Pub Quiz

As much as I deny it, it is still winter in South Africa.  This breaks my heart as all I want to do is go to the beach.  I have hope that September will finally be the turn-around point with longer daylight hours and sunlight without cloud cover.  It is light out now when I walk to the bus stop, which is a significant improvement over the past trek in the dark.

Not only did I participate in a pub quiz this week at a bar on Long Street, but I was part of the winning team!  Leila, Sarah, and I went for milkshakes (what this bar is known for) and the chance at winning 500 Rand for the grand prize.  The winning team (me J) got to select one of five prize envelopes. Unfortunately my envelope was not the 500 Rand, but 2 free milkshakes.  It was slightly depressing, but we still won at least.  The questions pertained to many things and were random, but I’d like to point out that I did in fact know the capital of Wyoming.

President Zuma was in town this week.  I always know when he has been to Parliament because he gets a police escort to and from the building.  There are multiple cars and the sirens wail.  I can hear it in my apartment and see the cars leaving Parliament from the side of my window.  He stayed late a couple nights this week, so I was home from work when he left.

During the ‘delightful’ rainy weather for the rest of the week I stayed dry indoors.  The kayaking trip I was supposed to take on Saturday got postponed to this upcoming weekend in hopes that the sun will be shining. 

Instead we went to the local bars in the area.  Several of my friends are on their last week in Cape Town – Sarah who leaves for a 21 day southern Africa trip and Tze who heads back to start her masters at LSE.  Once again I will be having another roommate.  Liz (who got here at the start of July) and I laugh about how many people come and go but she and I are here for several months still.

Today was supposed to be another big protest by the ANCYL.  They declared that at 13:00, 10,000 of them would march to parliament to deliver a memorandum of their demands.  I did not get the day off of work this time although the ANCYL who is marching declared today a holiday trying to rally support.  It turns out that not nearly that many people participated.  The police escorted them on their path and had rolling blockades to keep the traffic out of the way of the protesters.

I keep forgetting to take pictures, so hopefully this week I remember.  I don’t like taking my camera lots of places anymore because I am paranoid that it will get stolen again.  

Dog's Bollocks

A picture on my own camera showing that I am indeed still alive and in Africa!  This was taken on the roof of my apartment building.

This week and for the next month the majority of my time outside of work will be spent working on my masters applications and my travel plans for my weeks off of work.  I will hopefully be completing my applications by the end of September/start of October.  In October I get to take 2 full weeks off of work and roam around South Africa and neighboring countries.  The plans are in a very basic form at the moment, but they include a Kruger Safari and a trip to Victoria Falls.

Projects at PATA:

·         Local Forums – We are well underway planning 4 local forums that will be occurring in September and October.

·         Database – I have been creating and updating various databases in our network.  This includes updated clinic information and contacts. It turns out we have over 230 clinics and are still accepting new ones.

·         Proceedings – I have been compiling the proceedings from the 2011 Botswana summit that will be made into a book. This involves e-mail correspondence with all 47 different summit speakers.  This is semi-difficult as some of the speakers were doctors from remote clinics all over Africa, and they are very hard to reach even by e-mail.

·         Research – The first PATA research project on frontline healthcare workers needs for palliative care almost has the protocol finalized and the initial draft of the questionnaire complete.

·         Grant proposals – We are all working on different parts of grant proposals in the hopes that we get more funding.

·         Social media – We have been updating Facebook and Twitter.  I have been informing all of our contacts that they can use this method to learn about what is happening at PATA and find information about the upcoming forums and summit.

·         2012 Summit planning – There is lots of work surrounding our upcoming southern Africa summit in December.  The three days are going to focus on continuum of care, managing co-infections, and disclosure along with the master classes.  We are currently accepting applications from clinics to attend in December, as well as finding expert speakers, arranging the logistics, and managing everything else that comes with a conference of this magnitude.

