The Drive Back to Pretoria

I made it back to Pretoria. I woke up early enough to make it back in one day. It was a nice 15 hours to jam to home-made cds and sit in my own thoughts (Highly recommended by the way).

One thing I kept thinking about was how familiar this place was. For the first half of the drive I kept thinking that I had been here before and completely chalked it up to the fact that I had made a very similar drive, slightly different route, but very similar when Will and I drove down almost two weeks ago. But about half-way through the drive I started thinking my familiarity with this country was a lot deeper than one drive two weeks ago.

The grand conclusion for the drive was that this place is America all over again. Sounds crazy but that is what I have decided. Cape Town is like San Francisco, Johannesburg is Detroit. The people are obsessed with sports, almost as obsessed with sports as they are with TV. We call ourselves the melting pot bu there they have 11 national languages. They all speak English but make fun of eachother for their different accents. They have a government run by a black majority, which all the white people think is corrupt, like Memphis. Fruit grows down around the coast (California), and for hundreds of miles in the middle of the country all you see is cows and corn (Nebraska).

The only differences I could think of are that they all sing a lot better than any of us, they say howzit instead of whatzup (both equally indifferent to the response), and they drive on the left side of the road...which was contantly on my mind Thursday. That's about it.

Maybe we aren't so special over in America after all. But you still gotta love the good old Red White and Blue. There is no place like it (I recognize the contradiction). I'm coming home tomorrow. Flight leaves at 8:20 pm South African time, 1:20 pm Memphis time. I'm really ready. It has been a great experince, and Will and I learned a ton, but I'm ready to be home. Love to talk about the trip with you so just ask, or call, or make a lunch appointment.

This won't be the last post. I plan on reading back through my journal and trying to summarize some stuff, so stay tuned for a long one.

Paarl

Look it up on the globe, Paarl is this little town about 45 minutes from Cape Town. It is really beautiful (this area is probably the most scenic place I have ever been), and it is where I have been for the last 3 days, there and Stellenbosch. There is a group out here that has a bunch of clinics in this rural part of South Africa, so I have been in and out of some clinics out here and helping with different projects with these folks.

Dr. Nelis Grobbelaar runs and organizes a lot of the clinics out here and I have been in his back pocket for three days. He has been wonderful to me: incredibly welcoming, genuinely encouraging, and just nice to be around. He has been picking my American brain for the last couple of day trying to understand us, learn from us. He is 45 years old, he doesn't know me, why in the world would he give a rip aobut my opinion or perspective? But he did. Like he wanted to know what the American dream was, and what my American dream. He wanted to know about generation differences and the effects of internet and connectivity and social networking on our society. These were fascinating conversations to be having with a South African Dr. It was wonderful, made me feel great, and I think I learned as much from how he treated me as I did from how he treated patients or clinics or HIV.

On the other hand, he does have a lot of neat ideas about HIV treatment. He is on the forefront of moving clinics to nurse-initiated treatment, electronic medical records, and general HIV treatment. Because of the huge numbers of the epedemic, they are putting in place new ways to distribute drugs, keep track of patients, and break down some of the things that hinder treatment. He sees so much more to the problems than the physiology difficulties of the disease which in my experience is incredibly rare for a doctor.

There has been much more to this last chapter of the HIV tour (like Shoots and ladders baord game with an HIV twist, flipping through charts to collect clinical data, and chatting with the technology assistant guy who manages the electronic medical records system), but that is enough for tonight. Internet in Paarl is expensive.

Tomorrow I am back on the road headed toward Pretoria. Stopping tomorrow night in Kimberly... I think. It is just a long uneventful day of driving through the Karroo. Should be back in Pretoria Friday night and flying out of this deal on Sunday night. It is wrapping up in a hurry.

Entropy

Physical law of nature--in a given system, molecules tend to decrease in the degree of "order" or entropy in the system. It takes a net input of energy into the system to maintain or increase the order of the system.

For example, if you put a carving (highly ordered object) in a sealed jar, give it enough time and that jar will just have dirt (much less ordering of molecules) in it.

On Saturday I hiked up Lion's Head, a small hill/mountain in Cape Town. It was a gorgeous hike, beautiful weather, great day. On the hike however, you can't help but notice all the boulders and rocks that have rolled off the top of the mountain and lie at the base and all along the way to the top. The other thing I noticed is that the trail is really well built, and someone has hauled these wire baskets or cages filled with rocks (their are kinda like portable brick walls) up the trail and placed them in different places on the trail to prevent erosion. They support and hold the dirt and other rocks on the mountain. If they weren't there the trail would have washed out long ago.

It is the law of entropy in action. The mountain tends toward disorder. It's tendency is to end up as a little pile of sand blown around by the wind as those huge boulders crumble and get smaller and smaller. Here is the deal though. Someone has put in energy into this system. Someone carried those rock baskets all the way up the mountain. You can't drive up there. There is no lift or anything. Someone carried them up or built them on the trial. Someone put a heck of a lot of energy into that system. I could hardly carry myself up there, much less a couple hundred pounds of rocks. And the whole deal, energy input deal, is simply to keep the mountain like it is, to prevent it from eroding, not even to make it bigger or better or something.

There is another place I have seen the idea of entropy at work, AIDS. The whole deal with HIV/AIDS is just a way that society demonstrates it's tendency toward disorder. You leave society alone and don't put any energy into keeping it going and it breaks down. If you don't treat and educate and work and think and love and care and pour into a community it will become increasingly disordered. It is costing 48 billion dollars and thousands of working hours on the part of tons of people just to keep the HIV prevalence at 12%. Take away all that "energy" and it is going to 50%.

Application: let's step it up and put in energy into the system, not suck the system dry to make our lives fluffier. There is only so long a system, a society, can handle its inhabitants living like parasites, using people and situations, and resources for whatever they can get out of them. We can live in a way that gives people confidence and value and courage and knowledge instead of mining people for those things and keeping it to ourselves. We can increase the order in people and in the system instead of destroying the order.

Sorry for rambling. Just some recent thoughts. More to come.