Weekend trip 2/2: Drakensberg

The post on Lesotho took ages, and I put off writing the second half in the hopes that Kyle and Jesse would share their photos from the trip, and I would have better pictures to put in this post (and edit in the last post). However, that appears to have been a vain hope, and I've put off finishing the trip for long enough. I can always come back and add more interesting photos later.

In the morning, Melissa had arranged for the rest of the group (Kyle, Keith, Jesse and herself) to go abseiling. Abseiling is what South Africans call repelling. I had said from the beginning that I was not going to participate, but Sunday dawned with bright and crazy, apparently, because I announced I wanted to do it too! We ate breakfast at the hostel, Inkosana, and then drove out to a field in front of a helicopter flight school. There was absolutely no one around, so we called the abseiling company, and they assured us that we were in the right place and sent the guide to find us. The spot was right around the corner from where we had parked, and it was a quick 25m hike to the spot. As soon as I got up there, I was like, "yeah, okay, never mind. I'm not doing this."

I deemed myself the official photographer instead, and I think I was much happier that way than if I had tried to push myself. I really thought at first that the first step was just to jump backwards off that sharp ledge, but it wasn't like that.... but still, I would not have done well. The theme of the entire second day of this trip sort of ended up being "Katie learning how to recognize and acknowledge her limitations like a self-aware adult." Oi.

So, the others all went abseiling. Twice. Keith went three times. I took pictures and enjoyed the scenery of the Champagne Valley in the Central Drakensberg.

Kyle abseiling.

After everyone finished abseiling, we drove to the entry to the actual park of the Drakensberg to do a hike, which was designed to take us to two waterfalls and take 2.5 hours round-trip. We were in an area called the Monk's Cowl, which may or may not actually be part of the Champagne Valley (depending on who you ask, it seems....). It was really easy going for the first bit, and the first waterfall only took about half an hour to reach. We also found the pools that feed the waterfall and went to investigate them; we had been warned it would be freezing in the Drakensberg, but it was actually hot and really sunny, so we were hoping the pools would be deep enough to swim in. They weren't, but some of us dipped our feet in anyway. The water was freezing cold, which was a nice shock to the system. It was also so pure that we could refill our water bottles there, and it tasted much better than the bottled water we had bought before we set out. Such a nice surprise!

Melissa, Jesse and Keith chilling at the pool.

Kyle filling his water bottle with real spring water.

Afterwards, we walked for ages and ages, and the sun was beating down on us, and I just started to.... not feel right. Part of it was of course just that I'm not the most athletic person in the world, and I was tired. But I also could feel that I hadn't eaten enough, and I certainly hadn't had enough water. I rested for a while, and tried to keep pushing on, but it got to the point where I realized that I am all too familiar with dehydration, I'm prone to dramatic bouts of needing IV fluids to rectify it when things get too far, and I just didn't want to deal with it. I was willing to admit failure and look a bit like a sucky hiker to everyone else in the group in order to.... not end up in that kind of situation again. So when we finally hit another 4-foot patch of the trail that in the shade, I got my water bottles and the food I had brought on the trail and stayed behind. It was a really, really good decision.

I've never had to actually stop in a situation like that -- not when I was hiking Huayna Picchu in Peru, or climbing up to the Treasury at Petra.... it always takes me a long time, but I always make it. So this was a bit strange, and I'm not sure why it was so extraordinarily difficult or draining, but at least I knew enough to stop. My second moment of self-awareness of the day.

The others kept hiking, of course, so I had a while to sit and look around and just enjoy being in the area without watching where my feet were going. I also may or may not have napped for a little bit.... but they found me again (hooray!), and we headed back to the car. We passed a huge area that had clearly been burned in a controlled fire; everything on one side of the trail was black and ashy, and the other side was green and alive. I'm not really clear on why they do controlled burns in the Drakensberg, but there was a warning sign at the entrance to the park about it. We also saw a fire burning on our way down, which got bigger and bigger until the smoke was everywhere.

Black and green.

The ashy residue left behind.

Fire on the mountain.

