Photos!

World Cup Festivities

I've just returned home now, and must catch up on events at the end of my trip. It was a very busy time with all the goodbyes and the world cup opening festivities. The internet at my house went down, and I did not find time to go to an internet cafe. Friday was a beautiful sunny day, and Jess and I departed Observatory on the train with our friends Ivy and Andrew. We were all decked out in our Bafana Bafana finery - well some of us more than others as you see in the photos! We carried vuvuzelas and flags, and jammed onto the train with the crush of other fans going to the center of Cape Town. The train ride itself was exciting, with more people cramming their bodies into the packed train cars at every stop and eveyone singing! Vuvuzelas blasting in our ears! In town we walked to the area designated as fan park, but the police had just declared it full and closed the gate. The crush of people there was almost frightening, so we walked a couple of blocks to Long Street to join the fans celebrating there. Everyone shared greetings and stopped now and then to dance to music on the street. We enjoyed the party there for awhile, and at game time walked to our friend Sean's house to watch the game = our back up plan in case fan park was full. The group watching the game there was quite animated and all cheering on the South African team. When Bafana Bafana scored a goal our group, as well as the whole town, was complete pandemonium. When the game ended in a draw the fans were philosophic and happy that they had not lost, but all in all a bit deflated after the hype of the whole week leading up to the game. On Saturday Jess and I returned to Long Street for shopping at Greenmarket Square, and to Jess' utter mortification, watched as a local news team nabbed her mother for an interview, asking her to demonstrate how to blow a vuvuzela on camera. Oh well! Just as well we missed that news story on TV. At night we watched the USA /England match on giant screen TV at a bar in Observatory called Trenchtown. The large space under a tent roof was jammed with fans - about half American and half British. There was much cheering and jeering in a friendly manner, a good time was had by all, and in the end at the draw, all were friends again. Sunday, my last day in Cape Town, was Ivy's birthday and a planned party for all of the Volunteer Adventure Corps interns at Mzoli's - a sort of famous meat market and party place in the township of Gugulethu. Mzoli had definitely built on to his little establishment - added more tent coverings, tables with umbrellas, and aquired a liquor license of his own so that customers no longer have to walk down the street to the shebeens. At Mzoli's you choose your meat - lamb, beef, chicken, boersvorst (farmer sausage) at the counter and they cook it over wood fires - the biggest braai (cookout) in town. Incredibly delicious! Very loud music, a DJ, and a giant TV screen for the games. Dancing and vuvuzelas! Then the ESPN camera crew showed up. If they play that footage on any of the between game shows I'll be the one in the green soccer sweatshirt eating the meat! I had to leave before the Ghana match was over to get to the airport. Goodbyes all around! Smooth flights, and back to summer in Illinois! Still corresponding with Jawaya on the curriculum and waiting to hear if funding to expand the training comes through, so will continue to post on that as events unfold.

