inAfric

Big name here for a little place, informal settlements like this one dot the green countryside of KwaZulu-Natal state here in South Africa. Sounds quaint and driving through on our day trip to Giant’s Castle Nature Reserve this settlement IS beautiful and IS full of beautiful people, but you see what you wish. You may see happy children playful on a Saturday, posing for snaps and asking for “sweets”, or laundry flapping in the clean February air, but on a weekday you wouldn’t see men. Men need to travel for jobs, and often only return to the settlement on weekends to see the family. No-one has cars. Mini-busses jostle past cattle and goat herds over and around potholes so big they can swallow a car. Life is hard here amid the beauty and we just pass and snap and post and do what we do.

I think I’ll wrap up the Nigeria posts with this last picture by our media wonk, Micah Green of the Atlanta Statesman. He and all the team members played his roll to the fullest (is that even a word?)

See, I never did sports or military so all the team stuff I know about involves surgery on sleeping people. It’s pretty real, and the longer I’m away from it now in retirement, the more hindsight shows the depth of trust people place in us to do the right thing by them as they lay there with their jaws retracted open with a Dingman and a fragile Rae tube connecting them to life-giving oxygen so they can wake up looking not so bad and go about their lives with, perhaps, their heads held a little higher, hey? (that last colloquialism courtesy of my wildlife ranger her in SA who adds it as a modifier at the end of most sentences)

...which leads me to the now: http://makakatana.co.za

Yes, it’s just as complex and even weird as it sounds. In a sterile environment with proper equipment it’s hard to do, in a volunteer mission to Nigeria it takes on a “seat of your pants” feeling. Remember the first time you were belayed from above and made that impossible lunge for an overhead rock handhold and MADE it? Or for you skydivers, skateboarders, pilots, and scuba divers out there; that unmistakable feeling of having committed to an endeavor who’s outcome is far from certain. 

Our purpose in Nigeria was to operate on kids and adults who’s soft and hard palates had never fused leaving an oval opening through to the nasal pharynx, and who’s lips were parted in sometimes grotesque deformities. You could almost understand why many of these kids had been kept home, out of school and away from prying eyes and wagging tongues. 

I lay in the big bed, awake as a jet lagged tourist, hearing the sounds of early morning here in this city. There is the rooster crowing as in any village in the world, the honking horn of the cars on a mostly deserted street and behind it all the low hum of countless air conditioning units. I love those roosters, I’m fine with the inexplicable beeping drivers, but I NEED those air conditioning units. 

Mine’s off now as much for an experiment as for the quiet and I’m already fingering the m mysterious LG remote with it’s soft buttons and cryptic icons. One might think a traveling person might commit to memory the meaning of these internationally recognized signs as one has encountered them from Rome to Hong Kong over the years; but no, it’s a mystery every time. I digress.

I don’t know about you, but this week there have been a hell of a lot of tiny details that fleetingly make themselves known in my mind, only to burn out and turn to smoke before I have had the chance to act on them, or even writethem down.

Take packing; at a certain age one seems to need to pack medicines.   I feel the need to draw the line here at some point, do I really need pills to make me go and pills to make me stop going, pills to make me sleep and pills to make my bones strong, oh the tedium.