When we got back to the car, we set off for Joburg directly. The "2.5 round-trip" hike took about 4 hours -- probably at least in part because of how much time everyone spent waiting for me, if we're honest (but I like to think that wasn't actually an hour and a half). Still, we left while it was still light out, which was good. We took highways pretty much the whole way back, stopping only for a quick dinner at Wimpy's again. We made it back in good time, and then I crashed into bed pretty shortly thereafter.

Weekend trip 1/2: Lesotho

This past weekend was my first proper trip out of Johannesburg since I arrived here. About time, right? I was getting stir-crazy in the city, so we headed south. Before I came, I knew I wanted to get to either Swaziland or Lesotho. I was told Swaziland is closer, so I started to look into that, but it turns out there really isn't a lot to do in Swaziland (for tourists). I decided to sort of scrap the whole idea of leaving the country and set my sights on the Drakensberg Mountains instead, which run from the Free State province of South Africa into KwaZulu-Natal and is a UNESCO World Heritage site. As I started looking for accommodation in the Drakensberg, I realized that a number of the lodges to day trips into Lesotho... so I looked at a map and, lo and behold, the Drakensberg abut the eastern border of Lesotho.

Lesotho is completely surrounded by South Africa on all sides (as you can see from the handy-dandy map I stole from the internet). Swaziland is that other circle up and to the right, and it sits between South Africa and Mozambique. The eastern swathe of South Africa is essentially Zulu territory, and in the 1800s, King Shaka of the Zulu ranged around the area attempting to subjugate everyone around -- and largely succeeding. He innovated warfare by introducing a special type of stabbing spear and shield and trained his men to be the best warriors around. They went around knocking on other kingdoms' doors and basically said, "Submit to us or die." Most of the time, people submitted, but sometimes they fled. A huge amount of movement took place around this time as Shaka and the Zulus displaced people all over the region -- the movement is known as the Mfecane or the Difaqane (in isiZulu or seSotho, respectively), which means "scattering" or "crushing." This is all stuff that I remember from my South African history class at Berkeley... check out my knowledge!

Anyway, Moshoeshoe gathered together a group of the tribes living in the mountain region that is present-day Lesotho, and built a fort at the top. When Shaka showed up, Moshoeshoe dropped rocks and boulders on his head until he went away, basically. But the mountains weren't friendly, and the Dutch settlers in South Africa discovered diamonds in the region and came in and started trouble. So Moshoeshoe went to the British in Cape Town and bargained for protection. The British came in, kicked out the Dutch, and established Lesotho as a protectorate of the British empire until independence in 1966. So technically speaking, Lesotho was never a colony. Technically.

Anyway. That's your history lesson for the day. Now, to the trip!

Five of us went on the trip. Melissa and I planned the trip (I was the creative force behind it, and then Melissa took over and did all the wonderful planning to make it all actually happen). Then we recruited Jesse, Keith and Kyle to come with us. Melissa and I went to pick up the rental car from Avis -- our sorry little wreck of a car that we drive around in Johannesburg wasn't capable of making the drive -- and then collected everyone around the city. We left the city around 6:30 and drove down to Kestell, in the Free State, as our first stop. We stayed at a lodge called Karma, which was really just a woman's house in a quiet little Afrikaner town. We got there around 10, having stopped at a highway plaza to eat dinner at Wimpy (a classic South African burger chain) for dinner. I had never been to the Free State before, so -- check that province off the list. I was trying to think of which provinces I hadn't been to in South Africa. There are nine, and I've now been to seven of them.

I still need to make it to the Northern Cape and Limpopo. Anyway, that map should also give you a scale of how far we drove: we started in Johannesburg (in Gauteng, the rosy province) and drove south into the Free State until we were just east of the top of Lesotho. So the first day, we drove all the way down through Free State.

It was completely pitch black when we were driving, so we had no idea what we were driving through. The next morning, though, we woke up and realized that the area is gorgeous. Karma Lodge in Kestell was a lovely place to stay. The woman who runs the place makes jam and competes with it, and has won some "best of South Africa" awards, so breakfast was all the jam and toast and coffee and tea we wanted. Some of the jam was to dieeeee for. 

