This week has been a quiet one on the work front, a fun one on the social front, and a productive one on the research front. It’s a week of school-holidays at the moment (the South African school-year is structured very differently from the Canadian system), so my after-school program and computer teaching have been on hiatus. My supervisor at the NGO has also been on vacation, and the one job she left me with was to make a very large seashell and driftwood mobile to hang from the ceiling of the preschool library. As you might imagine it’s been quite strenuous work combing the beaches for pretty shells and nice pieces of wood (photos of completed mobile next week).

Never one to shirk from responsibility, I used the driftwood mobile assignment as an excuse to take a short weekend trip to Coffee Bay (see photo above of some typical coastline en route). It’s a much busier –and better serviced; it has electricity, for instance- village than this one, an eight hour walk or two hour drive (the road goes inland and back out again) up the coast from here. In addition to several beach bars, a pizza restaurant, three backpacker lodges, and a café, the village has a little boutique-y shop that sells clothes from India (you know, the scrubby hippy-backpacker style), delicious treats (who knew I would find

wasabi and fish sauce only a few villages away, when I struggle to find green vegetables in the one that I live in?), and pretty gift-shop type stuff like attractive soaps, candles and beaded sun-catchers. So I stocked up on pretty beads and 20 cent colourful Indian bangles, to mix with the seashells.

Otherwise, the trip to Coffee Bay was great fun! I went cliff-jumping into the Indian Ocean, went spelunking in a cave full of bats, ate fresh crayfish that I bought from a local crayfish-diver (see picture. Those crayfish are not all for me; I pooled my funds with three German guys and a Brazilian guy to buy those babies for a total of $14) and roasted on a fire on the beach, and partied like a first-year undergrad (my Saturday nights in the village almost invariably consist of being in bed with a book by 10:30, so I had to balance this out somehow).

Once back in the village, I resumed my routine of hanging out with informants, who themselves are usually at the backpacker lodge (the place where most young locals are employed –if they speak some English,- and the main focal point for socializing). This can sometimes be frustrating, as the backpackers are usually curious about this -presumed American, until they learn otherwise- girl who speaks some isiXhosa and appears to know some of the locals. I’m often roped into conversations about how long I’ve been here, followed by “Oh, what is your research about?” (not that I blame them for asking; I’d do the same). And then as soon as they find out about my research topic, then, man! Most of the time they have soooo many questions! I’m more than happy –and confident enough- to answer the questions like “what is your house like? What do you eat? Do you live with a family? Do you speak the language? Is it lonely living here? Do you feel safe?” but more often than not their questions veer towards the most grim and notorious aspects of life in South Africa: “is there a lot of AIDS here? Is there a lot of rape here? What about domestic violence? Do all the men have lots of affairs?” And this get annoying sometimes, for a number of reasons. Firstly, how the heck would I know? After five weeks I’m not exactly walking around asking “so, neighbor, are you HIV-positive? I know your husband is, because I've seen him at the mobile clinic. But are you using condoms? And hey, have you been raped before?” Secondly, why ask me to explain what life is like the village, when a local person is sitting two meters away? And thirdly, I get annoyed at how disrespectful it is to local people to sit here right in front of the local people and ask some foreigner who is new to the community to talk authoritatively about this stuff. I mean, how would you feel if you’re the young local person, and THIS is what outsiders want to know about your community. On the plus side, I learned this week that it can be very helpful for my research to say “why don’t you ask [insert name of local tour guide]? He knows better than me, given he’s from here.” And then I eavesdrop on the ensuing conversation. Sneaky.

Otherwise, its been a good week on the research front, over

all. I did my first proper interview (I’d decided not to do any interviews until I’d been here several months and built some rapport with the community, but my volunteer work has put me in contact with the librarian in the village regularly enough that I felt it was appropriate to interview him at this stage). Also, the manager/part-owner of the backpacker lodge (he owns 60%, the community owns 40%) has asked me to do a genealogy of the whole village, capturing photos of each community-member, noting their clan-name, and recording whatever personal stories they deem important for future generations. Apparently this is something that he and the village headman have wanted to do for quite some time, and he figured that this is a task that an anthropologist could be useful for. So I’ve done some research on genealogy software, and have begun the project. Approximately 900 people to catalogue (keeping in mind that about half are children, and will probably not have stories to tell yet), and so far I’ve input about 50. Quite ironic, in some ways, that I’m finding myself doing some seriously old-school anthropology; I certainly never planned to document lines of decent, clan groups and so forth.

As an aside, researching genealogy software has been really interesting! Some of the most sophisticated open-source programs are actually affiliated with big American churches, meaning they’re pretty useless in a society like this one. They are programmed to assume that if two people are married, all children of either party are the offspring of these married individuals. In other words, if John Doe and Jane Doe are married and if a child is added to Jane Doe’s family tree, the program is designed to add this child as John Doe’s child as well. And adding children to an unmarried couple is impossible (most children in this village born to parents under 30 are born out of wedlock -I can’t believe I’m using such an old-fashioned word!-, and quite a few of the young women my age have children with several different men). Adding adopted and foster children adds

another level of difficulty, let alone multiple spouses (there are only 5 men in this village with one than one wife, so this won’t be a big challenge). I’ve found one that seems to be working fairly well for now, though.

Alrighty, this is enough for one day. I’ll leave you with my favourite/least favourite photo of the week: an empty sorghum beer box, one of many, many such boxes found by the roadside. P.S.: the other photo above is of the sunrise from my porch. Sometimes my neighbour's rooster wakes me up early enough for me to drink my coffee and watch it come up.