The Ostrich Capital of the World

This was a three-day weekend to celebrate Freedom Day-the anniversary of Nelson Mendela’s release. I decided to head out to Oudtshoorn, about four hours away into the desert interior, which you may now by it’s other name: The Ostrich Capital of the World. When I arrived, the guy at the hostel convinced me to rent a mountain bike and do a 54 kilometer tour. The next morning I started at a high mountain pass, then dropped down multiple dirt road switchbacks for about 10 km.
I stopped in at the Cango Caves, which claim the largest stalagmite formations in the world. The tour was pretty challenging physically, often involving climbing up and down tight passages. The crawling was a little worrisome, mostly because my sunglasses and camera were in still in my pockets. Why I would bring sunglasses into a cave is any one’s guess.
Then the highlight: the ostrich farm. Inspired by avatar, I got the chance to ride the big bird. To mount, they blindfold it in a pen, so it won’t bite. Then you get on top, grabbing it by the wings. The ostrich has a hump for storing water, like a camel, so it’s comfortable enough to sit on. Then they open the pen, and it’s a bit like rodeo. I’d estimate I lasted eight seconds- not bad. The key is to not get kicked while

Putting the Z in ZA

I'm not sure why, but South Africans abbreviate their country ZA. I suspect Slovenia was quicker on the draw...

When we landed in South Africa from India, we ran into a bit of culture shock, The highway was smooth with little noise or dust and traffic staying on its side of the road. The group went to Rocky Road, a rural backpacker hostel, for our country orientation. After a few days of seminars, we visited the local townships where the students would work. The service project here is to follow hospice workers in the townships. Many of the patients are HIV positive, but with the new class of highly active anti-retrovirals treatments (HAART) it can be difficult to tell.

South Africa has the highest incidence of AIDS in the world, although India will probably pass it in gross numbers soon. There are a number of causes: extreme poverty, poor women’s rights, the legacy of Apartheid leading to slow public policy initiatives, and the strength of the economy regionally, which encourages a large number of men to migrate. One of the more powerful images of the epidemic for me was seeing a century old church graveyard doubled in size and nearly filled over the last ten years.

For the remainder of our time, we’re staying in Plett, a white beach town on the Indian Ocean that feels a lot like southern California. However, the students go everyday into the townships only a few miles away. There the living conditions range from lower working class to impoverished, sometimes euphemistically called informal housing. Most students seem to emotionally bond with the care worker they shadow. While they might complain about the slow pace of the work, they all seem to recognize how these women are able to make an important difference in someone’s life, often with very few resources of their own.

Delhi

Our enrichment week was to visit Delhi and the Taj Mahal. We arrived late at night in the backpackers section of town. The next morning we were awoken by the pandemonium that is city life in India: lots of mixed pedestrian/motorcycle/car traffic in every direction, noise, and dust.
We visited the Red Fort and the outside of the Jama Masjid Mosque (it was closed for mid-day prayer). I was surprised by the extent of Islamic influence in the capital city. Before the British, it had been the capital of the Moghuls and some of the architecture remains. The British tried to create a more ordered capital, hence the contiguous New Delhi.
We went out to Agra later in the week to see the Taj Mahal. It was incredible, the only difficulty being we could not visit it for sunrise, since it is closed on Fridays. By the end of our visit, the students and myself were all eagerly awaiting our arrival in South Africa, and the chance to eat beef.

The Village People

We moved out of A'Bad and into a small rural community about two hours away to begin work on our project. The students are doing home stays in three local villages. They're all pretty much celebrities: The main entertainment in town seems to be to take them to different houses to have chai and be stared at by as many as thirty people. Apparently, there was a Peace Corps worker in one village about twenty-five years ago, and people still talk about it. For many of the locals, our students are the first Westerners they've ever met. While this was funny for the first few days, some of the students are badly in need of private time and space. This is particularly difficult for female students trying to read for our seminar. There is a lot of sexism in the village culture, and so some families are incredulous that our students actually need to prepare for class.

The other major hiccup has to do with actually doing sustainable agriculture. The host families are all Brahman, the highest caste. The honor of having foreign guests would naturally fall on these families, and they've been extremely hospitable. However, their wealth means they hire workers for the fields, and don't engage in a lot of the actual practice of farming. Again, the female students get to do a lot of choirs, but mainly around the kitchen, since girls don't typically farm. The boys, well, they play a lot of cricket. We've tried a work around, having the students due interviews on farming practices for a local government outreach center. At the end of this visit, the students will have had once in a lifetime home stays, but probably not too much practical knowledge of sustainable farming techniques.