We got up early, loaded up the car and headed into town to pick up Zee, our tour guide for the day trip into Lesotho. I was a bit worried that we were in for a very hokey "cultural experience," where we were going to gawk at people and have very artificial experiences. I needn't have worried. Zee is a South African Zulu, but she lived in Lesotho for a while and really loves the area we went into -- as she told us about the culture and practices, she kept slipping into saying things like "we think" and "our elders," etc. But I'm getting ahead of myself. When we found her, we realized there was a Belgian family with two young girls who were also coming on the tour with us. I had been looking forward to it being just us, but they ended up being pretty unobtrusive (except for their sort of obnoxious photo-taking of people without asking permission like they were in a museum).

We drove to the border crossing, which was up in the mountains on an untarred road covered in rocks and stones. It's the smallest border crossing I've ever seen -- just two windows for passport processing, and no one was even sitting in them when we arrived. We left our car at the border post, got our exit stamps out of South Africa, and loaded into a minibus taxi to take us into Lesotho.

We drove down through the "no-man's land" section, between the border crossing where you exit South Africa and .... well, where there would normally be another border crossing to officially enter into the next country. But after we had been driving for about 30 minutes, I asked Zee why it was taking so long (it's usually only about a 5 minute drive), and she said, "Oh, we crossed into Lesotho at that river back there. They don't have a border office -- the Basotho are very welcoming." Er, okay. So I don't have a passport stamp for Lesotho, because the border crossing is I guess so minor and insubstantial that it's just not worth the bother? I can't even imagine that kind of lax security, but on the other hand.... it's not like anyone can really go anywhere. If someone enters Lesotho and keeps walking far enough, they'll end up in South Africa again. So, that was weird. But Lesotho still 100% counts in my passport stamp competition with my father, despite the absence of the passport stamp. So there.

We arrived at the village, which based on some after-the-fact Google searching I think was in the Butha-Buthe district of Lesotho. The village is called Mafika Lisiu, which means "Silo of Stones." We all piled out the minibus taxi in front of what was obviously a school. Immediately, kids started running over. Obviously they know what's up -- a number of them stuck around for the rest of the day and wheedled chocolate and empty water bottles and other things out of us. I think Zee may have even given them a few coins at the end of the tour. So, a little exploitative, but there it is. Kind of par for the course. Zee told us about the school and how the king in Lesotho owns all the land in the country and has to give you permission to use the land for anything (including building a school), and how the community had to convince him to give them the land to build the school. There was a little curio shop inside that we were encouraged to buy something from to support the school, and at that point I was feeling pretty anxious about whether this was going to be one of those tours and refused to buy anything on principle. I thought about just giving a cash donation, but didn't end up having the chance. The scenery was beautiful, and the kids were hanging around mugging for the camera, so I entertained myself that way instead.

After the school, we set off around the village. Zee kept stopping to talk to everyone, because as it turns out, she knows everyone. We collected a small herd of children, most of whom seemed to pick a "favorite" tourist and grab onto our hands and try to have conversations in limited English. We ultimately ended up in a little nook overlooking the valley that part of the village sits in, and Zee talked us through the history of Lesotho and a lot of details about culture in the village (courtship and marriage, religion, etc.).

  

We walked on a bit further, and then sat down for lunch, which was cheese and tomato sandwiches and oranges. Then Zee gave us directions to get up to a higher point near where we were for full panorama views, and we all headed up there. The two kids who were still with us came too.

We tried a "jumper" shot with one of the kids. Melissa is obviously great at jumpers. We already knew that I was really bad at them.

When we came down from the top of this spot, Zee took us to see a piece of San rock art. The rock art in the area hasn't been preserved or studied in the same methodical way that it has been in South Africa, so there wasn't a ton of information about it (including how old it was). She told us it depicted a warning that pastoralists were nearby (in other words, the Zulu in what's now South Africa), who claimed ownership over the eland.

