home sweet home

I'm back kids! Back to finding out I have no house if I don't find 2 roommates in the next 2 weeks. Back with no money and no nursing job. Americans are overwhelming. I need to flood my senses. NYC anyone? I can't pay for it though, so we'll have to walk and not eat and sleep on the street.

I am glad to be back though. Back to good friends. Back to a gym. Back to a way to make money. Back to lattes.

I miss South Africa already. I miss speaking Zulu. I'm trying to still use it here. Yebo=Yes. Saubona umgani= Hello. How are you? Those will be easy to use. I miss how warm and loving everyone was. I miss the warm weather too.

Call me to hang out!!!

Sidekick rings, What's up? Holler. Text the address. I'll see you later.

I got back from Mozambique yesterday. It was quite a hectic place. The poverty was massive. I can't even begin to describe it. The desperation was even crazier. Vendors were ferocious. They followed you for blocks trying to sell you whatever they had- necklaces, batiks, tissues, kazoos, mix cd's, anything. It was hard to be compassionate about their situation when they were following you like the paparazzi on Britney Spears. Kids directly asked for your leftovers. My heart broke constantly.

I feel overwhelmed just thinking about the experience. It was insane.

We got 2 flat tires, one 2 hours into our trip. I changed them both. I had explosive vomiting, even through my nose, in 3 different countries on our trip up. Every day, our plan A turned into plan F, because of lack of information until it was too late or because of a lack of any road signs. We didn't find a real beach the entire week. Mozambique is supposed to be a beach country. There was an incredibly creepy guy at our hostel who was caught watching me sleep. Every day, we planned on checking out a new area and staying at a hostel there. Every night, we ended up back at Fatima's Backpackers. It felt like we were coming crawling back after a breakup. Oh baby give me one more chance! Won't you please let me back in your heart. Oh darling I was blind to let you go.

Driving here is fun, because you can do whatever you want. If you're behind a car going slower than you want to go, you cross the double line and pass them. Everyone is used to this system, so cars pull into the shoulder if they need to. I'm going to have to make a conscious effort not to do this when I'm driving back in the states.

I promise that I'm still alive

I haven't updated in a while. Oops. My internet that I'd been stealing at my flat has been down.

I have very little time left on this internet I've paid for, so here is a very brief update.

I went surfing this week. Turns out I'm a natural and I got up on my feet 9 times out of 10 by my second lesson. My instructor said that's really rare. Sweet dude.

I'm going to Mozambique and Swaziland starting tomorrow.

I'm done with clinicals! Nursing school is over!!!! Here's to 6 years of college.

I've been learning some Zulu and that's been a lot of fun.

I can't believe I only have 2 weeks left here. It's not long enough. With the whole swine flu in the states, I think I'll just stay here. :)

I see your Range Rover and I'll raise you a Nissan Micra

Today, Ellen, Lauren, and I were asked to be models for an advertisement. Too bad the shoot is this weekend and we'll be away. I could've been an American South African model. haha

I officially didn't get the job at Sinai. They started out with 2 possible new grad positions, but it was reduced to 1 and that spot was filled. Back to square 1. I'll deal with it when I get home though. It'll all work out, I'm sure.

This past weekend Ellen, Lauren, me, and our Duke (Duke sucks) med student friend, Channa, went to a game reserve in Hluhluwe (pronounced shlushlooway). We saw lots of great animals! Giraffes and Zebra are my favorite. We conquered the park on our own in our little Nissan Micra without paying $85 for a tour. I was very proud of us. It was so wonderful to get out of the city and be where we could see the stars.Every giraffe's spots are different, like fingerprints.

Hippos are the number one killer in Africa. I thought they were cute and cuddly.

I've been nicknamed Elli-phant. I'm a fat kid at heart.

This is an inyala. It's really pretty.

I carry you in my heart

Ellen and I went to Cato Crest with the University of Kwazulu-Natal nursing students today. Cato Crest is an "informal settlement," basically a shanty town. The government designates squatter areas as informal settlements and then builds a few "starter homes." These homes are one roomed cement structures with no electricity, but they do have running water. Who knows how clean that water is though. The homes are called starter homes, because the people who are given them are supposed to be able to build onto them, but with the land eroding all around them, the extremely tight space, and no money to build, this certainly doesn't happen. These one room homes hold often 10 people. This is a set up for rampant disease.
The people who did not qualify for a government starter home build shacks out of anything they can. They often use tin walls and roofs or ply wood scraps. Some roofs were patched with sheets of cloth held down by stones. These home were about 8x8 feet.
To qualify for a government house, the family had to have lived there before '94. Within that group, those with disabilities or those with children were given higher priority.
In order to get electricity, people here run the power lines into their homes illegally. This starts a lot of fires, but it may be their only option.
Children here just roamed. No one was watching after them. As soon as they could walk, they were on their own. This contributes to the problem with child raping. There's a myth that having sex with a virgin will cure HIV/AIDS, so young children are raped. The age of virgins is getting younger and younger, so younger children are being raped, some as young as 9 months old. Sickening.
The people here were so beautiful though. Inside and out. Seriously striking. The smiles of the children were so genuine. I fell in love with these people instantly. I wish I could have worked in one of the clinics that serves the different informal settlements. This is the Africa my heart longs to serve.

shame shame

Why do white people throughout history think they're better than other people??? I'm often so ashamed to be in this skin. It breaks my heart the things that have been done to these other cultures that I happen to love.

An Indian woman from the hospital has taken the girls and I under her wing. She took us to dinner last night and on a tour around her town. She told us about her days as an activist for the end of apartheid. She had to leave the country because of the ways the government was hurting her family. She showed us these terrible places where the government moved all the Indians so that they wouldn't be living in the same areas as the whites. The Indians weren't even allowed to drive through the white towns or they would be shot. There were large walls to keep the white towns from even seeing the others driving on the highways. At first, the Indians had been allowed to sell beer in the white areas and the blacks weren't allowed to. An influential man in the black community said the Indians were making all this money from it and instigated violence on the Indian communities.

