Running for the Khulanathi Music Project!

It’s the beginning of my fourth week in Komatipoort, where life has been busy with interviewing, observing, and lots of running (and even a day trip to the Kingdom of Swaziland when my friend came to visit this weekend!) Though it's been busy, I did take a three day break back to Jo’burg a couple of weeks ago for a weekend packed full of delicious food, the wonderful Bryanston organic market, a braai, seeing Lynne and Peter, a Jo’burg Youth Orchestra concert, and cooking a birthday dinner with friends. And even a last-minute, spontaneous decision to run a half-marathon with Chris and Mary, who found a great race zig-zagging through the hilly neighborhoods surrounding the Jo'burg Zoo.

And it's on that note that I'd like to unveil our "Running for Khulanathi" service project. As I've mentioned many times, I'm training for the November 1 Soweto Marathon along with fellow Rotary scholars Chris and Lindsay, as well as Chris' wife Mary. We've known we wanted to run this race for quite some time, but also wanted to use it to give back to the community. When we learned about the Khulanathi Music Ensemble, a music school in Daveyton, a sprawling former township southeast of Jo’burg, we knew it was the perfect way to do so. The project was founded by Bennett Mamabolo, a musician who, along with a handful of other volunteer instructors, spends each Saturday teaching local township kids how to make music. Children begin playing the recorder and learning to read around age eight, and soon move on to other instruments and play in the Khulanathi Ensemble. With the support of a local Rotary club, they sit for exams through the London Royal College of Music and pass with high marks each year. In addition, the kids have played at the renowned Grahamstown Arts Festival and hope to expand their performance tradition.

The program has very little financial support, and yet has sustained itself for over nine years through volunteer teaching and donated materials. After our own visits, we were so impressed with what we saw and knew we wanted to help the school grow. The project takes kids off the street and teaches them not only all the values music has to offer but invaluable self-esteem and life skills.

We've set up a website, khulanathi.wordpress.com, with more information on the fundraiser and the marathon. You'll find videos of the instructors on their vision for the project, as well as excerpts of the performances we saw when we visited. There's also a section with more information on the Soweto Marathon (don't you want to join us in running?) and our ongoing training. We'll do our best to keep you updated over the final month and a half of practice runs and pre-marathon races.

I invite everyone to take a look at the site, and to please forward this information to anyone you think might be interested. We would be so so grateful if you could contribute and make a huge difference in these kids lives. With substantial funding, the project cannot only increase its music and the number of instruments, it can hopefully expand into a much larger program that will see the more students and teachers developing scores of future musicians. Please feel free to contact me for more information.

fieldwork begins

Greetings all from Komatipoort, the hottest town in South Africa. It’s not even spring and yet the noontime is unbelievably warm. Apparently 48 degrees Celsius (~118 F) is not unusual in the summer, which is why I’m glad in many ways that I’ll be out of here by late October/late November…

I returned from Europe just over two weeks ago, and after a final week of class I’ve started fieldwork this week. That translates into trying to orient myself in this sprawling area called the Tonga Cluster/Nkomazi Municipality, the area between Kruger National Park to the north, Komatipoort at the northeastern corner, 4km from the Mozambican border, and the border of the small country Swaziland about 70 km to the South. I’m driving a lot here, probably 150 km or so a day between some of the fieldwork locations and a bustling former township called Malelane that has a helpful NGO as well as a charming internet cafe. The fieldwork is gradually getting on track, but as usual, I’d prefer to talk about that on email rather than in the public domain.

It’s an interesting area to describe. Most of it is African and seSwatu-speaking, but Komatipoort and a couple of other small villages are former Afrikaaner towns. As in all of the South Africa I’ve experienced so far, the main roads are mostly in good condition (though I’d expect nothing less, given the $15 in tolls I paid to get here). In some places where I currently work, I’m by far the only white person in sight, which makes me a curiosity more than anything else. In white areas, people regularly speak to me in Afrikaans until I identify myself as the outsider that I am. I spend mornings and evenings driving on the open road, passing only a giant sugar mill and lots of farmland on the way. That, and the occasional giant, slow-moving truck transporting nothing but branches.

