Bit of a weird week

So, this was my second week at work. It was a bit unusual. But before I get into that -- after I wrote my last post, I finally pulled out my camera and took pictures of the house. Granted, now that Becs (the girls who owns the house) has moved out, a lot of the furniture is gone/rearranged, but the essentials are the same.

This is part of the living area. The kitchen is off to the left, as well as one of the bedrooms.

The kitchen and one of the doors to the outdoor areas.

Front door and main living room area.

My room!

Our piece of crap car, which I have grown quite fond of. 

So, that's our living space. There are three other bedrooms, including a rather large one upstairs with its own bathroom.

Last weekend was a flurry of activity. Sandeep arrived on Saturday, and a French guy that Becs and Becki had met on their trip to Mozambique in early May also came in to get his visa renewed at the Mozambican embassy. Johan, the former manager of the Rebeccas' local bar and their good friend, is still staying at the house, and he was still around, so we had a REALLY full house. Unbeknownst to me, Saturday night we ended up sort of having a party. With so many people in the house, that really just meant that two other people showed up and Becki made dinner and we all drank a fair bit of wine. We ended up playing a board game called 30 Seconds, which is a bit like the American game Taboo -- you're in teams, and you pull a card with a list of places or things or people on it, and you have to describe what they are and have your teammates guess what the things are, but you can't use any of the words in the name of the thing itself. The twist with 30 Seconds is that about half of the things are very South African, so some of us in the group were at a unique disadvantage. I knew some of the South African stuff, but there were rugby players and stuff on there who I just had no idea. But it was really fun!

On Sunday, there was a showing of the house, so we all had to clear out for the afternoon. Becs was going out of town to Nelspruit, where she's moving for her PhD research, so the rest of us (Becki, the French guy [Flo], Sandeep and I) separately headed to Melville to entertain ourselves. Melville is a nearby suburb that has a high concentration of bars and restaurants and is one of the hip "going-out" places. We actually got out of the house quite late, so Sandeep and I went and got lunch on 7th Street at like, 2pm at a place that promised Portuguese food and failed miserably to deliver. In doing so, I had to parallel park for the very first time in my life, which required a LOT of help from Sandeep, but I did it!

Sandeep knows a bunch of people from his undergrad who are in Joburg for one reason or another, and one of them was going to be on 7th Street later, so we arranged to meet up with him. We ended up at a place called the Melville Cafe with Sandeep's friend, Jacob, and someone Jacob met at his backpacker's named Jesse. We had just eaten, but Jacob and Jesse got food and everyone got drinks (although I got tea, because I was driving and I am responsible), and we sat around chatting for a few hours. There were two guys doing professional karaoke in the cafe -- I'm not sure karaoke is the right term, but they were covering well-known songs, and they were doing a really good job. After a while, everyone inside the cafe got up and started dancing, which was adorable. We were sitting at a table outside (and the only white people at the cafe, I think?), and didn't join, although the waitress encouraged us to do so. Maybe next time! Jacob and Jesse, who are staying in Melville, walked us up and down 7th Street a bit and pointed out the especially nice places to go, and then I gave them a ride back to their hostel and we went home.

Monday was work. Nothing fancy. I continued to work on the disability rights stuff. I didn't realize when I first got involved that it was going to be a summer-long commitment, which is I think what it's turning into. I don't especially mind, but I don't know anything about it and it's not the program I most want to focus on. But it's interesting to be in at the round floor of setting up a new program for the NGO and seeing what kind of work that involves. I found out later in the week that our disability rights organization partner in Lesotho, who we were relying on to liaise with the potential plaintiff in our first case, is trying to get us to pay their staff costs, which we can't do. There's some confusing over where litigation fits in their budget -- they're getting a grant that kicks in next year to cover litigation, but they're resisting doing any networking/setting up partnerships with us now.

Tuesday was the day of the big march to the art gallery near our office. The road closures didn't cause any problems getting to the office, and the turnout at the march was significantly smaller than what the ANC was claiming it would be. Media was reporting it would be a march of 15,000 people, and afterwards reported that about 2,000 people showed up. I didn't hear it at all from the office, so I wonder if it was even that big. The gallery and the ANC ended up compromising -- the gallery took down the painting, and the ANC dropped the lawsuit. I guess that's a compromise, although it mostly sounds like an ANC victory to me. There was a German buyer of the painting who still wanted it, even though it had been defaced, so it's been sent to him.