My bad? No, A'bad

We left Cambodia for India the day after Christmas. We had a brutal six-hour lay over in Mumbai from midnight to 6 AM. Many of the students slept directly on the tile floor. When we arrived in Ahmadabad, there were a few hundred people in traditional Islamic clothing on their way to Mecca for the Haj. It was very foreign, unexpected, and rather dream like after the long hours of travel. When we stepped outside there were a few hundred more people pushed together, shouting for attention, basically a realistic introduction to India.

Ahmadabad (or A’bad, as the kids say) is in Gujarat, which is in the northeast of India, bordering Pakistan. It’s a monsoon climate, so I was surprised to see camels pulling carts in the traffic. I guess we’re here during the dry winter months, so it works. Although it is majority Hindu state, there is a significant Muslim minority. It’s a dry state, which goes well with our program’s no drinking for students policy. Our food has been almost exclusively vegetarian (a few students found McDonald's- it’s a sixth sense with teenagers). While the veggie diet has lead some students to talk about being tired all the time, this combination means I’m losing some of my baby fat.

Our partner organization planned a pack week for orientation, including unexpected language classes. Our Gujarati teacher, Mr. Shukla is straight out of a Seinfeld episode. I can't tell if it's his English, or a cultural thing, but there is definitely a lot of back and forth to get anything across. For example, he asked what do we want to know how to say in Gujarati. I said "Where is the bathroom?" He says...well, it's down the hall. We asked him how to say "Can you show me?" So he puts up "can you show me the hillside?" Who, you might ask, is asking about the hillside? Well, Mr. Shukla is asking, and don't try to stop him- it'll just take another ten minutes. One student asked how do you say "Why?", so he taught us "Why are you screaming at me?" Actually,that might be a useful phrase based on his personal experience. Last one- someone asked how do you say "Is it far?" He pauses, then asks, "You want me to teach you...in Gujarati?" In any case, it seems like the students learned enough to say a few things to their host families, it's all charades from there.

Holiday in Cambodia

For the enrichment week between China and India, our group went to Cambodia. This meant that we would be having Christmas in a country none of us had ever visited, which was a little daunting considering the level of homesickness some of the students already exhibited.

We landed in Phenom Phen and the next day went to the killing fields. We felt like it would be impossible to visit Cambodia and not talk about the genocide, but we also wanted to give as much distance as possible with the visit and Christmas. When you walk into the site, there is a seven story building for all of the bones taken from mass graves. The bottom two levels are filled with skulls, which helped to give a visceral sense of the magnitude of the killing. Many of the skulls showed where a bullet had penetrated. Perhaps more disturbing was the clothing come up from shallow graves the victims were forced to dig themselves.

The entire process was very sobering, and my co-leader Jess did a great job of debriefing. It seems like the genocide falls into the gray area between current news and history classes, so many of the students hadn't even heard of it.

The next few days were spent at Angkor Wat and surrounding temples, which was a welcome relief. Like Machu Pichu, it was spectacular, but perhaps loved to death by tourists. It was hard to feel any spiritual connection surrounded by a thousand clicking cameras. We did visit one outlying temple in disrepair that the students nicknamed the Indian Jones temple. There were far fewer tourists and it felt much more like what the entire complex must have looked like a hundred years.

The end of the Tea and Horse caravan

The last week in China we went out to Shaxi, a rural community in the north of Yunnan, close to the Tibetan plateau. On the way to we stopped in Dali, a well touristed town originally famous for marble production.

Shaxi existed as a town because of it's location near a river on the Tea and Horse caravan, a less well known parallel to the Silk Road. It ran to the south, through Burma and on into India. Because of it's climate, it was snow free through the winter, providing an attractive alternative, especially during the winter.

Previous to being incorporated, this part of Yunnan was an independent kingdom. The Tang dynasty had attempted an alliance to prevent Tibetan hegemony of the area, but eventually this kingdom became more of a threat than the Tibetans.

Most people of Shaxi are of the Bai ethnicity (see pictures). They are one of the many non-Han people in the southwest of China. While they tend to be financially less well off, you can feel a real sense of community in Shaxi, which seems to be more important for them.

Our students seemed to enjoy their home stays here more than in the city of Kunming, mostly because the pace of rural life allowed for more interaction and the natural beauty of the area. Two students seemed to have stepped into a family feud. They were housed on opposite sides of a large mansion, owned jointly by feuding brothers. The mansion was in a state of disrepair due to an inability to reach an agreement on how to maintain it. This gave it a Scooby Doo feel to it, including secret compartments in the wall that boarding traders would use to hide their valuables.

Our local host and partner, Sam Mitchel commented frequently that Shaxi was a lot like Dali had been fifteen years ago, so the question of what increased tourism will do to this town remains an open one.