Vuvuzela Fever

Well, I wrote a nice long post a couple of days ago and my internet went down before I got it posted. I've been included in a couple of meetings this week that have taught me much about the public health work in communities here, and levels of training of the various community workers. I was asked to explain our project to a group of leaders from NGOs working on AIDS initiatives, special needs, mental health, and community health, as well as professors from University of Cape Town and University of Western Cape concerned with the levels of training and credentialling of the workers who learn to carry out these programs. The group sponsoring the meeting was Community Mutual Trust. Jawaya and I met as well with some guys from an NGO called Molo Songololo. They previously implemented a training for mothers of young children project - differently structured than ours, but lost funding for it. They have current funding for a school based project encouraging adolescent boys to value education and make choices other than violence and drugs - very interesting! The guys there are so enthusiastic, and so committed to teaching within the context of the boys' lives. Then we moved on to a meeting with the folks at the Burn Unit at Red Cross Children's Hospital. They are also interested in recruiting parents for our program, as well as collaborating with Jawaya on desiging a Child Life Specialist track in their UCT health masters curriculum. Robert reported today that the Fertile Ground camp weekend's registration is full! There will be chronically ill children 7 and up with or without parents staying over at the camp, as well as some younger children and their moms, who will receive the first couple of sessions of our training program. The kids will no doubt have a marvelous time, and will all go home with elevated self-esteem, a sleeping bag, and a soccer ball! At the end of my work day today Jawaya announced that she was calling Helen Zille's office as well as Desmond Tutu to pitch our training program as support for both the government initiative against drug abuse and children's rights. She's so committed to improving the quality of life for this generation of children in South Africa!
So - what is a vuvuzela? The long plastic horns that the soccer fans blow at the games! There was an article in yesterday's Cape Times about the decibel level in the stadium damaging people's hearing with all those fans blowing their horns. At 6 am this morning someone was blowing a vuvuzela in the street outside my window. I blamed Andrew, but he swears he was not in Obs yet at that time of the morning. Though I did see him at 9 with his vuvuzela - Ivy too, and before the day was over, Jess and Ivy were driving around delivering Ivy's Kitchen dinners in Jess' car blowing the horn out the window as people on the street answered with theirs. Sort of like ILL - INI. At midnight tonight all of South Africa is to go outside and blow their vuvuzelas. No chance of sleep until after that for sure. We plan to go to the big opening celebration at fan park tomorrow. We heard, though, that it was full already today, so we'll see how close we can get. All the city of Cape Town will be celebrating! Go Bafana Bafana! Ivy's feeling it, and it's contagious!

Shosholoza

No work today - it's Saturday, and all of Cape Town watched their beloved Bafana Bafana's victory over Denmark. Yellow Bafana Bafana soccer shirts everywhere! Jess and I drove to Nyanga township to watch the game with friends at a local shebeen - Molo Mhlobo. What fun! We stopped at our friend Ivy's house to pick her up, and her son and his neighborhood buddies were waiting in the street to greet us with the long, loud horns the crowd blows to start off the soccer matches in the stadiums. Really loud, and Ivy and a tiny neighbor girl were blowing them inside the house as well. Before we left the house the match began with the South African National Anthem. The children in the street heard the song and stopped their play to sing along - Nkosi Sikele iAfrika.... Then Jess drove us over to the shebeen. We were of course the only white people there, and many strangers came to shake our hands. One man brought us beer and told us all about how life had changed since Nelson Mandela and the ANC had control of the government. He said that bad things can still happen anywhere, but that now there was so much hope, and he wanted us to feel very welcome there. Jess dashed into the bathroom a couple of times - to jot things down as they happened in her fieldnotes book for her thesis research! Beers were consumed as everyone watched the TV screen intently. Midway through the second half South Africa scored, and the place was up for grabs. High fives and handshakes and shouting! As the game neared the end and victory was assured, they guys in the shebeen started singing a song that I did not know. Then at the end they switched to Shosholoza, and we belted out the song with the rest of the crowd. Photo included here of Jess with our friends Andrew, Ivy, and Lloyd. Andrew and Lloyd plan on wearing the wigs to the big celebation for the opening game this coming Friday. Word has it Jess has a bright green wig to wear the the big party as well. Also included with this post are photos from a wine tour - beautiful landscapes there - and Jess' friend Eddie who plays cello in a philharmonic. After a performance he played for us a bit on the front porch at A Touch of Madness.

Photos from Ivy's Braai my first weekend here!

I finally got the photos from the Braai at Ivy's in Nyanga Township from Jess' camera. Jazz band and dancing in the street, township cookout, boys with home-made car, and soccer game among neighbors.

