Hello again! Sorry it has been a while since my last posts, I’m kind of getting caught up in my life here. It doesn’t feel like a vacation anymore, it really feels like I live in South Africa. I’m figuring out this culture slowly and I really do love a lot of what SA has to offer. Everyone is so honest and open to talking about race and foreigners and their culture (whether its praise or disgust); it’s awesome. But there are definitely aspects of this culture that really irritate me. First off, in my Understanding Violence class we talk a lot about “xenophobia”, which is a term used to describe the tendency to discriminate against foreigners. I definitely feel a lot of that, they assume that Americans walk around with a sense of superiority. That makes me laugh because that is probably the last emotion running through my head as I walk through campus. Racism is definitely a part of that as well, I get these intense stares from mostly older black people here. They won’t look at my face, they’ll look at my body as if I can’t see them doing it, and they make a face of pure disgust. Every time this happens, I look down at my shirt thinking I spilled something nasty on it. Sometimes it gets really hard to deal with because I just want to scream “I came to your country to learn about this awesome culture and society, I want to be here, I love it here, and I’m taking Zulu! I love your language!” But I just smile and say hello. And one more aspect here that is getting increasingly irritating is the lack of efficiency. It’s kind of cool because it makes everyone relax and not take things too seriously. But sometimes when I really need something done and a teacher is “out of office” for the day, it really messes things up. It’s kind of just a generally slower pace around here, I’ll explain with a perfect example of how things just don’t work when I tell you about my most recent weekend. So those two things are the only things I’ve learned to dislike about South Africa, but at the same time I love it because it is something I would never discover in the U.S. I’ve also adapted an attitude for dealing with the racism: If I come across a rude person, I just take him/her as just that; a rude person. I have stopped linking those faces with the color of my skin because that will just take away so many opportunities to meet wonderful, nice, welcoming black people.
I am obsessed with my Zulu class. It’s about a 15 person class, most are South Africans from different provinces who speak a different language. SA has over 10 official languages I think! Some of these people pick it up in a snap, as they speak a different but very similar language to Zulu. A couple other people are Afrikaans, which is a Dutch based language and is what most of the white people here speak. It is not a very pretty language and I’m really glad to be learning Zulu instead. Sawubona umama, usaphila? (Hello mom, how are you?) It’s a pretty easy language to pick up on, the structure is very simple. I’m absolutely loving it! So fun to talk with my Zulu friends about it, they see it as a very respectful thing that I’m doing which is awesome! That’s another thing about SA culture I love; respect, loyalty and pride are HUGE here. “Ngifunda isiZulu eThekwini” I am studying Zulu in Durban!
This past weekend a couple of us traveled to Drakensburg, right near Lesotho. We kept joking the whole trip that we were on the set of the Lion King. It was so nice to get away from Durban for a little and into a more rural look into Africa. It was amazing to be there. We stayed at a hostel at the base of the Drakensburg mountains and were surrounded by miles of open, flat fields. I took a bunch of pictures but none of them seemed to do this place justice. It just felt so calming being surrounded by nothing but nature. This place was so much in the middle of no where that we actually got stuck there for an extra night. The bus only runs at certain times and wouldn’t take payment over the phone/internet, so we had to take the bus a day later then we originally wanted. The day we wanted to leave things like this kept happening. We had to pay in cash but none of us took out cash, because it’s so stupid to travel with a bunch of cash. The nearest ATM was 3 kilometers away, and there just happened to be a massive wind storm outside. But we took it as an adventure, rented a couple bikes and took off. The dry, strong, sandy wind was extremely difficult to bike through, but we had no other choice. About an hour later we got to the little shop in town and the machine says “out of order, see attendant”. We ask the owner and she says “oh, right, the machine is out of money.” This is what I referenced earlier in the blog about how things just shut off or break and there’s no solution to fix it. So that day actually turned out to be hilarious, if we were more uptight it would have been a disaster but we just had a comical outlook. We definitely learned a lot this trip, we can’t be as spontaneous as we would love to be, because getting stuck in the middle of South Africa wasn’t exactly ideal. But everything worked out and it ended up being a very successful trip! Next time we travel there we plan to go into Lesotho, we just didn’t have the money to spend on that trip this time.
We’ve been spending some time at the township that our friends Tubs and Thando are from. At first it was not really scary but more embarrassing. We were clearly out of place and pretty uncomfortable, but our friends are so welcoming and fun about the whole thing. We went to a house party one night and at the end of the night the cops showed up (guess the cops crashing parties is a universal thing!). But they were terrifying. We were outside waiting for a ride home when they came, about 2 cars of them came and they all had guns, aimed! I don’t know anything about guns, but these weren’t hand guns they looked more like shotguns, they were slung over their shoulders. One of them posted up next to the gate to the house and had his gun positioned towards the crowd!! My heart was pounding watching this, which is funny because aren’t cops supposed to make me feel safe? But our friends explained to us that there was nothing to worry about. It was a really fun night!
Sorry this one was so long, didn’t realize how much I had to write about!! More soon I promise! Thanks for following
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