where the heat is hot

I wanted to begin writing yesterday, but I guess I wasn't yet inspired enough, and the heat was too hot, and the jet-lag persists.  Though I have started reading again.  I just finished a book and a short story, and I guess that that's what happens when one returns to a place where time is plentiful, where the hours in the day seem sufficient, and where one manages to accomplish many-an-errand within but one solitary hour.  I should not use the word "return" as I have not yet returned as such.  I am in a place I have never been before.  Yes, I have returned to Africa, the great continent, and yet I realize how unfamiliar this unknown place is.  It is not home.

I left Australia exactly a week ago.  And despite what you may think, I left with a heavy heart.  I arrived in Joburg 26 hours later, caught up with some Zim friends, ate some biltong, went grocery shopping for food and cleaning supplies for my return to Zimbabwe… the usual sort of thing that a first-world vegetarian from Zimbabwe does before returning home.  And so we piled the Landcruiser frustratingly high, full of our supplies and bits and pieces that we were transporting for
everyone and his brother who needed something or other transported from Joburg to Bulawayo… as one does.  And we got in the car on Sunday at lunch time and headed northwards.  My parents slept in Louis Trichardt that night before crossing the Beitbridge border into Zimbabwe.  Rudz came to pick me up and drove me one hour eastwards through the mountains to the small village where he lives, just outside of Thohoyandou in Venda, in the Limpopo Province, the
northernmost province, geographically closest to the border with Zimbabwe.

Rudz is a paediatrician at the Donald Fraser district hospital here. There are 11 doctors at this hospital, and positions for about 70. Needless to say, it's a busy place.  I did not see the landscape the first night as it was already dark when we drove back.  I did not sleep much that night either, despite my jet-lag induced exhaustion. The night sweat out the heat, and with it, the mosquitoes came. Initially I thought it a good idea to open the window of my bedroom and get some air.  I quickly learnt not.  But the mosquitoes beat me to it and I spent the night turning the light on and off, trying to spot my attackers, the ones making that godforsaken buzz right beside me ear, precisely when I wasn't looking.  I succeeded in killing about 6, all filled with the red evidence of having taking a rather juicy bite out of my flesh.  And so I spent all of Monday scratching.

Perhaps this was in preparation for Zimbabwe.  We went to the grocery store the next day and I bought one of those electrical mats that you plug in at night to ward of the mozi's, and I bought enough mats to last me a while in Zim.  Monday night, with the help of a fan and the mats, I slept like a baby.

What I remember of yesterday is driving around in the late afternoon before dark, when the worst of the day's heat had subsided.  We drove into the blue of the Soutpansberg Mountain Range to observe the tea plantations below, to view some waterfalls, to understand the landscape.  Venda is a series of rolling hills that look toward these mountains of blue.  It exists in a subtropical climate such that if you flick a mango pip out the window, you can be sure that a mango tree will appear there, borne out of the fertile red of the soil.  It is the African land of a thousand shades of green, and we are
surrounded by mangroves, and banana trees, and fields of corn.

The days here seem to blur one into the next, but what marks today, Wednesday, is that the heat has offered us some relief in an overcast day, with the odd bit of drizzle.  Rudz went to a meeting in Polokwane today, and I woke up early to join Dr Munyaradziwo Kwinda, (who recently won a prestigious medical award for his dedication to rural medicine), on a short journey he takes monthly to the clinics in some of the nearby villages.  We stopped to buy some boiled mealies on the
way, and some boiled peanuts, which we both ate quietly as we headed to the first village, Munyaradziwo's home village called Nguyuni.  As we ascended the mountain towards Nguyuni, 12km off the tar road, the mist surrounded us reducing visibility, until we were greeted at the entrance of the clinic by a toothless old lady wearing a traditional brightly-coloured Venda wraparound, whose silver bangles reached half way to her elbow, and whose breasts, beneath a yellow t-shirt, rested somewhere in the vicinity of her waist.  Unfortunately the people of the villages had not yet been informed of the doctor's visit, and so despite stopping at 3 clinics, he saw no more than a half a dozen patients.  Here too, the health system is far from perfect, but in comparison to what I've seen, it is astonishingly functional.  It is what we used to have in Zimbabwe a decade ago… and a seemingly slow decline has made me oblivious to what exactly our functional system
really looked like on the ground once upon a time.

Yes, there is poverty here too.  But never before have I realized just how relative the term "poverty" is.  The example that I always reflect upon is that of Zimbabwe over the past 10 or so years.  Here, not everyone has electricity, but people have food, and fertile land, and they have water too.  If they cannot get to the nearby market, they simply grow their food themselves.

Zimbabwe has a significantly higher literacy rate than South Africa. But this reality is a time bomb on the verge of explosion.  Every half a kilometer I travelled this morning with the Doctor, there was a school: schools packed with children in brightly polished school uniforms, present and learning.  Their teachers can afford to teach, unlike Zimbabwean teachers whose entire month's salary is sufficient for only one day of transport to school.  And so it's no longer worth their while anymore to bother rising in the morning to ensure the next generation can read and write.  Here children do not rise 2 hours before school begins each day to begin the long walk on an empty stomach.   Here, their school uniforms are not threadbare and make-do.

Every clinic we visited today had at least 3 nurses.  Government department mobile clinics could be seen driving up and down the main road, on their way to service the off-the-beaten-track villages.  A nurse showed me a labour room, and explained to me that when complications arise, they call the ambulance from the Donald Fraser Hospital.  The ambulance no doubt arrives promptly: no shortage of fuel.  And despite the shortage of doctors, the pregnant woman is seen to, she is likely to survive, her child is will be vaccinated, and is unlikely to contract mother-to-child-transmitted HIV, regardless of the mother's HIV status.

These are but a few examples, and I'm sure that the quality of life, and the extent to which the health system works varies somewhat across South Africa.  But I can only describe that which I am seeing.  And so yes, I have returned to Africa, but no, despite my geographical proximity, I am still far from having returned home.