocks and an AK47 (he was our guide). So I thought that was really cool!

When we got to the Village we saw traditional Zulu Sangomas perform. Sangoma's are kind of like traditional healers, they interact with your ancestors to guide you/fix your problems. They were 3 women. It was kind of controversial though. Many students felt it was fake and unethical for them to perform for money...It was definitely interesting to see though.

That night we had a Braai (BBQ). And the next day we went to a GORGEOUS beach and then came back Sunday evening to our homestay families.

Miss you all!

My First Few Weeks

Linda and I at the beach
View from the place we ate lunch on the drive from Jo'burg to Durban

Hi Everyone!

I decided to start this blog so you can all get a little taste of my experiences here in South Africa. This post is kind of long, but I'm trying to quickly summarize what I have done so far!

I arrived in Johannesburg 2/1/08. We stayed in a hostel there until 2/4/08. While there we visited the Apartheid Museum, toured Nelson Manela's house, toured Soweto, hmmmm I know there's more! Well on 2/4/08 we drove 9 hours to Durban and stopped for lunch (see first picture) at this gorgeous place! When we arrived to Durban we stayed at a hostel and continued Orientation until Friday when we moved in with our first homestay families.

I live with a Zulu family named the Majola's in an area outside of Durban called Cato Manor. My specific neighboorhood is called Bonella. I live with My Gogo (Grandma) Khulu (Grandpa), their son (Thabo who is 33) and Thabo's son Linda (who is 11 years old). I will be staying with them until 3/1/07 and then I head to my rural homestay.

The family could not be any nicer to me and I really love staying with them! At first when I got dropped off on 2/8/07 I was a little nervous, but immidiately Gogo was calling me her baby, hugging, etc. Linda jokes with me and calls me tomatisi (tomato) and I call him zambane (potato) because I always have a sunburn! During the weekdays I go to school then come home do homework, hang out with Linda, go for walks and watch TV with them (their favorite show is The Biggest Loser South Africa!)

The Majola's live in a 2 Story apartment-type house. All the students live with in several miles of each other. The people in Bonella are primarily Zulu, but there are some Indian families. People are very friendly and welcoming for the most part. My Gogo does not let me walk alone around the neighborhood, Linda and I always go together. I try to avoid going out at night as much as possible also. The first few days people would come up to me and say "what are you doing here you need to get a cab and get out of here." But I just explain why I'm here and Linda does also, so you can tell people are very caring protective.

Linda is so fun! The first 15 minutes I was in the house he was helping me unpack and wanting to shoot a music video with my camera! He's funny...when we go for walks he'll pick up bricks to protect me from rabid dogs (he's really afraid of them though so he claims every dog is rabid!) or when we walk near tall grass where there are supposedly pythons! On Valentine's day he woke me up at 5:30 so I could take pictures of him (they can wear regular clothes not uniform on Valentines Day) because he was going to be in the school fashion show and trying to win "Mr. Valentine" for the second year in a row!

We get picked up every morning around 7:30 and dropped off at our classroom which is about 10 minutes away. Its funny...it feels like elementary school again!
I have been learning Zulu (we have had about 2 weeks of class). Its been fun/challenging and my homestay family loves to tease me about my pronunciation. The clicks are really hard! There are three different clicks for the letters Q, C, and X. In the afternoons we have lectures in either: Reconciliation and Development Seminar or Field Study Seminar. We have lecturers primarily from the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal. We also go on field trips during the week. We have been to an aquarium, 2 informal settlements, and the local market (Warwick Junction).


There are 28 kids in my program, 23 girls and 5 guys. Our 2 main teachers are from South Africa, a man named John and a woman named Vanessa.

I miss you and love you all! I will try and post as often as possible!