Welcome to Africa

Hello all!
After a long, long flight I finally made it safely to SA. The flight was very uneventful so I won't bore you with those details. After our plane touched down and we collected our bags we went to exchange our dollars for rands. I gave them $200 and got back over R2000! I had no idea it was going to be that much and at the same time I had no idea how far that money would go. Turns out that a meal is usually under R50, which would only be $5. Pretty good deal, huh?!
Ok, back on track…Maureen, our program coordinator, picked us up from the airport and took us to our host family’s house. There we met Sibongile (see-bon-gee-lay), our house mom, her husband, Tat, their 2 sons Boom-boom (16) and Thulani (14) and their grandmother, Elizabeth (or Go-go). Minus Sibongile and Elizabeth, those are all nicknames. Their real names are extremely hard to say, let alone remember. I’ll have them write them down for me and I’ll post them later. They are all very nice and Boom-boom especially loves talking to us. Their house is not the nicest but it does the job. Lindsay and I are staying in a room with 2 double beds. There is no AC in the house so it can get a little hot at times but not really too bad.
When we first got into Durban it was dark out so we really couldn’t see much of the city. It is actually quite beautiful if you are looking at it from a distance. There is a lot of greenery everywhere as it overgrows here due to their climate. When you take a closer look, every house is surrounded with a cement wall and gate for protection and all the shops have bars on the windows. The streets are fairly littered with garbage in most places and they are also decorated with people selling trinkets and other goods to drivers as they wait at stop lights. There are lots of horns honking at people crossing the streets at the wrong times and in the wrong places and at other cars. The drivers are very impatient. Perhaps much like NYC. They also drive on the wrong side of the road which should be a challenge when we rent a car for our weekend trips.
Mostly everyone speaks English along with either/both Afrikaans or Zulu. We are trying to learn some of these words but so far this has proven to be a bit challenging. The letter “Q” in Zulu is a clicking noise that you make with your tongue against the roof of your mouth and the letter “C” is a click you make with the side of your mouth. So thank goodness they all know English!
Monday we mostly just rested and had a small orientation so it was pretty uneventful. Tuesday we had to get our student ID cards which are required to get in to every place on campus and the hospital. We are working at King Edward VII Hospital which was built in the 1930s and when we first walked into it Lindsay said to me: “Reminds me of a prison” and I agreed with her. I don’t think it has really been updated since it was built. It was explained to us that this was a public hospital and the people with little money go here. There are private hospitals that supposedly are very, very nice. We might try and tour one later. For the first 2 weeks we are going to be working in the Pediatric Resuscitation unit (intensive care) and the second 2 weeks will be spent in adult medicine. We made rounds this morning on the babies and a lot of them are in for lung infections, some of which are a complication of HIV but not most. I’ll hopefully be able to post some pics later to show you what the facilities look like. It is very different from the states.
We did get to go to the beach last night and it was wonderful. There were some pretty big waves though so there was no chance of having a relaxing float on the water. But the sun felt great and the sand was warm.
Well that’s all for now. Hope all is well back home and I look forward to hearing from you!