The Rest of the Trip

I'm back in Indiana now, but the rest of the trip went something like this:

We drove north to an area known by climbers as Rocklands, a fantastic spread of earth unmarked on any of our maps, where there are countless house-sized boulders that vary in color from golden to red to black (and every color in between) scattered as far as you can travel in a day's journey. And again, the terrain just didn't quite make sense. Usually when you see boulders, there is a cliff line nearby that the rock more than likely fell from. Not here though - the ground was mostly flat, a gentle roll to it at best, with hills on the horizon. We were there to 'boulder' or to climb up the rocks. Bouldering seems a bit silly, because often the rock you are trying to climb has an easier way up, as in walking up the back of it, but the point is to challenge yourself and often there are beautiful lines to attempt. We stayed and climbed until we ran out of food, then began our journey back to Durban.

We drove along the southern coast, initially leapfrogging small resort towns, then trekking out into hills and valleys untouched by modern developments. The first day we hiked to the base of a large waterfall that fell 50 meters from the ocean's break, and climbed half way up it to a sunny ledge. The next day was a real treat. We splurged a bit and went to a place called Monkey Land, which was an enormous rehabilitation and refuge center for hundreds of monkeys. They were so fun to watch, jumping and swinging around. It was a blast.

As we traveled East from Monkey Land, the roads got worse and worse, until eventually we were on roads riddled with huge potholes. I have never seen so many in my life - so many, that in a 2 lane road with no one else on it, we were unable to dodge them, even driving slowly. We were in Xhosa country (the X is a 'click'). The Xhosa people in this area live in much of the same way that they have always lived. Their round huts dot the tops of the rolling hills and are painted pale green with thatched roofs. Thier livestock wander the hills, and often block or dart out into the road, which added to the exciting drive. They often paint their faces a chalky white, which I'm still not sure the significance of, but it did make them look a bit eerie to my foreign eyes. Large gardens stretched from hut to hut, and they would wave to us from the shade that extended from under the thatching.

This road took us to a small backpacker within walking distance a beach more beautiful than I could dream up. It was at the back of a small shallow bay where the waves were a perfect surf break. The water was so clear you could count your toes when swimming, and the combination of the aquamarine water lapping up against pure white sand under the enormous South African sky was breathtaking. We played in the water with a few Afrikaner families who had also survived the drive in, then in the evening walked pretty far down the coast, watching fishermen pull in tomorrow's meal. One night, we survived what the radio called 'gale forced winds' in a suddenly leaking tent, and woke again to stray horses whinny-ing and snuffing, inches from our heads. With our days running out, there was one more important stop to make before returning home.

We went back to the game reserve that I had been to with the CFHIers and on a surprisingly cool day the animals put on quite a show. Driving around all day can be a bit boring, especially when you have already loaded the rental car with 4000 miles, but today we had giraffes, rhinos, zebra, cheetahs, wild dogs, monkeys, impala, the funky deer-camel-with-stripes, crocodiles, wart hogs, buffalo, wildebeast, babboons, elephants, and tourists to watch. We sadly did not see lions, leopards, or penguins, and gladly did not see any great whites while in South Africa. The animals at the park have a huge area to roam, but are well acclimated to vehicles, so you can drive pretty close to most of them. One rhino thought we were too close and started moving in on the car, so we drove off pretty fast. A narrow escape.

The next morning we had to be at the airport early to begin our 40 hour (total travel time) journey home. It was thankfully uneventful with the exception of running into a couple that I had taken down the river last summer in the Atlanta airport. They were coming home from Peru. It is nice to be home again, though a bit chilly.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Kati

Since the 1st of the Month

Casey arrived in South Africa on December 1st, but the final leg of his flight was canceled due to Nationwide Airlines being grounded. A week or so prior one of their plane's engines fell off during takeoff. He had to catch a midnight bus from Johannesburg to Durban. I didn't know that he was on a bus though, because the day before my bag was stolen, and it had my phone in it.

We eventually met at the airport, where I learned that Delta lost his luggage along the way.

Neither of us got more than a couple hours of sleep, but we drove into the Drakensburg mountains with the intention to hike to the top of the second tallest waterfall in the world. On the way there, we were pulled over by the police and assigned a bogus 2000 rand fine that we were told we needed to pay immediately. We lied and told them we didn't have any cash on us and they let us go.