This was all so recent and the feelings are still very strong here. We're told on a regular basis not to go to places because it's where the black people are. It's not that it's a high crime area, just that the black people are there. I'm so ashamed.

we swam in the Indian Ocean

and I didn't get sunburned.

Sinik'ithemba

Meet my friend. I had lunch on the swingset with him. He's 8 years old. He has an uncle who snores and a cousin who wants to paint cars. He likes McDonalds and KFC. His favorite juice is grape and he wants to be a doctor when he grows up. He wants to play rugby when he gets older too. He doesn't like speaking Zulu. We shared my mango slices. He has HIV. He calls it the sickness and asked me if I had it too.
There are so many kids here with HIV. Happy, jumping like frogs, playing soccer, spiderman wannabes with HIV.
One of the 16 year old girls I saw, met a guy and had sex with him once. Now she has HIV too.
If a patient has HIV, they're almost guarenteed to get TB here too.
I'm working in the HIV/AIDS clinic, Sinik'ithemba, right now. So all my patients are HIV positive. Some of them are really sick with the largest livers I have ever palpated, while some of them have high CD4 counts (that's good) and are living healthy lives on their ARVs. It's encouraging to have those healthy patients come in after a day full of sick patients who are full of opportunistic infections. I'm really glad I am getting this experience, since I don't feel like I learned much at all in nursing school about the different ARVs (the medications to keep HIV patients healthy) or the opportunistic infections patients frequently get with HIV. I'm especially glad for this experience since I want to open a clinic one day. Now I'm even getting to see the politics involved in all this and how the government's regulations really effect the patients care.

Next time we'll figure out the Kombis

Yesterday, we decided to go to city center to do some shopping, because we've discovered that parts of our wardrobe aren't very appropriate for Durban. People here are very conscious of how they dress. Flip-flops are a no-go for restaurants (and they don't have fast food). If you carry a backpack, everyone knows that you're American.

So we planned on catching a Kombi (a 15 passenger van used as a shuttle) to city center. We started walking and every Kombi that passed by was full, so we just continued walking. We were almost to city center when our building supervisor passed in his car. He pulled over and had us jump in. He told us we don't want to go to city center because "it's where all the black people go." He said he would just take us to the beach instead. This bothered me a lot, as he's still very much in the mindset of apartheid and my classmates and I are not exactly on board with that. We'll just go to city center another day.

The beach was wonderful, even in our street clothes. It wouldn't have been out of the ordinary for us to get in the water in them anyway. People were swimming in jeans and a nice tank top that they might also wear to the bars.

We happened upon a beach boating competetion. We watched a canoeing and a kayakcing race. Lauren and I decided we could be happy with all the tall blonde men here. Gorgeous.

There were lots of vendors along the beach, but every mat we passed had the exact same items that were obviously mass produced.

Durban's not quite what I expected. It's much more westernized. I don't really feel like I'm in Africa. There are definitely cultural differences though. The dress code is much nicer here. Men wear speedos at the beach. It's very laid back. The waitress never brings the check until you ask for it. Dinner out costs $5. Stores close at 6pm. There's no fast food. Even coffee's not to go. The vendors when they're trying to get you to buy something say, "Please support me." It's a bit heartbreaking. Those are just a few of the little things I've noticed so far.

I haven't gotten even the slightest sunburn! Thank you SPF 55.

I miss everyone already. Send me lots of love. My email is elisaac3@gmail.com


p.s. I found Clement St. even in South Africa. I knew I was home.

C'est bon?

I’ve arrived in Durban after a very long and eventful 2 days of travel. Ellen and I left Baltimore at 2pm on Wednesday and arrived in Durban at 3pm on Friday.

On the flight from Boston to Paris, we each got about 2 hours of sleep, so spending the day walking around Paris exhausted us to the point of narcolepsy. I fell asleep mid sentence twice and Ellen nodded off while we were talking.

If you have the option, always fly Air France. We got 2 meals on each flight, no matter how late at night the flight was. Wine and beer were complimentary, although the flight attendant asked if I was at least 18 and said I looked young when I laughed a little.

Paris was beautiful. We spent some time in the Jardin de Plantes, walked down the Seine by Notre Dame, walked through the courtyards of the Louvre, and walked to this very modern building (I forget what it was called). Basically, we did a lot of walking. Our very limited French made us freeze when someone would start speaking very quickly in French. Eventually, I got used to using a few key phrases again, so I had a response ready.

Ellen and I were looking through my Lonely Planet book for South Africa, when this Parisian man told me to stop looking, he was right there, I had found him. I should have asked him to marry me right then.

We had some adventures finding bathrooms we could use. I spent 4.70euros at Starbucks just so we could get the code for the bathroom doors. We found a bathroom where the door had been left open to the men’s room, because we didn’t have change left to unlock the doors. We saw a student strike and a public transport drivers strike. The drivers strike meant we didn’t have a bus back to the airport, even though we had paid for a round trip ticket. Luckily, there was a couple that spoke French and English who helped us figure out what was going on and let us share a cab with them back to the airport.

Friday, we finally made it to Durban and it was beautiful! Our apartment is so cute! We had a nice dinner at an Italian place called Spigo’s and then walked along the beach.

Here are some photos of my place and my view.

leaving on a jet plane, maybe never to return again

I leave for South Africa tomorrow and have so much to do! I'll be able to post on here semi-frequently, at least once a week. So if you're interested, check back for updates and pictures from my trip!