First, for the past 2 weeks or so I had been feeling a bit under the weather. I won’t go into detail, but eventually I was sick of feeling drained (literally) and decided that it was probably time to pay a visit to health services. On Thursday I got antibiotics (and probiotic pills, which seems to me like they would just cancel eachother out but I guess this is why I'm not a doctor) to take care of whatever critter was wreaking havoc on my intestinal tract. After leaving the pharmacy, it was time to go to Kayamandi for the afternoon. I had my gym bag with me with my wallet and medicine in it. Usually I don’t bring anything with me to Kayamandi just because it’s annoying to hold onto it—we’re told not to leave stuff in the van because it’s parked outside the school where we can’t see it, so just to avoid any problems, we’re supposed to bring anything we take into the school where it’s safe. So, after the classroom time we headed out into the courtyard of the school for kickball. I put my bag against the wall along with all the other volunteers bags and the students backpacks. You can probably guess where this is going—when the day was over and we headed out, I looked in my bag to find that my wallet was gone. Andy (an AIFS student who helps coordinate the Kayamandi afterschool program) and I asked around, and immediately a bunch of the students told us they had seen “Tito” go into my bag and take my wallet. As it turned out, Tito was the younger brother of a 7th grader in the program. Techincally no other kids besides the students in the program should be on school grounds during the afterschool program, but when we go outside lots of little kids join us and it’s obviously hard to tell cute kids to get lost, but apparently this is why they’re not supposed to be there. Anyway, after lots of chaos and asking questions and translating English to Xhosa and the other way around and attracting A LOT of attention as two white people trekked through the neighborhood trailed by about 25 curious students, we tracked down Tito and his brother (who as far as I know had nothing to do with the theft). Tito literally had my cash in his hands (I didn’t have too much in my wallet at the time, probably $25 in bills and a lot of change, and I got almost all of it back). He had hid the wallet in a backpack, so I also got that back, however it was empty--my student ID and debit card were missing. He brought us to where he said he threw the cards after he nabbed the wallet, but we couldn’t find them. So it could have been much worse, I just had to get a new ID and cancel my debit card, my new one should come in the mail in a week or two. I was taken aback by the whole thing, and a little pissed, but the whole situation was mostly just demoralizing. The kid was only nine, he looked even younger, and it’s so sad that he already knew how to steal a wallet--he knew the cards were useless to him, and to throw those away and keep the cash. It makes you wonder where he learned how to steal. He seemed scared that he got caught, but did not really seem sorry. I hope he learned something from it and maybe won't continue down the road he's on. There are so many individuals in Kayamandi who are working to get rid of the stereotype of townships and better the community, but incidents like this undermine what they try to accomplish. The assistant director of AIFS also runs the International Office's Kayamandi Project, and he felt really bad about the situation, I guess this is the first time a volunteer has been pickpocketed during a program--typical.
Then, to make it a hat trick: we had an excursion this weekend (which was AMAZING and I will talk about soon), and I thought I had shut and latched my bedroom window but I guess I just shut it. Because I walked into my room Sunday evening to see that the window had blown open (they're like crank out windows not slide up), a bunch of stuff blew off my shelf, and the curtain hit my flower vase and knocked it over, drowning my laptop. I took it to the comptuer repair place in town, but I have a feeling it might be RIP laptop. Although I've heard stories of wet laptops working again after sitting around for a couple weeks, so I'm hoping for the best.
So, aside from all that, I had a fantastic weekend. My program group, along with eight South African grad students who drove the vans and were super fun to hang out with, went to the Cederberg Mountains, about a 3 hour drive north of here. We stayed in awesome cabins at a campground in the Cederberg Conservacy. We got there Friday night, and had an early wakeup call Sat. morning for about a 6 hour hike. It was so much fun, we hiked up and then into the mountains/caverns--to get through the "cracks" into the mountain we had to contort ourselves through all these tiny spaces. One of them is known as the "birth canal", we had to lie flat on our backs and slide under a boulder and then use our arms to lift ourselves up out of the space. At the top, it was like being on the moon or Mars--the rocks were unlike anything I've ever seen. I wish I could post pictures, but with the whole laptop deal I have nowhere to upload them. It was absolutely amazing scenery. After hiking back down, we went to a swimming spot surrounded by cliffs that we of course all jumped off of--the highest one was like 40 or 50 feet I think.
After a full day of outdoor activities, we went to a wine tasting at the Cederberg wine farm. The wine is sold in the States, so if you ever see Cederberg wine, buy it, it's delicious!! I only had enough cash on me to buy one bottle (because of the debit card deal) but I'm sure I'll bring home a few more. They were all delicious. My first wine tasting here and it was really fun!
Once it got dark, we went to the observatory that was up the road from our campground. The night sky was incredible because we were hours away from any big town. I got to see a comet and Saturn through the telescopes, and I saw about 5 shooting stars in probably 20 minutes. You can't see the Big Dipper here, which really makes me realize how far away I am. They have the Southern Cross, which is also pretty cool.
On Sunday morning, we headed out and stopped at some caves where there are drawings done by the San people between 1500-2000 years ago. There is also a spot known as the "town hall cave" where apartheid leaders met in secret. There are signatures from the late 1800s to the 1970s and 80s, some of the names are pretty significant to SA history. Ironic that the people who, as one of our drivers put it, planned to screw over black people left their mark on the same place that the native Africans did.
I borrowed these pictures from someone else in my group, hopefully I will find a way to do something with mine soon, so I don't have to wait until the summer to upload 3 1/2 months worths of pictures.
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