I’m sure there is more going on at work, but I can’t remember at the moment. I stayed home from work sick today.  Nothing horrible, but I spent the weekend laying in my bed/living room/watching movies as I just overall did not feel very good.  Hopefully that goes away soon.  I am sure I will be back at work tomorrow.

This weekend I did leave my apartment to go eat at the Dog’s Bollocks. It is a burger joint in this garage down a side street where they only serve 50 burgers a night.  You have to get there early or else you won’t get to have a burger that night and have to try again another night.  The burgers were huge and hard to bite down on.  Sadly I couldn’t finish mine, but Leila and Sarah did.

I also have old photos from a couple weeks ago of Sarah and I baking.  

I walked by a protest on my way home from work on Friday.  People were picketing in front of the police station. They were giving speeches and filming it.  The cops blocked off the roads so no one could drive down in front and hit the protesters.  They were just watching it happen, not really caring since it was fairly well contained and not violent.

In other news, South Africa had one of its worst incidences of violence since Apartheid ended 18 years ago.  Outside Johannesburg, 3000 workers went on strike calling for higher wages.  The police shot and killed 34 miners, injuring 78 others.  Supposedly the police tried non-lethal methods of stopping the protest first such as tear gas, but fired shots when charged by the armed crowd. 259 people were arrested with weapons including spears, machetes, and clubs.  Tensions had been escalating for some time with 10 people killed in a different Lonmin mine the week before.  27 percent of the platinum mine workers reported for their morning shift today.  Zuma has declared this a week of national morning.  

ANCYL Protests and Devil's Peak

This past week there was a lot of political tension between the government of the Western Cape and the ANCYL (African National Congress Youth League) as the Western Cape is the one province that does not have the ANC in power.  The Democratic Alliance (DA) rules here, which marks the first time since the end of Apartheid that the ANC is not in power.  The people in the townships were upset over the lack of public transport and government services to the townships, thinking that they deserved more than they already receive.  They participated in a service delivery protest to show their discontent.  In anger they burned a Golden Arrow bus.  They also stoned a bus in the Khayelitsha Township.  This led to the bus driver crashing into 4 shacks on the side of the road, injuring many people.  The driver died on the scene and one of the victims has since died in the hospital.  To me stoning a public transport service in the area you want more transport to reach is not the way to go about getting more services.

With tensions escalating demands were made to the government by the ANCYL that needed to be met by Tuesday night or they were going to lead a mass protest on Wednesday focusing on preventing public transportation.  Politically both sides were arguing that they were not behind the bus stoning, especially since the ANCYL has been diverting from the regular ANC philosophy with more violence.  The city was unsure what would happen on Wednesday or if a protest would take place at all. Considering I take Golden Arrow buses to work every morning, and I live roughly 50 meters from Parliament where they would lead the protests to, I was advised to stay home from work Wednesday just to be on the safe side. 

Fortunately, absolutely nothing happened on Wednesday so I just got an extra day off of work!  Supposedly the protests have been moved to August 27 to represent the recent closing of 27 schools in the area, but you can’t be sure what will happen or not.  Elections occur every 5 years.

With my day off, I finally made it to Bread Milk & Honey, a delicious breakfast/lunch place.  I realized that it will be well worth my time to leave for work 10 minutes earlier so that I can grab breakfast here; it was that wonderful.  The weather was gorgeous so in the afternoon, I hiked up Lion’s Head.  It took roughly 40 minutes to reach the top, which has sweeping views of the city bowl, the waterfront, Atlantic seaboard, Camps Bay, and Table Mountain.  The mountain is 669 meters high. The path winds around the base so you walk a complete circle around the mountain on your way up to the top, before climbing up the rocky part to reach the summit.  On the way back down the clouds were forming on top of Table Mountain making the tablecloth.  They were literally pouring off of the front of the mountain exactly like a waterfall.  I have never seen it do that before.  While Liz and I were taking in this moment, an airplane flew by with a banner trailing behind it.  The banner said “Mavericks” which is a strip club in the city. It was so funny that this happened to fly by while we were so impressed with the view. Then some passing hikers heard us say “Mavericks” but they didn’t see the plane with the sign, so they started laughing and thought we were going there later that night.

