24. “Ninjas Never Leave the Party First”; Makuas on Parade

Saturday April 27

Hamakuya Homestay Day 2

We all woke up so early in the morning probably mostly from sleeping on a hard floor but also from all the roosters crowing and cowbells tinkling. We started our water testing project with the two samples we’d collected from the previous day from the spring and the communal tap at the secondary school. We had delicious hot tea and bread with peanut butter for breakfast. Mmmmmmm. There was also a crate of fruit in our hut, and we definitely put a significant dent on the apples and oranges there.

Bennett had a whole day planned for us, it was great. He first took us to see a giant hollow baobab tree called Phambandingo.

           

Phambandingo

It literally took a minute to walk around the base of the tree

It was absolutely huge and Bennett climbed up it and was showing us each the lovely view from the tree when he dropped his Bob Marley sunglasses down the giant cavern in the middle of the tree. I think his sunglasses, after his three donkeys, were his prized possession, so he followed the sunglasses down into the cavern to retrieve them. We protested profusely because it seemed as if there would be no way for him to get back out. When he hopped down there, he found a dog’s skull…the dog had been eating livestock and crops apparently, and the village people didn’t know what to do with it, so they dropped him in the giant Baobab tree hole…where he died because he couldn’t get out. At this point, I freaked out because I thought if a dog couldn’t get out of a tree, there’s no way Bennett will be able to climb his way out. He found his sunglasses, but then…he couldn’t get out. Naturally. The five of us started panicking. We didn’t know what to do. After we pressured him, Innocent, our translator/guide, tried asking the kids where he could go to find someone to get help. No one else seemed to sense the same urgency that we had when we realized that we were standing under a tree in a rural African village and our host dad was stuck in a tree. Great. After about fifteen minutes I think our urgency turned into a sort of feeling of tragic humor. We were all laughing and trying to convince/help Bennett to climb out. He kept trying…but to no avail.

After about thirty minutes, I was praying pretty hard that some miracle would happen because I didn’t know how open the village people would be to sawing a hole in the middle of the tree to let him out. Just when we were on the verge of running to try to find help, out climbed Bennett. His legs and arms were all cut up, but he was laughing and smiling and to be perfectly honest, did not seem remotely phased by the experience. It was as if he intentionally chilled inside a hole in a giant Baobab tree for half an hour while his American guests freaked out…who knows?

The whole time we were standing at the tree, the number of kids in tow kept increasing at a steady rate. I think word was spreading around town that the Makuas were up and about and on the move. I think by the time we left, we had about thirty kids with us. We then hiked up a mountain to sit on a cliff…we were struggling and sweating and regretting not bringing our hiking boots by the time we reached the top, but somehow there were thirty kids, ranging from two to fourteen, and all barefoot. And they weren’t even out of breath.

Her shirt said: "Ninjas never leave the
party first"

Next, we walked to see the sangoma in the village. A sangoma is a traditional healer. It was a really neat experience, especially as public health students. She had agreed to meet with us and Bennett and Innocent translated our questions for her and then her responses. As we sat on the floor of her hut she uses to see people, we asked her questions for two hours.

The bones she uses to throw.

I won’t write down everything because that would take too long, but if you’re interested I’ll be really glad to talk about it forever. It was so fascinating. She threw the bones so that we could see what that looked like and she explained how the way the bones lay tells her different things. She uses a combination of jackal, warthog, springbok, elephant, baboon bones, shells, and petrified wood. She said she works with doctors at the clinic in Hamakuya, she will refer patients to the clinic if she knows “they need some water in their blood,” because she does not know how to put water in the blood but she can tell when a patient needs that and they know how to do that at the clinic. I asked her what she sees clients for, what types of ‘problems’ they present with. She explained that she sees people for general illness, for infertility, for bad luck, if a guy can’t get a girlfriend, for blindness. She collects different herbs and plants from around the area. She has dreams that tell her where she will find the necessary herbs for the patients she will see.

I took a bold step and asked her if she can treat patients for HIV/AIDS or if she sees it a lot in the area. She said yes she does, and I asked her to explain what it is. She explained that it’s not just one disease but a combination of diseases – nausea, diarrhea, headaches, TB-like symptoms. She says she can’t cure it, but she can give people treatments to make them feel better, same as the clinic. Once you have HIV in your body, you will always be HIV-positive and can never get rid of it. She said that about ten times, I think it was the most important thing to point out for her. She used to apply the herbs to all the clients who came to her with the same razor (can’t help but wonder how much HIV went around that away), but now the law states that she has to use different razors for each person. One person. One razor.

