as promised I thought I would try to fill you in on this weekend:
The program changes in about 3 weeks to being a mostly self-motivated independent research project. Accommodations are to be found by us and we spend a few weeks studying and writing about a topic of our choice. I am hoping to partner with a council of churches in the area that worked to resist apartheid and deal with the basically civil-war type fighting that broke out in this provence. I am still not quite sure what form my research will take, but I defiantely want to have a more practical experience with an organization than be sitting in a library all the time.
So I found a roommate to live with, Kim. She is also an SIT and Wesleyan student who is hoping to study nurses using a medical anthropology lens to talk about the intersection and dialogue or lack of dialogue between western adnd traditional medicine.
Anyway, we found a backpacking hostel called Ethekwini(the Zulu word for Durban) and got a long term apartment place there. it has a kitchen, common space, bathroom and bedroom we will get to live in. hopefully some of our friends will visit, staying for certain weeks in between living other places for their own research.
ok so back to what has happened to me this weekend. Friday, we went on a walk around durban with a brilliant developer to discuss successful developments in Durban. we began our walk in a nice white suburban mall called Mas Graves and slowly walked to a placed called warrick junction. these places had previously seemed to be very far apart because the race cultures that frequent them are so different but they are not actually all that distant from each other. Warrick junction is a train station where many street vendors used to sell all sorts of food and cook it in the streets etc. as a way of controlling this open, urban market place the government began to offer some stalls that could be rented and other types of places of business that could be purchased or rented for various prices. this developed into some covered areas with concrete benches mostly for selling foods - particularly cow and goat meat from the heads of those animals. the area than uses an old strip of highway and transformed it into a traditional healers market where tons of herbs and mixtures are sold as aids for illness. Eventually we walked into a more indian neighborhood and there markets more resembled an arab or israeli shok, which was a nice comfortable place for me.
Saturday was mostly a day of relaxing and looking into our apartment as I described mostly above and also a delicious meal in at a place called Cafe Europa and Sunday was a lazy day where I learned to make amaquinias - a fried dough type thing and also attempted to make chocolate chip cookies, the cookies were more like biscuits but a big hit and also I tried to make latkas they went over well too.
ok much love
Adina
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