Water Health in Limpopo Province, South Africa

[PhD_Polymath]

Back in 2010, I was attending college in my small hometown of rural Southwest Virginia. This town is nestled in the southern Appalachian mountains. I had traveled a bit within the Continental U.S., but had never experienced international travel. I had performed well as a student and interacted with faculty and staff frequently. Being at a small college and having close relationships with professors, I had a few that encouraged me to travel. Like many people, I didn't have the money to pay for the international trips the school offered during breaks. So I always responded that "someday" I would try to see the world. As the spring semester was under way, the chair of the department encouraged me to apply for a program that the science department offered for students to perform research during the summer.

The program selected a handful of students to do scientific research mostly within the region. I had participated in the program the previous summer (2009), working within the region around home to improve the diabetes landscape of the people who lived there. This would form the basis of a lot of future work for the duration of my undergraduate career.

However, fast forward to the summer of 2010 and I was selected for research in the Limpopo Province, South Africa. I was ecstatic and scared for my life! I had never been away from family (I know, I know). Even scarier, I had never been on an airplane. A few faculty assured me I would be fine and this would be a transformative experience. Boy, were they right.

I packed my bags and pondered the trip and the significance of what I was about to embark upon. The research side of the trip involved working with rural communities within the rural villages of Limpopo (the northernmost province). These villages had little to no access to clean water and as a result, many infants died of diarrheal illnesses. I was paired up with a group from the main campus of the University of Virginia to attack this problem from multiple angles. The school was paying all expenses and giving me a stipend to live off of for the summer. I was in disbelief that they chose me for such a sublime experience.

I got on my first airplane and must have looked confused. The passenger beside me struck up a conversation and when they found that I was flying to South Africa via a connecting flight on my first day of flying, they laughed and couldn't believe me. I am sure I'm not the first one to travel internationally on my first flight, but they were amused. Two planes later, I finally was aboard the South African Airlines (IIRC) plane from Washington Dulles to Johannesburg. When I got to Johannesburg, the reality of being on the other side of the world set in. No turning back now! I stayed in a nice hotel in Johannesburg for the night.



The next morning, I was headed to Limpopo. The trip showed me scenery I had never seen before. The road by Pretoria was particularly pretty.



Once I arrived at my destination in Thohoyandou, Limpopo, I settled in to a chalet in Acacia Park.



We had a little Hyundai van for our travels. It had a manual transmission, which was odd for me to see. I had never seen a modern van with a manual transmission and thought this was interesting.



I noticed the change in animal friends that shared our living space within Acacia Park. They loved when I left the chalet door open after buying fruit, running off with it any chance they got!



There were other new animals to see near our home.



Nothing could prepare me for the safari that would come later, but it was off to work! The day after arriving, the group and I went to a local elementary school where some of the group had already worked with the children to give a presentation on clean water practices and demonstrating the filters that we were distributing.







The water fair went well, with the chief of the village being happy with our help and collaboration to improve health in the area. As the presentation went on, a meal was being prepared of Pap and other local cuisine.


This was pap being prepared. Pap is a fine cornmeal prepared with water and salt to a thick, sticky paste that goes well with a number of condiments.

I drank the water in the chalet that night and paid dearly for a couple of days. Looks like I should have followed my own advise and learned a valuable lesson.

 

[unkamonkey]

It's good that you did what you did. My friend has worked in many places in the world and I believe it was his first trip to the middle east that he got sick. He pretty much stayed in the bathtub with the shower running for 2 days. A few years ago he went to S America with some co workers. He told them what they shouldn't eat. They did. Well, Mark was eating it?. He was fine, they wern't. When he got back from Africa my girlfriend was a clinical pathologist and wanted a stool sample so she could study it.

 

[yabanja]

You couldn't have picked a better destination! I have travelled all around the world and some of my fondest memories are the Limpopo Region- Kruger and the Three Roundevels are incredible!!!

Allan

 

[SSF556]

My first Africa experience was in the Limpopo region of Botswana just across the border of South Africa.....Africa can become an addiction...


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

[smlobx]

You mentioned a small university in SW Va. Was that UVA @ Wise?

I live near Roanoke and hope you post some more of your first big adventure.

 

[PhD_Polymath]

Thanks everyone for the kind words and interest. It was truly an amazing experience being in Limpopo and I plan to return again when life permits.

smlobx- UVA @ Wise is correct. That college did a lot for me and I can't say enough good things about it.

I have plenty more to share about my time in South Africa. I will be posting more about it very soon.

 

[PhD_Polymath]

While in Limpopo, I experienced a lot of new things. One of these is Indian cuisine. There was a restaurant near where we were staying named Bombay. We called ahead and because of the size of our group, the owner gave us a time and essentially opened the restaurant to us in the late evening. The food was incredible!





I mentioned that I loved SPICY foods and the owner brought out some peppers. He dared me to try one. A few others cautiously pondered whether to join.



I dove right in and definitely approved, as evidenced by my expression in this photo.



After filling up on the great food, we all posed for a group photo.



Since I am on the topic of food, I should mention a somewhat comical story. The day after I had arrived in Limpopo, I went to a local food store to get some essentials. This store baked fresh bread and I was bewildered by the quantity people would purchase (I often saw shoppers with carts nearly full of bread!). I picked up a loaf fresh in its bag and noticed it was not sliced. Thinking this was just a cultural difference, I just took it home that way. When my housemate saw me ripping off pieces of bread from the loaf to make a sandwich, he asked "Why didn't you get them to slice it?" I suddenly realized how ridiculous I must look. Hahah. Well, live and learn, I guess.



Another interesting food-related note is the price of produce was exceptionally low and this resulted in me being nearly vegetarian for most of the trip. The quality of produce was great!





