Hello from Kosi Bay

I have blackberry service all the way up here, about 17k from the Mozambique border. The 8 hour drive up here was absolutely thrilling. We went over the most beautiful mountains and lakes, it was absolutely breathtaking. One of the academic assistants, Sdu, drove us all the way up here. The N2 highway goes all the way up the coast, and that's what Erin and I took to get here. I was also able to add to my animal count since being here-- I'd previously seen some zebras and monkeys (they're like the African version of squirrels), but I've now seen wild boar (think Puma from the Lion King), ostriches, some African deer, and what looked like a wildebeast. There's an elephant reserve just down the road and Erin and I are planning to spend the R250 (that's about $35) to go on an elephant safari. Our accomodations are currently a backpackers lodge that is probably the coolest place I've ever stayed. The whole thing is made out of sticks and reeds, or at least appears to be so. We've got our own little stick hut, complete with thatched roof, porch, electricity, and mosquito net. There's a fully equipped kitchen for us to cook in and communal bath house with hot showers. The other communal areas consist of a living room that is seriously a tree fort and a bar, also made entirely out of sticks and reeds. There are pathways, like little stick boardwalks f, that lead you from one place to another. It's very rustic, but still has everything one could need. It's also very quiet, after being in the city for so long, it's amazing to just have the sound of the rain and the birds at night.
We're about 6k from the main town where the hospital is located. Erin and I have bikes, loaned to us by Zed, our academic director, that are probably the crappiest bikes I've ever seen. Not a big deal, it saves us walking the 6k every day, and we don't have to take a minibus, which are typically not the safest anyways. Plus, I now get to say that I'm living in a stick hut and riding my bike to work in Africa, and who wouldn't want to be able to make that claim? It's pretty cool.
Yesterday was our first experience of the hospital. It was originally a missionary hospital, taken over by the state in 1986. It's a public hospital, which here, means if you can't afford it, it's pretty much free. The hospital is very spread out, with different buildings for each wing and covered walkways connecting them all. The quality is definitely not state of the art, but they're making things work as best they can. Not the sanitary conditions you'd expect of US hospitals, but still much better than others around the world, I'm sure. We got to meet a lot of the doctors and nurses. Doctors are primarily white and nurses are all black. How's that for a power dynamic for you? In SA, doctors are required to spend their first year out of medical school doing 'community service' in a rural public hospital. It's good because otherwise these hospitals would never get staffed. But it's bad because these are mostly white doctors who are not invested in the community they're serving. The greatest of implications of this is that most of the doctors make no effort to learn to speak Zulu and their patients cannot speak English. So often nurses, who don't always speak too much English themselves, become the translators. It's just not a great system. From my two months of Zulu classes, I can speak lots more than the doctors, who have lived in this country their whole lives. I promise, that wherever I end up working, I'll learn the language of my patients. Having a doctor who can't communicate is kind of like having no doctor at all.
Plans for my project are looking up. I was able to speak with a nurse who says that she wants me to be able to do an audit of the mobile clinics. That is, just observe for three weeks and present my findings to the hospital so they can improve their services. I'm really happy about this as it means I'm not just using the hospital to learn for my own benefit, they'll be benefitting too. I start work on Monday!
That's all for now, happy halloween, even though halloween doesn't exist here. I think I'm okay with that, we might go see some elephants this weekend instead. It seems like a pretty good trade to me.