south africa travel notes v2.0

going back

2008-11-24T02:19:00.002+02:00

so i've been back in brooklyn for a while now. getting up early and cooking things and reviewing corporate legal documents and taking the subway and showing trader joe's a lot of love and wearing layers.

and i have been considering: will i go back to joburg? (or cape town, my, that would be much better.) this depends on several factors, namely, my bank account balance, fulbright & dean's award success and/or failure, whether or not i need to be with family, and whether or not i have to move again and pay the cost of that, etc.

i'd like to return, especially with more self sufficiency. as long as four months can feel while it's happening, when you get home all you can realize is the things you did NOT do. and those things occur to me all the time now.

good timing, bad timing, closing arguments

2008-10-20T01:51:00.002+02:00

the last post! i am leaving at the end of this week, so here are some reflections. get ready for some bad grammar...

this trip was well-timed because it came at a good juncture in my personal life, because it helped me write law school applications immensely, because i had a subletter covering part of the rent, because the courses fell right in with the gallatin/nyu machinery where i needed them to, because the african winter is wonderful, because the ending date lets me go back to work for a while before i go back to school, and because i genuinely enjoyed the company of the students participating this year & look forward to keeping in touch.

this trip was poorly timed because i missed all the volunteer opportunities in an election that has me caring about a candidate for the first time ever, because just now the rand hit 10 to the US dollar and i am about to leave, because i wish i could have worked more before i left, because i wonder if the ny board of elections ever got any of the forms i sent, and because i have to sort out my book list before nov 1st.

IHRE has a lot to improve on, especially in terms of academic difficulty and administrative organization, but as long as you're not a big old crybaby and have realistic (read: low) expectations, you can adapt it to be a pretty positive and useful experience by pursuing the things you find valuable and slacking on the things that do not benefit you. pretty obvious advice. surprising how many people would prefer to complain though. in many ways the problems that IHRE as a program had are not very different from problems i notice sometimes at NYU, so i was not overly frustrated by a new host of constraints/obstacles here. the educational consumer mindset is strong but that's endemic, it's not unique to IHRE or NYU or Bard.

so, on a scale of awful to amazing, i would suggest 'good'. i hope to return another time, not as a college student, hopefully with a local source of income and not just a chunk of savings, and see what more there is to do and learn.

rocks

2008-10-17T15:42:00.002+02:00

this is interesting and concise and a really good argument to keep in the back pocket when people ask me why i don't wear jewelry (the occaisional exception for wood/cloth/enamel type jewelry) and never want to be proposed to with a ring (the usual response to this is what kind of woman are you!?!): just say no to diamonds.
after finding out a lot about the history of the mines here in the course of research for work and also about the retail end of the business back home in ny, jewelry is even less tempting. mining is BIG MONEY here. so are retailing and wholesaling diamonds in the US and all over the world. we all know that wherever there is BIG MONEY there is also BIG EXPLOITATION and third world slavery in some cases, so why not stay away from something you don't need?

weekend away

2008-10-16T14:53:00.006+02:00

this past weekend i went up to my friend's lodge near the southern border of kruger park, in a town called hazyview. it was hotter than hell up there and i got a nice sunburn despite preventative measures, but it was a very good time. incredibly relaxing right before exams.

we cooked a lot. we braai-ed (i am again reminded of why i need to be a vegetarian, ugh). we drank an enormous amount of booze for three people. we snuck into the resort pool. there were trampolines. there were towns nearby with nationally famous places to eat pancakes, and waterfalls to see, and 90m drops you could bungee off of if you paid some people some money. there was a pick and pay right nearby to furnish us with things i do not eat in johannesburg like fresh herbs and sesame buns and chickpeas and fancy cheese. it was quite nice. the whole area is economically driven by logging and forestry so there are a lot of man made forests and logging wastelands interspersed in the hills surrounding the nearby towns, as well as curvy, cop-free roads that would make the stig from top gear whoop with joy.

here is the house and its backyard:

the river behind the house up-close, at dry season size. the river at high ebb is so nice for hippos at night that the resort actually employs hippo guards whose job is to walk around looking for hippos with a radio. one kind of snuck up on me as i was on a run and scared the crap out of me, unintentionally.

slightly blurry shot of the little balcony on the 2nd story of the house.

view of the river behind the house from the patio.

view from the patio down the row of backyards (all the lodges on this street were the same).

i owe this particular friend who drove us up to his place a lot because he has shown immense hospitality for the whole trip. we joke that when he comes to see new york, i will take him to my old neighborhood at metropolitan and bedford ave, ground zero of brooklyn hipster kids, and he will finally feel at home. apparently almost no one he knows shares his music taste here, although it is the uniform taste for most brooklyn college kids; not to mention all the shows we have in comparison to south africa. i can't talk about the shows too much because he gets filled with jealously right away: "you saw sigur ros when you were fourteen? aw, man, go to hell!" you can see why we get along!

lesson learned...again

2008-10-09T12:23:00.004+02:00

university housing is the same everywhere!

our building was built in 2002 & 2003, so it is gloriously new, but it was built by the laziest contractors with the cheapest building materials possible, according to the really nice woman who is on house committee who lives next door to me. it was a 25 million rand project, and definitely does not look or feel like it was, at all. this became relevant to my life when last night the city turned the water back on finally, and when i finally flushed the toilet, it flushed for the next eight hours continuously! apparently the change in pressure triggered some problem which then revealed a bigger problem... when they called a plumber, who by then had had a really long day already (it was 10pm), he found ROCKS inside the pipe components.

so on a more positive note, the water pressure here is so good it can lodge small rocks in your narrow pipes, all the way up on the third floor!

while he was replacing a bit on the top, the pipe was open and someone turned the water on downstairs, which sent an awesomely gross three foot stream of brownish water all over the bathroom, flooding it. this rocks in the pipe business happened in several rooms, i think, because he was around for a while. classy! i pay about the same rent here as i do at home (i converted it once out of curiosity, maybe us$10 less, another university real estate scam) and even though our building was built in 1913 or 1912, our shit does not break all the time. when it does look like it might break, our super calls a plumber before we even know something is broken. because he is great. because alma dropped many millions of dollars on that gut renovation a few years back and they're determined to keep major repairs low by actually fixing things when necessary.

on the other hand, though, someone may have been robbed on our floor (at home, not my floor here) yesterday, so let me not brag to you too much. apparently daryl heard the sound of "someone smashing in/at a door with a sledgehammer and/or crowbar" very very early in the morning, which understandably terrified him. especially because our huge concrete bomb shelter walls insualte a lot of noise, so i bet it was really loud. hope it was some jackass pratt kid who locked himself out trying to get into his place without calling a locksmith, but who knows. we have cameras in our lobby and elevator area, so maybe we'll eventually find out what happened.

as the plumber was finishing up, nearly midnight, my house committee friend asked if i was going to request a better room if i come back next summer to do more research-y work at wits. i replied i would probably live where all the postgrads live--in flats in melville, usually shares. they are really affordable, and a city bus runs between melville and campus during the day.

at the current rate of exchange i could rent a LUXURY one bedroom in braamfontein for us$150 less than my brooklyn rent, and that would be a really unnecessarily nice place for a student. wits is furthering my hypothesis that living on campus is always a bad idea.

debate night

2008-10-08T14:01:00.002+02:00

boy am i glad i watched the debate last night.

things i read today in the commentary:

"I like this format. I like to see one candidate actually move gracefully while the other lurches around like a drunk penguin."

"mccain: my friend my friends my friend"

"This debate started badly but its beginning to improve, in the same way that not being repeatedly hit on the head is a definite improvement on being beaten over the head."

“This is the man that sang ‘Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb Iran.”

"It’s so refreshing to spend an election cycle NOT talking about gay marriage, abortion, and windsurfing."

"Q: Senator McCain, this question is from the internet… A: What’s the internet?"

“… or som’in like that… uhhhh...” Wow. Really? Did he really just avoid actually talking about anything by summing it all up within “or something like that”? "

"Obama keeps talking about the government, what the government will do. It’s almost as if he’s applying for the job of running it or something."

"Hey, Senator McCain. Bob Dole and 1996 called. He wants his campaign back."

on a more serious note, i very much enjoyed obama's ideas on healthcare and the economy. they made sense to me, because i agree that healthcare is a right, and that the economy has stalled because of things other than the housing crisis which we need to also address (wages and benefits flatlining, deregulation, etc). mccain kind of came off as a crazy, twitchy old dude, which can't have been good for him.

raise that white flag of defeat

2008-10-07T16:57:00.003+02:00

i am headed back to kruger this weekend...and there is a bottle of amarula there waiting for me. i hope we get a chance to grill some things. like chicken legs. and red peppers. it will be such a wonderful break from reading articles about Bible Spice (palin) on wonkette and pandagon and wanting to claw my eyes out. and a break from working on this 4000-word paper, which i already wrote a shorter version of for my midterm. in the same class. college is not too hard.

also: presidential debates tonight at 3am south africa time! if they'd turn the water back on in our building sometime before then (please, please) i would be much inclined to shower and stay up late and watch them with other americans. there's no way the former president of harvard law review can lose a debate to near-senile free market wackjob, is there?

things i am going to miss

2008-10-06T19:28:00.002+02:00

[not in any specific order]

1. pap and gravy/egg white omelets/massive and cheap bunches of spinach.
2. the birds, even though they wake me up too early.
3. eating lunch in the matrix for less than a US dollar/getting gelato for one dollar.
4. clubs that make me want to actually go out: carfax, trance sky, candi bar, blues room, radium beerhall, buzz 9, sixes.
5. nino's hangover breakfasts.
6. friends i made during this trip & potluck dinners with them
7. lots of light & the big crossbreeze in my room thanks to big windows.
8. hearing people speak african languages everywhere.
9. some of the courses, or at least the spirited discussions therein.
10. being able to hear crickets at night.
11. the lack of air pollution.
12. the way living on campus involves almost no commute.
13. strawberry juice, guava juice.
14. nino's coffee.

i'm sure there are more, but i have to go read augusto boal because we are doing theater of the oppressed tomorrow at 8am. risky business.

rich food + booze = no.