It’s farm country, and though some of it has suburban-like shopping centers, much of it is also a poor region. This is not the South Africa of the rich Jo’burg suburbs I’ve grown used to seeing, but also contains vast, dusty areas of falling-apart tiny houses connected by mazes of bad dirt roads. The centers of these areas consist of one major intersection surrounded both by informal food and clothing markets as well as franchises of the well-known South African outlets (Spar for groceries, a Jet clothing store, and the ubiquitous KFC which seems to far outnumber McDonalds in South Africa). When driving through one of these areas, I feel vaguely like I’m in Senegal, except a version of Senegal that’s neither urban nor rural.

I’ll be here as long as it takes to collect the data I need (though it feels strange to call it “data collection”), which I think will be until about November. I have a few trips planned back to Jo’burg for errands (like extending my visa), running reasons (like running a half-marathon), and a few others (like celebrating my birthday). But except for these few weekends, I’ll be working pretty non-stop these next couple of months, a refreshing change from reading.

On the running note: the marathon training is now in full swing. I’ll write back here soon with the official details, but we’re planning to raise funds for a volunteer music school in one of Jo’burg’s giant townships, Daveyton. We’re so excited for this and can’t wait to share more, and to hopefully get your support! And in the meantime, I’ve taken up running with a running group in Komatipoort. It was lovely to be welcomed by them earlier this week, and nice to know that I’ll have somewhere else than just my guesthouse to return to some nights.

three months of winter

More than two months. I remember reading blogs of scholars last year and noticing that it was around May/June that everyone seemed to stop writing, leaving gaps of many months before writing again (if they ever did). I told myself that wouldn't be me. Except somehow I've let two months slip by without writing.

There's something to be said for a life normalizing in a place and realizing the moment that place is no longer "new." I've gotten so used to calling traffic lights "robots," knowing that "izzit" is synonymous with "really?" and understanding that "just now" means anything but now that I forgot I wanted to write a post on south african-isms. Going to a friend's unheated house and freezing because it's barely 35 degrees outside and somewhere between 34-36 degrees inside and feeling silly because when I left Michigan it was -25 degrees Fahrenheit outside loses its novelty. (Don't misunderstand: Jo'burg's winter, which has been here since early May, is like the perfect midwestern fall day every single day. But the moment the sun disappears, it turns from a comfortable warm to temperatures that don't exist in conceptualizations of Africa.) The FIFA Confederations Cup preview of next year's World Cup came and went, and with it the insanity of South Africa's contentious "vuvuzela," a simple plastic horn-like instrument that took over the city and country for two weeks, leaving everyone in its path wishing for earplugs and FIFA debating whether or not to ban it during next summer's festivities.

And where was I? I lost myself for a few weeks after the Drakensberg, in work, and in the cold, and in a small, often non-functioning dorm room. My work ended on June 15, when I had finished assignments and presentations and my thesis proposal. I wrote too many pages on how I plan to study the sociology of the policing of migrant children. I haven't begun yet, but the plan is that I will spend 1-2 months in a border town at South Africa's border with Mozambique, interviewing and observing, and hopefully gathering some interesting, original data. And for anyone who'd like more details on that, please email me.

I ran my first race, in the beautiful Cradle of Humankind outside of Jo'burg, and loved getting out and running. It's down to four marathoners for the November 1 Soweto Marathon (Linds, Chris, and Chris' wife Mary, and me), and officially establishing our cause has encountered some delays. It's coming, though, we promise. My chamber winds ensemble, which I still dutifully attend, won some kind of local competition prize, news that surprised us all. And...I broke down and finally found and bought a used car. I really never thought I would get to this point, but it has been the most liberating thing imaginable to be able to get to airports, coffee shops, friends, Rotary meetings, and what will probably be quite a few trips to near Mozambique in my very exciting 1996 Honda Ballade.