The Sangoma in her traditional dress

She sees at least 4-5 people a day – she is always busy. She claims she also knows when people will be coming. Her clients pay her part of the fee up front, and then if they are “cured” or their problem is “resolved” they pay her the remaining portion of the fee. She asked if we had cameras and could take a picture of her and show it to her. When we left, I asked Bennett if he has ever gone to her for anything, and he said yes, he does, all the time. He also explained that she is basically like family to him.

The Sangoma, Bennett and Makuas

After our visit with her, we walked to Lamvi, another nearby village, where we collected water from a hand pump for our testing purposes. There were lots of women and children there pumping water…again, harder than it looks. We asked them about the water – they use it for everything and they said it tastes sour.

Then we walked back to our family’s house to have lunch. The walk was long, we had traveled far from home throughout the course of the morning. Everything is so spread out, you don’t realize it. It took us almost an hour to get back. At some point, a six year old girl had handed me a baby because I think she was tired of carrying the baby on her back wrapped in a towel. The baby was clearly super sleepy and so incredibly cute. I was hot and tired, but it felt nice to hold the baby. Within five minutes the baby was asleep on my shoulder.

            

Eventually, I noticed that the little girl who had handed me the baby was not in sight…and I had no idea to whom this baby belonged or where she lived. I kept walking and walking with this beautiful sleeping baby, but then I turned to Hope and told her I didn’t know what to do with the baby. I started getting a little nervous…wondered if I’d be charged with kidnapping…or if some mother would come up to me very angry demanding that the makua give the child back. And then the six year old girl mysteriously reappeared and asked me for the baby back and then ran off to deliver the sleeping child to some older women about a hundred meters away who waved and smiled at me. I don’t even know. They told us Hamakuya was one of the safest places, that there were virtually no crimes committed there other than a donkey stealing every few years, but this incident with the baby made me realize just how different a “safe” rural environment can feel. I thought how reluctant – in fact how I would never even consider – letting my eleven-year-old sister go off with someone I didn’t know and trust very well and consider as a responsible mature person. Handing my baby to a six-year-old and letting the both of them disappear for hours on end, possibly even handing the baby over to a perfect stranger from another world, well that would never happen in a million years. Such a different world.

After lunch, Bennett’s mother came over and dressed us all up in bright colored traditional clothing, which was fun, but admittedly somewhat cumbersome.

             

The clothes started like this...

Reppin the pink and purple.
Try not to notice my dirty socks... ewwwww

And ended like this...
 (the dirt lines from our socks on Hope's and my ankles...) 

Then Bennett insisted we ride his donkey cart over to a homestead in Lamvi where he would parade us around for all to see. The donkey cart ride was bumpy and ridiculous but we were all laughing hysterically. Again, the thirty children were sprinting behind us and shouting and it was really fun. But I must say I felt kind of weird. I felt like show-and-tell, or a spectacle, like I was on display for all to see. But I guess that’s only fair, we were foreign guests in a small village. 

nice donkeys...don't let them fool you. 

Smitha and I in the donkey cart...trying to wear traditional clothes and failing.

Nkhumeleni (our host mom)’s dad bought us a bottle of grape Fanta to share, and after all the pap we’d been eating, I have to say it tasted delicious even though it was grape Fanta. A couple of the young people were walking around videoing us with their cell phones or asking if they could take pictures with us. We were still decked out in our traditional clothing, but they were all wearing “normal” everyday clothes: the men in t-shirts and jeans and the women in skirts or jeans or wrap around towels and blouses. We were definitely the odd ones out in this situation. They made us get up and dance, and they tried to teach us some traditional dances, but none of us were even remotely graceful or rhythmic enough to make that work. Womp womp. But we tried! And made valiant efforts! And laughed a lot! And had a great time! One older woman came up to us to greet us in the traditional Veda greeting and she stayed lying on the ground for about ten minutes. It was like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. We kept telling her good afternoon and thank you in Tshivenda and she kept responding. And it just went on and on and on. Finally she stood up and we all did too. I’m pretty sure the whole villages of Fandani and Lamvi were laughing at us, some of them outloud. But it was in good fun I’m sure.

All of us trying to participate in traditional Venda greeting. 

Receiving corrections on the greeting...it's harder than it looks. 