We camped at the top of a fantastic gorge and enjoyed a couple of days moving in and out of the clouds, the curve of the earth as the horizon line. Once while walking, we heard awful screaming noises and couldn't figure out what it was until we rounded a corner and saw a huge heard/pride/gaggle/school/pack of babboons. There were probably 20 or more of them running full speed across loose rocks. They would stop to look for food under the rocks, chucking them down the hill, sometimes at our heads. We stopped to watch them, partially because they were cool, partially because they were terrifying.

After getting back to the car, we called Delta and Casey's luggage had made it to JoBurg. Rather than entrust every piece of climbing gear that he owns to the slightly sketchy South African transport system, we decided to go try to track it down at the airport. I'm pretty sure that JoBurg has one of the highest (and ugliest) crime rates in the world, so I was a bit nervous, but we made it there and out again with nothing more than the normal delays trying to navigate a foreign airport communicating with people who don't really care to help and who don't speak very good English.

And now, we're in Cape Town, the 'fairest cape in the world.' It is gorgeous. The first day here we walked out the Cape of Good Hope, where the Indian and Atlantic Oceans meet. We got there just in time for sunset and scrambled a trail out to the lighthouse on the tip of Africa. The coastline here is absolutely breathtaking. The waves crash against enormous rocks that pile up into these huge mountains. The landscape doesn't really make sense, it is so uniquely beautiful.

We climbed Table Mountain yesterday and are about to go do it again. We plan to head North into the Cedarburg Mountains, then trek the undeveloped coastline East. The frustrations of the beginning of the month have definately died down and we're having a great time. See you all soon. Take care!

Hlabisa

Take the stats I just posted and compare them with this...

24% of the world population lives in Sub-Sahara Africa
1% or less of health professionals are serving in this area.

Hlabisa (the HL is pronounced by pushing air into your cheeks. Think of Eeek The Cat's lisp...) is the name of the 300 bed hospital where we have spent the last two weeks. It is the only hospital for hours in any direction, and there are about 20 clinics scattered throughout the countryside that feed into it. It is in the province KwaZulu-Natal, which is considered the global epicenter of HIV/AIDS. Statistically, the most reliable source of HIV infection rates has come from antenatal clinics, where there is now compulsory testing for mothers - 56% of them are testing positive here.

The doctors that work at Hlabisa are either South Africans who are obligated to one year of community service after completing med school, or young doctors from European countries wanting a year of experience with infectious disease before returning home. The doctor who had been there the longest had been there barely 18 months (and had also just adopted an orphaned infant).

While there, we were able to tag along with the doctors through all of the many workings of Hlabisa. We observed rounds in the medical, surgical, tb, pediatric, icu, and neo natal wards. We were able to assist in surgeries and deliveries. I sat in on counseling sessions for patients being initiated onto ARV's. The out patient department was always busy and understaffed. People would wait all day, sometimes having to stay the night on the benches, in hopes of being seen in the morning.

As I think of Hlabisa, a few stories come to mind:

*Almost every night we were there, we were either without water or electricity. It made for a fun game of resource roulette as we made dinner plans.

*The women here are insanely quiet while giving birth. One afternoon, two other girls and I were in the labor and delivery, hoping to observe a few deliveries. We were reading books while we waited, and on the other side of a CURTAIN was a woman in labor. There was no nurse or midwife in the large room that had capacity to hold 4-7 laboring women. We looked up when we heard the woman calmly call, "nurse", then jumped to our feet when we heard the baby wail. She had delivered on her own, without making a sound. We laughed, thinking of how we would have been screaming for help, and expressed gladness for the baby not shooting off the end of the bed.

*I have been fortunate in life to have very limited contact with death. At Hlabisa, it is a daily occurence. A morning priority many days is filling out death certificates for patients who did not make it through the night. One day we were doing a lumbar puncture for a man in order to confirm the suspicion of meningitis. He was clearly in the final stages of AIDS, with skin stretched over his once tall and probably lanky frame and eyes receding back in preparation for his final sleep. The doctor inserted the needle, and I stood, hands on his back, collecting his cerebrospinal fluid. During this simple procedure, he slipped away. The profoundness of being the last touch this man encountered has spun through my head for a week now. What other sensation should he have been encountering at this moment. Bouncing a child on his knee, smelling his wife's simmering curry and rice, calloused hands holding a garden tool...

We have spent a good part of our time here trying to unravel the complex nature of disease in South Africa. The struggle is not just against illness though. It is so much more. I am hoping to write about all that I am learning in an attempt to process through it better myself. That will be another day though, I'm out of cafe minutes! Hope all is well in the west. Love.

