It's a Titular Thing

Naheed, the only other member of the ravaged NGO Team Venda, has been staying with me for the last week+. Her organization has not been able to secure housing as yet so she’s spending her limbo with me.

It hasn’t been that bad. Generally, I get irked by sharing my space, but Naheed and I really click as roommates, I think. We are eerily domestic together, developing nuanced systems. We shop for food together, cook together, eat together, and in the mornings, we’ve arranged an alternating workout schedule so that I am jogging when she’s using the weights and vice versa. We also enable one another in the junk food department (specifically, toasted coconut covered marshmallows, the greatest food known to man).

She has put a mirror up to some of my obsessive compulsive traits. For example, I like a really well made bed, where the sheets are smoothed over perfectly and the blanket evenly tucked in. I have a wickedly uneven sense of sacred and profane; I am not too grossed out by sweat or smells, but stray hairs or towels on the bed or chairs drive me mad.

We get a lot of attention walking around. My guess is it has to do with there being so few whites or south Asians walking around. Most just use cars, jump out, do their shopping, jump back into the cars and shuttle away. We walk around a lot and use the taxis. These taxis are actually more analogous to buses, only they’re minivans. But anyway, I’ve only ever seen black people using them. I think the community is started to recognize us some. We’ll have strangers yell out information about us while we walk around. Like Naheed and I were walking to a photo place and this dude yelled at us in tshiVenda: “you are the girls who go to Tshiramba and Sibasa.” Creepy – that’s where we each respectively work, but we were in Thohoyandou at the time.

Naheed got a hair cut at a salon recently, which was awesome to watch. I think most of the American volunteers here have gone to some Afrikaner barber in Louis Trichardt, about an hour or so away, to get their hair cut. But Naheed asked around. She got rejected by the first couple places, who claimed to be too busy, but seemed to resent the request from someone who is differently colored. She finally found some awesome immigrants from Ghana to do it. The salon staff members were very shocked to see her – they had only ever catered to black South Africans. They sat her down, took a random lock of hair and were about to cut, when she protested: “I think maybe you should wet it first.” So they did, then they grab another stray lock, pull it straight up to the ceiling and try to snip it, but because of the angle at which they were holding the scissors, the hair just slipped right out of the scissors. They looked aghast. I was cracking up in the background. Then Naheed said, “maybe you should put up the top layers of hair and just cut the bottom layer straight across and then do the top layers.” It came out fine, everything was straight. It was just really awesome to watch. I think I’ll visit the Ghana ladies when I want my hair done.

I was on television again. It was another Black Leopards game. I was sitting with Naheed, who is south Asian, and a friend from work, who is black, and I think the photographer thought we could be poster children for the new South Africa. I was also recently on the radio.

There is currently a Zulu girl staying at my home for the purpose of visiting my homestay brother’s Catholic church to rid herself of a demonic possession. The exorcism will be today. As a result of the possession, the girl has lost her appetite and her performance in school has deteriorated. These developments have transpired in the last three months, ever since the same demons killed her mother.

I visited a jail area today for work. This was a … new experience for me. It was very Silence of the Lambs. The criminals (alleged) were enclosed in red brick rooms with large Plexiglas windows facing forward. Their hands and feet were cuffed together and they sort of shuffled to the window to hoot and jeer as we passed. Little scary.

I’ve been reading Dark Star Safari (props to Angela for the recommendation) and it’s really inspiring me to take a cross-continental trip after my service is over. I’ve been thinking I’ll make my way up through Zimbabwe (I think I’ll visit Botswana at some point before I leave SA), see Victoria Falls, through Zambia, and then to Tanzania where I’d like to climb Kilimanjaro, then Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, where I think I’ll try to hitch on a cargo boat to Egypt (I’ll skip the trip to Sudan because of…err…time constraints). Then somehow to Morocco. Anyway, this is all hypothetical and I’m leaving out details of a lot of what I’d like to see, but you get the point. I’m pumped about it. Especially because I don’t really have anything lined up for after PC so I won’t have to rush the journey. I’m sure something will come up though, and it’s possible I’ll just be so homesick I won’t be able to take the wait. We’ll see. I hold on to the hope that much of this will be accomplished by hitchhiking with a friend from PC (or home, if there are any takers?)

I will be celebrating Eid (the celebration that marks the end of Ramadan) this weekend with Naheed and another area volunteer, Omar. We’ll be making a big feast, with a coconut curry, saag, mango lassies and hello dollies (my contribution – a dessert made with a graham cracker base, chocolate chips, coconut, and sweetened condensed milk baked to melty perfection – tell your friends.)

And by the by, those feeling the itch to visit (please do, by the way), I think Jo'Burg is your best bet. If you want to take a domestic to from Jo'Burg to Polokwane once you've landed that's good to, but I think you probably aren't going to find reasonable international tickets into Polokwane.