Thursday, August 9, was a national public holiday, Women’s Day.  On August 9, 1956, 20,000 women marched to petition against legislation that required African persons to carry the special identification documents that banned the freedom of movement during the Apartheid era.  They left over 100,000 signatures outside the prime minister’s office in Pretoria. Outside the building they stood in silence for 30 minutes.  This was another day off work, giving me a 3 day workweek. 

Sarah, Liz, and I decided to hike Devil’s Peak, which is 1000 meters tall (only a little shorter than Table Mountain) but does not have a cable car so you have to hike both up and down.  Devil’s Peak was named after a folk tale about a pipe smoker who was forced to smoke outside by his wife instead of in the house.  He would smoke on the slopes and one day he met a mysterious smoking stranger.  They competed to see who could smoke the most.  The stranger turned out to be the devil, but the man won the contest and all of their smoke formed the table cloth of cloud on Table Mountain.

We took the Platteklip Gorge start off of Tafelberg Road that also has the path up to Table Mountain.  There is a fork in the path at one point, with the second path heading sideways and toward Devil’s Peak.  The path meanders past Table Mountain and up into the saddle where it meets up with the path starting at Newlands Ravine on the other side of the mountain.  Then it climbs up the side of Devil’s Peak until you reach the top.  It kept tricking us where you think you are so close to the top, but once you climb the ridge there was another hill and another until finally we made it.  Overall the hike only took 1 hour and 40 minutes which was much faster than I anticipated.  At the very top you can see both False Bay and the Atlantic Seaboard with Cape Point and the Hottentot Mountains in the middle.  The other way has Table Mountain, Lion’s Head, Signal Hill, waterfront, city center, and the cape flats. 

The wind on top of the hill was very strong and chilly.  We hiked back down the path we came up, but instead of climbing down Platteklip Gorge, we hiked along the face of Table Mountain where the hill ends and the rock starts 3 km to the area above the lower cable station and down to the station.  It turns out there was a huge line at the station to go up the mountain with a wait time of over 2 hours.  It would take less time to physically climb the mountain than to wait in that line. Overall we spent 5 hours out on the mountains. 

I had to go back to work Friday, for just that one day before the weekend.  Things are picking up with 4 local forums occurring in Tanzania, Malawi, and Swaziland before November starts.  I feel like a real employee now since I officially received my first phone call at work on Tuesday.  The secretary answered the phone and the person asked for Michele!  I also have my own work e-mail address that I now receive quite a bit of correspondence on which is exciting. 

Friday night I finally watched some more Olympics at the Kimberly.  I got to see the USA women’s relay break the world record.  It was really entertaining for me because I was practically the only one rooting for the USA in the bar, as everyone else favored Jamaica.  I was out with someone from Sweden, South Africa, and Singapore which meant we all were from different continents (Europe, Africa, Asia, and North America).  We went to Evol a hipster bar afterward (it is love spelled backward).

There were storms this weekend with snow hitting lots of other regions in South Africa.  Pretoria hadn’t seen snow since 1968.  Cape Town did not have snow, but it is apparently never this cold during a cape winter.  This is unfortunately one of the side effects of global warming.  Hilary Clinton however made a stop in South Africa during the snow and was named “Nimkita” or “one who brought the snow.”  She went dancing in Pretoria with the video going viral.

