Hello Everyone,
Happy Halloween! It’s strange, not that many people
celebrate Halloween here. Well, I guess it’s not strange, Halloween is a very USA
thing and since this isn’t the good ‘ol USA, why would people randomly dress up
and wander the streets in the pursuit of sweets? (Seriously though, why WOULDN’T
they?) In honor of Halloween, I am
wearing my Halloween earrings that Al bought me – Thanks love! Regardless
though, me and few friends did a go a Halloween party this Saturday at the Cape
Town City Hall. Amazing! A national monument was turned into a party venue for
dressed up drunk people. It was complete with two different dance halls and
amazing DJs and music. It was a good, great time. I dressed up a dancer from MJ’s
Thriller. Yes!
I would say pictures are coming, but I never use my camera…
Oh, and I am really getting hit hard by allergies here. Just
today I woke up at 5am because my throat was super scratchy and my nose was oh
so congested! LOL. I’m sure you’re glad I shared that.
Okay, so on to more fulfilling life things. Last week’s Ladies Club meeting was awesome! For
those of you that don’t know, I started a Ladies Club in Masi. Basically, I
want it to be a safe place for young women to come and discuss issues that they
deal with every day. The topics cover
just about anything and I hold a near and dear spot in heart for issues dealing
with self-identity, self-respect, empowerment, critical thinking, and you
guessed it – sex and sexuality.
Last week’s topic was Women in the Media. We started off by
showing the trailer for Miss Representation, a film that looks awesome! I will
place the link at the end of this blog post if I remember. Basically though,
this film examines how the media portrays women and what messages it sends to
women. It looks at the fact that even the most powerful women in the country
are still looked at in terms of their appearances and not so much their
abilities. Next, we watched Destiny’s Child “Independent Women” which has the
Destiny’s Child members looking sexy while singing about being empowered and independent. The conversation that arose from these videos
and themes was awesome. We examined the differences between being powerful and
being independent, whether it was a good or bad thing to be sexy, and even what
the term “sexy” means. The conversation went deeper to examine why
advertisements for women still featured sexualized women products to women. We
also (briefly) discussed gender roles in the Xhosa community and how women were
expected to be sexy yet innocent.
Overall, it was awesome to see so many of the young women participating
and voicing their opinions. For this week, I am not sure what I am going to
do. I think I am going to start talking
about sex and that’ll be an awesome jump off point for things like teenage
pregnancy, abortion, rape, STIs, etc… Next we can move into peer pressure and
drugs.
Other than that, I am still looking for a position doing
research here. If anyone has any ideas or connections, please send them my way.
My nerdy, technical side wants to get really involved in being technical about
a certain disease or topic or spread of disease.
LoveYouALL.
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