The week really went by without anything of note happening. The HIV program last year put out a litigation manual for attorneys in the region dealing with HIV discrimination cases, and they're working on a new one dealing with mandatory HIV testing cases. I spent a good chunk of time going through the first draft of that manual and making substantive comments, which I sent off to the head of the program. When I edit, I tend to be a little bit harsh, so I had to go back and make sure that the comments I made sounded duly deferential for an intern -- but confident enough for a competent second-year law student. It's an interesting sort of balance I need to strike, and very different from being an intern when I was in college; I feel like I'm old enough and educated enough at this point that my insights are actually worth something (especially in the field of HIV, where I do think I'm on my way to becoming an expert), but obviously I'm not in a position of authority or even equality, so I have to figure out what tone to use when I'm interacting with the attorneys here. I guess I got it right, because the feedback I got from the program attorney was really positive. She's going to go through the manual in more detail next week and said she might ask me to do additional research, etc., which I would absolutely love.

On Friday, I literally ran out of work to do. Alan, the intern coordinator and one of the attorneys on the international criminal justice program, had recently gotten back to the country from Italy, but he hadn't had time yet to sit down with Sandeep and myself to really put us to work. I decided to email him anyway to see if he could give me anything to do, and I struck gold. He sent me documents to acquaint myself with about the case of a foreign national who has been granted asylum in South Africa, despite the fact that he is heavily implicated in war crimes and crimes against humanity elsewhere in Africa. In fact, there are indictments and extradition requests from France and Spain related to the alleged crimes.

There's something called the "exclusion clause" in pretty much every Refugees Act ever that says that even if someone qualifies for refugee status otherwise (which this guy does, because he's made himself very unpopular in his home country and there was even an assassination attempt against him in South Africa that possibly was ordered by his home government), you aren't allowed to grant asylum to anyone who you have "reason to believe" has committed war crimes or crimes against humanity. On the other hand, you also aren't legally allowed to deport a person back to a country where there's a substantial likelihood they will face torture or a threat to their lives -- so simply revoking his refugee status and deporting him back to his home country isn't really an option (since his own government hates him now, and possibly has already tried to assassinated him).

So, the options South Africa government has are basically to 1) prosecution him themselves (which obviously they don't want to do); or 2) hand him over to either France or Spain and let them prosecute him. All the lawsuit is about, though, is forcing the government to rescind his refugee status, which it has refused to do. So I spent the afternoon reading the original brief and founding affidavit from the NGOs, and then the government's replying affidavit, and the responding affidavit to that. The nerve of the South African government is just unbelievable, and the sauciness in the affidavits going back and forth is sometimes downright hysterical. In part of their paragraph-by-paragraph response where they were either admitting or denying allegations, the government's replying affidavit literally said: "To the extent that the contents hereof correctly reflect the law, I admit them. To the extent that they do not, I deny them." OH OKAY, THAT CLEARS THINGS RIGHT UP. The NGO's response to that sentence was something along the lines of, "This paragraph is nonsensical and embarrassing, and I cannot respond to it." Zing.


So, that was the work week. Friday night was low-key because Becs was packing up and preparing to move to Nelspruit. Saturday morning, Becs left (although I managed to sleep through it -- oops?), and when I woke up, all the furniture was different and there was an empty bedroom upstairs. Johan had apparently also moved out very quietly at some point, so the house is down to just Sandeep, Becki and myself. Sandeep and I went to get gas for the car for the first time, and then hung around until one of his friends from Duke came to pick us up to go see an independent movie as this totally hipster theater called the Bioscope. We also picked up Jacob, another Duke student who I met last weekend. I find myself inexplicably surrounded by Duke students -- it's an invasion!


The movie, called Otelo Burning, took place in the late 1980s in a Durban township. It mostly focused on young black kids learning how to surf as a way of experiencing freedom and escaping township life, but it also had this back story of the ANC vs. Inkatha rivalry in the townships that the apartheid government fueled. The main character's younger (12-year-old) brother ends up getting falsely accused of being a government informer and necklaced, which sends the protagonist over the edge. (Necklacing was this really brutal thing ANC supporters did to suspected government collaborators, where they fill a car tire with gasoline, put it around the victim's neck, and set it on fire.) When Otelo finds out the real informer was one of his surfing buddies, and that he was the one who pointed the ANC towards his brother, he goes and kills the real informer. It was pretty heavy, but also beautifully made -- and always nice to see South African films.


After the movie, we went to an Ethiopian restaurant two doors down. Then we headed back to Melville (good old 7th Street) and went to a bar called Six, which has an absolutely massive and overwhelming menu of cocktails. Jacob has somehow become bosom friends with a group of theater students at Wits (the big university in Joburg), and a group of them showed up at the bar as well. Jacob ended up leaving to meet some other people, but we stuck with the Wits students for the rest of the night. We migrated after a while to another bar on 7th Street called Ratz, which was overwhelmingly a "white" venue (almost everyone at Six had been black). Melville is, or at least was, one of Joburg's happening gay areas, so while neither bar is technically a gay bar, the crowds were heavily gay-influenced. At least, that's what I was told. It was kind of hard to tell.


Anyway, I know that's a huge update, but I guess that's what I get for not writing for a week. I will try to write more often so that I don't end up with these massive entries!