a few large game animals

We took the students to Kragga Kamma Game Park a little way outside of P.E. and got close up and personal look at some wild animals of Africa. Since it was such a nice experience we took Jessica and Todd there even though they had seen these animals in Kruger but these views were much closer.

Springbok - floppy eared

The animals shown above is a springbok which is the national animal for South Africa. They are quite prolific so they have a nice population at the park. The little fellow in the middle is one the guides have gotten to know because it has a floppy ear. None of the rest have one so it serves as nice marker.

Giraffe - Mrs. things are looking up!

The park has a pair of giraffes with two young, one male and one female. In this case the mother gave birth to just one at a time. The animal pictured above is the female (mother), which can be identified because they have a hairy fringe around the horns on their heads. It is hard to see in this picture but I know that this is the mother because the father had a much darker color coat. They are a very funny animal but graceful when they walk or run.

I'm a gnu how are you?

These are familiar animals to anyone who has watched wildlife films of large migrations of animals in Africa. The vast migration of wildebeest is about to be a thing of the past. Hunting and more importantly the loss of habitat has caused most of the herds to shrink. They have a small herd here in the park and they seem to be doing well considering there were several young around in the herd. Interesting looking beasts but this was as close as we could get to them.

male ostrich

There are a number of ostriches in the park, which you will see as you drive around. They have built a little shelter to protect the female when they are on the nest. The females are greyer so they blend into the ground consequently they sit on the eggs during the day when they cannot be seen easily. The male does the night shift on the nest when they would not be noticed because of their black feathers. When things are going to get amorous the males legs turn red. I don't remember what triggers this or if it is seasonal. I will have to check and report back. I will keep it G-rated. There are some ostrich farms around but the emphasis is more on the meat than on the feathers which is what started the farming in the first place. Like all things there is more to the story than I can relate right now.

White rhinos

Both the rhinos above are white rhino (They are a male and a female.). I suppose you think that just because they look gray that they should be more like black rhinos or may be a cross but no it is not the case. White rhinos and have a square lips to help them graze on grass as they mover their heads from side to side. The black has a pointed lips and lives in brush since they are browsers so must be more weary because they can't longer distances. There can always be a predator sneaking up on you.

I have more pictures particularly cheetahs eating, which I will get off later.

Post 5

Post 5
23.02.2007

This post has been delayed for a week but we will catch-up with some of the news with this post and I will post some additional pictures on the blog.

Some of you may know that Jessica and Todd have been traveling around S.A. for about two weeks before they visited us. Originally they landed in Cape Town and looked around before driving up to Johannesburg to meet Todd’s father, brother and his brother’s friend. They left J’oburg to head for Kruger National Park to go on a couple of game drives. They had a good time and saw the big five which are rhino, elephant, lion, leopard and water buffalo. (By the way we had to look this up because neither of us was sure what constituted the Big Five.) They saw a rhino crossing the road in front of them on part of the trip. The park is getting overrun with elephants so they are everywhere. They are very destructive to the trees and shrubs so the park is deciding what needs to be done to control the population. As part of their trip getting into Kruger, they saw Blyde River Canyon, which is the third largest canyon in the world. They said it was very picturesque. From Kruger they went to the coast and scuba dived for several days at Sodwanna Bay. The diving was very interesting with the various corals and many different kinds of colorful fish. Some place along there, they took a course on the reef fish which meant that they now might know what they were seeing. This made it more interesting. On to Durban they went where they looked around for a day or so and put their guests on a plane for J’oburg and back home. Durban has a high percentage of people with Indian heritage so Jessica and Todd were looking forward to some good curry. They did find it. They did another dive near Durban and were going to do yet another but it was too windy so they headed down to P.E. Now the lady at the auto rental place told them that it was only a five or six hour drive. Obviously she had never driven it. The road is a two lane that goes through very hilly country with pot holes and cattle on the road, with very little shoulder and large trucks in a hurry so by the time they arrived here they were pooped! During the trip they found that it was over 900 km (over 600 miles). No wonder it took them all day to make it. They arrived about 10:30 PM and had trouble finding flats so the trip took about 10 hours. Yup, it was just an easy day’s jaunt.