2008-10-05T14:40:00.006+02:00

last night we had a birthday party for a well-loved american girl who turned 21, which consisted of a potluck dinner, delicious but incredibly rich cheesecake, drunken dancing at a surprisingly fun party in braamfontein, and more of the same dancing at rupaul.

i am reminded by the combination of dinner, super-rich cheesecake and vodka/cheap wine/cheap beer that my body doesn't like being overloaded with multiple indulgences at once. it should be easy to quit drinking, because drinking is financially unsupportable in new york in my case, unless my bar of choice is sending a friend to costco on my behalf. i've never gotten drunk out of sheer boredom in new york either, which seems to be a habit here. what helps is to live with a straightedge vegetarian, i got that advantage. (alas, resisting the urge to eat things such as cheesecake is much harder for both of us.) so a couple more weeks of partying, and then i'll be home, and that's it for a while. at least until some gastric recovery occurs.

the party in braamfontein is part of this series called "the end is nigh". so they have the end is free, which we went to. since they are free, they attract a lot of crazily dressed college kids. it's in a great old warehouse building that reminded me of williamsburg/bushwick house parties.

rupaul was also nuts. she performed on the carfax courtyard stage, outside, and there was a nice breeze (the nights are warmer here now). we got fancy viva la glam wristbands:

and she had a white wig on that was about two feet wide:

(photo from rupaul.com)

what i learned was: rupaul is super tall and unbelievably fine. she has olympic track star arms, and an impossible hourglass figure. of course the show included runway walks and costume changes (blue sequins to pink sequins!) and diva-tastic dance moves, what else. highly recommended if she ever comes to a stage near you. turns out the ticket price goes to supporting SA Pride programs next year--saw that today after the fact, but it's good to know there's a cause and we didn't just give money to the club as usual.

rain

2008-10-03T11:25:00.003+02:00

we got the first small rains of the season last night, which was lovely, even a little thunder and lightning. i can't wait for it to really pour, i haven't seen a rainstorm for maybe half a year at this point. on the downside, this is a high lightning strike area, so you have to unplug your electronics when a storm comes along. not as bad as central africa though. i think the eastern congo is highest, since they have year round thunderstorms.

some people stayed up till 3 am to watch the VP debates on the tv in our building's lounge room (usually it is monopolized by really serious soccer fans but not at 3 am). since i am pretty elderly in my sleeping habits so i went to bed earlier than that. i heard palin sounded like a wind-up doll, how predictable.

seven of my fellow students in the program went to durban over the past weekend and got mugged at gunpoint, all together, in broad daylight, while walking to the beach just after going to see a famous mosque. one of them was saying last night she almost can't fault the muggers for doing what they did because they legitemately needed what they stole, and they only took some of what people had on them, as well. no one got hurt, thank god, but i think it served as a wakeup call (or perhaps a reminder) that we are really conspicuous here, which limits where you can reasonably go and at what times you can go places.

that is a big piece of advice for people who might want to do this trip in future years from nyu: your movement is going to be really restricted, and for someone who prowls around new york at all hours seeking adventure, it's like being trapped. expect to be at home a lot in a building that is designed like a high security nyu dorm, expect to need a car, expect things to be segregated, expect people to tell you to go to malls for fun, all of which might be weird, especially for a new yorker.

reflections on expat life

2008-09-29T21:05:00.003+02:00

discussed the headscarf in anthropology today...man, i cannot escape this topic. it just follows me everywhere, from course to course, all the way over the atlantic, reminding me that former colonial powers are racist in real time, and making me wish i had kept up with french a bit more. all the discussion of immigrants and their kids is making me think about expat life.

a couple of weeks ago my boss said something interesting to me when i was asking him about coming back next summer to do more refugee research (this time with fieldwork!). he said, it takes about nine months to a year to understand south africa. that is, to be able to "get" the news/radio, to move through the city without a hitch or a second thought, to know where the good parking is, to know what days the market gets new shipments, to know where to take a classy business associate to dinner, to figure out the SABC tv schedules, to be able to understand people through thick accents. i think it took me about the same time to 'get' new york, at which point i was so in love with brooklyn thanks to that canvassing job i knew exactly where to go.

sorry, i digress.

anyway, he was joking about the one french postgrad in our office who says she is just now beginning to understand things, and yet has to leave at the end of the term. i can sympathize. and most of our postgrads have sublet apartments in melville, which is a pretty familiar welcoming area at this point (not so much late at night). overall a good place for young folks to live. i guess it would be like living in williamsburg in brooklyn, but with more crime. and a lot of guys guarding cars parked in the street (but they do that everywhere here).

i suppose my boss has the mind of a long term expatriate (a loopy, slightly jet-lagged expatriate that day). every american adult i've met here seems to have this kind of mindset. or, they have come to consider this home and have expatriate mindsets about other parts of the country/region, like my anthro lecturer who has a pretty serious connection to zimbabwe since he has been going there since 1982. he has two homes, i guess. or at least one and a half. maybe more, he is a really well-traveled guy.

i think it would be wonderful to have two homes or one and a half homes in different places, and by that i mean cultural 'homes', not just the fact of owning two apartments on two continents. sometimes life in the US makes me want to throw myself off my little brooklyn porch and down onto the renovation in progress below. this is mostly a function of us politics. simply having a place to go where people know you and you know people and things are Very Different, politically and otherwise, could be a relief. south africa is a good option, croatia is a good option, and perhaps i'll get to come across more options in the future. i should follow my lecturer's example: travel far and travel wide.

i mean, zuma may be a callous, politically manipulative, corrupt arms-dealing rapist, but i could never get as angry about him as i do about some plain old non-rapist american knuckleheads. because home #1 is really home, i guess. or maybe i haven't lived here long enough...

carfax lessons

2008-09-28T12:42:00.002+02:00

first of all, carfax the club, not the used car sales thingie. and no, it's not a strip club, they just wanted something attention grabbing on their site, i guess.

1. food from the food cart outside carfax is delicious, increasingly tasty in proportion to how late it is. eat it.

2. oh man, look at those hipsters in there! so many hipsters in carfax. avoid the german ones though, especially if they are there to see a half-literate pair of german rappers.

3. don't start a fight, and if you do, don't for the love of god shove the security guy trying to break it up, because he will drag you outside, knock your ass to the ground, step on your head, kick your ribs, and taser you several times. and then your blood will be all over the pavement. and don't be the good samaritan trying to intervene in the excessive guard-patron exchange cause the guard will punch you so hard in the face that you will fly backwards and hit the ground. and don't be belligerant when you drive away, because the same guard will try to taser your car.

4. if you call the cops during a fight like the one described above they won't show up, even if they were at the food cart just a little while earlier. in fact, the dispatcher probably won't know what the hell you're trying to ask her for.

5. this man is totally serious about what he does.

friday was one of those nights when you come home and it's light out and the birds are singing...but don't worry, the only part of those lessons that apply to me/my friends were #1 and #2. i did try to call the cops unsuccessfully though.

the serious part of the program is winding down soon, since classes end in a week and a half. that will be followed by a two week break of nothing, a few exams, and a few more weeks of nothing for the people who are sticking around. i guess i'll have more time for forced migration research, which is good since i need it...jeez, if i didn't have that to do i can't imagine how bored i would be.

buy this car to drive to work, drive to work to pay for this car*

2008-09-25T10:18:00.002+02:00

i thought that i'd come here and immerse myself in south africa, but with all the turmoil currently going on in the US -- the election, the wall street collapse, a $700 billion bailout, potential new HHS regulations (deadline for comment is today midnight!!), a downtown in the nyc real estate market -- i've been reading and thinking and talking about home a lot. by 'thinking' of course i mean panicking. but anyway!

there's a bit of turmoil here too, though. mbeki got deposed for corruption and motlanthe will probably replace him. then elections next year, where people are saying that zuma will probably replace motlanthe. south africa's about to elect a man who thinks that you can prevent contracting HIV after unprotected sex with a HIV+ partner by taking a shower...woops, i mean after unprotected rape with an HIV+ lesbian, in zuma's case.

there's good stuff too though -- yesterday for heritage day i went to a friend of a friend's house for a braai and ate a lot of things i would never buy or eat at home (steak) and drank a lot of g&t's. it was a nice afternoon. tonight i might go see dj krush at carfax as part of arts alive, a thing that has been going on all month. a japanese hipster with a beard? i'm there. and then lockdown this weekend and then next weekend pride on the fourth and then after that maybe a trip back up to kruger park. the only way to prevent tunnel vision of boredom here is to have something lined up each weekend, a thing to look forward to, and that keeps you from just sleeping away your time off. or going nuts. johannesburg is such a car city...i am nearly itching with anticipation to come home and get back to taking trains.

