Cradle of Humankind

Okay, I am late with this post, but I had such an insanely busy week at work last week that hopefully I can be forgiven if I ask nicely. The report that I posted about in the last entry turned out to be a genuine nightmare. It was in worse shape than I thought was even possible, and I spent pretty much every waking hour (both at work and at home) trying to punch and coax and finagle it into some semblance of a respectable report that would be useful to practitioners in the region. For the first time since I started work here, the days flew by -- I felt like I sat down, started to get into the groove, and then it was 5pm. If it had been up to me, I would have stayed late at the office, but Melissa and Sandeep didn't have any reason to stay, so obviously they wanted to go home at the regular time. So I got into the habit of emailing the report to myself with a note of what I was in the middle of doing, and then picking up right where I left off on my laptop at home for another few hours.

I didn't get everything done that I wanted to, which was really a shame because I felt like it was an opportunity for me to take a pretty crappy report and really mold it into a polished product. That was ambitious for one week, and I ended up sending a marked-up copy with all sorts of notes of "things I wish I had time to do, but didn't, but here are my thoughts so you know I at least didn't think this was acceptable." Priti, the deputy director of the organization and the program lawyer for the HIV/AIDS program, seemed fairly happy with what I sent her when I saw her at the staff meeting this morning. I think her words were, "What you gave me was awesome." And then she asked me to do the extra research I had noted needed to be done, but didn't have time to do last week... so in the end, I get a second chance to make some of the changes I wanted to make anyway. All's well that ends well.

Anyway, all of that is just to explain why I didn't write up my trip to the Cradle of Humankind, which I did last weekend, before now.

The Cradle of Humankind is a World Heritage Site about an hour northwest of Johannesburg. It's the site of some of the oldest archaeological discoveries of hominid fossils (some dating back 3.5 million years), as well as a lot of them. Sterkfontein Caves alone have produced more than 1/3 of all early hominid fossils ever discovered, including "Mrs. Ples," the most complete skull ever found of the 2.3-million-year-old Australopithecus africanus. The archaeologist who found the skull was convinced it was a woman's, because it was small, and as everyone knew in 1947, women have small brains. He declared that Mrs. Ples was his one true love and everything. As it turns out, further excavations uncovered a skeleton nearby, and upon examination it was determined that Mrs. Ples was actually an adolescent male. Oops. No one wants to change his/her name now, so she stays Mrs. Ples. They also discovered "Little Foot" at the Cradle of Humankind, which is a near-complete skeleton between 2.5 and 3.3 million years old. They think he might be a completely new Austrolapithecus species (or genus? I can't ever remember), but they're still working on getting the skeleton completely free from the Sterkfontein Caves.

The site where Little Foot lives.

So, we went into the Sterkfontein Caves. It was cool, although it was really just a cave. I got to touch a fossil, which was stuck in one of the rocks... otherwise, it was kind of just a cave. There were some fun parts where the passage got narrow and we had to crab-walk for a while, and there's an underground cave that no one knows how deep it goes.... apparently three students from Wits (the big university in Johannesburg) went in a few decades ago to try to measure how deep the lake is, and one of them got lost and ended up dying. The guide told it like a bad horror story ("a week later, they found his body, and a message was written in the sand... it said, "I love you, Mom" -- I mean, really?), but apparently it's true.

After we came out of the cave, we ended up in a little amphitheater type place, where we got a final talk from our tour guide. There was a sculpture of the archaeologist who discovered Mrs. Ples with the skull, and the guide told us that we could choose to rub either the guy's nose (for good luck) or his hand (for wisdom). The guide told us we could only rub one, because rubbing both would be greedy.

Only choose ONE!

 I chose luck. I figured that if you have good enough luck, you end up wise as well. Or something? Anyway, here's our whole road trip crew in the amphitheater:

From the back left: Kyle (Canadian law student, working at an NGO), Nomonde (South African law graduate, working at an NGO), Sandeep (housemate, fellow intern), Kat (American MPH student), Kyle (American law student, working at an NGO). From front left: Brittany (American MPH student), Jesse (American Masters student), Melissa (housemate, fellow intern) and me. We're a heavily legal/ex-pat crowd.

