October 31, 2007

Happy Halloween! South Africa doesn’t celebrate Halloween, so we didn’t dress up and there were no trick-or-treaters. Unless you count us dressing up as “nurses” to go to clinical as a costume!

We started the last week of clinical today (thank goodness!). And of course, Leslie and I sat in the psychologist’s office for an hour and a half before the nurse was ready for us to listen in on her sessions with patients. It was a little more interesting today because we had a new patient to the clinic and I could watch her do the initial interview and I was able to talk about what my diagnosis would be for the patient. Sure enough though, all of the patients spoke Afrikaans, and when they would speak English they would default back to Afrikaans and I wouldn’t be able to understand what was being said. At 11:50, Leslie and I want out to wait for our ride…and we waited…and waited. Finally at 12:30 I went into the clinic to call Denise to tell her that I think we were forgotten about. Denise made a few phone calls and a half and hour later a kombie came to pick us up. It was great fun sitting in the parking lot in Central PE, in not the safest of areas. Let’s just say that we were a little frustrated and it wasn’t a funny Halloween trick.

We made it home to Langerry with only a half hour to grab lunch, change, and hit the road to NMMU for a three hour lecture on the democratic negotiations from 1990-1994. We were all dreading the class, but it actually was very interesting. We had a guest professor teach our class, and we have had him before and he gets very long winded, but he kept my attention the entire time! After class we came back home and Alex started a fire in our braai pit and we all cooked our meat and he made potatoes and we all brought our own veggies to have a Halloween dinner! We listened to spooky music and sat around and ate dinner! I spent the rest of the night working on my political science paper (the last one for classes for the semester!) and then went to bed!

I hope that everyone had a happy and safe Halloween! I want to see pictures of cute costumes!