*you dirty hipster, you know what song this is from!

logistics time.

2008-09-22T18:01:00.002+02:00

1. so i am coming home on saturday october 25, the day after finals end, to get back to brooklyn (oh brooklyn how i've missed you) and get to work as a compliance officer at InternationalLawFirm (fingers crossed) to earn back all the money i spent on this trip :)

2. the people at my work are great! they are great. and they are also doing really interesting work. i am really going to try to come back in the summer of 2009 to do some more stuff with them, either my own project or assist with one of their research initatives. but next time i am not going to live in an expensive/fenced-in dorm single, which i think will help with the intense cabin fever and feeling of being trapped that we all have been getting lately.

3. excited for lockdown festival and also pride on october 4th, that should be fun. i saw kwani experience play on friday in brixton and they are playing again at lockdown. it should be even better with a bigger audience.

4. any souvenir requests, email them sometime soon. i am going to stop at the rosebank african market before i leave, and maybe the market in newtown too.

i just had to add this

2008-09-17T19:24:00.001+02:00

"at the forefront of cutting through bullshit": domestic issues
READ ALL OF IT, please.

therapy?

2008-09-17T18:51:00.003+02:00

we had a very interesting conversation this morning in the class on psychosocial issues, which is largely being taught via black thought (aime cesaire, steve biko, achille mbembe, and franz fanon) and also some paulo friere and some augusto boal. a woman of color and fellow exchange student spoke up and argued forcefully yet diplomatically that we were spending too much time discussing white guilt and white feelings in response to the text. i think she was right. if you get a class on these writers together and there are white students who have no exposure to any of it before, that is what is gonna happen. but that doesn't mean we couldn't have resisted the urge to let it devour half a class meeting, i think. now that we are conscious of this we can stop it, and get back to the text, and let multiple voices speak.

it is not everyday you hear your teacher admit she priveleged the contribution of a white student because it mirrored her own experience and transformation from a classic white liberal (which biko does away with) to a white progressive who is conscious of power/privelege. it is not everyday you hear a fellow student perfectly apply paulo friere's notion of dialogue to what is happening right there in the room in real time. i guess being in the course as an ignorant white person is a little like going to therapy: paying big dollars to learn really obvious things about yourself and the way you think thanks to someone else's infinitely more useful perspective on you. although in this case the therapists are books.

some of these obvious things: when white liberals "reach out to help" people of color it is patronizing help, it is not true generosity. when we white people want to help we should address white racism among our own. after all our peers originated and continue to employ it. things like, no person of color has an obligation to teach you step by step what the problem is, or an obligation to correct the discourse actively and intervene every time something comes up that they disagree with. or that it's not the end of the world when you get hostility for parroting the same old White Liberal Bingo Card arguments over and over about non-racialism; folks are hostile because they're tired of hearing it. they're laughing because they're tired of hearing it. that power--and minority/majority position--is something more insiduous and subtle and pervasive than having the legal right to do something or the legal right to opt out.

this is basically a course everyone should have to take in college. we should all read these writers; at the very least know their basic arguments. we should all have to watch the power dyanmics form in an integrated group, and note who is speaking and who is silent. everyone should do this, even though it is awkward at times and confusing at other times.

i am looking forward to see where the next few classes take us and whether the discussions can be productive and not two ships passing the dark as they have been at times.

meanwhile, on the home front: if mcpain and failin' get elected and america takes a turn for the handmaid's tale, starting with police brutality, I CALLED IT, YOU GUYS. i kid you not, i am researching south african law schools and the funding options therein.

ramblin'

2008-09-16T16:55:00.005+02:00

i am missing this conference held by the national lawyer's guild at brooklyn law:
"from the Black Panther Party to the 2008 RNC: COINTELPRO – then and now"
oh man. they got guys who helped sue the FBI and NYPD and former black panthers, oh man! definitely when i go away i start getting five emails a day about great things downtown/in brooklyn that i am missing. i bet that conference would be interesting. i bet i could network with people from brooklyn law there, ah well.

spent the day in class, watching the first center for indian studies on the african continent get inaugurated (yay wits!), then at the botanical gardens, then at a health food store (black beans!), and now at home. lost another free water bottle. dragging around achy muscles from yesterday's resistance thing, and reading paulo freire for an elective. not enjoying the 80 degree fahrenheit weather with the lack of a breeze. i really don't like warm places too much. i like the african winter down here though. that was nice, with layers of clothes. spring rain is coming in october!

also: as of yesterday, watching wall street collapse even more, from many many miles away. know how that feels? terrifying. surreal. kind of like the boom 90s is yelling "i told you so!" from the grave. we're done, guys. merrill lynch...lehman...bear stearns...AIG...goldman posting a 51% drop...foreclosures in the hamptons...how is this going to affect normal people?

i can't escape it!

2008-09-15T09:38:00.003+02:00

the other night we went dancing in melville out of sheer restlessness. once again the best dancing/best music was to be found at candi bar. as we were just leaving i learned that no matter how far i run i cannot escape election bullshit. some white boy from cobble hill, brooklyn (small world!) who my friend was talking with at old folks bar ratz turned out to be conservative later in the night, which led to a bit of a yelling match in the street. what i can i say...i was a little sauced, and he was a little conservative, not a good mix.

he kept asking me why not mccain, to which i sputtered about twenty reasons, some issues and some not issues. he latched onto the "mccain can't use the internet" reason by replying "do you know how many CEOs can't use the internet?" yes but how many are likely to be the leader of the free world, einstein. in addition to how you just pulled that CEO comment out of your nether regions, man. i guess this kid is down with mccain's voting record of warmongering, and making rape victims pay for their own rape kits (yes, he and palin share this), and all those rich folks tax breaks...somehow i think a grad student renting in cobble hill wouldn't make enough hundreds of thousands to benefit from that tax plan, but maybe he just really wants to support all the millionaires at lehman brothers who lost their jobs over this weekend. how nice of him!

anyways, enough election stuff. i can't escape it.

ok, i do not know if this drink exists at home, but if you can find this you should order it. we were having $2 shooters called "supermen" which consist of a layer of aftershock (cinnamon liquor), a layer of blue curacao, a layer of cape velvet (south african cream liquor), and a touch of 140 proof stohr rum. they were delicious. i would like to eat a slice of cake flavored like this drink, if that is even possible. there are lots of tasty things with cape velvet and amarula, which i've yet to see easily available anywhere but here.

this week i've got to change my airline ticket, write a paper for anthropology (discursive analysis of something, we should get the assignment today), sell my used books, fax recommender forms to the US, interview someone for work...it's nice to have things to do.

racing pigeons?

2008-09-13T10:28:00.003+02:00

earlier this week we got to see achille mbembe speak about his work and his book on the postcolony. in our class. i must admit not only is he brilliant, but his west african/frenchman accent is wonderful. he described being monolingual as "[cultural] incarceration", which is probably true, which means i need to work harder on the jailbreak.

this movie looks EXCELLENT. the tagline is "most people respect the badge. everybody respects the gun." YES. not only does it have pacino, de niro, and john leguizamo (sp? who knows), it also has the actress who played the detective's ex-wife in american gangster, another all time favorite movie. imdb shows no release date for south africa, boo...but eventually i will see this, even if it is off of itunes sometime in late november.

if i think about the US election for more than 2 minutes my head will explode. so i've been distracting myself with top gear, discovering new bars (such as the jolly roger, where we ate free pizza), running, working on the township research (slow going), taking naps, and watching pirated movies i've already seen. class itself does not take up much time, i have to admit.

interesting things crop up, though. the other night we saw an eighteen wheeler drive by the bar, filled with little cubbyholes that contained racing pigeons. i have no idea.

a really busy weekend

2008-09-07T19:36:00.005+02:00

saturday:

we all went to the apartheid museum, which was EXCELLENT. i must go back to digest everything more slowly. definitely not a day to forget the camera on, but it happened anyhow.
and then for class/for paper writing we took a look at the steve biko traveling exhibit, which was pretty unimpressive on the whole, but it was a small traveling thing, to be fair.

then a quick sandwich at the museum cafe, then 2 taxis (mini buses, not radio taxis) to maponya mall, where we bought some food for a braai we had been invited to through a friend at wits / looked on as people ate from the various maponya fast food places. the pick n pay in maponya, in fact all of maponya, is glorious. not only is there a pick n pay hyper with massive produce displays, there is also a liquor store on the side, from which we bought a case of heineken and started the walk into residential soweto to the braai.

the streets are kind of arbitrarily branched, and there aren't really names or numbers, so you go by landmarks, as our host told us, which is how she got lost going to this place once before. people cruised by and said hello to us in languages we don't know, and yelled welcome to soweto!, because no matter where you go in the world, i think, lower income communities are places where you will find hospitality. nobody yelling welcome to sandton! or welcome to houghton! or welcome to befordview!

