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| Snigdha in Kruger |
Oh boy. So much has happened since my last blog
post. We went to Johannesburg and Kruger
National Park on excursion and it was awesome. Johannesburg is definitely a
very different place from Cape Town and I expected it to be more
metropolitanesque of an area. In Cape
Town I’ve been hearing the saying that people often go to Johannesburg to work
because that is where the money is. The
first night off when we were there I could tell because the minimum cab fare
was R70 when it’s R30 in Cape Town.
Again, just a very different place from Cape Town. We went to casinos and museums and a prison
that housed Mandela and Ghandi and other political prisoners. It was an amazing experience to be at the
museums because for a brief moment I felt like I was standing in the middle of
history itself. The level of brutality
people faced during apartheid was horrifying.
Visiting the Hector Pieterson Museum as well as the Sharpeville Memorial
really opened my eyes to the struggle that people faced. And it is not just any people, but
students. Kids my age and even younger
were in the streets in Soweto protesting for a better education. I myself have taken education for granted but
being at the Hector Pieterson Museum I saw how students died for their right to
learn. I kept asking myself if I could
ever have the courage to participate in a protest like that. I have never in my life had to fight for the
right to education and so I don’t think I’ve ever really appreciated just how lucky
I am. I was talking to a friend and she
told me that her parents would never have let her go into such a protest no
matter how noble the cause because ‘life threatening’ is just too much of a
risk. I was thinking about this and
realized how my parents would have reacted the same exact way. I wonder how all the parents whose children
marched and died that day in Soweto felt.
Did they know that was the last time they would speak to their child? Did they allow them to protest? Or did the
child him/herself insist on marching? Student protests at this level of
intensity are something just so foreign to me that I just can’t relate. It is something so far from my mind that I
can’t believe something like this is actually real. The Soweto Uprising doesn’t seem real, yet
the photos are as real as it gets.
Johannesburg was just fun because
I got to be around all my co educators again.
It felt like orientation. Except this time we all knew each other and it
was a lot less awkward. It was nice to
be in each others’ company once again.
I wish the trip could have lasted
for a bit longer because as soon as we got back I got sick. Very sick. Like hospital sick. That was not a fun experience at all. However, the hospital I stayed at was very
nice and my doctor as well as the nurses were just fantastic when it came to
taking care of me. The admitting nurse
asked me what type of insurance I had and I didn’t have an answer for her.
Clearly I was not educated about my own health insurance or the health
insurance here in South Africa (it’s called Medical Aid by the way) and I just
came off as an ignorant American: the one thing I feared the most. But I was
also in a lot of pain so I didn’t really mind anything at that point except
getting on an IV. Hospitals here are
very similar to those in America. Nothing’s really out of the ordinary. Except the TV really only played Afrikaans
soap operas. All my nurses were student
nurses. I was in a room with four other
beds but I had my own curtain for privacy.
It was a little bit scary spending the night alone in the hospital but I
was knocked out after they gave me the drugs.
I only spent one night in the hospital and the throat infection cleared
up over the next couple days. Being sick
in a different country is a lot different than being sick back home because
everything is so much more dramatic than it needs to be. I built up everything in my head (so did my
parents) and it was just scary. But it was an experience. I have come full circle with my trip so far!
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