Looking through the bushes: A student's South African experience

Journal of Multicultural Nursing & Health, Winter 2002 by Rodriguez, Helen

The phone rang late one night and it was a call from my professor, Dr. Allen, from the university. I had turned in a paper a week ago and thought surely it was not that bad that she had to call me at home. I nervously returned the call and was asked the question of a lifetime. "Do you want to go to South Africa for a nursing research project?" I was so surprised and excited I could barely breathe. Many thoughts ran through my head: my husband, my job, and my life. A decision had to be made, and with the encouragement of my husband I decided to go.

Honestly, I never really thought much about South Africa in the past, I never thought about Africa. This was an opportunity to embark upon an experience that would allow me to put theory into practice while learning about different cultures in a different country.

The Minority International Research Training (MIRT) Program, which is funded by the Forgerty Institute and administered through the University of Illinois at Chicago, accepted me into the program. The program's goal is to train minority-nursing students in the field of research. Research is a field that is not well understood and is underrepresented by minorities. The program teaches the research process through hands-on experiences.

The cultural expectations flooded my mind once I received the acceptance letter. Several people asked if I was ready to sleep in the bushes. I had thoughts of wild animals roaming freely in the open land and naked people. I checked the Internet several times to look up information about South Africa. There was information, but none dispelled the preconceived ideas I had conjured up in my mind. I knew that Johannesburg was a historical place, but I knew little about the history. I knew there would be black people and I knew there would be white people. I had read about apartheid, but not the impact it had on the nation of South Africa. I knew this was going to be an unforgettable experience.

I said my good byes to all things familiar to me. I was on my way to a place I have never been, with people I had not met, to do something I have never done, in a country I did not know. I was on my way to South Africa. I boarded the plane expecting that for the next 10 weeks I would be "waiting to exhale".

We finally arrived after 20 flight hours. I saw people of all ethnicities. Johannesburg looked a lot like Dallas, Texas. There were many tall buildings, traffic, cars and even Kentucky Fried Chicken. There were no animals roaming around and people dressed just as we do in America. There were people of all races in the airport. I was pleasantly surprised. We resided in a very nice guesthouse in Pretoria where the only bushes we noted were hedges and the only animals were cats, dogs and birds.

As we drove through the streets of South Africa life here resembled scenes from America. There were some very wealthy areas and some extremely poor areas of homeless people and people selling or begging in the streets. Where were the people you see in Time magazine? Where was the underdeveloped country? I was not prepared for the answers that unfolded as the weeks progressed.

I never appreciated the value of the dollar while in America because it was never quite enough, but in South Africa, one American dollar equaled eight of their Rands. That first transaction immediately suggested to me that the economy might be suffering. In the meantime, however, I was well-- off economically because of the value of the appreciated dollar from America. I wondered what suffering I might encounter.

We worked in rural South Africa in the North West Province. We drove for what seem like hours down a long paved road. However, it was only approximately 73 kilometers (45.5 miles) from Pretoria. There were the poor, the indigenous, and the undeserved. I saw homes made of tin, some from cardboard and sparsely dispersed throughout were small brick government homes. The toilets were outside in a small shack, and there was no running water inside the home at all. People were barefoot, and dusty. We visited the squatter homes in Soweto, an urban community on the outskirts of Johannesburg, where the conditions seemed unbearable. The homes were crowded together and there were people crowding the streets. I expected to see poor people, but this was poverty at its worst.

Apartheid, which means apartness, was instituted in 1948 and abolished in 1994, wounded so many individuals and families. The goal of apartheid was to separate black Africans from the whites. Although slavery was abolished years ago in South Africa, apartheid kept it alive by creating laws that enslaved an entire continent. Blacks were not allowed in the cities after a certain time and even then, they needed to have in their possession a "dompass". It was called "dompass" because blacks were considered stupid and dumb and for them was created a pass for the dummies, the "dompass".

Seven years after the abolishment of apartheid, the passes are gone, but the bondage and oppression remain for many of the black people in the form of poverty. Many poor people are without jobs and the unemployment rates for black