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.