Find the Good News

November 07 UNAIDS Fact Sheet

Global Overview
Global HIV prevalence (the proportion of people living with the virus) appears to have levelled off. However, the number of people living with HIV has risen to 33.2 million in 2007 from 29.0 million in 2001.

Some 2.5 million people were newly infected with the virus in 2007 and 2.1 million people died of AIDS-related illnesses.

Sub-Saharan Africa
Sub-Saharan Africa remains the most affected region. Some 1.7 million people were newly infected with HIV in 2007, bringing to 22.5 million the total number of people living with the virus. Unlike other regions, the majority of people (61%) living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa are women.

More than two-thirds (68%) of all people infected with HIV live in sub-Saharan Africa where more than three quarters (76%) of all AIDS-related deaths in 2007 occurred.

Within the region, Southern Africa is worst-affected – national adult HIV prevalence exceeded 15% in eight Southern African countries in 2005.

South Africa is the country in the world with the most HIV infections, but like most of the countries in Southern, East and West Africa adult HIV prevalence is either stable or has started to decline. The latter trend is most evident in Kenya and Zimbabwe, and signs of declining HIV prevalence are also being seen in Côte d’Ivoire, Mali and urban Burkina Faso. In these countries there is also evidence of a shift towards safer behaviour.

St. Mary's

The hospital of the week was St. Mary's. A super old, semi-subsidized hospital which seems to be run by extremely compassionate, well organized individuals who are doing great things with the limited resources available. The first day I spent in the HIV ward where the halls were exploding with people waiting for care. A fellow CFHIer, Chris, and I spent the day bouncing between two doctors, seeing HIV+ patients mostly in stages 1-3 (out of a possible 4). They were in the hospital to be treated for the opportunistic diseases/infections that jump in once the immune system is weakened. I had my first look at tuburculosis, oral thrush (a rash in the mouth), severe cases of herpes, and genital warts.

The medical information was absolutely fascinating, and as I overlooked the crowd it swirled in my head along with the thought that these people have been handed their death sentence. Unless something random jumps in, they know how they will die, and have more than likely seen very vividly the process in full. A granny came into the office. She had nursed her son until his death and in so doing, had incurred the disease. Now his children would nurse their granny to her death. The doctor turned to us and repeatedly said, 'this woman is not supposed to be a statistic.'

There is so much ignorance here about the disease - and at all levels. It was only a few years ago that the department of health acknowledged that it was HIV that caused AIDS. It is especially within the Zulu culture that there is much misunderstanding about the disease, and they are very resistant to attempts to educate them. They would rather hold to their cultural beliefs and traditional healer's remedies, even though they are dying. This didn't make much sense to me until one of the CFHI doctors reminded me that only 20 years ago, these beliefs were all that they had. Apartheid really screwed things up.

Anyway, the second day I was in a unit called PMTCT (preventing mother to child transmission). It was nuts it was so gripping. Seeing babies all day, some positive, some not. Most not thriving, but some doing okay. I worked with a 62 year old white woman who had gone to school at a black college and had recently adopted 2 black children. She had 44 years of nursing exerience and talked my ear off all day. I took pages of notes. Then today we did home visits in the Valley of 1000 Hills. It was a gorgeous area, and we walked all day through a hillside village that had a mix of huts and small houses made of stone, mud, cinderblock, sticks, etc. We were checking on the HIV+ patients of St. Mary's in this particular village to make sure they were taking their ARV's and were doing okay. One woman told us that she couldn't take her meds because she had no food. Another had no money to get back to the hospital to get her son tested. I guess it was pretty typical, but still sad.

For the next two weeks we will be in rural clinics, so there will be no internet. We have heard though that they are very understaffed and we will be put to work, not just observing. So here we go... it should be interesting!

Welcome to Durban

Made it! It is beautiful here. The family I'm staying with is fantastic. They live in a small house in a neighborhood stacked on a hill that overlooks the suburbs, which I'm guessing is slightly south of the downtown area. From the front door you can see a few miles out, all the way to the 'sea' as they call it here. They have two boys, who enjoy greatly the Colts football I brought along. :o)

The other girl in the program that I'm staying with is named Lisa, and she came in last night. She is from Michigan and has spent the past few weeks touring SA with her brother. I like her a lot already.

The younger of the boys is teaching me Zulu. He was really excited when I could pronounce almost correctly a few words that have clicks in the middle of them. (I was too!) He is a very patient teacher, much like his parents, who are both school teachers.

