Weekend #1- The Drakensberg

I guess this post is a bit late (definitely a theme with this blog as a whole…) but here’s a bit about our first real weekend in South Africa.

We left early Friday morning to travel to Mnweni, a mountainous area in the Drakensberg region near the border of Lesotho. We stayed in rondavels, small circular hut type buildings, at the Mnweni cultural center. Agrippa, the owner of the center, took us to visit a nearby school, which we brought books and a bunch of soccer gear, including some sweet soccer cleats that hopefully will be well used at the school. Christy and Keith definitely helped bring most of the stuff, which deserves some acknowledgement here too.

After visiting the school, we went on the first of a couple hikes we had planned for the weekend. This was a shorter hike to some nearby cave paintings as well as a trip further up to the house of our guide, Caiphus. Most of these cave paintings were done by the Zulu to show what animals or other things they had seen in the nearby area. In a nearby area, Caiphus told us there is a drawing of an elephant, although he hasn’t ever seen one in the area. The most interesting one at this site was a half man, half-buck creature, which Caiphus said signified a spiritual leader. We then went to Caiphus’s house where we met his father (the house Caiphus lives in was built on land that was first owned by his great-great-grandfather), three of his five children, and his wife, who graciously provided us a great lunch. After visiting for a while we walked back down the hill, and most of our group continued on back to the Mnweni center for the night.

Amit and I stayed with Caiphus to spend the night at his house. When we said goodbye to the rest of the group, we went to find Caiphus’s cows to bring them back home for the night. This was a pretty cool experience, and one of my favorite parts of the trip. We ran into one of Caiphus’s  sons who was celebrating a victory over a nearby school at the sports competition earlier that day. It’s interesting how what was considered a “hike” for us today is what children like these walk to school every day (and on Saturdays as well, sometimes.) It definitely puts the idea of skipping class in a whole new context. Whenever a cow would start heading the wrong way, Caiphus would pick up a rock and throw it at the cow to get it moving back in the right direction. It was a fun time, and I’m definitely glad I decided to spend the night up the mountain.

At about 6 we went back down the hill to go to Caiphus’s traditional Zulu dance practice. There’s a Ph.D. student from Penn trying to record as many of the traditional Zulu dances and songs as he can, and Caiphus and his group have been practicing a lot to be ready for the recording day on July 1, which is also going to be a big gathering, festival-like day for everyone living nearby. When we were almost there we ran into someone who let us know that no one was showing up to the practice because it was too cold. We were a bit disappointed, but it was still an interesting experience. We went back and Caiphus’s wife again made us some fantastic food, maize meal with beans, gem squash, and chicken. We then helped lock up the family’s two horses, so they would not get stolen by the Lesotho people who sometimes cross the border and steal from the people in this area. We went to bed pretty soon after that, the earliest I’ve been to bed since I was a kid, maybe, but I was so tired I didn’t really mind. And it was already so dark, we weren’t missing out on anything still going on.

With no other lights in sight, the sky was absolutely magnificent. There were so many stars in the sky, more beautiful than any I’ve seen anywhere other than in middle of nowhere, upstate New York.

At about 6 in the morning we got up to head back down the hill to meet up with the rest of our group to get ready to go on the 8-hour hike planned for the day. This one was much more exciting to me because we got to really hike, and not just walk on the nearby roads. Some of the places we had to walk up were pretty treacherous, but there were only a couple cuts done as damage, and maybe a broken bone or two (just kidding, duke engage). About halfway through our hike we came to some more cave paintings, which I thought were cooler than the ones from the previous day.

One of the cave paintings was of many people surrounding a fire where they were calling on a snake-like god to help direct them. After the hike, one of the guides at the Mnweni center told me that when this ritual was performed, the people would then wait for one of the people to get a nosebleed, which would be a sign that the spirit had entered them and given them the direction that they should go to hunt. This was particularly interesting to me because Christy had gotten a nosebleed just after we left those cave paintings. Huh.

Although we did a lot of hiking, I thought this was a pretty relaxing weekend overall (maybe just because I love hiking.) It was also a good weekend to help get a better context about the country of South Africa as a whole. Where we are the majority of our time is a fairly urban area, which, other than a much greater difficulty of getting a Wi-Fi connection, doesn’t feel too different from many other cities even back in the States. This weekend we got to see that not all of South Africa is like this, and there are incredibly rural areas such as Mnweni that are only a few short hours away from these big cities. As fun as I thought the weekend was, I was definitely ready to get back to my worksite, the Isiaiah 54 Children’s Home, which I’ll write about in a post soon.