It’s been a while since I have written here so I have a lot of updating to do. I will start from a week ago on Friday when I got a chance to go to the largest shanty town in Cape Town called Khayetlisha. The informal housing has around one million residents, a shocking figure of South Africans livings in below poverty lines. I guess what is so strange to me is that you can see towns like this everywhere here. The similarities that I see between Cape Town and Baltimore are in the sense of their vast inequalities in the distribution of wealth. In both of these areas everyone is well aware that this problem exists but a lack of opposition groups and corrupt political institutions is what makes these issues persist. Anyway, as you can imagine I was not sightseeing in Khayetlisha. I went there to see one of the forensic pathologists in our department present the autopsy of a murder case committed in 2004 by no other than two eighteen year old boys who at the time of the crime were about fourteen years old… yea scary… The two boys, one of them in jail and the other free, were chatting and laughing as if they had absolutely no worries in the world. It was definitely one of the strangest things I have seen. What kept running through my mind was “wow, these two kids have killed a human being.” Unfortunately one of the boys’ lawyers decided not to attend the hearing and the court was adjourned so I didn’t get to see the court in session.
After that exciting end of the week we decided to take a trip to Simons Town to actually sightsee. Seeing the little, cute, cuddly penguins made all the painful things I had witnessed flee instantly. Now that I am thinking about it, I think the penguins had far better living conditions than the people in the shanty towns. I felt like I was in another world than the day before staring into the ocean, the mountains around me, and hearing the constant camera clicks of the Asian tourists everywhere. I just wish that the one million plus people here could one day enjoy the beauty of this life that resides right in their backyards.
The rest of that week was sort of monotonous yet productive. Some highlights were finishing going over the 1999-2002 reports and sitting in a pathology lecture. Regarding the data we are now ready to start pulling out the information we need out of the data we have, soon start analysis, and most importantly start the whole writing process.
Then on Saturday things started getting a bit more interesting. We decided to explore our surroundings. We did more than window shopping and came back home a few rands lighter than from when we left the house. Our hungry stomachs led us to a restaurant called Mimi’s, where we had great lasagna and met our American waitress, Crystal. She was really sweet and her New York accent made me homesick. Crystal is pursuing a Master degree in medical anthropology at UCT. Her concentration is the status of women so when we told her about our research project she was really excited. It was good seeing people doing work in the social sciences aspect of what we are doing. I hope she contacts us and that we are able to get to know her better during our time here.
During our return home some other remarkable things happened like running into some people smoking marijuana in their car, a very entertaining passerby scene. After that we met two British medical students doing their rounds at UCT. It was fun to have dinner together and experience Cape Town night life more. I learned about the British medical school system and how 21 year olds are actually having hands-on experience, something you don’t see in the States until the third and fourth year of medical school. Anyway they are great friends to have here and I think we are going to be doing some other fun things together. I still have more updating to do but will continue this today!
After that exciting end of the week we decided to take a trip to Simons Town to actually sightsee. Seeing the little, cute, cuddly penguins made all the painful things I had witnessed flee instantly. Now that I am thinking about it, I think the penguins had far better living conditions than the people in the shanty towns. I felt like I was in another world than the day before staring into the ocean, the mountains around me, and hearing the constant camera clicks of the Asian tourists everywhere. I just wish that the one million plus people here could one day enjoy the beauty of this life that resides right in their backyards.
The rest of that week was sort of monotonous yet productive. Some highlights were finishing going over the 1999-2002 reports and sitting in a pathology lecture. Regarding the data we are now ready to start pulling out the information we need out of the data we have, soon start analysis, and most importantly start the whole writing process.
Then on Saturday things started getting a bit more interesting. We decided to explore our surroundings. We did more than window shopping and came back home a few rands lighter than from when we left the house. Our hungry stomachs led us to a restaurant called Mimi’s, where we had great lasagna and met our American waitress, Crystal. She was really sweet and her New York accent made me homesick. Crystal is pursuing a Master degree in medical anthropology at UCT. Her concentration is the status of women so when we told her about our research project she was really excited. It was good seeing people doing work in the social sciences aspect of what we are doing. I hope she contacts us and that we are able to get to know her better during our time here.
During our return home some other remarkable things happened like running into some people smoking marijuana in their car, a very entertaining passerby scene. After that we met two British medical students doing their rounds at UCT. It was fun to have dinner together and experience Cape Town night life more. I learned about the British medical school system and how 21 year olds are actually having hands-on experience, something you don’t see in the States until the third and fourth year of medical school. Anyway they are great friends to have here and I think we are going to be doing some other fun things together. I still have more updating to do but will continue this today!
No comments:
Post a Comment