12 April, 2008

The past couple of days were spent on the West Coast in a rural area complete with nothing more than townships and a small military base. We went to this Saldanha area with our community development class to do service in the area. Thursday was pretty much a waste as we drove for several hours to do nothing more than fight with our teacher about where we would sleep and then braai-ing at like 10 at night. Long story short she put us through an hour of moving people around to fit where she believed everyone should sleep and then ended up just where we were in the beginning. Also for the dinner she had in our agenda- verbatim: "the male students will take responsibility for the fire and the braai…the female students will prepare the sandwiches and set out the plates." If nothing else the night merely made me hate my teacher that much more for her complete inability to work in social situations without coming off as a completely horrible person. At first I just thought it was her lack of ability to interact socially, but slowly I am learning that it is a personality flaw which I will have to deal with to make it through the next few months. Long story short, the service learning department is loosing out on a lot of potential by having her teach the class.

The next morning we went to the community to construct a garden for one high school/ clinic in the area. The HIV infection rate is above 60 % meaning that clinics are in short supply for housing all of the patients. In addition to that many of the infected people are in later years of the Virus causing them to need hospitalization in a place where hospitals are few and far between. So, the gardens that we dug/planted would be for this particular make shift clinic which had patients too sick to create their own. It was good at the end of the day to see our finished little plots of vegetable beds, but not once did we actually see anyone from the community there. It would have been nice to have some interaction and conversation with people from the area.

In the end of the day though it was nice to walk away knowing we had done something for them. The vegetables we have planted will help them greatly (if they actually grow) for the fact that the woman running the program told us that food is their biggest problem in the area. They do not have any food to take with their ARVs causing many of them to become sicker. In addition, they can't get donations from local shop owners because they are mostly white and just say that the people had stolen from them last week so why should they donate food to them?

It's hard to go into places like this and see the reality of some people's lives, but this is why I came to Africa.