I did make it to the Planetarium and S. A. Museum this weekend during a break in the rain.  Liz and I wandered around the displays which were rather disjointed and not sequential in any way. One floor had minerals and mammals.  There was a whole section on Charles Darwin.  The coolest part was the wonders of nature section that was up a rickety staircase at the top. There were large shark jaws (similar to the sharks I swam with) and fossils found of ancient fish.  Liz and I went to the Oceans in Space show in the planetarium.  When sitting down the seats recline and you are practically laying down in the dark.  We both knew that this would be a problem.  About 10 minutes in to the 30 minute show, I fell asleep only to wake up to the closing scenes of the program.  Unfortunately I didn’t get to learn the main concept of the show and whether we will find water on other planets. I do recall them talking about Mars previously having water and it vanishing as well as Jupiter’s moon Europa being a frozen tundra with slushy water under the icy surface.  Other than that I was unfortunately sound asleep. Both of us found it hysterical that we took a 25R nap, but at least we saw the museum.

More pictures stolen from the web:

1) Lion's Head

2) Devil's Peak with city hall (The Grand Parade is the parking lot in front of City Hall and just across the street from that is where I get on the bus for work every morning)

3) Map of the path we took hiking up and down Devil's Peak

For camera news: FedEx called me today and said it has arrived, but I have to find a way to go pay international customs fees before they will get me the package.  The only problem with that is I work during all business hours and can't make any of the opening times to actually pay this fee. No worries, I will figure it out somehow and have a camera again (hopefully). TIA. This is Africa.

Franschhoek Winter Wine Festival

Friday night we had reservations at South China Dim Sum Bar on Long Street.  We were meeting Ash – Leila’s parent’s friend’s son who was in town from Australia to see Groote Schuur Hospital.  He is a medical student and came to check out the area as a potential place for him to move to.  We ordered a bunch of plates to share, but the shrimp just never came.  We had to ask over 5 times until finally, 2 hours after we ordered it, it arrived.  It was very tasty, but definitely should not have taken so long to get there.  It was a good thing we had wine to keep us occupied in the meantime.  Later on we went out to a couple bars I had never been to including Jo’burg and the Shack. My favorite game is when people ask me where I am from.  I try to reply with the States.  When they ask which one, I say the Free State, because that is one of the nine provinces in South Africa.  They get so confused at first unsure of what I mean, before I clarify and say I am from Nebraska.  That usually doesn’t help too much because they have not heard of Nebraska.

Saturday was the winter wine festival in Franschhoek.  It was held at the Franschhoek Motor Museum at the L’Ormarins Estate.  The area was gorgeous and down in this valley surrounded by mountains.  There were over 20 locally made wines to choose from, and my ticket let me try every single one of them if I wanted. There were plenty of wine connoisseurs there, using the spittoon and judging the character of the wine.  Our group on the other hand was simply drinking all of the wine.  Winter wines are all red, which is sad because I like white wine better.  Now, after spending an entire afternoon drinking it, I think I like some red wines better.  I tried around 18 of the wines there, not having enough time to make it to the rest of them.  I remember liking the Haute Cabriere a lot. It was a sparkling wine, more commonly known as champagne, but since it is not from France they can’t use that term.  Most of them were pretty good and by the end of course I thought all of them were good.

Throughout our tasting we went into the four different stables that housed the motor museum.  They portray the evolution of the automobile with over 80 cars on display at all times.  They show antique, veteran, vintage, post-vintage, post-45, and post-60 cars including a 2003 Ferrari Enzo supercar.  Some of them were really old and cute with bright teal paint and long fronts.  Then there were the really nice low to ground cars with the wing doors that open upward.  We weren’t allowed to touch or go near any of the cars, but forced to stay far away on the other side of a rope. 

The entire afternoon we kept refilling our wine, wandering through the museums, and sitting outside on wrought iron chairs listening to live jazz play while the mountains and vineyards surrounded us.  It was a relaxing time and allowed me to get to know some of the new interns that just arrived earlier in the week.  We got to keep our wine glasses as a souvenir of the event.  I tried to watch a movie that evening, but I kept dozing off, worn out by my day of wine tasting.