some residents probably build their own houses and fences. i saw a bunch in varying stages of completion. i respect this, especially because i would have no idea where to begin with it. my maternal family built a house cement block by cement block while renting a place next door. i suppose when it was done they just picked a house number and tacked it up and there you go, 16 na komardi exists, time to move all of twenty feet down the road. that has to be a good feeling, to live in a place you built with your own hands. it must be just as good to give your kids a house you built yourself.

women don't really drink beer here, we were reminded when the braai chef of the night started joking with us when he saw us crackin em open. the food was good -- boerewors and rolls, chicken, beer, peanuts, roasted marshmallows. i can't remember the last time i had something from a backyard grill, so that was pretty nice.

later we walked out to get another taxi back to wits, and people were still out after dark, saying hello, washing cars and drinking and dancing and kids in the street playing. this was more normal than ghost town braamfontein. and more likeable. i was thinking about a friend at home who got busted & fined by the nypd for drinking a beer on his own stoop, while watching everyone out having a good time. somehow i think the open container ordinance is the last thing the nypd should be worried about when there was a grow house in our building last year, but, you know, maybe they keep the fine...?

after i got back to wits, i left half an hour later to see a band called the indian ocean for free at the blues room in sandton. sandton and soweto in one day...i prefer the latter. the band was good, though, good enough that i bought one of their cds. we went to melville to get pizza real late and they forgot/didn't hear our order, so that took a little while. it was decent...easy to find peppadew peppers and feta here, which makes pizza good even if there's rib meat involved (hmm). now if only this country could figure out proper crust and stop putting so much sugar in their tomato sauce!

more on the steve biko thing, and how that is playing out in class, another time. i've got some work to do, for once.

a little election coverage

2008-09-05T16:12:00.003+02:00

"Now, I don't believe that Senator McCain doesn't care what's going on in the lives of Americans. I just think he doesn't know. Why else would he define middle-class as someone making under five million dollars a year? How else could he propose hundreds of billions in tax breaks for big corporations and oil companies but not one penny of tax relief to more than one hundred million Americans? How else could he offer a health care plan that would actually tax people's benefits, or an education plan that would do nothing to help families pay for college, or a plan that would privatize Social Security and gamble your retirement? It's not because John McCain doesn't care. It's because John McCain doesn't get it."

-obama speaking at INVESCO

response:

"No, actually John McCain doesn't care. He doesn't care that millions of Americans don't have health insurance, or if he does, he cares more about party ideology that the government shouldn't be in the business of making sure people have health care. He cares more about the hollow platform of "individual responsibility" than he does about individuals, more about the political benefits of being pro-life than the moral implications of denying women agency over their own bodies. John McCain and Sarah Palin get it. They know. They just don't give a shit."

-m. leblanc, the bitch JD of bitch phD which you can see here.

i'm not even going to start on RNC & DNC law enforcement presence, and all that restriction of freedom of speech, and freedom of movement, and freedom of assembly, and freedom of association. time to get that law degree pronto. all i can say is, if i saw a bunch of decked out jackbooted riot cops pepper spraying a girl in the face for handing them a daisy, i'd go from progressive to radical in about two seconds. wouldn't you?

refrigerator game

2008-09-02T19:02:00.002+02:00

it is a fine, amusing kind of calculus that keeps my food from spoiling:

if i want ice, i have to take out the eggs and vegetables and crank the coldness setting, and then remember to take the milk out at the last minute, or all of it will freeze and the eggs/vegetables will go to waste and the milk will be a solid block, useless for tea or cereal or coffee. once the ice is frozen, that comes out and everything goes back in and the setting goes down. the bread goes at the top since everything at the top freezes, which means i have to remember to buy small amounts of vegetables at a time because i can only keep them on the lowest shelf. i once accidentally froze apricot jam and half a bottle of vinaigrette while trying to make ice. i wonder, does frozen and thawed yeast still rise? i bought it for rolls a while ago and it's been frozen and thawed over and over by now.

but if i turn the coldness setting below four to keep things from freezing, the fridge thinks i am sending it on vacation and turns itself off so everything gets warm and gross, and i have to ask the guy downstairs to throw the circuit breaker to turn it back on again. the best is when in the morning while i am not home the circuit goes out, and i come home to a big pool of water from the melted freezer on the floor, a bunch of warm, squishy chicken sitting in there, and a tub of spoiled yogurt in the fridge. learned my lesson, now i only buy small things of yogurt if at all.

so eating is strategic depending on what setting the fridge is on and how often it has been breaking lately, and what i need for dinner or breakfast the next day. no wonder i am beginning to enjoy more things in cans...this isn't even a regular size fridge. it is a mini one and yet it is so fickle! and the top part is so much colder than the bottom bit, even though they're only about a foot apart. like it has a mind of its own.

music, weather, food, law school

2008-09-02T01:19:00.005+02:00

first off, music:

the past couple days have been cold (weirdly) so i've been listening to laura veirs' most recent thing, amon tobin, god is an astronaut (sounds like mogwai, like everything else metal i have), and yo la tengo. yo la tengo is probably the best music for fall. of all time. it helps that they have more records than i am old, so i can just loop them endlessly and get hours of tunes.

we've been having these 20km/hr and worse windstorms, and for the whole weekend i heard yo la tengo over the sound of flying plastic trashcans flying into the railing, slamming windows/doors, and rattly tree branches hitting more railings. when we ran there was this headwind up the one side of the track that would make my eyes water.

other things: eating huge quantities of naartjies, a 5kg bag for a buck fifty US. so good. working on colloquium and rationale ideas and a preliminary book list. thinking about law school applications, dreading paying folks a fortune to copy paper from the lsds files/mail things on my behalf.

one thing about south africa: lawyers are into public service work here, more so the progressive ones, but luckily a progressive place like wits is also a very competitive law program (which, i hear, lets you take the NY bar without conversion). the work going on around refugees, land claims, HIV/AIDS and access to healthcare, as well as combating law enforcement corruption is a good reminder that not all lawyers are doing BigFirm securities/corporate contract type jobs. actually, to be fair, i volunteered with people doing that work and it didn't stop them from getting involved in human rights. you'd just have less time for it.

certainly public interest is complicated and difficult, especially in south africa because the transition turned everything legally upside down (rightly so) starting at the top with the constitution. since one of my 12 week classes is taught by cathi albertyn, who helped negotiate over the south african constitution/is a human rights lawyer, public interest law has been on my mind. lucky i picked ny...there are a lot of good human rights and public interest law programs within the reach of public transit.

four unrelated things

2008-08-29T11:42:00.004+02:00

1. my boss leaves for a 3 week trip after today, and came to work this morning wearing a tshirt that just says "kwerekwere" in capital letters across the front which is a kind of snub term for foreigner in isiZulu (unrelated to kwerekwere the city in malawi). the man is from oregon...kwerekwere indeed! he is an expert and an academic leader, yet he maintains a sense of humor. well done.

2. a couple of american program kids got mugged at knifepoint at 10 am walking to work from the shuttle stop yesterday, right near the parktown campus (we live on main campus). they are ok, nothing stolen since they had nothing on them, and no one was hurt, but this is a lesson in Don't Walk Around Joburg. i think when i get home i am going to take a 3 hr walk in brooklyn just to reclaim my right to be a pedestrian and not risk my life/belongings in the process. might have to bundle up for that, though, i hear it is already cold in ny.

3. i got skype to work. for those of you who roll with skype, my skype name is janet_m_sloth (referencing the vice magazine "raised by sloths" caption a while back). guess i could stop using it after going running and getting so tired i fall nod off in the middle of a call, though.

4. fingers crossed for THIS and fingers crossed for neat thunderstorms during the african spring. i hear this city is the international capital of lightning strikes, which, as long as they don't hit my building are gonna be spectacular to watch. until they kill someone's appliance with a massive electrical surge. got to remember to unplug things. thanks to a wits friend for reminding me of this.

play the blues

2008-08-28T12:26:00.002+02:00

anyone in joburg for any amount of time should go to the radium beerhall in orange grove, and listen to the blues guys on wednesday nights. they were really good yesterday evening and there is no cover. plus it is a restaurant and you can eat a proper dinner while grooving on the nice sounds. we're going back another week on friday for live jazz, since there is no cover for that either and it's been a while since i've seen a good live jazz show.

people back home, think of the brooklyn tavern crossed with cleveland's beachland ballroom, perhaps with a bigger kitchen? and more old people. god knows i love to go to shows full of old people, though, i made it when yo la tengo played the beachland and i was fifteen, me and a bunch of old people singing along and requesting devo. those were the days.

a massive data swap between a wits friend and i this week has been making me miss new york's hipsters. almost. maybe. a little bit? my itunes is going to DOUBLE before i get home, it is wonderful.

some more storytelling

2008-08-27T15:45:00.004+02:00

first mishap: i check in with a friend's passport by accident (she had left it in my desk drawer for safekeeping, guess i passed it back without looking). we laugh about this, since she isn't white and yet the clerk still had no trouble giving me (her) ticket after staring at her passport.

first sight in cape town: the shacks on the side of the freeway as we drive to rondebosch. some things are the same all over.

first trip: to the 24 hr diner for dinner (burgers) and then to pick n pay for breakfast (one bag of cereal for the whole week). main street in rondebosch is incredibly convenient and nice to walk along, with all kinds of stores, and we can't shut up about it because we are used to joburg, which is, according to our wits friends "a raw deal". 24 hr diner? ability to walk around like a normal person? SOLD.