We wandered around the cave exit for a while. The scenery was beautiful, and it was so nice to be out of the city and breathing clean air for a change.

Nomonde and me

No smog! No buildings!

 Anyway, the Sterkfontein Caves aren't only one part of the Cradle of Humankind. The other part is Maropeng, which means "returning to the place of origin" in Setswana (one of the 11 official languages of South Africa).  Maropeng is the official visitor's center of the Cradle of Humankind, and it has a restaurant and a science/natural history museum, as well as an underground boat ride and a whole bunch of other kind of random stuff. So after we had had enough of the caves, we headed over to Maropeng.

Welcome to Maropeng.

We ate lunch at the Tumlus Restaurant. [Vocabulary lesson: tumulus -- an artificial hillock or mound (as over a grave); especially: an ancient grave.] I didn't know what "tumulus" meant when we were there, but now it seems a little creepy to have eaten in a restaurant named after an artificial grave. Still, the name is appropriate, if a little morbid.

After we ate, we went to find the infamous boat ride. We walked through this sort of cheesy exhibit about the "four elements," and then we got into this round boat that went through.... well, the four elements. I don't really know how else to explain it. First it was all icy, and then there was water, and then everything kind of melted into lava, and then ... I don't know, what's the other element? Air? I forget what they did for air. It was a little underwhelming, but we promptly forgot all about it, because as soon as you get off the boat, you step into this vortex thing -- it's just a hallway, really, but there's some weird thing happening that makes it feel like everything is spinning, and the exit at the other end spins around until it's sideways, and it is the coolest thing I've ever experienced. We were all too flipped out to take any pictures, but this is from the website:

That girl looks a lot calmer than we did -- we were all screaming and falling over, and then stumbling out, catching our breath, and running back in to do it again. I have no idea what it had to do with the origins of mankind, but it was fun!

The majority of Maropeng is sort of a science/hands-on museum about the development of humankind over time, what makes us special, and how we're all connected and we're all African, etc., etc. It was a little over the top for me. I kind of felt like the museum was trying really hard to sell me something I already believe in.

In any case, after we left the exhibit, we found ourselves outside again. We looked around at the sun setting and took another group photo, because that's what you do.

And we found a playground! It was the best playground ever. You can see it in the lower right-hand corner of the picture above. Sandeep and Nomonde went back to go on the boat ride again, and we played on the swing set and climbed on things. And then we decided to play "Snakes and Vines," which was basically life-size Chutes and Ladders. I had never played before, but basically you're trying to move from the lower left-hand square of a grid (number 1) to the upper left-hand square of the grid (number 64), and sometimes when you move onto a square, there's a ladder/vine which you can "climb" up the board.... but sometimes there's a chute/snake, which you slide back down back towards the start. So, all 9 of us decided to play. Well, 8 of us were on the board, and Jesse was the "game master" who spun on all our turns and told us how many spots to move forward.

I lost. Badly. But it was fun.

After Snakes and Vines, we all packed up and went back to Joburg.

So, other things have happened in the last week, but nothing all that interesting. Melissa and I went to the Market Theatre on Saturday night to see a show called !Aia - From Cave to Sky, which was a dance/drama sort of interpretive three-man piece about the experience of the San people (the "bushmen" -- the indigenous people of South Africa, even before the Bantu pastoralists moved into the area). A lot of it was completely over my head, but it was a cultural experience to be sure, and the two main performers were both incredibly talented.

It has gotten absolutely frigid this weekend. Miserably, horribly cold. It actually snowed in lots of places over the weekend, and some of the highways were shut down for a few days. A group of us are going into the Drakensberg Mountains this coming weekend, where it is going to be cold (people go snow hiking). We're taking a day trip into Lesotho, which is an independent country but is completely surrounded by South Africa on all sides. Then we'll do some hiking on Sunday... and everyone else is going to abseil, although I'm still deciding. Then the following weekend, I'm flying up to Dar es Salaam, the capital city of Tanzania, to see a friend of mine who I interned with in New York in 2009. I'm taking a day off from work, but even so, I'll only be there for 3 days. Still, I'm we'll be able to go to Zanzibar for one of the days. It's warm and beachy in Tanzania, so that will be a really nice change, weather-wise! I can't wait....!