Internet Cafes

I'm working again at an internet cafe in Observatory. My favorite spot for internet is Cocoa Cha Chi. The food is great, the coffee strong, and they give you an internet voucher for free internet for a couple of hours when you buy food. Jawaya and I came here last Friday to do a skype conference with Debra back at Illinois - all about toddlers, advice for tantrums and biting. The usual crowd here at Cocoa Cha Chi is typically the university student group and a mix of locals and internationals. We arrived at a fairly slow time in the late afternoon, so the staff here gave the two middle aged women quite alot of attention. They made sure we got connected, got our camera working on skype, and slipped us an extra voucher, as skype uses the time up really fast. One of the guys listened with interest and amusement at our conversation, and as we were finished, leaned over and said,"I was beaten as a child for bad behaviour, and I turned out ok. I say just hit them with a sjambok until they behave." Though he was smiling, I'm sure he was not joking about the discipline when he was a kid. We seem to get a similar response from all of the adults here, so in the end, felt lucky that the women at our training were willing to consider other ideas like explanation and reasonable consequences. We can only hope they'll apply the information when they get home! Other venues with internet connection of note in Obs are Mimi's and A Touch of Madness. At Mimi's I prefer to just eat my breakfast, sip the coffee, and watch the people about thier business in Obs. Madness has a nice warm fireplace on cold evenings, I can just connect to Skyrove as long as I've got some paid internet credit, and the desserts are fabulous. Chocolate cake! Madness also has a resident ghost, but unfortunately, I've not seen her.

Weekend Parenting Training Sessions

Successful training trial run this weekend! I'm exhausted! What fun! All the children came with the moms to the training, and unlike parent meetings or classes at home, the children run in and out of the room, babies are fed and cared for, etc, all the while. Plan the agenda on Africa Time! I feel very accepted after a weekend of getting to know the moms. By this afternoon they were translating their jokes and the local gossip. These moms had willingly come to the training and really wanted to learn. They also agreed to tell me if I suggested things that absolutely did not work with their culture, which did happen a couple of times. I enjoyed teaching parenting styles - renaming the styles to Positive Parenting, Bossy Boots, Spoilt Child, and I Give Up Parenting. It was great to see how much sense this made to them, and rather than me giving examples, to hear their stories of families they knew who fell into each of the categories. I felt very clever explaining that warnings to remind children of the parents' expectation were like the yellow card in soccer, and consequence like the red card. I was not prepared, though, to answer the following question. "Jan, what then is an appropriate consequence if your child burns down the house?" We moved from there into safety and how to prevent accidents before they happen. Fire is a terrible thing here in the townships. It spreads so quickly and typically burns all the adjacent houses as well. They have asked me to next prepare a class on coping with tantrums. Sounds just like parent needs at home, but here there is less feelings related vocabulary to use, and parents are expected to tell their children what to do rather than helping them to sort out feelings and express their own ideas on how to solve problems. This week's challenge for me will be to sort out how to do this within the cultural context. I've also been invited to visit the moms at their homes. I hope to be able to do this before I return home. One more cool story for this post - regarding last weekend's braai (cookout) at my friends' house in Nyanga - the event made the township newspaper! The headline read, "Whites Spend Night Ekasie." We did have a great time sharing experiences with the locals folks in Nyanga.