first minibus ride: 6 rand all the way downtown! more reasons to move to cape town. the minibuses only go in two directions, and are easy to hail, since they go down the road starting and stopping with the driver's right hand guy whistling and yelling their destination repeatedly.

first trip through the street market: so many pairs of cheap sneakers! thank god i resisted the urge. train station market, outside and inside, had many vendors you can buy almost anything from. it is a little like if the west side market in cleveland diversified into clothing, shoes, herbal medicines and household items.

first stop at a travel agency (since i've gotten here): only to discover that four or five days stopover for some time in dakar is going to DOUBLE my airfare home, so there is no chance in hell of that happening. i think she quoted me 20,000 rand, which would be more than the whole roundtrip fare is now? how come no one wants to go to dakar? this baffles me.

first ride on the metro: along the coast, which my sleepy brain mistakes for the croatian coast subconsciously. a whale swims by. an incredibly cute little boy sits next to us and makes faces. i try to photograph the obviously orasac-like mountainsides but the window is all scratched up and the pictures come out terribly.

first time in the ocean: to surf at muisenberg, total beginners, in what is basically a windstorm, with a big horizontal riptide dragging our weak little human bodies down the beach. i heard the shark siren at one point, but it might have been a different beach since i looked over and the instructor motioned to me to come back in and try again. i gave up when my arms stopped working.

first realization about sharks: the siren! plus also when the rasta shark watcher guy came over with his shark tshirt and radio and was like, you are safe with us! apparently, just out off of muisenberg and surrounding beaches is a great white breeding ground. nature is fascinating.

first hike: cape point to cape of good hope. too many stairs. at least i had real shoes on, couldn't say the same for my companions. at the top of cape point there is a lighthouse with a lot of graffiti, some even in croatian. some dude from zagreb left his mark at the bottom of the inhabited earth.

first ostrich sighting: beach ostriches near cape of good hope. they remind me of raptors, with their dinosaur looking feet.

first night out: stones in observatory. enough said.

second night out: a bar called marvel on long street which played great hip hop hits from home, and was really fun, if not way too crowded. towards the end i was throwing elbows to prevent getting groped, which is when i went home.

first late night food run: other than the 24 hr diner which we never really ate at that late, actually, we did go for samosas (here it is samoosas, i think) at 3am after closing hours and convinced the chef to open up just for us. in the restaurant was an off shift waitress who either a) just escaped from her 12 step program or b) was just crazy. first she told a rape joke to cure my friend's case of the hiccups, then she tried to get us to order a round of liquid cocaines.

in other news, our host in cape town is roommate to a pair of unrelated tall canadian redheads, although they look like sisters (imagine the odds). one of them is a triple citizen in canada, australia and new zealand (once again, imagine the odds). i didn't even know that was possible.

things i am missing

2008-08-26T09:58:00.002+02:00

1. the annual conference on transitional justice at nyu law.
2. big, controversial conference on torture and psychology and law at john jay.
3. a gazillion free food events at nyu welcome week.
4. numerous paralegal openings.
5. dregs of the ny summer/start of the fall. god, i love the ny fall.
6. idealist graduate school fair. :( two years in a row i missed this!
7. most of the public fall conflict lectures at wagner.

unrelated:

i think i heard a white south african student say this today: "ew, i hate colonialism, i hate reading about it, i didn't know this class was all about colonialism." to which i thought, REALLY? i wonder if she knows why she even lives here? why she was born here? hint: she hates it! also, the class is called "psychosocial perspectives on human rights", you'd think since it's taught in south africa it will have a LOT to do with colonialism. looks like it'll be a good class though.

cape town wildlife

2008-08-25T17:32:00.004+02:00

i am not sure what this is, but it might be a rock badger. it was very friendly and very gobbly.

baboons! near cape point.

penguins at boulder beach. one of them bit our host.

a very tiny lizard at cape of good hope.

guide to south african nightlife

2008-08-21T15:39:00.003+02:00

a flowchart for how to decide if a nightclub, bar, or lounge is a good idea, based on my limited experience.

the --> means "if yes".

step one:

do you see only or mostly white people?

--> are folks wearing 'subculture' clothes, ie the kind that one group of kids wore in middle school/high school? --> leave

--> is bad 90s rock music playing? --> leave

--> are there pool tables? --> not into pool? --> consider leaving.

--> is it a gay bar? --> is it not very crowded? --> it is probably not a good one, maybe leave.

step two:

do you see non-white people/a well-mixed group?

--> is the music not rock? --> give it a shot

--> is there an extreme cover charge? --> leave

--> is it a gay bar? --> is it fairly crowded? --> give it a shot

step three:

are there samosas available?

--> buy a whole bunch and enjoy them, then repeat the other steps.

step four:

is there a creeper old dude sitting the back staring at you and your friends, with his fly unzipped and his hand down his pants, and a big grin on his face?

--> LEAVE NOW, lest you throw away cash money for the bar version of a creepy subway ride in new york.

special thanks for that last nightlife lesson goes to the ex-pat hangout "stones" in observatory, cape town. i am sure there is a good time somewhere, but each time folks talk me into going out, i am reminded of what i'm spared when i decline.

in other news, i am already wondering if/how to get back to cape town again. it is wonderful. it is everything i love about south africa mixed with everything i love about dubrovnik & the surrounding area in croatia, with a bunch of english speakers and great public transit. perfect. pictures & adventure re-counting next week!

exams, how they went

2008-08-15T16:23:00.003+02:00

literature exam: because it is literature, it is open book, open note, you had the questions 48 hours before you took the test, etc. needless to say i am not very worried. i got to outline everything down to the last detail before we wrote the exam. oh, literature.

international law exam: not open book, not open note, didn't have the questions beforehand. still went pretty well. the exam venue had an epic view--7th floor. i had the urge to cite cases, only we didn't brief any, (civil liberties panic mode is a permanent reflex!) and instead settled on citing country case studies and authors from the journals we read. is it weird to get a head rush out of stacking a paragraph with citations? whatever. it is great.

now i am not going to have to take that friday 8 am intro to international law class at nyu that jita recommended to me, which is WONDERFUL, because, really, am i going to drag my sorry self all the way from central brooklyn to school at 8 am for what is essentially an intro class where you review for the final by reading wikipedia? no way.

now all i have left is a 3000 word paper for the internship class and some journal entries for my unpaid job. oh, internships, what a strange idea. i can't wait to get home and do bitch work for $, instead of doing bitch work and being paid in essay assignments and more reading. work visas are hard to come by, though, which is an understandable obstacle to getting foreign exchange students proper work. if i had a car to get to and from a job, i'd bartend, cash only, right. to be fair: the people who organized this did the best they could. they are pretty great.

also: a thing that might be about racism. what is especially apt is just the part at the end really. john campbell for the win!

completely off topic, but awesome.

2008-08-15T09:10:00.003+02:00

my brother is crazy! in the best way! he is doing this:

http://web.mit.edu/esummers/www/driving/quebec08.html

700 miles in the canadian wilderness...in a toyota camry. a tricked out, modded for the wild camry, granted. but still...gutsy! nothing i would ever try, ever. i can barely handle not getting killed on 271 south back home.

2008-08-13T12:15:00.003+02:00

today i am thankful i'm not living in the south side of chicago.
true story:
http://stereotypist.livejournal.com/115377.html
trayvon's cousin died, probably because the response was not fast, and because they ran him over on purpose, which is a thing that'll kill you. rip, little man. jesus, gang violence.

john campbell drew that, by the way. go see his other things if you haven't. they're about a sad feeling that makes you happy or a happy feeling that makes you sad, according to him. the new yorker just interviewed him as well, which was pretty funny.

off to study for international law test/read for the core class tonight. CAPE TOWN IN THREE DAYS. i can't wait to go running on a trail, maybe even a paved one. exciting. and possibly the beach, even if it is cold.

cleaning out the camera...

2008-08-11T20:24:00.007+02:00

...because i never put up photos (sheer laziness), and this is kind of a finals week lull, no adventures. i'll probably run down exams (and adventures!!) after i come back from cape town on the 23rd.

1. cooking like my mother, despite having bland/vaguely unsatisfied memories of eating her food as a little ravenous kid just home from swim practice. it turns out that's the best thing for an african winter too. bean soup! all full of onions and garlic and green things! and mushrooms! if only there was smoked tofu to eat it with. i haven't had anything soy since i got here.

2. i have a sneaker problem. i can't pass up big stompy running shoes like those new men's nike airs to the right, which were on sale at rosebank. they were an investment in not wearing holes in my shoes in a few months, like i did with the reeboks on the left. i didn't even jog in those till i got here and they still had holes! is the ny pavement especially aggressive? hopefully the airs will last through both jogging here AND a long time walking at home.

the, uh, recipe of the week...two cups delivering newspapers...