Ask (or blog) and you shall receive

Or so they say. Before I explain what that means, I have to share an email that just got sent around my office. I had just snagged the last English breakfast teabag in the kitchen (a Tupperware full of teabags magically appears each Monday, and is empty by Friday), and was feeling rather smug about it. Of course, I then promptly spilled that tea all over myself, in a fit of tea-hubris-induced karma. Ah, well.

Back at my computer, there was an email that had gone around on the news listserv from Pambazuka, a Pan-African news website, titled The Dead Horse Theory. I thought I would preserve it here, because it's hysterical.

The unfailing productivity study for governments.

The tribal wisdom of the Plains Indians, passed on from generation to generation, says that: "When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount."

However, in government more advanced strategies are often employed, such as:

1. Buying a stronger whip.

2. Changing riders.

3. Appointing a committee to study the horse.  

4. Arranging to visit other countries to see how other cultures ride dead horses.

5. Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included.

6. Reclassifying the dead horse as living-impaired.

7. Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse.

8. Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed.

9. Providing additional funding and/or training to increase the dead horse's performance.

10. Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse's performance.

11. Declaring that as the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overhead and therefore contributes substantially more to the bottom line of the economy than do some other horses.

12. Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses.

And, of course...

13. Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.

South Africa's government operates unfailingly on the theory of the dead horse.

Anyway, I think maybe someone from the NGO is secretly reading my blog. Not really, but as soon as I posted my last entry that I was disappointed about not having work from the HIV program, I got work from the HIV program. I got called in yesterday by the lead program lawyer, who basically said that the draft of their second litigation manual on HIV testing (researched and written by a consultant) is a complete mess, and she gave me carte blanche to do everything in my power to fix it. Rearranging sections, doing extra research, rewriting chapters -- anything. I had read through the report draft once (I think I mentioned it before -- about trying hard to be polite in my suggestions for changes), and she had said she would ask me to help in the future. But that was weeks ago, and I hadn't heard anything, so I thought she had forgotten or changed her mind. I was pleased as punch to get the assignment, and to be given free reign over the manual.

I don't know why NGOs insist on hiring consultants. Every time I encounter anything done by a consultant, the NGO is desperately unhappy with the end result. I guess it could be selection bias, since they wouldn't need an intern's help on high-quality work produced by a consultant, but it seems to be a pattern.

Note to self on possible career avenues: NGO report-writing consultant, as there seems to be a dearth of talent in the field.

An unexpected specialization

I guess I haven't written about work in a while. That's partially because work was a bit slow for a while, but it's picked up lately, so I figure maybe it's time to write about it.

As I think I've mentioned, my NGO has a number of discrete programs that focus on particular human rights issues. For example, there is an international criminal justice program, an HIV/AIDS program, a pretrial detention program, an LGBT and sex workers program (I don't know how/why those two groups got stuck together), etc. I think all of the interns expected when we applied that we would be located within in specific program for our time here -- I was obviously hoping to be working specifically with the HIV program. However, when I got here I realized pretty quickly that it doesn't work like that. We all get work from all the lawyers, based on our availability and interests.

As it turns out, the HIV/AIDS program really doesn't seem very interested in giving any of the interns much substantive work to do. I think part of it might be that they have a young program lawyer attached to the program, so she gets all the grunt work that would normally fall to someone in my position. Still, I'm disappointed about that, and I wish I had known ahead of time.

Despite the fact that we are not officially assigned to projects, it has sort of shaken out that we each focus most of our time on one particular program. All three of us wanted to work on the ICJ program, and Sandeep and I each were assigned to work on a case for a while. Once Melissa arrived, she sort of supplanted us and has become the go-to ICJ intern. Sandeep has become the only intern who works on regional advocacy and freedom of the media, and I.... well, I've ended up spending a considerable amount of my time working on the disability rights program.