We have gotten through the second week of classes and had our first days working with Pendla Primary School in New Brighton, a township, and the House of Resurrection, an AIDS hospice. I think those going to Pendla got the biggest surprise even though we talked about what is was like last fall before we came. You can not picture it until you are here. There is a fence around the school yard with barbwire on the slanted metal piece at the top of each post. There is some grass and weeds around the edges of the yard but mostly it is bare soil, which is very rocky and has a lot of glass scattered over it. There is no play equipment. The arrangement of classrooms is in a “U” shape with each building on the sides and end containing several classrooms which face out on the grassy court yard. This is the nicest grass in the school. The roof from the classroom continues out over the walkways to provide cover but otherwise it is open. At the top end of the “U” there is another building with the principal’s office and a room that has some miscellaneous stuff such as a copying machine and a fold up gas cooking stove. They have two sets of toilet buildings in the back with one for the intermediate grades and one for the primary students. The primary toilets mostly work and are a bit cleaner (this is relative) partly because the teacher hands out a little toilet paper for each student to use as part of letting them out for recess. Otherwise they are locked. The intermediate grades are open and in worse shape with no toilet paper and the stools having newspaper stiffed down in the bowl. A large number of stools do not flush. There are sinks but no towels of any kind. The smell is not pleasant. There appears to be no janitorial service whatsoever judging from the amount of dirt on the floor but time will tell if this is true. The children will, at the end of the day, pickup in the courtyard and will help sweep out the classrooms. I don’t think much other cleaning gets done. There are some shipping containers turned into additional rooms for the lunch preparation in one, computers are in another, library in another and one other that I don’t know what is in it. They had four computers at one time but two were stolen and only one of the two left works but there is no software for it. We are not certain how comfortable the teachers are with computers so utilization is an open question.

They are starting the school year without a full roster of teachers because of three retirements and one young teacher quitting during the summer. The school system has been slow to replace them and is an issue for most public schools around P.E. and in fact may be S.A. One teacher should have retired but is staying on to help until they get her replacement. Maybe two classes have a reasonable size but others are very large. The seventh grade has around 70 students in it. Can you imagine teaching that many students especially seventh graders? The teacher runs the classroom with an iron hand so things are not as out of control as you can picture a classroom back in the states with that many students. Monday we were there and everyone was interviewing to fill the positions. Our students were trying to keep the children occupied, which was a challenge! A couple tried to teach but the students were much too worked up to listen plus they do not look at them as teachers so listening to our students is not something that happens. Now try to tell a small child what to do when you only speak English and the child only speaks Xhosa. This is most true from kindergarten through second grades, since do not speak English and begin learning after those grades. Tricky! Our students come home drained because of the effort they put in to the process. Even when things are going well, teaching is a draining process, a fact not appreciate unless they have taught before. We hope that the hiring and class sizes gets worked out soon so things start getting into a routine. It will make it easier for the students to help the teacher more.

There are always broken windows in the classrooms so two students and I have started to fix the windows. This will not be too expensive so we could start on something and decide what other things were feasible to do. There are leaks in the roof, a switch or two that doesn’t work and of course the toilets to fix. We will have to decide upon what projects to do because there is only so much money. BD

Bruce goes to Pendla while I go to the AIDS Haven House of Resurrection. It is a cross between a nursing home, a hospice and an orphanage. It was previously a convent and about 8 years ago became an AIDS facility. It is sponsored by the Anglicans. It receives no public money from the government although they keep hoping! They do receive money from cooperate entities but, of course, never enough. Last year the government closed a nearby hospice that was publicly run. Now some of those patients are at the Haven.

Our students work caring for and loving on three groups: the infants (there are about 6), the toddlers (there are about 8…they move quickly so it seems like more), and about 6 school age children. They also help in the kitchen. There are also about a dozen adults. The facility, though very simple, is clean and friendly. I looked around to see what I could do and found that I could do hand and arm massages. I worked on three folks last Monday.