2008-08-10T20:15:00.004+02:00

those of you who know liam lynch got the joke in the title. if you don't, go to itunes --> podcasts --> lynchland --> episode two, skip to the sock puppet skit, and prepare to laugh till you cry.

this is the recipe of the week. of the week used loosely, of course. here we call it mealie-meal or pap, not polenta, but the deliciousness is all the same.

since the topic here is food: i've noticed people seem to be a lot less disordered in their eating here. things are made with sugar instead of corn syrup. there are plenty of 100% juice juices to pick from. portions are normal. drink portions are also normal, including coffee. there are not too many skinny sick looking white girls going around sucking on diet cokes like at home...instead there are so many beautiful, big, proudly curvy african women. just this morning at rosebank i saw a gorgeous lady on five inch gold heels walk by on the arm of her beaming husband; she had curves about as wide as my arm is long. she didn't look like she was wearing any spanx or whatever to suppress them, either, and her skirt was a bright apple green, not the kind of shapeless black thing an american woman her size might prefer in order to 'hide flaws'. her husband didn't look like he thought that ass was a flaw, hey! it was almost as if she loved how she looked. shocking! this acceptance that your body is gonna do the things it is gonna do, within reason, it is a positive outlook. that woman will never in her life be a size six, there is probably nothing in the world that could make that happen, and i bet she couldn't care less about that.

another thing: i've never heard an african woman do the requisite verbal guilt performance while eating (you ladies know it: oh my this is so bad for me, straight to my hips, but it's so divine, i'll just have a tad more then, maybe one more, oh i'm so fat, oh i have no self control *chomp*) ...a thing that is incredibly common at home. people eat butter and drink whole milk and eat whole yogurt and whole cheese and nobody panics over fat content. they just eat the rich things in proportion to other not as rich foods...at normal portion sizes. even the nastiest fast food: normal portions. fascinating! i wish i could import this non-confrontational, low-anxiety, common sense outlook about fat and food home to everyone i know who spent the healthiest, most attractive years of their lives truly hating themselves.

reflecting on UN missions

2008-08-09T17:15:00.004+02:00

a friend loaned me a copy of emergency sex and other desperate measures: true stories from a war zone, written by 3 UN employees who were on the ground for missions in cambodia, haiti, rwanda, bosnia, and somalia. the book isn't really about sex, despite the title, although there are a few stories about the authors' very international love lives. as a whole it's more about trauma, ineffectiveness, bureaucracy, and epic tales of violence. go read it. it is FASCINATING. i read the whole thing this morning instead of drafting my lit paper.

next time someone starts talking at me saying so you totally want to work for the UN and go on missions because that's totally what human rights is about, i'm gonna slap their face, and then loan them this book. and if they get that the UN is not the end all of human rights work after reading the book, i might apologize for slapping them.

but honestly, if there is one thing i've heard all the former mission staff say -- and this is everybody from the folks in the book to the guy who spoke at the puck building for wagner (he also did cambodia and somalia, and had close friends in haiti) to my old boss, who consulted for the UN in the congo, it's this: there is so much corruption. so much waste, inefficiency, inaction. bribery, kickbacks, sexual abuse, theft, drunkenness, drug abuse. the philosophy of "hurry up and wait".

the story goes that if you have any kind of a conscience and are not in on the backroom deals and sex trade and bribes and are actually there to do a good thing if you can amidst the chaos, you will quit, or go crazy, or both. romeo dallaire knows all about it...

2008-08-08T12:25:00.003+02:00

while doing some work on the motherwell report today www.nelsonmandelabay.gov.za (the municipality motherwell is a part of) has this to tell me on security. doesn't it kind of sound like directions to criminals, maybe beginners who want advice? ha! the methods are interesting. i like how they tell you the "best part" at the end, too.

“Recent criminal methods of operation.

Palisade fencing: A normal car jack is used to open and thus separate the vertical bars on palisade fencing, thus allowing criminals to walk through fencing and remove objects or prepare cars for hijacking.

Electric fencing: It’s simple. Take a length of wood with two nails attached, push it through two wires, and voila, the current is re-directed, causing no harm to the criminal, but damages and disables your electric fence, which will inevitably cost you in repairs. Another method of deactivation is by jumper cables. Simply redirect current and the result is - No alarm.

To disable a motorised gate: Simply pour petrol over it and set alight. This allows for the gate to be moved open without too much difficulty. Don’t be surprised at how easily your car was removed.

The best part is this: The very latest trend is to place a burning CD in an open window of a home. The toxic fumes serve to drug the inhabitants. The effect is a very deep sleep to awaken a few hours later, feeling very drowsy. Whilst asleep, the criminals have free access and reign to everything in your home. The terrifying part is that you cannot even protect yourself - you simply go to sleep.”

learning: it is hit and miss!

2008-08-07T13:19:00.003+02:00

HIT: i saw richard goldstone speak last night, due to the efforts of our director who is a goddess. yes, my excitement about this makes me a legal nerd: richard goldstone. you lead the prosecution for international criminal tribunal in yugoslavia, and that was your first experience prosecuting, your first experience with the region at all. nelson mandela was telling you, son i'm about to amend our constitution to get you to go and take this job. when you were under pressure to accept from both madiba and your wife, you knew you had no choice. and you learned as you went. you indicted karadic fourteen years ago. you watched milosevic die in prison. you showed those assholes. i don't care if you can't pronounce srebrenica, you're my hero anyways, ok?

MISS: today a professor found it necessary to define the words "war" and "land mines" to us. basic concepts, we can has them?!? it was a little patronizing, i guess.

HIT: the all too short 6 week state sovereignty (international law) class. one of the lecturers, timothy longman from vassar is like The Rwanda Guy and knows so much, he is full of insight. the wits lecturer is excellent as well, so it is win all around. i wish the class was twice as long. we did our evaluations and we all agreed: awesome. more please.

MISS: said evaluations are "focus groups", facilitated by evalutors who are like ad agency ladies. it is like what gatorade might use to try out new flavors or something, very corporate process. kind of made me feel like a consumer and not a student, but a lot of things do these days. because it is the case.

2008-08-05T10:13:00.002+02:00

we saw wall-e this past saturday, which was EXCELLENT, and made me think of a) the robot version of cute overload, or b) the feature film edition of the air song "how does it make you feel?" robot romance! it was WONDERFUL. i am going to BUY A COPY. i have never spent so long hyperventilating from The Cute in a movie theater...there wasn't any words in the first half hour, just little beeps and boops of robot noise.

then we catered/very aggressively hosted a house party in bedford view on saturday night. in a mansion. with a zen pond and fountain inset next to the kitchen. with a tennis court on the grounds. with a tiled pool. with a built-in oven thing for braai-ing next to said pool. with floor to ceiling windows. it was one of the moments where i think about my obsessive focus on new york/brooklyn and realize that i'm probably going to live in a tiny, poorly-lit, cluttered space for the rest of my life. is that enough motivation to look elsewhere? not really. still got that nytimes real estate page bookmarked!

hopefully going to hit up oriental plaza this saturday, buy cape town tickets at some point, and see the play "a touch of madness" at a very deep discount on sunday.

marechera

2008-08-04T10:41:00.002+02:00

in the midst of studying for two finals, writing three papers, doing a presentation, and trying to figure out the cost of spring break (at the moment durban is looking like a slightly better deal than cape town, we really would like to get a tan), i got to read dambudzo marechera's 'house of hunger' for class, which is a crazy surrealist commentary on life in zimbabwe when zimbabwe was rhodesia. violence against female characters aside, it reads a little like african vonnegut with a splash of hemingway, a lot of intense description and fighting between people. very interesting.

2008-07-31T16:08:00.003+02:00

Doing a lot of writing. It would appear that 1000 words here and 2500 there and 3000 for that other thing plus blogging and bibliographies and emails and note-taking for essays and exam revision and keeping the contact list going is all adding up. When am I not in front of the computer working on something? When I’m sleeping, eating, or in lecture. And that’s about it. Research 'deadline' (soft deadline?) for township reports moved up a week; this is the part where one begins to panic. Talk to you all next week, at least when I burn through papers.

because july 25th in the states is not august 18th here...

2008-07-27T18:30:00.003+02:00

since, clearly, i couldn't see the xfiles movie 'i want to believe' on friday night, as it is not out here until august 18th, i saw 'lust-caution' instead, which was a horrible decision on my part, but what can you do. at least the dinner beforehand was excellent because we were at rosebank. lust-caution is an award winner, so i thought it would be awesome. and it was! such 1940s class, such great cinematography and sparse, sharp screenwriting and beautiful costuming. it was great until the graphic, protracted rape scenes came along. don't take a date to it, whatever you do. it probably came out a while ago at home anyhow. ugh.

but back to the good stuff: "I was there because I knew, eventually, my heroes would get it on. And because I was totally enraptured by special agent Dana Scully."
-Rebecca Traister, writing at Salon about why she kept watching the show back in the day
we're all enraptured, definitely. ha, clyde bruckman even thought she was immortal! what young girl saw this show and did not want to grow up and be her?

in more relevant and scholarly news, i spent this morning slogging away at an IR/international law term paper, which is making me mentally twitchy in anticipation of law school. in a good way! it is nice to get a hint telling me that is the right direction, and being forced to do more than surface research / work for hours continuously for a class that is actually challenging...is a good hint.

testimony from work

2008-07-25T10:46:00.003+02:00

police brutality in hillbrow (this is a neighborhood that is literally next door to braamfontein, when we take the bus to go grocery shopping each week we drive through it):

a nigerian who was trying to sell someone a tv from his electronics shop at 11am on a sunday was shot in the face with rubber bullets while the police performed some kind of unidentifiable raid on the sidewalk in front of his store. not only did he go blind and end up disfigured, but there is still a rubber bullet in his skull, which the hospital did not remove despite him paying the medical fees out of pocket. he didn't know they were rubber bullets, so he said, "at first i just lay down" [expecting to die].

i know about this because it was part of an interview i edited for work, don't worry, i wasn't an eyewitness or anything. be sure to bring this up when people are making the argument of "if anything goes wrong just call the cops, man, you can always trust them!" well, be a minority, and then you can't trust the cops. especially in a place like hillbrow. nigerians (and a variety other foreign nationals, or people originally from out of the country) are minorities here, even when their papers are in order, even when they are married to south africans and so are legally south african in terms of citizenship, even when they are part of the community and part of the economy, they are getting robbed and shot by the police. pretty much next door to our neighborhood.

not surprising that he wants to find a way to go back to nigeria now.

some observations

2008-07-24T13:51:00.003+02:00

-people dress pretty sharp here, in a way that college kids do not generally (exceptions for the nyu supermodels). actually, there a lot of similarities between here and nyu (more on that another time) so us urban college students have an advantage when it comes to avoiding culture shock and homesickness.