The program is brand new, and the area of law is drastically underdeveloped in Africa -- and internationally, really. There is an international convention, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, that came into effect in 2008. It's so new that there's almost no jurisprudence or interpretation of it yet; the Committee hasn't issued any General Comments, and it's only decided one case under the Optional Protocol (which gives individuals of signatory countries the right to bring complaints directly to the Committee for violations of the Convention). So there's really not a lot of law to work with.

The program lawyer I'm working with had the idea to create a litigation manual for lawyers on the continent -- in a lot of countries outside South Africa, public interest litigation is fairly unknown, and public interest litigation of disability rights is practically unheard of. So the idea was to write up a "how-to" guide that outlines the case law that does exist, as well as the international law under the relevant treaties, to give lawyers a place to start if/when they get a client in front of them facing issues related to discrimination on the basis of disability. I started with the right to education, which was fairly easy, and then moved on to the chapter on sexual and reproductive health -- which is much trickier. It involves issues of forced sterilization of women with disabilities in and outside of institutions, denial of sexual education and services to women with disabilities because of a belief that they either are or should be sexually inactive, all sorts of HIV-related issues, etc.

While I was still researching the second chapter, the program lawyer (Abeda) came to me and asked if I could have it finished by the next day, because she was meeting with the funder on Wednesday, and she was going to ask for $10,000 to publish the manual next year and needed to show the funder what we had. I was like, oh man, no pressure. That was the first night I took work home with me, because I was nowhere close to finishing. I worked like mad for 24 hours to get the chapter done, but I did, and off it went. Granted, when Abeda came back from the meeting, she was enraged because apparently they want the manual completely developed by this September. Abeda had been imagining it would be a yearlong process, but she's going to train some paralegals in Malawi in September, and that meeting has turned into a 20+ person training session on litigating disability rights and is going to involve people from five countries, and they want the manual ready for that.

So, no pressure.

RSA bureaucracy and USA politics

It's been a big, social week. I was planning a detailed entry about it, but today sort of blew everything else into irrelevance. So, a quick recap of the week until today:

On Monday night, we went out for sushi. Yeah, I don't know.

On Tuesday, a group of us went to Moyo, which is a famous restaurant in Johannesburg -- there are actually a number of them all around the country. We went to the one in Melrose Arch, which is a very fancy and wealthy shopping area of Johannesburg. Parking our junky car in the parking garage was sort of a riot... we keep seeing these really nice cars all over Johannesburg, and it felt a little bit like we had found their nest. I set the car alarm off as we were leaving the car, and everyone turned around and stared. I wanted to be like, "Look, if I were going to steal a car in here, it wouldn't be this one!" The food at Moyo was supremely average, which was disappointing. According to some of the people in our group who have been in Joburg for longer than Melissa, Sandeep and I, eating out in Johannesburg is often a disappointing experience. The restaurant itself was very cool though -- we had to go down two flights of stairs to get to our table, and there were giant boulders around, and the bottom floor was clearly trying to 'feel' like a Bedouin tent. We got our faces painted with Xhosa-style decorations, which was a little bit hokey but kind of cute, and it was a nice night -- food notwithstanding.

Being fierce with Jacob, my favorite of the Dukies.

On Wednesday at lunch, we went over to our sister office on the other side of the building to meet the interns at our funding organization. My NGO is its own organization, but we're funded by the Open Society Initiative of Southern Africa (OSISA) and considered part of that organization too, and they have their own fleet of interns. It felt silly not to meet them, especially since they're all young South Africans, and I'm always keen to meet young South Africans who are interested in social justice. I had set things in motion a few weeks ago, and after a few missteps, we finally managed to meet up. There were 5 of them, plus the 3 of us. We ordered food in from Nando's (yum), and it was a really fun hour. They all seem really lovely and nice, and I think we're going to try to get together again as a group.

So, that brings us to today. When I arrived in South Africa, I got a 90-day visitors' visa stamp in my passport. It's the default, it's free, and it requires no paperwork ahead of time. The last time I was here, it was really easy to do something called 'border-jumping' -- crossing an international border for a few days, and then coming back into South Africa to get another full 90 days. I was planning to do that, since I'm actually in South Africa for about 100 days. Apparently, though, South Africa has caught wise to border-jumping, and they no longer let you do it. So I'm in something of a bind: if you leave South Africa on an expired visa, they charge you a fine, and there might be problems if/when I come back again. So my housemate suggested that I go to the Office of Home Affairs and apply to extend my visitors' visa, which is apparently easy to do once, to get an additional 90 days. The only problem is that I cannot for the life of me figure out what I need to apply for the extension.

