[Half a] Spontaneous Weekend

[22th/23th May]










On Saturday morning after playing PS2 and speaking to Gregor while a chicken climbed on my head [as you do] Sam and I headed over to a football tournament being held at a local school. The Jabulani Foundation had organised and funded it and invited a number of the local teams to come and play with a trophy and prize money on offer for the winners. The ARV counsellors were also running HIV testing all day with all the people who tested being entered into a prize draw to win an all expenses paid trip to watch a World Cup match in Port Elizabeth. The aim of the entire event was to attract young men [who are the demographic least likely to test] to test for HIV so that they could be counselled and prepared for ARVs if necessary.







It was a blisteringly hot day and there was a pretty giant crowd, the obligatory vuvuzelas and lots of random dancing – at some points more people were watching the dancing than the match, but oh well! After watching the football for a while [to be honest, it would be more accurately be described as head-ball as all they seemed to do was header it about] Sam and I decided that we should go for an HIV test – it may seem like a ridiculous idea since neither of us should have been exposed to the virus, but everyone here is encouraged to test so that they know their status regardless.







Despite the fact that I knew there's no way I could be HIV+, I was still pretty nervous. I can't imagine what it would be like to find out that you're positive. Before I came here, I thought that contracting HIV was a death sentence and despite all the education we supposedly get in the UK, there's still a lot of stigma surrounding the disease and people who have it. I've learned so much about it since I came here and know plenty of happy and healthy people living with HIV. Still, being HIV+ is life changing without all the medical implications – it complicates your relationships and makes you a slave to the 7am/7pm ARV times [imagine never having a lie in, going to bed early, or going anywhere at all without your meds]. So as I watched as my tiny speck of blood was tested for the virus there was a part of me that worried about what I would do if the two lines meaning 'negative' didn't appear.







Thankfully they did and the massive wave of relief that washed over me made me realise just how nervous I had been! Five minutes later, both Sam and I emerged with smiles on our faces at our HIV- status. The counsellors tested 160 people over the course of the day with 6 testing positive. [That's actually a really low percentage given that the prevalence in the country as a whole is % and I'm quite sure it's higher in this area].They will now have the option to start the ARV counselling process and start taking the anti-retroviral medication that can save their lives.







At midday there was a break for some HIV education from the counsellors [who I must say, were absolutely buzzing with excitement and were hilarious as a result]. After persuading the young guys who were having a seriously odd break dancing competition by the music speakers to have a short rest, they started giving the crowd the whole 'Wear a condom, don't spread HIV' chat in extremely animated terms including a bunch of songs which were pretty catchy [I found myself whistling one in the corridor the other day and the ARV counsellors thought it was hilarious]. While they were talking the DJ decided to come and ask me if I was married/wanted to marry him so I ended up lying and saying that my husband was working in Johannesburg [ very bad I know], then fobbing him off onto the Sam. The break dancing then resumed and our giant preschool teacher Ronnie added his own legendary flair by trying to sell oranges at the same time as he was doing a weird walking-dancing-thing...







Back to the football and the hospital team were playing so there were a few familiar faces on the pitch: Thabo, my fellow pharmacy assistant; Mr Ntlantywa, a nurse; and Eric, a strange laundry man who never seem to do any work and had a picture of me as his phone screensaver for a while. I ended up watching with a small child who latched on to me, prompting a young guy next to me to ask, 'Why is your baby black?'... The match ended in a draw so we went to penalties, at which point, the entire crowd stormed the pitch and we crowded round the goal. There was loads of tension [poor goalies] but Zithulele pulled it off and pandemonium ensued when the final goal went in – everyone was running around like crazy, jumping up and down, yelling, hugging and, of course, playing the blasted vuvuzelas at one zillion decibels. Sadly for us, that was just the semi-final and we went on to lose the final, bad times :(

The crowd anxiously watches as Zithulele play

Pandemonium ensues as we win the penalty shootout!

After the semis were over, Liz mentioned something about going to Mdumbi for the night and after five minutes of conversation and ten minutes of packing, Liz, Lisa, Sam and I all ended up on the road to Mdumbi for a spontaneous road trip and night away :) [Or as Lisa likes to call it, half a weekend away with the wife and kids, since Sam and I are pretty much looked after by the two of them]. We were also joined by Kate's dog Jack, who did a fantastic job of slavering all over the back of our seats [thankfully missing our heads by centimetres alone]!







In a record time of one hour fifteen minutes we arrived at Mdumbi backpackers and were shown to our dorm and given a quick tour of the place, including my personal favourite, the 'iabulutions' aka 'the ablutions'. Putting 'I' in front of an English word in Xhosa is like putting 'le' in front of an English word and saying it's French. My personal favourite is 'i-plastic file', which means, er, 'plastic file', but if you don't say the i-, no one understands you!







We went for a walk along the beautiful Mdumbi beach as the sun was setting and had fun trying to take everyone's favourite picture, the epic jumping photo. It was a bit of a fail as there was always one person still on the ground but the pictures were cool none the less :) We had a quick swim in the sea then headed back up to the backpackers. There was a group from Madwaleni hospital there so we enjoyed a long night of banter on various [mainly inappropriate] topics and had a seafood dinner with mussel soup, crayfish, line fish, calamari and prawns.







The next morning I got up reasonably late and had a quick walk along the beach to wake myself up, had breakfast, then ended up back on the beach for with everyone else :) Lisa and I went swimming for about an hour, being joined part way through by the others, including Liz, who tried to kill me by dunking my head under water without prior warning, good times!







The road trip back was made extra exciting when we got a flat tyre, and the sight of the four of us unsuccessfully trying to wrench the hubcaps of drew in a crowd of local kids. After various attempts to get it to move, including two of us standing on the tyre iron, a guy driving past stopped to help and changed it for us in about 5 seconds, what a fail.







And that was the end of the spontaneous weekend!







xxx