It was our first day back to real class. I didn't want to do it. I wanted to sleep. I wanted to go on safari. I wanted to not sit in a classroom. So instead, I went to the cinema at the Student Center. But don't you worry, my politics professor (who'd gone on our trip with us) and the other 19 students in my class also all showed up at the cinema in Neelsie at 9:45 that Monday morning.
Our professor had taken pity on us and had decided to do something low key for our first class back, so we were assigned a movie for the day. And they showed it to us in the student center's movie theater. Kinda cool, huh?
We watched the movie Skin. I'd actually watched it once on Netflix before I came to South Africa (Netflix doesn't work here, along with Hulu and many other things, but worst of all...Pandora). It is a great movie and very thought provoking about a black girl born to two white parents because of recessive genes in both parents. It's an actual biological condition that has since been tested and proven.
In case you're interested, check out the trailer here:
On Tuesday, we had an all-day public health excursion to Mowbray Maternity Hospital, a level 2 secondary hospital in Mowbray, a lower-income level neighborhood in Cape Town. We had a really interesting lecture there about malnutrition and breast-feeding. Despite having the world's highest HIV/AIDS rate, South Africa officially supports that all mothers breastfeed exclusively for the first 6 months of their children's lives. Although HIV/AIDS can be transmitted through breast milk, if the baby and mother are on the appropriate medications, transmission can be prevented. Breast milk is the most nutritious food, designed to perfection for babies so why would anything else be better? The simple answer is: nothing is better. The risk of babies contracting infections from improperly washed bottles and dying of the consequential diarrhea is actually five times higher than the baby's risk of contracting HIV/AIDS from the mother. I learned a whole lot about breast feeding and maternal care and premature babies and formula and bottles and sucking muscles and cup feeding (also used instead of bottles! imagine a hospital nursery without a single bottle!) Formula feeding is unsustainable because it's too expensive, mothers don't know how to mix it properly oftentimes resulting in severe damage to the babies guts or malnutrition, and formula just isn't as healthy as mother's milk. For babies who have severe nutritional deficiencies or whose mothers cannot feed them for some reason, they can be given fortified breast milk in a cup. The rest are just breast fed 100%.
We then had a tour of the ward and saw lots of premie babies. Due to the area's socioeconomic status, the number of young teen mothers and malnourished mothers and alcohol abuse and related premature births is really high. I saw babies that weighed less than 2 lbs. There was even one baby who weighed less than 1 lb and was somehow managing to cling to dear life. Some of the babies had been abandoned by their mothers. Some of the mothers had been sitting beside their babies beds for months on end.
We watched a baby get cup fed, and the dietitian who was giving us our tour made Chance, the sole guy in our group of 20, sit down and hold and cup feed a tiny infant. It was adorable. And the 19 of us girls were dying with jealousy. Why'd they give the baby to Chance?!
I felt somewhat awkward when we walked through the maternity ward, again, part of a group of 20 parading through when we really don't know these people, we are not part of their lives, we are just invading their privacy. I'm pretty sure this kind of thing would not be tolerated in the US. HIPPA and common courtesy and customer expectations would prevent it, but we just marched on through. I don't know. It was a great experience. I'm glad I saw it. I don't think I'll forget staring at some of those babies, realizing they were tiny tiny people, hoping they would grow up to have good lives in loving homes with lots of food and not turn around and give birth to the next generation of malnourished premies in thirteen years. Kind of weird thoughts to be having in a nursery probably. Although it's the only hospital nursery I've ever walked through.
After our tour at Mowbray ended, we drove over to Tygerberg Medical Campus, it's Stellenbosch's med school. There, we were spoken to by two nutritionists and experts on malnutrition and its links to poverty. The lectures ran from 11 until 3, so it was exhausting but very interesting. We focused primarily on the first thousand days campaign and idea which supports the belief that the first 1000 days, from a child's conception until it's second birthday, are the most important - the most cognitive, nutritional, physical and social developmental habits and changes occur during these years. Having visited a Maternity hospital in the morning really complemented the lectures and drove home the First Thousand Days idea. I do not think I will ever again think about malnutrition without first thinking of the first 1000 days and the importance of breast feeding and premature babies.
If you're interested, read more about the first thousand days development ideas here: http://www.thousanddays.org/
On Wednesday, the week simply continued. We had politics class in the morning and then our Culture, Language, and Identity course in the afternoon. We had a professor from the Afrikaans department speak to us about the cultural, social and linguistic implications of Afrikaans. My perception of the language did change I have to admit after this lecture.
Prior to this lecture, I had perceived Afrikaans as a funny language that made me feel like I needed to use a cough drop after I tried practicing it for a few minutes, but on a more serious level as the language of apartheid, the language of oppression and racism, the language of the Afrikaners, the language of the colonizers. I knew that the colored people of the Western Cape also spoke it, and that seemed a bit funny to me, but I mostly focused on the political connotations I'd associated with the word before this lecture.
However, this professor opened my mind a bit. Obviously biased, she spent her allotted two hours trying to convince us of the merits of Afrikaans and its cultural and linguistic and racial diversities. Obviously she wouldn't stand in front of a group of Americans and tell us she supported and taught a language spoken by a lot of racist people who'd implemented apartheid and forced their language on other people. I'd visited the Hector Peterson museum in Soweto and read all about the Soweto Uprising which was a school stay in protest staged over the school language issue.
But this professor really drew my attention to all the other people in the country and in Namibia too speaking Afrikaans. People of different racial, cultural, economic, social, linguistic backgrounds falling on Afrikaans as their primary language, their first language, their language of preference.
At the end of the lecture, to the loudening groans of our stomachs, she lectured about Boerkos (farmer's cooking), the traditional or cultural or ethnic (not sure of correct term?) of the Afrikaners. I have already tried some of them - boboetie, Koeksisters, Chicken pie, etc etc etc, but I am eager to try some more (things within some sense of reason of course! no more worms for me)! I was a little disappointed she didn't have any samples, I kept on thinking she was going to give us some when she alluded to a special treat she had for us at the end...but it was just a mini lecture on dessert. How cruel?! (sarcasm of course...mostly anyway).
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