And so, I embark on the telling of the past four months of fantastical stories.
I have now entered into year two of my time in South Africa. I think it is delightful to be back, although my thesis supervisor says that it is about time that I left. What he means to say is, hurry on up with your dissertation and stop being so lazy. But, to some extent, I am thoroughly enjoying my relaxing time, having new adventures, dreaming big dreams, and making new connections. On the other hand, however, I do feel the pressure of producing the seminal academic work of my career. I try not to allow the stress of writing to overwhelm me, but, as it turns out, it has instead under-whelmed me, which is to say that I have not accomplished too much in regards to my thesis just yet.
But I have done a great many other things, which I will attempt to chronicle in some sort of chronological or otherwise organized manner.
Let us start with January. I arrived in Durban late night on Wednesday, January 20th, when Mike fetched me, and after a detour to visit his mom and dad, he took he home, which at that time was still the house on Bulwer Road.
My first few weeks back were about reconnecting with friends and getting myself settled for the year ahead. Of course, there were bumps along the way, like, for example, the break in by the crazy father that I wrote about earlier. But on the whole, it was a lovely beginning to my time back in South Africa.
In the beginning of February, Sarah came to visit. (Not Sarah my old roommate, but Sarah from Frisbee.) She also arrived back in South Africa in late January, but quickly sped off to Botswana with her mom for an adventure. When her mom left for the States, Sarah came to Durban, to celebrate her 19th birthday with friends.
We had a blast of a time. Mike and I arranged a variety of surprise outings and in-ings, including lunches, dinners, braais, a lazy afternoon in a stranger’s backyard watching local bands, and, of course, SUPERBOWL SUNDAY! It is funny how important “American” things become when one lives outside of America.
Because of the time difference, the Superbowl game would be showing live in South Africa at 1am. Sarah and I decided that it would be best to record the game and watch it with friends on the following night. However, the boys rallied and chose to watch the game live, from 1am until 5am on Sunday, I mean Monday, morning. Okay, we can do that. (The thing was, Sarah and I did not have work the next day, while all the boys did…)
So Sarah and I scoured Durban for tortilla chips, sour cream, and salsa (however we could not find refried beans, fail!), and concocted the most amazing nachos this side of the Atlantic. We watched the game, but sadly not the commercials. Unfortunately, the brilliant Superbowl commercials are only aired on that side of the Atlantic, so we on this side suffered though advert after advert for ESPN. It took quite a bit of the fun out of the Superbowl, but our South African friends trying to understand the game put all the fun back in, plus some.
On Tuesday, Sarah left us and traveled back to Cape Town. Keith (a good friend of our good friends) picked her up at the airport and took her to her new apartment in Bo-Kaap (the part of Cape Town with the brightly colored houses). On Wednesday night, Sarah’s house was broken into, all of her stuff was stolen, and she was stabbed.
I suppose that sounds super hectic and scary, and it totally was.
Sarah woke up at, say, 4am, with a man standing over her bed saying, “Keep quiet.” Sarah screamed and started hitting the guy. As he was running away with her stuff (computer, camera, wallet, Frisbee boots, etc), he flips out a knife and swipes her across her chest. She was cut from her shoulder down to the center of her chest, at the bra line. The cut was not too deep, but she has a scar, and it will probably never go away.
I found out about all of this on Thursday. On Saturday, I arrived in Cape Town.
I spent three nights with Sarah. I knew that it was not necessary for me to go to Cape Town, but I knew that if something so hectic happened to me on my second night in a new city, I would want a friend to come (even though I would tell him/her not to come). So I went.
We actually had a lovely time. We spent good time with the infamous Keith (who was a total rock star and Sarah’s first point of contact after the event), had Valentine’s Day dinner at the beach, and played Frisbee.
I left Cape Town knowing what I already knew: that Sarah was strong and would be okay. But I did go with her to look at a new apartment, which she later moved into, so that made me feel helpful!
When I returned to Durban, the search continued for my own new apartment. I had lived at the house on Bulwer for over a year (longer than I have ever lived in any other apartment) and it was time for a shift in space and in energy. I saw a variety of apartments in a variety of locations and faced the difficult task of deciding what I wanted. Did I want to live alone? With a group of people? With one other person? Far away from varsity? Near campus?
I was completely undecided, until I met Jo. Jo is a good friend of my good friend, Grant, who played Frisbee with us at 3:30pm on Sundays. Grant tipped me off that Jo was looking for a roommate, so I went to meet her and see her apartment.
I met Jo on a Friday evening. On Wednesday, I picked up keys and started moving in.
