School trip to Durban

     Earlier this week we went in 2 vans with 29 nine to 13 year olds and 5 real teachers to Durban. The good parts of the trip were quite good; the less good parts were more amusing than annoying.

Good parts

Durban is a big modern city with lots to see. 3^rd biggest city in South Africa, it is Africa's busiest port, and noted for its diversity, with many people from all over Asia living there. We stayed near its really nice beachfront: clean, user-friendly, great beach, nice waves.

     The first night Katherine and I wanted to get away, so we walked up the beach to a seafood place and took some prawns upstairs to a bar with a view of the Indian Ocean;  we watched the orange Super Moon come from behind the clouds, shortly casting a trail of rippling silver on the waves.

     Each night we went out to eat on our own, partly to get away, also to sample the different foods. One Indian specialty - “bunny chow” - was so spicy we could hardly finish it.

      We visited the Shark Board's education center and saw a shark dissected.

The Shark Board is a local government agency initiated in the early 1950s to deter shark attacks on swimmers, which is harmful to tourism. Their research and deployment of shark nets and baited hooks have resulted in there being no fatal shark attacks in this area for 50 years.

     Then we went to a place displaying birds and doing a bird demonstration. We got to see up close many of the birds we've seen in Swaziland, Kruger, and St. Lucia, and also many birds from around the world. Here is one of our favorite kids with a lorikeet (we think – spelling approximate.) from South America. 

We got back in time to go up the beach to play in the waves. The children are not very good swimmers and the only teacher willing to supervise them could not swim, and did not feel safe with them beyond knee deep.

I went out a little deeper.

     The 3^rd day we did a harbor tour and then a visit to a Sea World kind of place and got back in time for a swim in the hotel pool. Again, the teacher who always ended up dealing with the students, with whom I shared a bed, did not want them out of the shallower end. One little boy told me he wanted me to teach him to swim.

The water was not heated, it's the end of the winter, and both of us were really cold. We tried.

     The hotel we stayed in was quite nice. There was one other male teacher, so he and I shared a double bed in the room with the 2 van drivers, who were in the other double bed. The teacher I was with was an early riser, so each morning he and I would go for a walk on the beach, catching the moon going down and the dawn over the water. People he described as the Jerichos had a service at the waters edge each morning before dawn.  When we got back he and the 2 van drivers would carefully iron the clothes they would wear that day – even when it was at least the 2^nd day on a T shirt. I didn't iron. Swazis are very careful about the way they look, in the sense of having new- and clean-looking clothes that are “smart,” to use their word. We've seen women walk out of thatched huts made of cinder-blocks wearing satin cocktail dresses and high heels.

Not so good parts

     The teachers running this gave the most consistent display I've seen yet of the Swazi disinclination to think about something other than what they are doing right now. And they didn't communicate, with each other, nor with us. And they make no effort to tell the students what was going to happen next. They spent hours each day trying to find where we were supposed to go, waiting to do something that could have been started hours earlier, finding their way to where they needed to go and wandering around lost. They were peremptory and rude to us when we tried to figure out what was going to happen next so we could prepare a little. At one point they drove off and left me, when I'd stepped into an adjacent store to buy some airtime for the SIM card I was using to try to get communications in South Africa on my Swazi phone.  Almost all their conversation was in siSwati, even when we were sitting with them in the room; we've been working on vocabulary and grammar, but when they are speaking quickly to each other, with slang and abbreviations, we have little chance of understanding much.

     We spent a lot of time driving in these vans. Gospel music at full blast can give you the headache from Hell.

    Each day they bought packaged meals from KFC for lunch for all of us; KFC is more frequent here, and in China too, as I recall, than Starbucks in the US (actually, there are no Starbucks here, that I've seen.). I've decided the American distribution of KFCs in “developing” nations around the world is the nutritional equivalent of Lord Geoffrey Amherst selling small-pox infected blankets to the Native Americans. At one point the kids were given money their parents had sent with them, I believe in various amounts, to shop. Here they are at a really fancy SA shopping mall (3rd biggest in all of Africa, we were told, and I can believe it - probably 1/2 again the size of Cherry Creek Mall - it even had a Cinnabon store!) at which we repeatedly stopped. They purchased no fruit, only sugar, salt, and highly processed carbs.

And we had taught these kids 3 weeks of nutrition! This shows that effecting behavior is much harder than just imparting knowledge, which is indeed a cautionary note on our HIV avoidance task. But, you know, we ate the KFC too; in each case, nearly finishing it.

     At the Sea World-type exhibit (Shaka Marine) the MC was killing some time asking for a show of hands of those who would participate in a dance contest, and then had those who raised their hands dance in place. The audience, full of kids, joined enthusiastically, including many tourist kids and the 50 or so school children, most clearly of Indian descent, directly in front of us. But hardly any of our kids would even raise their hands, none enthusiastically, and none would get up to dance. Katherine and I kept coming back to the word “repressed” to describe their behavior. And these are the most responsive, outgoing students we have, by far. Partly they may have been intimidated by the surroundings, and maybe a little weary - no one told them when they had to turn off the TV and the lights, so they didn't.