Woohoo, I have finally adjusted to life over here. It is crazy how it just takes some time to let go of what I was doing and begin to settle into a much calmer lifestyle here in Kimberley. I have joined the gym, become a regular at the movie rental store, and gotten to know the city. Monday night is Movie Mania Monday and at one of the movie theaters in town you can go to any showing at any time for FREE! We are guessing that Monday is a slower day at the theater and they are still showing the movies, so they have a special promotion. I am going to be watching a lot of movies, hopefully reading a lot of books and maybe even writing some. Shoot, I still need to find an Internet café so we can upload pictures and download music and a place to do my laundry. Oh, the biggest news of the day is that I CAN DRIVE. I drove last night and this morning without stalling on my trips or without turning onto the wrong side of the road.
More fun from Kim. I was on the radio. Yep, the radio. Thuso set up an appointment for us to go meet this radio DJ named Malik. Crazy dude. We walked in and chatted for a while during a song, then next thing we knew we were being interviewed on AIR. He basically introduced us as this year’s GRS interns and asked us about 15 minutes of questions on air about how our time is going, what we are here to do, and some comparison questions about here and the U.S. After the show we spent about another hour and a half just getting to know him and forming our relationship with him. This way we can call him whenever we have an event coming up and be on the show to talk about it. We also might collaborate and just do AIDS informational session with kids and coaches. Malik spent about 5 years in New York studying some music and theater. He sleeps for about three hours a night because he has 3 jobs, one of which starts at 5:30 a.m. and the other that ends around 12 midnight and more energy than most people I have ever come across. He is super smart and has a bundle of random information tucked away in that brain; I cannot even explain to you the plethora of topics of conversation we hit in a couple of hours with him. He is super passionate about music, makes his own house mixes, and had an 650 gigabyte external hard drive that is full…just with music. I have never seen such a big music library in my life. Albert and I are hoping to get our hands on some of that music sometime soon. He is also very creative so we are really looking forward to working with him in the future. We will hopefully be able to help him on some of his ventures and maybe he will help us out with World AIDS Day coming up 1 December 2010! I’ve already got some ideas flowing for it, so we will see what Mandla and Thuso and the rest of GRS have got up their sleeves.
Something I realized today is that in South Africa people are all about the face-to-face contact and forming relationships, as opposed to the American way of just getting it done. For example meeting with Malik, after our meeting was over, we just hung out until we exhausted our conversational topics and it was time to move on. You just got to go with it. Today we went and met with Lucky, who works with Isibindi, which is an organization that provides a refuge for homeless people and abused people, especially children. I believe there are five sites around Kim and each one has a “safe park” which is a playground for children to go and hang out and seek the help that they need. Really a very cool idea. They are actually located in the townships too for easy access. So because of the strike we decided that we might try to put on a SKILLZ Holiday camp next week partnering with them, since kids are not in school or doing anything. We would run a two-hour program everyday and therefore would be able to complete an entire intervention is just a week. We really need this because our numbers are so low right now with the strike and FY 10 is approaching fast, 1 October 2010. So instead of calling them to set this up, we drove out to their headquarters for a 15 minute meeting to go over what we wanted to do, only for Lucky to tell us that he will have to talk to the head and see what she says. Though it ended positive in that they liked the idea, we are just trying to wait to see what’s going on with the strike. The whole meeting was just interesting because I know if we were in the States we would have just called, so I guess it makes working around here unique. It is actually sort of refreshing.
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