My timer here in the Internet Cafe is running out, so I'm out! Take care, hope to hear from you as well! Love.

Today is the Day

I'm outta here! The total travel time is only 26 hours... yikes. For the first month it'll be hospitals and clinics, then for the second month I'm going to see how much of South Africa I can cover. I'll try to post here frequently. Take care! If you get a chance drop me a line as well, I know I will miss friends and family back home.

Heading On Downstream

Well... the Gauley River has seen its last day of busting through the Summersville Dam, so I am headed home for about a week to relax, see friends/family, and play with my dog. The kidney stones mysteriously turned into "nothing". The doctor said I was fit as a fiddle and that the ER doctor lied. And graciously, the mysterious pains went away. I'm okay with that.

Just this morning I received my housing assignment for South Africa. I'll be staying with a couple who are both gradeschool teachers who have two sons, ages 12 and 15, one of who's name is BoomBoom. There are 4 others that will be doing the same program as I am through November, which is an intensly focused, academic course consisting of daily lectures and observations seeking to help us begin to understand the complex culture and health care system of this facinating country. More on this soon... Chipotle is calling.

Aches, Groans, and Kidney Stones

Well, after a week of pretty intense pain I headed to the hospital where they informed me that I have kidney stones. Great. So I asked them what to expect, what I should do, and how I should or shouldn't alter my lifestyle. Their response: It depends.

Thanks.

Then it seemed like a good idea to get the first-hand account from others who have experienced the joys of passing small solid objects through their urethra. Their response was encouraging: "It's a bit worse than childbirth."

Thanks.

So for the next week I'm laying low, which is frustrating because the meds they gave me for the pain make me feel slightly less motivated than a slug. I'm going to the doc on Monday. Maybe they'll have answers.

Seneca Rocks

I have spent the past three days climbing a fantastic pile of rocks. It is like God was bored one day and decided to stack rocks, one boulder on top of another. I'll post pictures as soon as I have access to do so, but for the meantime, think of a giant fingernail sticking out of the ground, 900 feet tall, 100 feet thick, large enough to take you a day to walk around the base.

After hiking, it takes four to five 100 meter pitches to reach the top, each one scarier than the last as we edge our way above the tree line, above soaring birds, above every hill in sight. On our first day we climbed easy routes to the summit, each of us repeating to ourselves, "it's not hard, it's just scary." Once acclimated to toeing along a ledge, attached by harness, rope, and rusty peton, we began to climb more challenging pitches. The next two days were unbelievable. I have never climbed so hard, or felt so satisfied to top out a tough route.

On top of the world, I could feel myself breathe and laugh with such ease. It was the feeling of being so overcome with delight that you can't help but giggle with joy. Pushing past my perceived physical limit, each climb was a new ecstasy, shared by incredible friends who know what it means to love deeply and wonder at the good in each other.

After setting up the final rappel, I was left alone on a cliff, waiting my turn to descend. Birds flew by, and I could hear the wind catch under each beat of their wings, a pulsing rhythm, that mingled with a low whistling of air over hollow spaces in the rock, and the shrill of eager crickets at twilight. Moments like these are so overwhelming for me, because I feel so small, yet so complete. Like everything makes sense all of the sudden, and I'm so overcome by the clarity and joy of insignificance that I can barely stand up straight, and all I want is to hang on to the simplicity and beauty of this moment.

The chatter of my friends called me down and within minutes I was on the ground with them, hiking back to the van. As we drove back to Ace-land, the full moon rose orange, lighting the road home. I can't wait to show you the pictures.

My Home

Here's a look at my summer home in the hills. Thanks Immanuel.

Catching Up

Sometimes I wish it wasn't so easy to stay in touch with people. Mostly because as I continue to find out how easy it really is, I realize how much I suck at it. Maybe it would be easier if I didn't live in a tent. Or at least more convenient. No guarantees that I'd be any better at it though.

Living in Wild Wonderful West Virginia has been an adventure for sure. Earlier this summer I guided a boat full of Amish folks from Illinois. They were in full garb - bonnets, big muslin dresses, button up shirts, work boots, etc. Basically each wore an ensemble that could sink a small yacht. Somehow we survived.

Other noteworthy incidents that I have lived to tell about include frequent visits from black bears (heeere bearcub bearcub bearcub...), jumping into a pond to pull a drunk friend out of an unsettled SUV, getting my knee STUCK in a crack while rock climbing, and one extremely intense lightening storm. As if the river is not exciting enough.