This weekend was full of early starts, today at 9 my roommate Sarah and I had SHAWCO training because we didn’t go to the one we hd signed up for on Friday, oops. SHAWCO is one of the main volunteer organizations here that most of the study abroad students/ UCT students in general participate in. They have a medical sector, which you have to be a 5th or 6th year medicine student to do L, denied haha, but they also had an education sector in which you go into the townships and teach kids a range of different things from normal school classes to life skills to teach kids how to play a sport. I signed up to teach middle school aged kids math and science and life skills. The program I’m doing is called Mazizame, which goes into 2 different Childrens’ homes in the same township.
The training was basically just a bunch of different icebreakers so we could get to know the people we are going to be working with and some free juice at the end that was in a triangular shaped container? Hmmm. One of the girls in our group, her name was so difficult to pronounce so she told us to just call her flower. I was thinking about making mine really hard to pronounce so I could tell people to call me BBD. Good idea?
Right as we got home this guy named Pappi, like pappi land.. drawing? Childhood TV? Anyone, anyone? Well anyways he picked us up and drove us out to a township that has this fantastic meat place that people go to on the weekends to eat called Mizoli’s. It was insane. We got there and got in line to order our food. All they have to eat there is meat and bread. So you walk into this little place and there is this huge display cooler of 3 meats, lamb, sausage, and chicken. Very interesting. So you literally point to the cuts of meats you want and how many you want of which kinds and they throw it all into a huge metal pan and then you pay by the pound for the meat. Once you have paid you bring the tray with the raw meat in it to the back where they have these huge grills that cook all the meat. Each person has a number so you keep coming back and checking if your meat is done or not like every 20 minutes. Once we ordered the meat we walked down the road into this random family’s house to buy beer out of their fridge. There was no sign on the house or anything telling you they had things for sale you just had to know that they were selling it, thank goodness for Pappi. So everyone got their drinks and we set out to find a table. This place by 1130 was SO packed there were no tables left so all 12 of us sat around a little wooden table waiting for our meat to be done. After about an hour Pappi came back out with the metal tray filled to the top with meat YUM. There were no forks, no knives, and no plates. So six of us just dug in with our hands into the bin of meat. It was so primitive; we were literally pulling meat apart with our teeth and ripping it in all directions. Juice was flying everywhere, so much fun. We also got some bread and this stuff called pop (spelling not so sure on that). Pop is kind of like grits but a little thicker and they are usually topped with this stuff that is kind of like salsa. By the end we all had the sauce all over our face and hands, one girl even had it on her arms. So funny. After we were all in food comas we walked around a little, there were a few stands right outside the place where we were eating that were selling cool glasses and tee-shirts, silly little things like that.
This cooooooool hot grill!
We all decided to leave after about a half hour of eating, just as we were pulling out of the main area a car was driving towards us trying to move around the 100s of semester at sea kids that are docked in Cape Town for the next few days and he hit one of the girls. Not kidding. She was walking forward and the car hit her from behind, she fell down hit her head and then he ran over her leg. He didn’t realize that he had run her over and stopped the car right on top of her leg. OMG. Finally he pulled away and got out of the car to go see if she was okay. By this time people had picked her up and moved her off to the side and into one of the people who live in the townships front yard. The guy causes a huge traffic jam so once he got back out her asked him how she was and he said that she could kind of move her toes but they had to bring her to the hospital. All of us were literally traumatized. I couldn’t believe that we had just witnessed a girl being hit by a car. Never again do I ever want to see that. Not to mention this girl was only here for like 5 days, she was in a township, and got ran over by a native African man. Holy hell.
So needless to say that kind of put a damper on our day. We got home after that and went to coco wawa, the free internet café and I attempted to upload pictures on facebook, big fail. So we got some groceries and headed home. Naturally, it being Sunday it is family dinner so we are all waiting for dinner to be done, baked ziti and salad, yummy. Don’t want to go to class tomorrow, boooooooring.
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