-observations on courses: the engagement course is a bit of a crisis. some people are boycotting it at this point. the core course is off to a slow start due to guest lecturing that was largely disorganized. the literature class and the class on sovereignty and international law are both going VERY well though.

-we were sitting on the library lawn and a friend piped up, "high school in california, guys" which is exactly what this campus is like. even in the so-called winter. sixty degrees in the winter! perfect.

-newtown market theater has half-price tuesdays. i am usually a person who is not into drama and rarely sees plays even living in nyc with the student discount on tickets, but the drama scene here is amazing. we saw tenbush at the market theater earlier this week for about US$5, a great play and a great deal.

-apparently there is a bar in the middle of the central business district (cbd) that is on the 50th floor of a high rise, and, while this is an area that i would never, ever walk around or park outside in (think buildings that are bricked up at all the windows and doors because of squatters) the place is classy somehow. those of you know this city probably know there is no reason for us to go down there, so i'm a little surprised this bar even survived. good on it, though. maybe we'll go with someone who knows their way around. i bet the view is awesome.

-we have had potluck dinners four nights in a row (i think we had about seven courses last night?) and tonight someone is turning 20 so there are plans for sushi. and i hear papaya season is coming. excellent. as my inner foodie comes out more each week, i get increasingly obsessed with finding a way to get back to this country again next year or another time.

a moment for healthcare

2008-07-22T14:16:00.003+02:00

if this doesn't bother you, i just don't know. sign that thing, put your names on that thing. public clinics are the refuge of millions of women in the us and by extension their families. not to mention it's in VIOLATION OF NEW YORK STATE LAW, apparently.

in local contrast: the "basic" student health insurance is so generous and inclusive here that i get a free pair of glasses, a free teeth cleaning, a few free fillings (if i were to need them), and free contraception of whatever kind, including brand name products rarely covered at home. i plan to take advantage of all of this, like any sane person. the nurse who came to explain the plan to us was emphasizing that we should get every last bit out of it, even if we were healthy, which is not something i've ever heard an insurance rep say at home.

i also would be able to get some free travel immunizations through this plan, if i hadn't paid out of pocket for them before i left. good to know.

2008-07-20T22:03:00.002+02:00

number one thing: if you want a postcard or mail of some sort from here, please email me your address.

fun things: going to trancesky, going to candy bar, going to unplugged on seventh, going to oh! bar, and still being clearheaded enough to exchange Words with the creepy dude trying to pick up my friend with the line "i've never dated a white woman before". please.
the most exercise i get here is endless stairs and all this dancing.

food things: having recovery breakfast at nino's in rosebank, classic eggs and toast and a bit of tomato and mushrooms and some bacon and sausage. we go every week to nino's, we can't change our brunch habit, made cheap and so classy. they serve muffins on a dinner plate with powdered sugar and a parsley garnish, for christ sake. for dinner: chicken piccata, spinach salad, pasta, avocado and cheese and apple and pomegranate salad, vanilla custard, and a papaya. don't worry. there were a lot of us to eat it all.

an ironic thing: i've a friend who works here, and when they say "on the fringes of urban rejuvenation" it means the same as when someone says something like that in brooklyn. gentrification.

mundane things: enjoying the temperate weather. definitely not missing the new york summer and the sweaty mess it engenders. my kitchen lost power, so now i can't use the stove and the freezer bit of the fridge has melted into a puddle on the floor. this building has bootleg wiring/plumbing.

school things: we are almost halfway through the block three electives?! where has the time gone? while i would like to say these classes are hard, there's no point in lying. interesting, yes, and i've been making it to all the 8ams because they're interesting, but they're not hard. i suppose they might be if i was an extremely slow reader, due to sheer volume, but it's not too bad.

the staff of this program kicks ass, though. i know a few readers of this blog advise & teach students at home, and let me tell you, if the staff sticks around then next year's group will be in great hands. they are very resourceful, deal with problems quickly, and are full of good connections. this trip might be worth it for the connections alone.

2008-07-19T02:19:00.002+02:00

1. this is a wonderful thing. 2. so is this.
3. happy slightly belated birthday nelson mandela!

wits theatre = excellent

2008-07-17T15:01:00.002+02:00

because they put on insane student productions like CROCODILE TEARS, for only 10 rand (about US$1.20) which i saw this morning in lieu of going to work for extra hours since i worked a bunch at home last night. the description:

CROCODILE TEARS; Nunnery; 15 – 19 July; 10h30

In a time when we see, hear and speak no evil, Crocodile Tears prompts the audience , through satire, allegory and metaphors, to review and examine society and their role in a country. Five women deconstruct the female body so that the world can mend; directed by Tshepiso Konopi and composed by Mathew Macfarlan

it was amazing. four woman cast, big political commentary, one of the best shows about women's rights/human rights (they're interchangeable, really) that i've seen in a while. they were very physical with the audience: sitting with us, pointing at us, accusing us, congratulating us, sitting on our laps. (not mine, i was in the back row, but you get the picture.)

birthday party tonight. we're keeping it classy with chocolate cake and no-name generic boxed wine!

achebe, housing, out on the town

2008-07-15T16:54:00.004+02:00

to be fair, although i said in the last post we had no hot water in our building, i should add that the building itself and the little studio apartments we are living in are very nice, way nicer than what we expecting and probably way nicer than we actually need. example: we have free laundry because it is a pretty small building. bonus!

here's the windows in the notkitchen part. there are a lot of shelves and the desk you see there actually spans the width of the whole room. overall, a very good design.

headed to doors on marshall street tonight to listen to (probably) nineties music because culture is a bit behind here in terms of things coming out, especially music. example: i'd be shocked if they played something from in rainbows, but not at all surprised to hear the bends. ratz in melville is apparently even worse for old music, but they have good food there and half price stella on monday nights. to future visitors and tourists: melville is a deal, but never walk down those alleys and always pay someone to keep an eye on your car.

read an interview with chinua achebe this morning where he verbally smites people who won't take the time to understand the cultural and historical context of african literature and then presume to criticize or comment on it. it's their responsibility to do so, he argues, because he was forced to learn the context of western writers--like most kids (white and black, east and west) are expected to do at some point in formal schooling. a self-proclaimed protest writer, revolutionary and teacher, he nevertheless is branded as resentful for making comments like that. it never ceases to amaze me when white people get offended by having their own expectations suddenly applied to them by the Other. especially with something as trivial as saying you don't understand a book. we expect a lot of people, but can't expect the same of ourselves?

i'm not going to even start about the other article arguing that conrad's heart of darkness and achebe's things fall apart are making similar commentaries on colonialism, geez. we took that one down in class pretty quickly.

three parts:

2008-07-14T21:43:00.003+02:00

1. brooklyn life: i am saddened to hear of two gay bashing incidents in prospect heights in june around the vicinity of pride weekend via the community board. one guy got sent to the doctor after getting assaulted on the train and another guy deftly avoided a physical confrontation after having some Words. i am pleased, though, to hear that folks in our neighborhood are retaliating, erm, countering this dynamic by having a gay night out at a local bar. i hope nobody gets sent to the hospital on the way home, though. apparently our community has enough bigots to stage THIS right on eastern parkway, for shame. hopefully it won't have a big turnout. unless there are free reggae shows.

2. joburg life: we have no hot water in our building, and i have no xfiles dvds (have been streaming things off of youku, which is such bad quality and so slow to load). hopefully tomorrow i can solve these problems with a trip to braamfontein shopping center and a visit to the office of the building manager.