The people I met doing this were very interesting. Enoch was emaciated man of perhaps 40 years. He clearly wanted company and so I was welcomed. He had just come back from the hospital because his foot which was badly encrusted with scabs. He and I worked at conversation although we frequently misunderstood each other. I have always wondered what it felt like to be a masseuse and know, at least, one small part of another’s body intimately. Enoch’s hands and arms I knew intimately. I could feel very small muscles and it was amazing how small his bones were. His hands felt swollen to me. When I pushed on the fingers they felt full without much give. He has no feeling in the ends of his fingers and two fingers are clenched tightly into his palm. His hands and arms were very dry as with most of the patients. He apparently has no one left in his family. He asked me for an apple*. He wanted one to taste. I will take him one when I go again next week.

Dion, who I had spoken to last week, was my next patient. He had just taken his meds for AIDS and for TB…this is his second bout with TB…and he was groggy. He is the one who pesters the Matron to go home. He is hoping to get his Subsidy (like social security) reinstated…but that has not happened and he does not dependably take his meds. He is an interesting mix of races. His mother is Chinese and his father is Xhosa and something else. This gives a very angular appearance to his disease wracked body. Last time I had met him he was very loquacious and told me his father was coming soon to pick him up. He had reading material by his bed and seemed very alert. I did a pretty quiet rub and he fell asleep toward the end.

Bed 1, a female who had just been bathed, was the next on the list. She had her eyes closed when I started. She tried to communicate faintly but I could not understand her and she gave up after a while. She was very dry with some open fissures in her skin and I was told I could do her legs as well but I did not because I couldn’t...I couldn’t tell if I might be hurting her. She was not skinny and so it felt like arms I have rubbed before with flesh and a bit of subcutaneous fat. She had trouble rolling to her side and it evidently caused her pain. When I was nearly done she took my hand and held it tightly for about 20 minutes. Touch is a very powerful sense.

We had a church service in the very small chapel for internment of ashes. There had been a number of deaths during the past year and the Matron said the ashes were “stacking up”. Some of our students were very moved. There was no one there to remember the dead except the staff and perhaps the toddlers who also attended. A minister came and the service was filled with song. There was a lot of children’s hymns…it was the first time in a long time that I heard “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam”. ND

We do not have any pictures of either the school or AIDS Haven because taking pictures at this point seems intrusive. I do hope that we get some pictures before we leave so everyone can see for themselves what both places look like.

*Very nice apples are grown in South Africa.

Some pictures for P.E.

I will show you some views from our balcany of our flat. The view across the park is very nice toward the dunes and the Indian Ocean. The path along the edge of the park has venders selling a range of items from homemade leather shoes, plastic shoes, bags of various sorts, African carvings on walking sticks and animals, bead and metal work, jewelry, clothing, food, etc. It all shows up mid morning on Sundays and ends by 4:00 PM. We have gone there frequently some of us more frequently than others.

If you walk further down the beach, you get to some rocks, which are not particulary spectacular but adds a little splahing when the waves get up. By the wasy this was a calm day in P.E., which is a very windy city. I am in my office the wind is whistling through a space in the window frame and this is not as bad as it has been at other times.

The Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University's south campus is where we are located for classes and our office. It is an interesting campus which originally was Port Elizabeth University but it was consolidated with a technicon next door north campus), a campus in the down town area (2nd Ave.), one in the township (Vista) and two further down toward Cape Town in the city of George with two more campuses there. One does specialize more in the study of forestry work. The south campus has a large area set aside for wildlife and we will get a tour next week so I can report more after that tour. As you can see in the attached picture that next to this one building Weaver birds built nests. They are quite the feat of engineering but this is not their breeding season so no birds are in the area. The picture below shows the center of the campus as it steps down via terraces toward a dinner area who's roof is part of a large plaza in front of the library. There is a lot of vegetation, which surprises most students.

This is small path that goes between the International Education building and the library. Once day I saw a couple of monkeys in the bushes here but they are never around when I have the camera.

I will send more pictures every so often. I have more of the campus but they are not on the computer at the moment.

BD