Trying to learn traditional Venda dances... harder than it looks. 

We rode the donkey cart back again and the donkeys decided to sprint AND they decided to go off roading at one point because they knew a short cut home that did not involve a cart… it almost tipped and for some reason all I could think of was Morty’s letter to the student body on the death of four NU students abroad…in a donkey cart accident. I was that sure we were going to die. Only four of us were in the cart because Smitha had been recruited to go to a neighboring farm and pick a chicken for dinner... Uhoh…we were all so nervous. We began psyching ourselves up to kill this chicken. I was secretly praying for a sharp, not a dull, knife. I hoped it wouldn’t shake a lot after the head had been severed. I hoped I wouldn’t vomit when I had to eat it for dinner. But then when Smitha (a lifelong vegetarian) returned with the chicken, Ndamurore killed it for us so we didn’t have to. We just watched as he did it right in front of us. I was so relieved. And it wasn’t really that bad to watch. And we went back to playing with the kids/learning Tshivenda.

When we got back from the party event in Lamvi, I asked the woman who had dressed us up and been so sweet to us if I could give her a hug...Innocent was supposed to translate but he looked at me kind of funny and I tried to motion to the woman what I wanted and everyone looked confused. So then I just said to her: "Do you do hugs? We hug. Can I hug you?" Innocent translated and then we had a nice giant hug and then everyone wanted hugs. :)

Makuas have funny hair... Everyone wanted to touch it. 

The kids asked me for a pen and some paper and then proceeded to spend the evening hours teaching me Tshivenda. It turns out a lot of them know a lot more English than they had initially led us to believe. We ate dinner by candlelight again because it was dark out. Only two of us ate the chicken with the pap…two are vegetarians and one was so grossed out by the fact that our dinner had been the white feathery thing running around the yard about an hour or so before it met its demise and became our dinner. It was actually quite incredibly tasty and I told myself that every bite of chicken I’ve eaten in my life lived a chicken life at some point, and that this one had probably had a better life than any of those anyway. I let Innocent eat the intestines and internal organs… So generous of me.

Pap and moroho...chicken didn't make it into this image.

Eating by candlelight...and headlamp. 

            

After dinner, we played games with the kids, using our torches (flashlights) to help us. After a while, I was getting worn down and wanted to talk to Bennett and Nkhumeleni who were sitting with the other adults around the fire roasting peanuts again. So Hope and I walked over from the sandy yard to the fire. Right when I was between the three huts, the beam of my flashlight, bouncing up and down with every step, landed on something…I froze in my tracks and just shone my flashlight at it. IT WAS A SCORPION! About two feet from where I stood. Hope noticed that I had stopped and turned around and said, “why did you stAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” 

All I could think was that I needed to say help and scorpion but of course I didn’t know those word in Tshivenda and Innocent was nowhere to be seen. I immediately questioned why those words had not topped the list of five essential Tshivenda words we had learned the morning before we arrived at our homestay. Those were probably the two most life-saving words I would need. Hadn’t Innocent said only the day before that it was the wrong season for scorpions and he’d never seen one in his life as far as he could remember? He must have lied to us. And here I was standing now about a foot away from a poisonous scorpion that could kill me or at best hospitalize me for a week. And yes, all this did flash through my head in the seconds between when my brain first processed what I was looking at and when Hope started screaming. So then I backed up, kept shining my flashlight on it, and realized that Hope had the answer: scream. So I started screaming too until our host mom came over and looked at it and squashed it with the heel of her shoe. I’m just glad it was Hope and I who found it and not one of the thirty barefoot kids running around in the dark there. Seriously! That could’ve been bad. Also, our host mom is kind of a boss! I liked her even more after she did that. 

Then she took us over by the fire and told stories to us while Innocent translated. She told us some classic Venda tales, mostly involving lions and baboons. Those are the most common villains in Venda lore apparently. Then it was our turn, so we told the story of Goldilocks, Red Riding Hood, and the Three Little Pigs. I started getting sleepy and it was warm and toasty by the fire and I had a cute little kid on my lap and…I fell asleep on her. Michelle nudged me awake and after the stories were over we went inside and, clustered around our little candle on the floor, had a formal discussion about the day, especially our encounter with the sangoma and took notes on it so we could remember all that had been said as accurately and freshly as possible. Can you say Nerdwestern? It follows us all the way to the rural village in the chieftainship of Hamakuya, Limpopo, South Africa. Go ‘Cats!