Cricket in the Free State and Other South African Things

Neglectful again! 

I don’t know how this keeps happening… I type up even my most mundane adventures thinking of you all, and then every time I plug into the internet it slips right out of my head… 


Case in point: the lizard I shared a washroom with during our road trip south. I called him Terrance. Thought you should meet. 

May 27: Cricket in the Free State!

This weekend we went to Villinsgrout The small farming town in the Free State where Mark grew up and where his family still farms. It was his nephew’s 30^th birthday party so almost his whole family was there and a ton of friends of the family  (about 50 of us in total) who came to drink and eat and celebrate! The party was great and I met all kinds of really wonderful people! Then the next morning (after sufficient quantities of coffee) we played cricket!! Luckily both Mark’s nephew and his friend coached cricket professionally so I could not have asked for better guidance when I stepped up to the wicket (that’s right!) for the first time! It was a ton of fun - but a lot of rules - and I’m still not convinced that I’d last watching an entire game (which range in length from 1-5 days). 

The only unsettling part of an otherwise incredible weekend was before the party on Saturday a couple of us decided to go to the pub to watch the rugby game. We drove past several bars that seemed to be full of people until we came to a white bar. They are  not officially segregated, but owners will close down for the night if a group of the wrong coloured people come through the door (they said it had happened at the bar they were at the night before). 2 days later I still don’t have words… 

June 1: The Canadians Arrive!

Last week at the PHRU was not terribly eventful, the project is currently struggling with a funding SNAFU so everything is just a little bit crazy which makes things a little slow. 

This weekend, 2 PhD students from Canada arrived to stay in the same home I am. They are working on a really neat project involving body mapping (I suggest a google-image search - its a new art therapy/discovery/research method) and at-risk youth. 

We had a large (and boisterous) welcome party Friday night with some friends and then shopped off our hangovers at Woolworths in the EastGate Mall Saturday morning. 

On Sunday we went to the China Mart which is absolutely bursting with the most beautiful scarves - I’ll admit, there was not a lot of self-control exercised - but it was a ton of fun. 

We have also all decided to go on a fitness kick at the villa, and to that end we are going to combine the km we each do on  the treadmill and the stationary bike and see if we can make it from here to Durban before the girls fly there for their conference at the end of the month (about 600km). This weekend we are off to a pretty strong start, but they are flying to Cape Town on Wednesday and I am responsible for holding down the daily minimum all alone for the week…. 

June 13

Winter has finally set in; the temperature here is like late October (10-12 during the day and 2-3 at night - there was even frost on the grass this morning!), the difference is that without insolation and really limited heating (also a habit of keeping windows and doors open) means that even indoors are cold so you tend to spend your entire day hugging yourself to keep warm. Luckily because half of our patients are babies, our clinic gets special treatment when it comes to heating so I’ve not yet had to resort to drastic measures at work. 

This weekend we went to a comedy fundraiser for a friend’s son who broke his neck while on vacation in the US and is trying to raise money for rehab-therapy. The show was absolutely hysterical. Mel Miller was the big name draw, he is apparently quite famous here and has had a pretty long career. There were also three younger comedians who were all very funny. Luckily none of it was in Afrikaans (which I was worried about going in - I’ve learned from experience there is not a faster way to make it painfully clear the joke went over your head than to have the punchline hit in a language everyone knows you don’t speak. Awkward-face). We were all also thankful that our table had been moved from the front row because one can only imagine what kind of direction the show would have taken when the joke starts “A Canadian, 5 gay guys (including a member of parliament), and 3 teenage boys from the township walk into a bar…”   It was a really really fun time though!

At work this week I am working on a new project while we wait for the results from the blood tests to come in. This project is about cervical cancer rates in HIV-infected women. It is a really interesting study and I am really getting my tuition’s worth out of BioStats.