Monday was Memorial Day! But we
didn’t observe it. We did school instead. We started out our day at a hospice
for palliative and chronic care in Knysna. It provides free of charge services
to the lower income areas of the community and focuses on traditional medicines
and herbal remedies that people like to use since it is a huge part of African
medicine. We met a guy named Frank Muller who spent the next two days with us.
He is a doctor but he researches African traditional remedies and actually puts
a lot of faith in healing via chemical substances in plants since it is
technically more natural to receive vitamins through dietary (fibrous) paths
than through multivitamins and supplements so it’s better for your body to do
it the way evolution relied on than via synthesized substances. Interesting
points.
We
got to watch some ladies making a substance out of different leaves and
Vaseline. It is used as an all-purpose skin treatment in a gel form and a
deeper muscle/arthritic treatment in an oil form that seeps deeper into the
body tissues. These two older community members shared with us their history
and affiliation with the project. They have been volunteering for many years,
sharing their remedies and treatments with the community for minimal costs (only
R5 for a bottle) to buy the supplies and sustain the project.
After our visit, we got take away pizza
and drove up to the mountaintop where we enjoyed the incredible views and the
yummy pizza.
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| They call it the "Map of Africa" - do you see it? |
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| I felt like this view was too beautiful for pizza. |
Then we drove to George Botanical
Garden where we waited for our profs who had gone to pick up a guest lecturer
for us. We played volleyball with an old random soccer ball while we waited. It
was fun!!
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| Playing volleyball/soccer |
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| The Medicine Mound at George Botanical Garden |
Then a guy named Richard came to lecture us on traditional African
medicine. He has a bachelors in chemistry, an MD, and he is a natural sangoma,
called to heal body, soul and spirit in the art/science of traditional African
medicine. It was a very weird experience. I don’t really know how to explain
it. He had a lot of interesting and radical views. But he comes from a
completely different worldview than I do. He taught us what different plants do
and showed them to us in the healing mound of the botanical garden and then
when we got to the top of this mound, we had a lecture and Q&A session. He
was a freedom fighter and was actually sentenced to life imprisonment during
apartheid but then he escaped to Mozambique. He’s been a healer from a young
age, but he also went to medical school in Russia because he was curious but as
a black man he could not attend medical school in South Africa during
apartheid. Now he practices free of charge in a very low income area of George.
He practices sangoma healing though, not western medicine.
After the botanical garden
experience, we drove way out into the middle of nowhere to a place called Laila’s
arms. It was a farmhouse converted into a quasi restaurant. But we were the
only people there besides the owner/cook and a few of her staff members. We had
a debriefing session with Dr Snyman and Dr Muller about what we had just
witnessed. And then we took a break to eat some delicious home cooked food and
then went back to our debriefing session. I think I’ll have to write about this
later because I’m still terribly confused and don’t know what to make of it. Probably
because I come from such a strongly Christian & Western/material worldviews
background, this was an extremely intellectually challenging exposure for me. I
just struggled to understand, to conceptualize this belief system. But I
acknowledged that and as always, when I have a gut reaction to something, I get
unsettled and don’t like to accept it. I like to analyze gut reactions and
challenge them. See where they come from and why. So I asked Dr Frank Muller a
million questions and that helped me a lot. But I’m still mulling it over in my
head.
Then finally it was time to leave
and we drove back to Knysna where we were spending the night at a backpackers
called Afrovibe on Myoli beach, a lovely, quiet beach with warm beautiful
water. It was pitch black when we got there, but almost all of us went out to
the beach as soon as we put our bags into our dorm rooms because how could we
not?! It was so beautiful. I even lay down in the sand at one point at the end
of a row of people and then Dillon jumped over us. We went from three up to six
people (and somehow I always managed to be on the far end…scary!)
I was walking
back to our hostel when Mariah and I saw a sky lantern floating towards the
beach from the town, and we raced, following it. It landed on the beach and we
ran over to it just before the flame died out. It was beautiful and I decided
that sky lantern is something I will have to add to my bucket list. Good night, Beautiful World!
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| Good Morning, Beautiful World! |
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| Early morning by the Indian Ocean. |
Monday morning, after visiting the beach and saying farewell to the Indian Ocean, we visited Nelson Mandela Municipal
University outside George, a nature campus with lots and lots of fields and
natural spaces and things like that…where students can study environmental
science, animal sciences, conservation, etc. It was a lovely surprise for me,
and a beautiful campus. I think I might transfer…. A man named Quinton Johnson
spoke to us about his work with plant remedies. He is isolating the active
ingredients in traditional African medicines and studying the orgo of those compounds.
Ick. Haha Just kidding, it was really interesting and he was a very very
charismatic speaker. He’s won prizes all over the world for his science and
wrote a book of which he gave all of us free copies for coming all the way from
Chicago to visit him and listen to him. Then we went outside and had a
discussion on Worldviews – we broke it down into the five predominant
worldviews in South Africa: Christian, African traditional, Secular, Muslim,
and Hindu in order of decreasing population percentage. Frank asked for one of
us to represent each worldview, and surprisingly (or not so surprisingly) we
were able to represent all five to some extent. Maybe Northwestern is more
diverse than everyone thinks… We had a student who is first generation
Nigerian, I represented the Christian, we had a girl who practices devout
Islam, a guy who is agnostic and someone whose family follows pretty strict
Hinduism. Go us for being so diverse! Frank asked each of us questions and
asked us to explain them from our represented worldview. It was really cool,
and also really interesting for me to see how similar several of the religious
worldviews are. Makes me wonder how people get into wars over the little
technical stuff when a lot of the big picture things are so similar. Ugh
people!
After
our lecture and discussion ended, we departed for Stellenbosch. It was about a
five hour drive back, but we put on some tunes and had a sing-along party in
the car taking turns DJing with our iPods (for those of us whose iPods had not been not
stolen).