While Confederations Cup craziness descended upon Jo'burg, the term ended, and my dear friend Amelia arrived. The next three weeks were happy ones. We kicked off the visit with an immediate trip to Ellis Park to cheer for Iraq as they played New Zealand. Amelia's clothes in the abyss of lost luggage, we left soon after first to the Mozambican border (where I spent two days exloring my new home and in meetings) and then to Maputo. We met up with a good friend of mine from Jo'burg and spent four days exploring Mozambique's capital. Perhaps most exciting, besides the tropical-esque temperatures, was being in a city that was just that: a city. With streets and sidewalks and a feeling of urban security. We walked! At night! We found beaches, ate, drank, and were merry.

We returned to Jo'burg, promptly obtained tickets to the Confederations Cup finals happening two hours later, and cheered on the very outplayed U.S. team as their defense couldn't match for the Brazilians' beautiful footwork. The next day, my friend Kathy joined us via a very long trip from Michigan. We biked around Soweto, petted baby lions, fed a giraffe, ate at my favorite restaurant, and soon Kathy, Amelia and I left for winter break trip #2. The goal: show Kathy a microcosm of South Africa in seven days. It started with a trip to the mountains in which Amelia and Kat decided to give up migration work and become historians and tourguides of Lesotho and the Drakensberg. We climbed Hodgon's Peak after making our way up the treacherous Sani Pass (in a 4x4 manoevered by a brilliant guide), and spent fourth of July hiking through the breathtaking valley of Garden Castle National Park. After a night of dancing with a friend of mine in Durban, we went on to St. Lucia, about halfway between Durban and the Mozambican border on South Africa's east coast. We took a couple of safari drives and saw all of the Big Five (lions, rhinos, water buffalo, elephants, and even a leopard!). We spent a day relaxing on the glorious Cape Vidal beach. We explored the wetlands for which St. Lucia is known.

After one last beautiful morning walk along the Indian ocean, Kathy and I drove eight hours from St. Lucia through mountains straight to O.R. Tambo, where it was time for her to leave. I had another two days with Amelia before I was off to the airport again to say goodbye. Time for normality to resume, to start running again, to dive into coursework, and let my Rotary club know I still existed. And that, along with one last very spontaneous and laid back visit, is the end of the story of May and June and July. I'm taking only one course this term, which deals extensively with questions of identity and territoriality in the context of migration, and I'm really enjoying it.

I have one more trip planned, for now. I leave in a week for Europe, where I'll both be visiting family in Germany and traveling around quite a bit with a friend. It's an odd feeling to know I'm leaving southern Africa for the first time in six months. Or maybe it isn't. People here often ask me what it feels like to live in the third world. It's a question that makes me realize the irrelevance of these labels. Jo'burg isn't the third world, I say, but then again what really is? Senegal? Haiti? A South African township? None of these places are the same. I drive on roads here that, while the drivers on them may be crazier, are in far better shape than Michigan's. What does that mean?

And on a final, related note, South Africa's been in the news recently for strikes and protests. These strikes haven't been happening on Wits campus or in the areas of Jo'burg I see most frequently; rather, they're downtown and in other parts of the country. South Africa has joined the world in a recession, and the recently elected President Zuma won't have an easy time delivering the (many) promises he made during his campaign. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, especially as the world keeps watching in anticipation of "2010."

For now, I'm going back to reading about borders and their (ir)relevance. The moment I return from Europe it's going to be off to the border with me and from there, I promise another update.

escape to the mountains

Cheers from a sea of papers, articles, and books on child migrants. Winter brings with it the work of the end of the semester, so this will just be a short note that two weekends ago I spent a beautiful weekend hiking in the northern Drakensberg with Tyler. After a day and a half in Jozi, we rock-scrambled and descended on chain ladders in hail storms in the Ampitheatre and wandered around northern Lesotho and spent a final day seeing waterfalls in Royal Natal National Park. Thanks to internet outtages and various other room malfunctions, I haven't even tried posting pictures to Picasa. You can see them here, though. Is it any wonder I want to return? Tomorrow?