I decided to just brave it blind, and marched off to Home Affairs this morning. Yeah. When I get there, the first thing that happened was a guy tried to convince me it was okay to park on the street in a handicapped spot. I told him that no, I wasn't going to park there, and he tried to tell me that it only used to be for people who couldn't walk. Then asked me if I was going to Home Affairs and needed photos. It didn't occur to me until I had already opened m mouth to tell him 'no' that he meant passport photos (which I wasn't sure about), but too late. I asked him how to get into the designated parking area next to me, and he very obligingly gave me directions and sent me on my way. It's so weird -- the whole area was full of people who it felt like were setting me up for scams, but they also very helpfully handed me along to the next step of the process without asking me for money or anything when I said 'no thanks.'

Anyway, I parked and walked over to the Home Affairs building. It was a zoo. There were lines of people snaking out of the doors, and not one official employee in sight. I was the only white person around, and I sort of stood there looking lost for a minute. Another guy approached me and slyly pulled out passport photos and asked if I needed photos. I still didn't know if I did, so I told him that I needed to extend my visitors' visa and I didn't know. He told me that no, I don't need photos for that, and to stand in this line over here and wait for a ticket to get into the building. I was like -- oh, okay. I kind of wondered whether it was the right information, but there were three or four other guys just hanging around who confirmed the information, and they seemed to be experts (though definitely not government employees), so I just did as I was told. Again, it was a pleasant surprise: the guy trying to sell passport photos could easily have lied to me and said that yes, I need photos to extend my visa -- but he didn't. For all the terrible reputation South Africa has, South Africans are often such a revelation. I have never been in a situation here when I needed help or advice and couldn't get it with minimal effort on my part. (At least from non-government people.) Often all it takes is standing and looking like a deer in the headlights for a second or two, and before you know it, someone wants to help.

So I stood in line, and a grumpy guy eventually came and handed me a green ticket with a number on it. He screamed at the woman in front of me for being in the wrong line, so I was kind of terrified, but he was okay to me. She had a permit from 2010, and apparently the line I was in was only for people with permits or stamps from 2011 or 2012. How anyone could have known that, I have no idea. I then had to go and stand in another, different, longer line to actually enter the building. It moved pretty quickly though .We went through a metal detector, and then I had to stand in another line to get onto the elevator to get up to the 6th floor. At every opportunity, I told anyone I could that I didn't know if I had what I needed, and could anyone tell me whether I needed a photocopy of my passport or were there any forms, and everyone just kept shunting me forward, so I kept moving.

I got up to the 6th floor. There were information desks, and a door to the left that said "extend visitors' visas." Before I went through the door, I told the guy, "I don't know what I need to extend my visa." He just said to me, "Move inside." So I went inside and waited on a bench until I got called up to talk to someone, and I explained I had no idea what I needed, and he looked at me like I was nuts and told me to go back out to the information desks and ask. I'm positive that he could have just told me, but oh! The joys of third-world bureaucracy. That wasn't his job, you see. There's another desk for that.

So I went back out to the information desks, and I found a group of people sullenly waiting -- and no one behind the information desks giving any information. There was a government employee on the phone ordering pizza, though. Efficiency! I also saw signs saying things like, "We do not provide forms. Please Google the forms you need." Oh, excellent. Even better, they then announced that their system had gone offline, so could everyone please make themselves comfortable. About 10 minutes later, they said the system was still offline and they didn't know when or whether it would come back online. They didn't appear to be willing to speak to anyone while the system was offline. I had been gone from the office for 2 hours already at this point, so I just gave up and left.

So. I accomplished exactly nothing. An extremely typical and unsurprising trip to Home Affairs. I was naively optimistic that it would be easier than I had heard, but South Africa did not let me down. I don't know whether to go back on another day (I still don't know what I need), or pay someone to do it for me, or just leave the country and come back in and hope I can get an extra 7 days, which I've heard is possible and is kind of all I need. I'll have to strategize.