3. academic life: i spent an hour of my time today listening to a totally specious argument that universal human rights and utilitarianism are diametrically opposed. yes, because we never combine these two belief systems in institutions called "prisons" and suspend rights from a group that we argue poses a threat to the rest of the society, a group commonly known as "convicted criminals" in order to ensure the civil and political rights of the rest of the society.

surely, we can all agree that the criminal justice system is problematic in a variety of ways, but it exists, no? instead this guy stood in front of us posing wildly unlikely hypothetical utilitarian moments, such as: what if smallpox got dumped in a city? how this would affect the right to freedom of association? (what? could that get any more abstract?) so many better examples, all of which actually exist in history, could have been dissected. better luck next time. it's a pity because the readings we have are quite interesting.

a relevant thing and several irrelevant things

2008-07-14T02:58:00.002+02:00

1. comments should be working for people who don't want to login as well as those who do, but they're moderated, so don't panic if your comment doesn't show up instantly.
2. what the hell birds are singing on my roof at 3 am?
3. someone lent me six feet under dvds. this was a terrible sunday night idea. i have a new creepy tv show to be fascinated with. this is why i am not sleeping.
4. of course the ACLU is hiring full time paralegals in new york while i am thousands of miles away.
5. if you had told me a couple months ago i would be studying this via firsthand accounts for work i would not have believed it. damn.

out of episodes on these discs...so goodnight.

food. you knew there would be one about food.

2008-07-12T21:29:00.004+02:00

food! it's the thing i would make a career of, if i had no other, more pressing interest in that respect.

south africa: filled with delicious things for not a lot of money. let me show you some conversions. a bag of twelve tomatoes for US$.80, and eighteen eggs for US$3.80 (what? we like omelettes), and three papayas for US$2.75, and a bag of "soup mix" with seven raw vegetables and little white beans, big enough to last me for four meals for about US$4. a 12oz jar of garlic and ginger paste for US$1.25. a half pound of spinach for $1.50. a loaf of bread for $1.20. pretty much every three days we have an international house potluck in someone's room, and we eat like vegetarian royalty. in fact produce is such a deal i could probably be a vegan here more affordably than an omnivore in brooklyn, geez (that is if you don't do community supported agriculture, which our slice of brooklyn has).

speaking of food: the gentleman who organized our trip to kruger/tshulu/ha-makuya invited a friend and i back to do some "extreme bush cooking" for a group of anthropologists from uchicago who are coming out for one of his programs. although we are still arranging this informally, it appears that he is unfamiliar with paella or quinoa or millet cold in a salad, and has been trying to do things like make risotto or falafel for large groups over a campfire. from scratch. ambitious, yes...but possibly suicidal?

soon: bringing vegetarian paella
to the elephant families of kruger.

in any case i'd be grateful just to cook with venda women, the very same who built tshulu camp from the ground up, carrying water for mortar from the river. uphill. singing. they did this little by little, like my mother helped build her family's house in dubrovnik, back in the day. but without any electricity or plumbing or paved roads, right. now there's a full kitchen in tshulu with two fridges and a big industrial stove, all running on solar power, spewing forth happiness whenever guests arrive.

frame of reference: http://www.maplandia.com/south-africa/northern-province/
we were about 20km from the mozambican-south african-zimbabwean border intersection there.

2008-07-12T18:11:00.002+02:00

this is the little girl who attached herself to my hand immediately on the first day at tryphinah's house in ha-makuya. coming from someone who is generally unnerved by small children: aww!

i don't have a lot of photos from the trip because of two reasons. 1) the things i wanted photos of eluded me (like the southern hemisphere stars) and 2) i resent having to take myself outside the interaction/make a photographic spectacle of people's homes when i'm traveling. (similar sentiments are why i did my AP art portfolio on abandoned factories and bridges in cleveland's industrial gutter.)

i let the photographer handle it and kept my camera in my bag for the majority of the time. when we get those images from him i'll put a few up for you guys, with credit of course. you'll get to see venda traditional dress. it's beautiful stuff.

as devendra would say, all my thoughts touch too much

2008-07-11T15:23:00.002+02:00

between reading adam smith, chinua achebe, simon gikandi, and assorted international law for various block 3 courses, my head is spinning. this is the first time i have been surrounded exclusively by students and teachers who are primarily into human rights. i was walking back from lecture last night with a friend from uconn, and she said to me, "do you think if i told our lecturer (cathi albertyn from the required course) that i want to be her, that it would freak her out?" we laughed but it was funny because it was true. constantly thinking: how can i be more like these folks when school is over? how can i get to where they are (or a parallel place)?

we have four zimbabweans, one ghanaian, and americans from all over america; all of whom have done interesting volunteer work or internships. the zimbabweans especially are interesting because they have been on the ground for so much of what us americans were reading about before this trip, and they are constantly saying insightful things no matter what the class or the reading in question is.

i've made more connections in the last few weeks than i made in months back home. not sure why this is. maybe it's because this is a concentrated community in terms of lecturers and students with the same interests. maybe it's because our program director ayesha kajee is an extremely well traveled and well connected journalist and academic, and she's already set up some amazing things for us (same goes for her as for cathi albertyn!). maybe it's because there's a natural hospitality and openness here you just can't get in new york, despite the dynamic NGO, law, and non-profit communities the city boasts. maybe it's because here i feel compelled to go out more, since what constitutes home is a bit foreign anyhow.

i do miss brooklyn, though, if only for the freedom of moving around after dark, and for things being open late (past 5pm) and for the great public transit. culturally, it's not drastically different here in johannesburg, at least not among young people. there's no language barrier. even the accent is slight. we all listen to the same music and we go to similar bars and wear similar clothes and have the same social patterns and text message addictions. we all love facebook and myspace and instant messaging, and house parties and shopping and eating out and music videos. there's a lot in common to talk about.

all that said, though, i can't think of a single american nineteen year old boy who's as thoughtful and intelligent and articulate as the wits boys of similar age i have met in the program. (yes, small sample, just an observation.) are young white males in american universities thinking about critical race theory and development economics? even more unlikely, how many of them are starting conversations about these topics with their female peers?

we are probably fortunate, however, to have in the program this year a group of people who are not misogynistic or racist and by nature pretty thoughtful and considerate. it has led to good class discussion, even during the awkward first week.

storytelling

2008-07-10T15:51:00.000+02:00

In the interest of summarizing a lot of strange things that have happened in the last two weeks, here’s a list:

first thing an afrikaaner said to me: a cab driver told me, “you don’t take any nonsense, do you?” after I resorted to getting my own things out of his backseat as we waited for him to get off his phone.

first thing out of the airport: a fake porter tries to steal a cart of our luggage as we wait for cabs at the curb. thankfully he is not successful.

first thing that happened on the road: Johannesburg’s highway entrances are blocked off because Zimbabweans are rioting at the embassy.

first thing on the news radio: the Johannesburg metro police have gone on strike, as of the day we arrived…because it’s not dangerous enough as is.

first meal upon arrival: was the Hotel Devonshire buffet, too delicious to handle, also the first time in several years I’ve eaten beef and not felt immediately ill after. Also involved things like custard, guava juice, and goat milk feta.

first night of sleep: very jetlagged, woke up at four am to rearrange things in my luggage and watch sesame street in zulu on SABC 1

first linguistic confusion: ‘just now’ or ‘now’ actually means later, ‘now now’ means much later, and ‘later’ means a whole different time of the day.

first south African roadtrip: we were headed to ha-makuya in the northern province with a four hour delay in the morning because our drivers a) got lost coming from Wits to the Devonshire (they are three minutes apart), b) got more lost and then got separated from one another and c) one of them locked his keys in the car just before nine am. We were scheduled to leave at six am. Finally on the N1 north, our driver takes a wrong turn and misses the exit to Polokwane, whereupon the program director unleashes her fury on the confused fellow. On the way, we get pulled over three times and get one speeding ticket.

first meal in hamakuya: cooked by amazing, resilient Venda grandmas and aunties and a manager named Shadrack; it involved more feta cheese, and homegrown tomatoes.

first party in the country: drinking amarula and “miner’s beer” at shingwedzi camp in kruger national park and trying to figure out the southern hemisphere’s sky/watching the equivalent of MTV

first dinner party I threw in the country: included six courses, at least one of which is curry. The more things change the more they stay the same!

first time doing laundry: was in a bathroom sink by hand, at tshulu camp ha-makuya, in the dark, with hand soap instead of washing powder, while listening to a horde of screaming baboons just outside.

first night out the town: began with a group TV appearance on the SABC 2 show African Views (the episode was produced by a former IHRE student) and ended with a trip with ten other people to an old folks bar, a gay bar, and a trance club called Monaco.

classes and work

2008-07-10T15:44:00.001+02:00

course schedule:

block 3
african literature and human rights
state sovereignty and human rights
human rights: perspectives from the disciplines (required core course)
engagement in human rights internship course

block 4
psychosocial perspectives on human rights
culture and human rights
human rights: perspectives from the disciplines, continued
engagement in human rights internship course, continued

work
i am interning at the university of witwatersrand forced migration studies programme (www.migration.org.za) under the supervision of jean pierre misago (from burundi) and dr. loren landau (from the usa).

i will be assisting with fieldwork, writing and research for a study of current xenophobic violence in south africa. the FMSP is affiliated with lawyers for human rights, which also is having a staff member work on the xenophobia project, along with another fellow student of mine. needless to say, i am extremely lucky and pleased to have been given this placement!

first off

2008-07-10T15:36:00.000+02:00

hello readers from:

http://web.mac.com/zdravo/the_hour_is_here/south_africa_travel_notes/south_africa_travel_notes.html

sorry to be out of touch for so long!

please bookmark this page for actual updating, since blogger is a thing the university allows access too.