Catching Up

Finally found time to write more! I spent the weekend in the township of Nyanga with friends. Friday night we prepared lots of food for a braai - a barbeque - on Saturday. I grated carrots and chopped vegetables for chakalaka! Chopped cabbage for umfino! Prepared spicy marinade for meat! I was so impressed with my friend's 4 year old son, who helped with the vegetables and the housecleaning for hours! Oh, and the power went out, so some of this we did by candlelight. Saturday was a beautiful warm day for Cape Town winter. And we had a small jazz band - local guys - playing in the street outside the house. It was great fun watching people dance to the music - and watching the children push each other down the street in a makeshift car made from a plastic crate, scraps of wood, and small wheels off an old cart. The creativity in making toys and games from what you can find in the neighborhood is amazing! Why do we at home just run to the store to buy our kids another toy? By late afternoon older kids and adults had a soccer game going in the middle of the street. Cars simply had to wait or go around another way! South Africa is mad for soccer, and almost everyone has a bright yellow Bafana Bafana shirt. Everyone is to show their support for the team on Friday, so I had better buy myself a t-shirt! World Cup 2010 is just days away!
The curriculum for parent training is shaping up! We just keep expanding the things we need to cover - guidance, supporting children's development at home, handling emotional crises, parenting hot spots like biting, toilet training, sick children, and more! The plan for a weekend pilot of the training is going to have to be expanded to 2 weekends to get it all in! This weekend we'll need to get lots of feedback from the parents on what is helpful so that we can fine-tune it before training counselors to take over the sessions. We met with a young Xhosa man today who is also a psychologist and doctoral student. It was a very informative lesson for me on language translation. There is no Xhosa word exactly for anxiety or worry. The translation is literally "my hands are sweating." This is true for many words that we have in English regarding feelings.
Last night I attended Ivy's Xhosa conversation class. She's a talented teacher! Molo! Unjani?
Ngubani igama lakho? Igama lam ngu Jan. Of course we sang the South African national anthem - Nkosi Sikele Afrika! Oh, we were feeling it! So patriotic! We had a lesson on marriage traditions. To marry a woman a man must pay Ilobola to her family. Guys, if you get a girl pregnant you pay damages to her family and also support the child. We're talking 4 to 8 cows or money to equal that value. If you then marry her, you must still pay Ilobola - more money or cows. A meeting with the bride's uncles with a bottle of whiskey (weather you drink it or not) is necessary to seal the deal. It's much more complicated than this in all the details in reality. How much you pay depends on her education, if her job contributes funds for the family, how many siblings she has. I learned of very similar traditions from a medical student from Botswana last week as well. I truly learn more and more every day! What an opportunity just to be here!

Children at Red Cross Day Clinic

Robert and Jawaya sharing vegetables with family eating lunch on clinic steps
Children's artwork in waiting room at clinic

Robert doing puzzles with girl waiting for blood test

Siya with children in waiting room

Photos of Red Cross Children's Hospital

Giraffe at hospital entrance


Infant's hospital bed

Hospital entrance

More work today

Today has been great fun - more interaction with children and parents at the Red Cross Hospital, have met many researchers, doctors, nurses, faculty, and researchers who are all very supportive of our project. We work a bit each day at the Child Health Compound - in their room 7! I'm going to take a photo of it and place it in our room 7 Christopher Hall when I get home. It is also a lecture room, and has an observation window into the next room where children play as researchers observe. My experiences teaching at U of I, Parkland College, and with young children back home are contributing very positively to my input in the training project here!

Work Has Begun

Yesterday I began work with Jawaya and Robert Shea. They introduced me to many staff members, grad students, researchers, at the Child and Public Health Compound. They explained the big picture of their project - including their summer camp experiences for children who are chronically ill or have life threatening illnesses, additional experiences there for the kids' parents, and the counselors who work with the campers and will be their mentors. We decided to begin by focusing our training curriculum on the moms (hopefully a grandmother and a couple of dads will join the group as well) who we have immediate access to and will offer a relaxing camp experience to them while they receive the training. Then we can test it out right away, adapt if needed, and expand into counselor training to support all of this next. We began looking at my teaching materials, their stories of previous camp experiences with the kids, and cultural factors that will guide our interactions. A funny story about the camp first opening - at dinner time they offered food to the children first - not a culturally appropriate thing to do among Xhosa families, and the kids gorged themselves until sick while the parents responded with anger. Homework for us last night was to interview people we know living in local townships - as many cultural groups as we could connect with - and ask questions about discipline, interaction with grandparents, common toys and games, the value of education, and more. Today Jawaya and Robert took me to the Red Cross Children's Hospital. I will post photos soon, as I did receive permission to take photographs as long as I kept the children's faces out of the shots, so you'll see the backs of the children on purpose. This was a humbling experience. We take good health and quick, efficient health care for granted at home! Jawaya took me on rounds in the infant's ward. The babies looked so frail, and miserable with oxygen tubes and IVs connected. The best comfort they had was if the mom, and in a couple of cases, the dad, were there simply to hold them. I commented on the fraility of the babies, and Jawaya responded, "These are the healthy ones! They're still alive!" Then on to play with the preschoolers in the clinic waiting room. Their monthy check ups included having blood drawn. I was so impressed with the self-regulation ability of a 2 year old girl who was showing me a coloring book when another child who had just left the waiting room began to cry loudly. She looked worried, then began to suck her thumb, then ran to her mom for comfort saying the Xhosa word for blood, then calmed down and came back to the coloring book. She knew very well that her turn to have blood drawn was next. The hospital seemed a very child friendly place all in all, with smiling staff and painted murals everywhere. The moms who met me in the waiting room and learned the purpose of my visit offered to come to the training. Jawaya promised to come to their homes to give them information and have them sign the participation forms. Then back to the drawing board for curriculum training. It looks like our training goals will include empowering parents, guidance practice, activities to enhance parent-child interactions that will support physical, cognitive, social, and emotional development. Tomorrow we'll design games and activities that parents can make or do with their children at home with materials at hand. Compared to the things we think we have to have at home, this will be very simple. No computer games, writing materials, board games, or educational toys: this will include old tires, balls, empty water bottles, rocks, sticks, and seashells. Another thing that happened today - we stopped at the store and bought 60 rand (about $8) worth of bananas and carrots. We gave them to children and adults at the hospital, as many of the families bringing kids to the clinic can afford to eat about every third day. Happy banana faces!