Tyler, by the way, is putting my feeble attempts to run a marathon to shame and is racing a half Ironman and full Ironman in Austria and France by the end of June. As part of the races, he's fundraising for an organization that he's worked with in the UK called Afghanaid which focuses on sustainable development in Afghanistan. If you're at all interested in more information, check out his fundraising site.

elections and other updates

A new president will be elected by the end of the day, a decision overwhelmingly expected to place Jacob Zuma of the ruling African National Congress into power. For foreign students, it means public holiday number three of five this month and a few more flyers and posters around campus than usual these past few weeks. For the country, it means that despite opposition from the recent ANC splinter group COPE (Congress of the People) as well as the older and vastly white DA (Democratic Alliance), the ANC, the party that liberated the country as so many say, will remain in power for another five years. Despite the many controverseys surrounding Zuma, the election is largely expected to be free and fair.

It's been a wonderfully quiet time since returning from our trip. Save for a few Rotary presentations, I've done almost nothing but work, and needed that. May and June are quickly approaching and with them, due dates for a lot of papers, presentations, and (nerve-wrackingly) my research proposal. For anyone interested, I've decided to look at the legal construction of child migrant vulnerability and why, though both children and certain types of migrants are considered vulnerable and therefore entitled to protection under international law, children who don't also fall into a category of vulnerable migrants (e.g. refugees, victims of trafficking) are perceived and treated as criminals rather than as deserving protection as children. Phew. How that will translate into a field study is not yet entirely clear, but I like this topic, and that's a start.

In running news, I've started training for a marathon. If you think I'm crazy, my knees will most certainly agree with you within a few weeks. A month or so ago, Chris and Mary asked me to join them in running the November 1 Soweto Marathon (I've written about Soweto earlier), part of a series of South African marathons. Many of you know that I ran my first half marathon last summer, and that I really had no desire to ever increase that distance. The only alternative on November 1, though, is a 10K, and so somehow I decided that the marathon would be a better idea. As of a week and a half ago, I've begun an official base training program in which my iPod and I take frequent trips to my beloved track. I often run at the same time as a very official looking track team (either Wits or something else), and while it should be motivating to run alongside 15 guys all running what seems like four minute miles in bare feet, it really just makes me feel inadequate and silly. That said, I prefer those days to the ones I run around a field hockey match or other random activities.

Lindsay and Ad have decided to join in as well for the races. As such, we've turned this into a group Rotary Service project, somewhat in the tradition of the hike for AIDS that scholars here did a few years ago. We'll get ourselves better organized within the next couple of months and plan to run this race for Rotary and charity. In the meantime, we'll also be running a few shorter races, beginning with a 5-6K trail race at the Cradle of Humankind (also see below) in May.

Until then, it's back to child migrants and research methods on this beautiful and chilly fall election day. The days are getting shorter and much cooler. To celebrate, Tyler and I will be going hiking in the Drakensberg mountains in Kwa-Zulu Natal when he visits for a few days in the first weekend of May. Google image that. It promises to be a just a bit snowy and completely breathtaking, and I'm so excited to have my first visitor. More updates, then, when we have a new president, I've made some more proposal progress, and after a trip to the mountains.

bots and zam and craziness

Every time I sit down to recount our trip to Botswana and Zambia, I quickly feel so overwhelmed that I give up and delay until another time. Nine days that started off so relatively "normal" somehow turned into experiences that sound unreal every time I say them out loud. How does one convey that?

Botswana was yet another new perspective on Africa. I'm beginning to realize how much, despite my concerted efforts to avoid this, I still compare everything I see back to Senegal. Dakar was chaos, loud, dirty, vibrant, in your face. Somehow I thought I would see more of that on this trip, but Botswana, from what we saw, seemed in many ways quiet and reserved. The makeup of the people changed once we crossed the border, but it was less than 20 km before we saw yet another of our favorite institutions: the Mall, containing the same shops one would find in South Africa. For the rest of our 1000+ km drive through the country, one could tell how sparsely populated Botswana is. Hundreds of kilometers would pass before seeing another village, which always presented an interesting juxtaposition of thatch roofed huts but with diverse and unexpected amenities.

