Alex and I don’t have the most graceful relationship. In a five-minute span today I was the most socially awkward and clumsy that I have ever been. My research partner and I were headed back up the hill and over the wall to the Sixth Avenue clinic to meet the women’s support group (we arrived to late because RHREDI offered us breakfast). The five-minute span started with a local man making the international sign for masturbation at me. Then the smells of the township’s local dump and the sight of a dead, decomposing rat, distracted me. There was also a cop down the road that turned on his siren and I tripped over a loose brick sized piece of pavement. I fell, practically sprawled out flat in the middle of the road. I got up hopped over the wall and then almost immediately another young man grazed my breast.
After this eventful start, the girls took us to see the Juksei River. The levels of pollution are unbelievable. And people live literally within a few feet of the watercourse. The though of children playing in the water or anyone using the water to drink or wash clothes with is heartbreaking. On the way back into town, we stopped by the house of one of our guides. It was an informal structure (plywood and corrugated metal) with a small kitchen and one room that is divided into a bedroom and a living room. She has a DVD player and TV that run on illegal electricity. The house has no bathroom but she does have a bucket or something similar that she uses as a toilet. Seeing and knowing people, in a tangible concrete manner, that live like this really calls your humanity into question. Knowing what I have and what I have complained about in New York seems beyond greedy and selfish. As we were leaving, my partner told the guide to turn off the lamp so as to save money and electricity. The guide replied that if she paid for the electricity she would but since it was an illegal hookup it didn’t matter.
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