Heading North

Good Morning from Thohoyandou!

I’m sorry I haven’t been able to update the blog very much so far! I must say though, it is refreshing not to be constantly connected over here.

Our day in Johannesburg was well spent. Truthfully, all I wanted to do was sleep, but in a heroic effort to beat the jetlag we decided to do some exploring of the city. We went to the Apartheid Museum, the entrance to which, fittingly and somewhat shockingly, looks like this:

Having been only 6 years old when apartheid ended, I knew next to nothing about it before this visit. I highly recommend it to anyone visiting the area… it provides a very poignant glimpse at the history of South Africa and the factors that continue to influence the social and cultural makeup of the country today.

The visit to the museum was, of course, a pretty sobering experience. Afterwards we decided to explore near our hotel and get a few beers, which were considerably less sobering.

I only meant to have one of these but got confused by the currency conversion and had seven instead.

The next morning we left Jo’berg to head north to Thohoyandou. The drive up took about 6 hours. Fortunately, the radio station we were listening to kept me up to date on everything happening back in the states, which is to say they spent about 2 hours talking about Miley Cyrus.

Arriving in Thohoyandou, we were greeted by our hosts Vhuli and Martin and their sons Kevin (14) and Feni (10). Vhuli is a project coordinator for the VHEMBE study that I am helping out with and Martin is a family practice physician at the Tshilidzini Hospital. They are incredibly nice people and have been amazingly generous in opening their home to Eli and me. We had brought them some gifts, including a box of chocolate chip cookies baked by the incomparable Julie Green. The picture of Feni really says it all.

That bowl literally had five cookies in it to start

There’s a lot more to tell and hopefully now that I have a little more regular internet access during my days I’ll be able to update more frequently. But I’ll leave you with a final video of yours truly, trying my first ever worm… a staple of afternoon snacking here.