It is a two bedroom apartment, with a shower!!!, a dining room (with a table with 6 chairs, heaven!), a lovely lounge, spacious kitchen, big veranda, huge garden, pool, and a garage for me. And rent is all-inclusive and R300 less than what I was paying before. Yes please! And to top it all off, Joanna is absolutely amazing, a lovely person and a great roommate. And she is super hardcore, as I write this, Jo has just completed the ultimate mountain hiking trail in South Africa: the Grand Traverse, a 14 day hike from one end of the Drakensberg mountain chain to the other. Um, wow!
February finished off with an Ultimate Frisbee tournament in the Free State, in a little town, or little location, called Swinburne. About 30 players from Johannesburg, Pietermartizburg, and Durban came together to play two days of a hat tournament. As such, the four Durban okes were split and mixed up with players from other locations. My team was the “Mixed Nuts” and we won all of our first day’s games. On the Sunday, Gauteng took on KwaZulu-Natal and lost. KZN victory! That was very reassuring and lovely (because Gauteng is pretty darn good if you ask me!).
I absolutely loved the Swinburne tournament. I made so many new Frisbee friends, won yet another spirit/loudest person award, and had an absolute ultimate blast.
And of course, the end of February means the beginning of March, which means my birthday!
On my birthday proper, I had dinner with a group of friends at a sushi restaurant (vegetarian sushi is life), and the following weekend, I hosted a birthday/housewarming party at my new apartment. We all had a lovely time (some more lovely than others) and the party went on until the wee hours of the morning, when I got tired and made everyone leave.
Before I fully submerge in March, let me first mention a project that I was semi-involved with throughout Feb and into March: The Street Child World Cup. In this first ever event, street children (literally, children who live and sleep on the streets) were flown to Durban from 8 countries, including Brazil, Nicaragua, the UK, India, to play soccer and engage in cultural activities for two weeks. Abi and Fran (the two girls who I bonded with last year at the Grahamstown National Arts Festival) had been asked by Umthombo (one of the street child organizations in Durban, and the host of the Street Child Soccer World Cup) to create a performance with Durban’s street children to be performed for the visiting nations during the event. And Abi and Fran, being lovely and generous people, asked me to help out. The goal was to devise an original piece of theatre around issues of home and space that would be performed throughout the streets of Durban, as a promenade performance piece. The reality, however, was far from the ideal, and although Abi and Fran were intricately involved in the Street Child Soccer World Cup, the performance never quite materialized, due to a variety of factors. I participated in a few of the beginning workshops, where we created puppets with the children, and then joined in on some of the events when the other teams from the other nations were in town. It was a beautiful and exciting experience. It made me think a lot about the potential of sport to bring people together.
Speaking of sport bringing people together! In preparation for our National Tournament in May, the Prawn Bunnies (my Frisbee team) challenged the Long Donkeys (the Pietermaritzburg team) to a variety of friendly matches. This began what would become a real friendship between our two teams. We played each other, officially, bi-weekly, but often some of their players would come to our Sunday games in Hillcrest.
March was a month of a lot of Ultimate. We increased our schedule to train four times a week instead of two or three, and organized a committee to handle the day-to-day running of what had become quite a beast of a sports team. I signed on as the Development chair along with my teammate Jared. Together, we started dreaming of community service projects and places where we could introduce the game of Frisbee.
By April, Durban Ultimate was playing Frisbee with a group of street children at an organization called Street-Wise located in Pinetown, about 20 kilometers from Durban. (I will not be too detailed here about my work with Street-Wise, but I will point you, oh loyal reader, to my other blog, www.durbanultimate.blogspot.com, where I write extensive reports of our work with the kids. Soon though, this blog address will become www.durbanultimate.co.za, and the website will become much more extensive, so look for that change as well. And please please do read up about the adventures of Durban Ultimate!)
Jared and I hope that our work with Street-Wise will soon expand into other communities as well. We hope to get youth all over KwaZulu-Natal playing Ultimate, and use the sport to do community building and development work. As our adventures continue, they will be posted online at the Durban Ultimate website along with pictures and videos!
Easter marked the one-year anniversary of my adventures into the Transkei. So, naturally, I decided to take another epic trip. This year, I was determined to make it to Splashy Fen, the music festival that I could not attend last year because Manuel had gone ka-put.
I went to Splashy with one South African and four other Americans (although I considered myself more South African than American when placed in a group with other Americans). We arrived in one piece, believe it or not, but since it was April 1st, and April Fool’s Day, I decided to be awful and play what was perhaps the best April Fool’s joke of my life.