After I had been in Limpopo for awhile, one of the members of our group mentioned an Ethiopian restaurant was nearby. Feeling adventurous, we decided to go. This restaurant was actually someone's garage, but the cuisine was great.

 

[PhD_Polymath]

My housemate developed a strong affinity for pap, so one of the students from the local university decided to instruct us on how to prepare it.



I was enjoying one of my favorite foods in the photo. My housemate thought it was hilarious that I ate onions like apples!



I have since shared pap with family and friends in the states, with mixed reviews. I guess I need to practice more. There is an art to getting the consistency just right.

There were so many other foods that I got to enjoy there, that I still miss to this day after returning to the States. I have replicated chakala and boerewors, with the latter being much more intensive.

When discussing food, I should mention that an offer of food could not be refused. This was hard for me a few times, not because I was being picky, but rather because many people who offered food had so little to spare. Experiences like this reshaped the way I view the world. I was in one shack that was hardly livable and the mother of an infant insisted that my co-worker and I have a serving of the dinner she was preparing for her family. At first, I was going to kindly refuse. But before I got a chance to, my co-worker gestured to take a small portion. After leaving, she explained that to refuse would be much worse than to at least try the food.

Of course my trip wasn't centered around food, but water health. I had the pleasure of helping with multiple projects ranging from helping local villages build water filtration systems and learn about how some water sources can make them sick, to developing protocols for monitoring infants for diarrheal illnesses. We traveled each day into the villages, where the roads ranged from okay to downright bad. I particularly remember a member of the group ripping the oil pan out from under a Volkswagen sedan.







The housing also varied in quality with the metal sheds as seen in the above photos to the mud houses that were quite nice sometimes.



Some views of from the villages were awe-inspiring, such as this view of an Acacia tree from the road.



After visiting the villages, we would sometimes go to the labs at the local university, which was gated with security guards that actually inspected cars entering and leaving. They would even open the trunk. This was quite different from what I had experienced anywhere else.





Right outside the gate, taxis would line up all throughout the day. These were usually toyota vans that looked like Volkswagen Vanogans (sp?). The taxi drivers were reckless in my opinion, swerving onto the sidewalks within less than a foot of pedestrians. I learned to carefully navigate the streets while there.

Inside the university, the labs were well equipped and looked like a lab similar to what I worked in back home.



The work in the labs was the easiest, as we only had to deal with science and samples from the field. Work in the villages was extremely rewarding, but logistically difficult. For example, the communities needed a way to get clean water. There was a municipal water source that supplied water, but the service was intermittent and not everyone had ready access. Samples from commonly used sources were frequently contaminated with enteropathogenic bacteria (would make you sick). To remedy this, the engineering team had worked within the communities to devise a plan to build simple, robust, easy-to-maintain filters in each village. The team even worked with people from each village to build these filters to get the people who lived there involved. That way, the filters would be sustainable and maintenance would be readily performed by the people who used the filters. These filtration systems were large and placement occasionally became a big issue.

This is where the difficulty came in. Because the teams were refreshed as new students were available, time would pass and what was okayed months before became prohibited. I remember a brother of a village stepping in and insisting that the filter site be moved to his property while acting in his brother's stead. Suddenly negotiations about proper placement for the filter halted production. Things like this occasionally came up and it was sad to see it. However, we frequently worked diplomatically to ensure that the village's needs were met and that we didn't offend anyone.

Another problem was mothers would enroll in a program to monitor infant health and not meet with interviewers at key dates. Of course, I understand that such a commitment is hard to keep and we would just try to catch them on another day when it was convenient for them. Unfortunately, due to the distance between villages, some records would simply not be penned in and the next check up would have to suffice.

Sadly, I lost most of my photos of the trip, which included a collection of photos from the field. After returning from South Africa, I had problems with my computer that I had stored the photos on and lost a precious number of photos. This was a very hard lesson in backing up important data that I would not make again.

The best word I could use to describe the work I was involved in is "humbling." I have never been an arrogant person. The time I spent in Limpopo pushed me to think hard about how I approach problems within a cultural context. I made many friends, who I still can communicate with thanks to the internet.

 

[PhD_Polymath]

Of course, no trip to South Africa is complete without a safari! We loaded up a couple vans and headed to Kruger to see native wildlife with a couple of stops along the way.

One of the stops was at a place called "God's Window" in the Mpumalanga province. This qualifies as the most beautiful overlook I have ever seen. We could even see into Mozambique from this vantage point and the view was sublime. I had grown up in mountains with their views, but God's Window impressed me to silence. I could just stare into the horizon for hours and be at peace.





The second stop was at "Echo Caverns," which get their names from the bell-like ring that reverberates through the caverns when some features are tapped with a hard object, as seen in the photo below.





We stayed overnight at a quaint dutch bed and breakfast, where the owner was on pins and needles watching his home country's team playing in the World Cup when we arrived. This was the summer that South Africa hosted the World Cup and the spirit of football was everywhere. Vuvuzelas were always blaring when in cities, much to the chagrin of some of my group after the novelty had worn off. :coffee drink:

We arrived at the Phibeni gate of Kruger early in the morning.



We even got to catch the sunrise over the savannah.



The quantity of wildlife was amazing and I was taking photographs all day.

 

[PhD_Polymath]

This monkey was begging for food from every vehicle that I saw pass by.




I leaned out of the window of the van to capture photos of this lioness and a few of my companions suggested that this may not be a good idea.


I hung out the window to get a photo of this water buffalo and it wasn't particularly happy about that! At this point, I decided playing daring wildlife photographer is best left to the professionals.


I was mesmerized by this bird's colors.

 

[PhD_Polymath]

I also spotted the interesting Land Rover Defender species while at Kruger.


The road trip to Kruger had some stunning views as well.