I got back to the office and very quickly distracted myself by finding the decision from 2006 of Jacob Zuma's rape trial. (Jacob Zuma is the President of South Africa). I'm a terribly productive intern.

Around 3:30pm, I started to get anxious about the Supreme Court's health care decision. So I logged on to a site that was live blogging the decision and followed it obsessively for the next hour and a half. All three of us (Melissa, Sandeep and I) were on the same site, and we all were completely shell-shocked when they announced that the individual mandate had been upheld as a tax. I was obviously incredibly relieved, but it was also a little bit hysterical. After all the hard work that the Democrats did to not call this a tax, which would have been so easy to defend and so easy to justify -- but politically untenable -- the only way the Supreme Court was willing, with a majority, to uphold it was as a tax. We all were just like, "Oh my God," and talking about how it was Roberts, not Kennedy, who saved it, and then Caroline had to shush us because Melody was on a conference call and couldn't hear the other people on the call.

At one point, about 10 minutes after the main decision was announced, the director of the NGO slipped out of her office and looked at us and asked, "Are you guys following the --?" and we all go, "YES," as we're hunched over our computer monitors, obsessively trying to follow and understand all the nuances of the decision before the opinion was released electronically.

Then there was, of course, CNN's "Dewey defeats Truman!" moment, where their staff clearly only read to "Supreme Court strikes down individual mandate on Commerce Clause grounds" and stopped reading, and posted the following stupendous blunder:

Wherein Tea Partiers rejoiced (assuming Tea Partiers read anything other than Fox News, whose staff was apparently so stunned it failed to update its headlines at all), and then were heartbroken when CNN was forced to correct itself a few minutes later because yes, in fact, Congress does have a Tax Power as well.

Anyway. Needless to say, we didn't do any work for the last hour of the day. We drove home on a giddy wave of victory, and now we're sitting in a coffee shop near our house that is warm and smells like incense and has rooibos chai tea and free wi-fi.

Despite my utter and complete failure at Home Affairs (which I will count as a cultural experience! I wanted to take pictures, but thought the government might be unhappy about that, so I didn't), I am going to count today as a success. And this week as a good week. Unless something catastrophic happens tomorrow. Knock wood!

On -- one other thing. A friend who I interned with when I was living in New York in 2009 is currently living in Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanzania, for 6 months as part of her MPH program. I have been trying to make it to Tanzania since 2007, but have failed so far. I decided that I was not going to fail again. It's expensive, but I bought a plane ticket to go up and see her the last weekend of July. Yay!

In closing, I can't help but share this:

 

High praise indeed

Just a quick note that I just met with the program lawyer for international criminal justice, after submitting a research memo yesterday that I had worked really hard on. He told me that it is one of the best memos he's ever gotten, everything he could have asked for, and is going to make the advocates 'very, very happy.'

:-D!!!!

I will post a real update soon about what I did this weekend, with pictures and everything.

Accomplishment: first week

I have made it through the first week of work! I don't even really know how to sum it all up, so I will do so in broad terms.

I started work on Tuesday. I got rather lost on the way to work (I got through most of the bad traffic, and then accidentally ended up on the freeway instead of turning onto the last road I needed to be on and ended up approximately back where I started), but still showed up close to on time because I had left super early. It took me about an hour to get there.... whereas now that I know where I'm going, it takes about 20 minutes. But I did make it, and I got to the office and met Ethel, the office manager. She took me around and introduced me to everyone who was there, and then called the IT call to set up my computer. I sit at the same sort of desk "complex" with two junior attorneys, one South African and one Zimbabwean -- and when the other two interns are there, we'll all be there too.

Anyway, the director, deputy director and intern coordinator were all out of town/the country, so two program attorneys had been assigned to be my "welcoming committee." I met with Nyasha first, who's an attorney on the HIV/AIDS program but mostly does gender and reproductive health work. I was exhausted and a bit overwhelmed from the driving experience, so when she asked me to tell her about myself, I think I babbled a little bit -- but she was really, really nice. She handed me off to Abeda, who's technically a consultant but does a lot of work for the organization and is working on starting up the disability rights program. We talked about that program a bit, and a potential case she was tracking down in Lesotho, and we set out some things for me to work on related to that.