Obtaining stamps one and two of the trip (South Africa exit and Botswana entry) was not so much a problem. We got our car, a far too nice Nissan Tiida (think Altima) through, too. After a lovely evening in "Gabs" with Graham, sharing really great conversations on just about everything with him and his roommates over a braai, we left early the next day to Maun. Notable events of this 1000 km drive: seeing the Tropic of Capricorn, crossing the tip of a salt pan, and going through at least two or three "Veterinary" checkpoints. More on those later.

Twelve hours drive with countless donkeys and cattle on the road later, we arrived at our backpackers, the "Old Bridge." The place was lovely, with a relaxing great outdoor bar/restaurant by a river coming out of the Okavango Delta. We each had small rooms with the open-air bathrooms/showers nearby, and stars surrounded us. Around 8 am the next we were sped by motorboat to the protected area of the delta, from where we took Mekoro--small, dug out canoes that seat two people and are maneuvered by a guide with a pole--through a tiny part of the vast Delta. Mostly this was swampy water, with beautiful lilies and reeds and vegetation around us. We stopped for lunch on land and were guided on a long, hot walk to spot giraffes and elephants. On our way back, as we stopped in an area with more open water, we spotted hippos in the distance. (We'd spotted them on the way there, too. This time they were slightly closer.) We paused, enjoying the water, watching the hippos, until one of them decided he'd had quite enough of us watching him and started charging towards us. Loudly. Huffing. Quickly. Our guides tried to speed us away into the reeds as fast as can be done when using a pole, and we swiftly escaped (though a short while later we still heard the huffing near us). Kind of amazing.

So one Mokoro tour and twelve applications of sunscreen later (no, really), we returned to our backpackers. The next day was spent blissfully relaxing, as well as mentally preparing for the drive to Zambia the following day. Rumors saying the ferry crossing at the Kazangula border was closed due to flooding turned out unfounded, while a man named Rex gave me all sorts of advice of what to expect on the road there. The trip should take you seven hours, but there's a stretch of really disastrous potholes. Watch out for those. What kind of car are you driving? A sedan. Hm. I mean, you should be ok. Just...you'll know when you hit that part. Take it slow. Let the lorries pass you. Drive on whatever shoulder you can. Oh, and be prepared for a lot of chaotic bureacracy in Zambia.

At 5 am Wednesday, along with a lovely Israeli woman who was also traveling to Victoria Falls, we began Adventure #2. A sunrise drive, with giraffes in the road at one point, greeted us, and we sped along. Somewhere we hit another checkpoint, which are geared toward preventing foot-and-mouth disease and require all shoes and car to be dipped in a soda-ash solution. In Nata I took over driving. 285 km to Kazangula to go. I drove about 25 km before potholes appeared. A lot. Well, Sarah said, I guess we found it. I proceeded to navigate for four hours through roads that were, indeed, disastrous. The worst of it, the 20 km stretch at the beginning, felt at times impassable. No road, or gravel, would have been preferable to the spiderweb of concrete and 8-12 inch giant potholes. The "shoulder" was no better. As giant trucks veered and swerved passed us, as well as pitying SUVs, we pressed on at 0.5 km per hour.

It did get better after those 20 km, though it was bad for at least another 100 km. Not long into the slightly better stretch, we passed elephants on the side of the road at a watering hole. Occupied elephants are supposed to be no problem, so that was exciting. I continued driving, listening to celebratory music for having survived potholes. We approach an SUV stopped in front of us, and see elephants hanging out at the side of the road in the distance. Great. Unoccupied elephants, especially if there is a baby, require extreme caution. There's a long stretch of potholes just before them. We wait by the side of the road, not sure what to do. I realize that I am sitting in the driver's seat at the side of a road trying to determine how to speed by elephants through potholes, and I break out in quiet laughter (lest the elephants be provoked by my laughter in a car several meters away).