We headed back into the village. The plan was to find a rondavel that was offering local beer so that we could try it. There's no cell phone reception in the village, and no electricity I think (although there was a generator at the bar we went to later, but homesteads are pretty far-flung. Zee said that people often just shout to each other when they need to communicate, or send messages with kids. But another way to communicate to the village at large is with flags outside your rondavel. There are different colors you can fly, and each one symbolizes something different -- red might mean that you've slaughtered an animal and are willing to barter meat for an equivalent value of crops, for example, and green could mean that you have an excess of crops and need to give some away before it rots. I forget exactly what color means what, but those were definitely two messages. The one we were looking for was a white flag: a sign that the family in the rondavel has brewed beer, and there is an open invitation for anyone who wants to come and drink some. We had seen a white flag up earlier, but it was gone by the time we got back down. Zee found another one though (apparently it's pretty common on the weekends), so we headed over to that family's hut.



I got distracted though. The group of kids who had disappeared showed up again, and they suddenly all wanted their photos taken. Well, I'm never one to deny small African children anything, so I started snapping away. Then they wanted to use my camera to take the pictures, so my camera got handed around the circle and the kids took pictures of random things (mostly of me and each other, and also my knees). But at some point, one of them asked me for sweets. Now, I knew better. I did, I know what happens when there's a group of African kids and you bust out candy, but I was feeling obliging, and I had a chocolate bar in my bag, so I pulled it out and started to break it up. All of a sudden I had 10 little sets of hands grabbing at me. I tried to put one piece in each set of hands, but of course they didn't just take a piece and then go away, and I started to lose track of who I had given to already. I made the fatal error of giving the same kid two pieces and everyone got very upset, so I just shoved the rest into one girl's hands, told her she had to share, and fled into the rondavel where everyone else had disappeared to. Sigh. I never learn.

Apparently, this is what the world looks like to children.

 Inside the rondavel, everyone was sitting around drinking the local beer. It's brewed from maize and sorghum, which is yeast-like and naturally ferments. It didn't taste like beer at all. Zee had described it as kind of yogurt-y, and that was pretty accurate. Compared to some other local beers I've tried, it was eminently palatable. And there was a ton of it, so we all sat around for a while drinking and sort of talking to the family in the rondavel. The young woman there spoke English pretty well, but no one else did that I noticed. 

After we left their home (and Zee told them the beer was "on the house," so we left to loud cheering), we went to another woman's house, although we didn't meet her or go inside. But she had prepared a plate of traditional Lesotho spinach and pap for us. Pap is basically white kernel maize, pounded and mixed with water, and you use it to scoop up whatever food you're eating. The spinach was possibly the most amazing thing I've ever eaten, ever. Lesotho spinach is different from other spinach somehow, although I didn't see how except for its exceptional deliciousness. It was coated in butter and other unidentifiable and delectable things, and we cleaned the plate without a problem.

At that point, we were pretty much done. We headed to the pub of the village, called Two Sisters, which was hooked up to a generator and had a little all-purpose store attached, which sold warm beer and sodas. We got beverages and went into the bar, where there was a pool table and a group of bored-looking Basotho. One of the local guys agreed to play some of the guys in our group in pool. according to local rules. I don't really know the actual rules of pool, so it was all a bit over my head, but it was something like if on your turn you don't "cushion" the ball (hit it on the sides?), then your opponent gets to go twice on his next turn. Keith and Kyle both took turns, and they both lost. The Mosotho was really good at pool.

Our minibus taxi ride showed up, so we got back in and went back to South Africa. Then we drove another 2-3 hours south into the Central Drakensberg to Inkosana Lodge in the Champagne Valley, so as to be better situated for hiking the next day. There was a particularly lovely 20 km stretch of road where the government just... gave up making the road on one side. I kid you not, there's a sign saying the road is closed, and one entire side of the road is just unpaved and covered with giant rocks at intervals to make it impossible to drive on. So both sides of traffic have to drive in one lane, which means you have to pull over when a car is heading towards you. Oh, also, there are sections of the road that are more pothole than road. For 20 kilometers. It slowed us down considerably, and I was relieved when I got back to driving on proper tar roads, even if the potholes didn't go away entirely. That slowed down our progress, but we made it to Inkosana on Saturday night and crashed out a bit.

I'll post about our second day (which will be a much shorter entry) separately and later, as I think this is quite enough for now.

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.