K-Staters in South Africa Blog - Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Up early again today; most days we need to be on the bus by about 7:30am. So if you want breakfast, well, you gotta get your boodadoe out of bed. We’ve done pretty well at that. Little Richard is not what you’d call a morning person. More like a late afternoon person, but he gets up. Just don’t talk to him for awhile. Shelby has also gotten up well without the help of Rooi Bul (Red Bull). I believe we’re weaning her off her normal dose of 3 kilos of caffeine/day. Yes, positive things can come from these trips. For example, Bailey has talked much less like a sailor lately. Encouraging. Others need a dose of caffeine also: Dana and Lesley were ecstatic that they finally found some Mountain Dew at a truck stop. This is Coke country down here, so it’s hard to find Pepsi products. I myself like a good Dew and have been also been deprived. Although this helps in keeping the bathroom stops minimized during bus travel. Micro-bladder syndrome. You can Google it if you don’t understand.

We visited a place called the Fair Deal Training Center. It is run by a remarkable woman, Sabina Khoza. From pretty much nothing after she moved out of Soweto, Sabina has set up this farm to train people in sustainable agriculture. They raise chickens and vegetables for their own food. They also sell some products to local markets. She has taken in orphans and people in need from many places around southern Africa. These people working at that farm were as friendly as we’ve come across. I really enjoy walking around and watching our kids fan out to talk and hug and laugh with these local folks. It is really heartwarming. (Trying not to get all mushy here; I mean, I still like American football and gutting a fish, but it’s hard not to get a bit emotional with some of our American-African people interaction). Your kids do a great job of this. As we left, the women on that farm sang a song with harmony that was great. This tour stop got two thumbs up by all of us. Even Richard and we’re not sure he was even awake as he mingled.

Next we were off to one of the most beautiful beef ranches I’ve ever been on. They raised Bonsmara cattle and have a sale coming up in a couple weeks. There is a big sale barn on the place with permanent bleachers and show ring. The pens to hold the lots on sale day are over short turf grass. I mean, it’s the kind of grass you wish your golf ball landed on when you hit off the tee. (I’m thinking we should get Breiner-Man at our Purebred barn to plant some grass for a nice lawn for our lot bens before our K-State sale. Why not? It’s only time and money. We’ve got plenty of that). We then looked at some of his cattle, an impressive breed for down here. We got a couple fake bull palpation pictures, for future students to play the “What’s Wrong With This Picture?” Game. We did have a comment from someone in our group asking about whether certain cattle in a pen were pregnant. Luckily this question wasn’t asked too loud for the owner to hear, because it was going to be hard for this pen of bulls to be pregnant. Unless the uterus in these breeds hang extremely ventral in the back of the animal and look like “she” is having ‘twins’, if you get my drift. (If not, that’s OK, not everyone has a PhD in reproductive physiology. I’m not being pompous here, it’s kind of an inside joke. Suffice it to say, repro phys is not getting the respect globally it deserves. But again, I digress). We gave our host an “Eat Beef” license plate, and we think he liked it. He said there is another slogan they have in South Africa: “Don’t Be Chicken, Eat Beef”. That would also make a cool license plate back in Kansas, although we might have to get wider vehicles.

Finally, just some constructive notes of over the last couple days. We ate at a KFC (vintage South Africa, nice choice team) and I did the classic “shoot the straw paper off the straw” trick. Just thinking of my own kids back home. I thought it was cool, but Zana says, “Very mature, DrG”. So good news: your kids can recognize maturity, or lack thereof. Later in a convenience store, I wondered out loud, “Should get a candy bar?” Maura says, “You might as well, you only come to Africa once.” Great advice, Maura. So I went ahead and bought that South African Snickers bar.

Stayed at a very nice bed and breakfast tonight. There are card games going on all the time within the group. I, for one, am not smart enough to play cards, but glad it keeps the youngsters occupied. (Every once in awhile I’ll throw in a Bill Snyder-ism, if you notice in the last sentence).

Still healthy and glad we are,

DrG for DrP and The Youngsters