First Day of ISP

Like I said Saturday I moved out of Cato and into Happy Hippo with Julia and Emma. We enjoyed our weekend. Nothing too exciting went to Joe Cools again and to the beach. We have Ushaka just around the corner which is the largest marine park – aquarium thingy in South Africa so that’s cool. We made pasta for dinner Monday night and Tuesday we made chicken curry stir fry. Those days we just had more community health lectures. Wednesday we have one lecture but mainly we had ethics meetings for our ISPs.

Funny thing to note: Julia and I have developed a British accent that we do sometimes. And once when we were in the kitchen at Happy Hippo we were getting our accents on and what do you know..there were British people there. It was a little awkward. We decided we needed to be more aware of our surroundings from now on.

About my ISP it’s a little frustrating right now. The hospital we originally wanted to work out referred us to this one NGO and then they were like no this other NGO really needs your help. So we were all set with this last NGO and two days ago the hospital was like actually no we want you for a little bit too. So that’s frustrating and I’ve abandoned my interest and what I was originally going to do with the hospital so I don’t know what is going to happen.

We moved into our ISP accommodations today. They are great. We are staying in a dorm so it’s cheaper and we get other people coming in and out so we can meet lots of people.

Anyway we got here today and then went straight to the hospital to try and see what they want us to do. They set us up with contacts for our original interests. Hannah – pediatric TB and me – traditional healers and TB however my contact works at night so I don’t know if that’s going to work out. But today we actually followed around a doctor who is the head of medicine on his rounds which was super cool and sad. A lot of HIV. Anyway that’s about it. We took the mini-bus taxi to the stop that’s near the mall that we are staying by. We perused around the mall then walked back to our backpackers. Now we are just chillin. Gotta get some groceries and meet with our contact with Siyaphila, the NGO, to pick up some readings.

This weekend there’s not much going on. Tomorrow were gonna explore Pietermaritzburg and also Hannah has some friends who have a soccer tournament here so were going to go to that. There is also a flea market on Sunday we could go to. Nothing too much for Easter which is sad. Oh well.