Needless to say, a giant safari truck passed us and as its passengers happily distracted the elephants with picture taking, I take our poor Nissan at full strength through potholes past this. We make it to the border. Stamp #3. We get onto a ferry that uses a small wooden board to separate me from the Zambezi as I drive our car onto it. A lovely river-ride. And then Zambia.

Stamp #4 comes only in the midst of completing a ridiculous number of steps required for entry, transactions we completed using four different currencies. Two hours, one Pontoon Fee, Road Toll Fee, Council Levy, single-entry visa purchase, Customs Import Tax, Carbon Tax, and Third Party Vehicle insurance later, we officially enter Zambia. The 70 km of road to Livingstone is well sealed, thank God. We're stopped three times, each time a request one of the different documents we obtained. I find myself officially in complete disbelief that we made it through this day.

Our last sight of the trip was, of course, the indescribable Victoria Falls. We spent a day hiking through the Zambian side of the falls and seeing them from every angle, including an amazing walk over a tiny bridge so close to the falls that all one feels and sees is pouring water from every side. The falls are at their fullest not only during this time of year, just after the wet season, but apparently moreso this year than in the past fifty years. As a result, we saw far more mist (which doesn't feel very "misty" when you're in it) than falls, but it was breathtaking. As was walking on the bridge to Zimbabwe, which we didn't enter, and hiking down through a rainforest-like area to the base of the falls, where the vortexes forming give an idea of what white-water rafting through the area might feel like.

That night we took a relaxing cruise on the Zambezi. We left to Botswana the next day, earlier than we'd planned, but knowing what we did about the road conditions we knew we couldn't make it back to Gabarone in one day. For all of its border-bureacracy, Zambia and Livingstone were culturally the most interesting part of the trip. Everyone we spoke to and dealt with, from border officials to taxi drivers to the police who stopped us at checkpoints and ultimately to the ferry operator with whom I had a 45 minute conversation waiting for our ferry, were wonderfully friendly. Though traveling is supposed to be logistically difficult, I'd love to return there one day.

This time the border was a breeze. Backing off of a ferry on the Botswana side was not. On our approach to the pothole area, we had two more elephant sightings. Once when we were accidentally parked on the side of the road next to one that was hiding by a tree, and another when, in the distance, a full elephant train of parents and children crossed the road.

And so, via a night in Francistown, we made it back to Gabs, spent another lovely evening with both Graham and Rafa, and were back in Johannesburg by Sunday afternoon.

Pictures are posted, by the way, though my internet connection makes posting them on Picasa time-consuming. If you have access, the album on Facebook actually has captions and a few more photos. I'll try to keep adding to both.

skies and ponies and lesotho

it's 6:45 am, saturday. In 15 minutes, Adriann, Lindsay, Sarah and I embark on our first real southern Africa trip. We're heading to Botswana, starting with a visit to Graham in Gabarone, followed by Maun in the Okavango Delta and then through to Livingstone, Zambia, to see Victoria Falls. 

So it won't be a long entry, but before this adventure starts I wanted to quickly mention the last one, in which three FMSP students in one fairly old VW city sport drive five hours through the Free State (think Kansas) to "get out of the country." Of course, Lesotho is a tiny kingdom inside South Africa, so really you feel as though you're driving more into the country, rather than out, which is what we're about to do now. 

The Malealea Lodge, in southwest Lesotho, was a cozy, comfortable, and friendly lodge. We arrived to the starriest sky I have ever seen. We spent six hours pony trekking to a waterfall and some San (I think) rock art, and I learned to trust a horse. Specifically, I learned to trust Mistress, a beautiful black pony who, like me, ate whenever she had the chance, pretty much never lifting her head from grazing the ground. It was a perfect mini-getaway, even if the next day we were all a little sore from trekking up and down rocky mountains and trotting along riverbanks.

Pictures are posted. Enjoy, and see you in a week or two.