Sunday I really wanted to go hike Lion’s Head, but the fog and clouds came in, and with it the cold.  Sunday was one of the coldest days we have had in a while.  Instead I went to a local market on Long Street, which was actually terrible.  Most things aren’t open on Sunday and this market is the poor exception to that rule.  We rented some movies and spent the rest of the day lounging around inside.  It was lots of fun watching movies with everyone because we are all from different countries.  The 5 of us were from Sweden, South Africa, Philippines, Singapore, and the United States.  It is educational talking with them about their universities and their home towns to compare the way education is in other parts of the world. 

Emma’s flight got in from Jo’burg at 2 am so I had to wake up and let her into the apartment at 3 in the morning.  She is now on a flight back to the USA so all of my original roommates have left South Africa. Where did the summer (and by summer I mean winter) go?

These are stolen pictures off of the internet.  

1) Two of the motor museum sheds, with the one closest to us where the wine tasting was.  

2) Inside one of the sheds.

3) The wine glass filled with delicious wine.

My First Winter Birthday

This week marks the end of the month of July and a good portion of my friends are heading back to their respective countries and starting their next semester at school.  Leila cooked a delicious supper club for a Monday night goodbye to everyone.  It was really sad since we all spent the last two months together. Milou heads back to Holland, Sara to New Jersey, Melinda to New York. Rebekah and I met up with some other friends from the DRC afterward to watch the Olympics and so she could say goodbye to them.  This was the first time I got to watch the Olympics since the opening ceremonies; swimming and beach volleyball were on (on separate TVs) which was really nice.  It is convenient because London is only a 1 hour time change backward from Cape Town. 

Tuesday was Jake (UK) and Rebekah (North Carolina)’s last night so we went out for a dinner and Olympics night again.  I loved the atmosphere watching the games because we are all pulling for different countries, which makes it that much more fun.  Back home it is always the USA and everyone around me wants the Americans to win but here the environment is incredible and diverse.  It was sad at first because only Judo wrestling was on, not my favorite, but then the swimming began.  For the 200 fly when the South African out touched Phelps for the win, the pub went insane.  Everyone was so happy and excited.  In 2008 South Africa won 1 silver medal during the Olympics.  This time they already have 3 gold.

PATA received an award Tuesday night as the charity pick of the year for the YPO in South Africa. We got a nice check and lots of recognition for our work.   Hopefully it leads to more funders so we can expand our current programs.

My birthday morning started with a nice surprise.  Leila baked me cupcakes, and she and Rebekah brought them down at 7 in the morning as I was getting ready for work.  They had a sparkler, and I got to blow out a candle.  Unfortunately after this I had to go into work and Rebekah had to go to the airport.  At the office, everyone was surprised when they found out I was only turning 22.  My boss couldn’t believe I had graduated from University at the age of 21.  We celebrated at work with a delicious banana and caramel tart. 

I came home and met my new roommate, Haley, from the UK.  8 of us went out to The Fat Cactus for Tex-Mex and margaritas.  When they found out it was my birthday we were all given cowboy hats to wear, with mine black and everyone else having a tan one.  I also got a free tequila shot with an orange instead of a lime.  I had a really good time, even though it was my first birthday where I saw no family whatsoever.  It was also my first birthday that occurred in the winter (since this is my first excursion into the southern hemisphere).

I finally watched Blood Diamond.  It was exciting to see the clips from Cape Town with Table Mountain in the background. It was also fun when I heard them use phrases that are popular here: “howzit” “lekkah” “ya, ya.” Most South Africans do not like the movie because the accents are wrong and do not sound like they are from Zimbabwe.

Unfortunately I still do not have a camera.  It got backordered at Best Buy, so mom doesn’t have it, meaning it is not even on its way here so hopefully I have one by mid-August, but the odds are not looking good.  Instead I will just put up this cute nephew picture because I miss them so much and they are freaking adorable.