Lloyd, another program officer, had said when I met him that he had work for me to do, but then he had left the office. So I started getting familiar with some of the disability rights materials (e.g. the UN Convention on Rights of Persons with Disabilities) and doing some research on the health care system in Lesotho to put the potential case into context. Basically there was a deaf woman who was turned away at a clinic because they didn't have a sign language interpreter, and when she came back with her own interpreter, the doctor gave her sensitive/confidential health news through the interpreter that the interpreter had no legal right to know. Problem.

I hadn't brought lunch, so I asked the two junior attorneys (Caroline and Melody) what I should do, and Melody offered to go with me to the Rosebank Mall to get food, since she had to go to the bank anyway. So we drove over there (it's really close), and I went into Woolworths and got a chicken and mushroom pie, mmmmm, and in the process realized that I had actually been there before. When I was in Joburg last August, I'm almost positive that I went out to dinner with some people in the same center.

Anyway, when I got back from lunch, Lloyd was back, so I went in and met him properly. He asked me to talk about myself again, and I think I did a much better job the second time around -- having recovered from the drive in and woken up a little bit. He's working on a case in Swaziland related to the Suppression of Terrorism Act, and he asked me to do some comparative research on whether the US, the UK and/or India had ever found their own antiterrorism legislation to violate fundamental rights like freedom of speech or association.

So, I spent most of the week working on those two things. I drafted a list of questions for an interview with the potential client in Lesotho, and we're working on a sort of "road map" of disability-related issues that we can distribute to regional disability rights groups to make it easy for them to identify potentially actionable issues. I've also spent a lot of time fruitlessly searching for courts in the US, UK or India that care about freedom of speech when it comes to terrorism. There isn't a ton out there (it turns out courts are fairly happy to trample on fundamental freedoms when it comes to national security -- who would have guessed??), but I've found a few things that I've almost finished writing up in a memo for Lloyd.

Getting to and from work has gotten really easy. I know the routes now, although I still keep the GPS on as a comfort thing. I'm even getting to be a bit of a Joburg-type driver -- hard to describe exactly what that means, but it involves being impatient with cars that are turning and going around them, even if it means not quite staying in your lane all the time. I still do manage to get stressed out when I'm going somewhere new, as I discovered this morning when I went to pick Sandeep up from the Gautrain station in Rosebank. But it's getting easier.

Politically, there are some interesting things happening here. There's an art gallery about half a block from my office that has been showing an exhibit called "Hail to the Thief II," which is a satirical collection of art about corruption and power in South Africa. One of the paintings, called "The Spear," depicts Jacob Zuma (the president of South Africa) in a Soviet-era style propaganda poster, which his genitals hanging out. Er, see right.

The ruling ANC party was... not happy about it, but then things got worse. On Tuesday, two South Africans snuck into the gallery and defaced the painting. The weird thing is, they didn't know each other or coordinate it, but they showed up and acted at almost exactly the same time. In any case, it's brought all this attention to the painting, and the ANC has brought a lawsuit to try to force the gallery to take the painting down, claiming it violates Zuma's right to dignity. The gallery and the artist are, of course, claiming freedom of speech. The court postponed the case this week, and the ANC got angry and called on its members to march to the gallery and protest outside it on Tuesday. So, that will make getting to/from working interesting, since roads will be closed. It's also a very interesting -- and, quite frankly, a very typical -- South African political moment. The gallery has temporarily closed the exhibit for now, but I guess we'll see what happens in the end.

So, that was my first week. Sandeep is here now, which will likely change things quite a lot. He's another of the American interns at my NGO, and he's also living in the house. Becs, the house owner, is moving out next weekend. Lots of changes afoot, just when I'm settling into a routine! Ah, well.

I still haven't taken any pictures. Every time my room gets organized, something happens and it gets messy again. And it's honestly so incredibly freezing at night that the last thing I want to do is organize my room and walk around the house taking pictures. I mostly just want to curl up in my bed and try (and fail) to stay warm. Ugh, the southern hemisphere.