I called Cecil, my Rotary counselor, the man who put the down payment on Manuel for me, the man I called when I was stuck in the Transkei. “Hi Cecil, its Robin. You’ll never believe this, but I am on my way to Splashy Fen in Underberg, and everything was going fine. But now, Manuel broke down. The car won’t start. I don’t know where I am, and I don’t know what to do!” Oh, I had Cecil going! He panicked, stuttered, tried to think of solutions. I let him go for a minute or two before I stopped him and said, “Cecil? April Fool’s.” He was furious and delighted at the same time, frustrated while laughing. When I saw him the next Monday at Rotary, he hugged me and cursed me at the same time. It was the most brilliant joke I have ever played.
Splashy Fen itself was an adventure. On the Thursday night, I got a little too excited, ate too little and drank too much gin. Urgh. Gin. By 9pm, I had fallen flat on my face, peed on a car, drunk dialed friends in Cape Town and Taiwan, and hugged a bucket. And I continued to hug that bucket for the next four hours, the entirety of my insides finding their way into that metal chunder bucket. It was beyond awful.
The next morning, I was regaled with stories of my drunken stupor, which were, admittedly, quite funny in hindsight, but their humor was not fully appreciated as I was trying to force greasy eggs down my throat at breakfast.
Needless to say, I did not touch alcohol for the rest of the festival.
My hangover, however, lasted for most of the rest of the festival. I never quite reached full form again, but that did not stop me from having an absolutely delightful time. Making new friends, throwing a Frisbee, tubing down a river, listening to amazing and terrible bands, sloshing around in gumboots.
Although we arrived at Splashy Fen in one piece, we left in two. Mike’s car would not start on Sunday night when we were meant to be leaving. It was midnight, pitch dark, and muddy as we tried without success to push start and jump-start Michael’s car. Finally, it was decided that Mike would have to stay the night in Underberg with his cousin, while I drove the Americans back to Durban for their 6am flight to Cape Town.
Somehow, I did not fall asleep at the wheel, the Americans made their flight, and Mike’s car started easily the next morning.
The day after I returned from Splashy, I received news that a friend, an acquaintance, a friend’s ex-boyfriend, had drowned over the weekend. I suppose I did not know Siyanda that well, but we had spent time together, laughing, dancing, enjoying life together. And now he was gone. Andrea and I went to his memorial service on campus. There were hundreds of people in attendance, of all ages, races, and classes. It was a beautiful sight. Siyanda is missed.
April spiraled into three things, with one dominating the others: teaching, thesis-ing, and Frisbee. Take a guess which one took precedence?
Over the term, I have been teaching a total of five courses to undergraduates at UKZN. Well, by teaching, I mean tutoring, technically, but tutoring is teaching, really, so it is all the same thing. 1st year theory, 1st year playmaking, 2nd year South African theatre, 2nd year Theatre for Development (we go to the youth prison on Saturday!!), and 3rd year Realism. It is a lot, or so it sounds, but the hours are few, and the pay is barely there, which is rather unfortunate. I do enjoy most of my classes, although some are tedious.
Also tedious is my process with my thesis. I have not received confirmation from the organization that I want to work with that I can work with them, which is disheartening, and I am concerned that I will not meet my May 31st deadline for my research proposal. Perhaps more stressful is the fact that my supervisor basically changed the entire scope of my project two weeks ago. The change makes sense, I suppose, but I am having a hard time wrapping my head around the switch.
My thesis used to be something along the lines of: the performance of gender and sexuality by homosexual IsiZulu youth in Durban. My case study would be in the form of theatre workshops that I would lead with gay youth. The theory would mostly be in the realm of gender and queer studies.
Now, my thesis is something along the lines of: the application of Paulo Freire’s methodologies to theatre for development in South Africa, with gender and sexuality as the subject matter of the theatrical experiment. I still get to my workshops with the youth, but my paper is now a theatre paper, and the theory revolves around theatre.
This should be an easier paper for me to write. But, as you know, I’ve never been a fan of easy. I am trying to get my theory going for this new approach to my topic, trying to get inspired and motivated, but I am not getting much (read: any) feedback from my supervisor at present, so it is difficult for me to move forward.
Oh well. It will get done, eventually.
It is now May. I hope to have my proposal done by the end of May, so that I can breathe easily on my two-week trip across the country with Abi and Fran. We plan to drive from Durban, through the little Karoo, to Cape Town. I will leave the girls after two weeks and fly back to Durban for a World Cup game, before flying to Johannesburg for another World Cup game (USA vs. Algeria in Pretoria, oh yeah!). Then I will bus to Grahamstown for the National Arts Festival, and fly back to Durban on July 4th. It will be a big and exciting month! I am already anticipating the hugeness of that upcoming blog!
Before I close this entry off however, I must note that last weekend, I traveled to Cape Town for the South African Ultimate Frisbee Tournament. It was beyond incredible.
But I will leave you in suspense for the details and stories from that event. It is deserving of its own post, complete with photos and, hopefully, if I can find someone who has them, videos.
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