I'm Here!

I arrived in sunny Cape Town today - Monday, May 17. My plane was one of the last out of London Heathrow before another closure due to volcanic ash, so I am thrilled to be here instead of still waiting there! I am staying in a neighborhood called Observatory, very near the Groote Schur Hospital where the first heart transplant was done, and not far from the base of Table Mountain where the University of Cape Town is located. Obs is a very mixed neighborhood in terms of race and socio-economics, though not the very wealthy of Cape Town. It is home to local families with children, academics and international students, people with small to medium sized houses with fenced yards, and people who are homeless. During the early 90's Observatory witnessed some of the violence associated with the ending of apartheid, including a bombing. Today there are restaurants (one with a resident ghost), art galleries, book and clothing shops, internet cafes, and more. I am sharing a house with Volunteer Adventure Corps interns from around the world - Montreal, LA, Rome, Pakistan, France - and more coming in during the week. Those of you students reading who need some adventure and would like a volunteer experience tuned in to your own interests in South Africa for a few months, check out VACorps.co.za online! Those of you who have been on one of the UIUC study abroad trips with me - Steph in my house is doing her internship with Esther at the Health Clinic at Imizamo Yethu! To get to work Steph must take the train from Observatory to Wynberg and then the mini bus to Hout Bay, though today here a train workers' strike began so she was an hour and a half to work on two mini busses - careening down the streets - more than the usual sitting-in-people's-laps crowded due to the train strike. Everyone here is more than ready for World Cup Soccer (football here) - team flags everywhere and murals at the airport and in town. World Cup 2010 merchandise for sale everywere! I begin work with Jawaya Shea tomorrow morning and will then have a clearer picture of the training program we will design and when we will begin work with the counselors, foster parents, and mothers group. More tomorrow!

Journey

I'm just getting started blogging and will do my best to document my latest trip to Cape Town, South Africa. Uhambo is Journey in Xhosa - I think an appropriate name for this trip. Previous trips have taught me to have open expectations. What you think will happen in South Africa is often different than the real experience, though always positive. I can't wait to connect with those I already know in Cape Town and make new friends as well. I plan to spend a month in Cape Town collaborating with my friend and professor at The University of Cape Town, Jawaya Shea, designing training programs for counselors and foster parents, and a group of mothers as well, in child development practices important to the support of HIV positive children. I will also spend time with my daughter Jess, a grad student in social anthropology at UCT. I should arrive in Cape Town on Monday morning, May 17, and I've been told there is to be a welcoming party of friends waiting at the airport!
My recent previous trips to Cape Town have been leading study abroad trips for University of Illinois students - Human Development and Family Studies Volunteer/Experience Abroad, open to students of all majors at Illinois.

Will post again when I arrive in Cape Town!