Recapitulate

Recapitulate (v)- to review by a brief summary, as at the end of a speech or discussion; summarize.

When you don’t write for so long, it’s hard to start again because there are so many things to be said that one doesn’t know where to start. Excuses if there is no logical, even chronological flow in whatever follows.

I haven’t been writing for so long because… I dunno, really. I was extraordinarily busy with school for a few months, that’s one reason. Also, the internet at our house was down for most of a month, with intermittent periods of regular internet access. That has been an interesting exercise in time and resource management. I also sort of lost interest in writing. It felt like a chore more than a constructive activity. I reactivated my Facebook account so I could more easily communicate with people but it seems all I do is a fair bit of lurking. 

So, to recapitulate the past few months: 

What have I been up to… I became SCUBA certified. I had moderate success with my exams. I had four distinctions and one equivalent of a B+. The B+ was in my honours class, the exam for which was an 8 hour writing session. I'm happy with my marks. I had a wonderful vacation in July; my grandmother, mother, and sister came to visit. We went around P.E., to Cape Town, the Kruger area, and Johannesburg too. It was really an eye-opening experience for all of us. Seeing and meeting people from different parts of the country was rather humbling. We also had incredible animal encounters. It would probably take three pages to list all we saw at the game reserves we visited. My favorites were elephants trumpeting at the riverside, a civet, a group of white rhinos grazing in the sunset, and a pack of African wild dogs with their puppies. This trip also helped show me how much I had changed in the last few months. I felt very apart from my American family but still totally distanced from South African people as well. Identity changes with knowledge and experience, I suppose, along with convictions and beliefs. 

University started back up at the end of July. I had a module on evolution which took us on a fossil hunting excursion to the Karroo! That was amazing. No therapsids (mammal-like reptiles) were found by the class, but I found a trilobite pygostyle, some Glossopteris leaf imprints, and some casts of ancient brachiopods. My paleontologist dreams from my early life were coming true. We were also treated to San and Khoi rock art, a trip to Nieu-Bethesda to see the famous Owl House, and some of the best goat cheese I have ever eaten in my life. Wow. 

Can you look closely and see the rock art in the back?

The Owl House. I'll tell you all about it sometime.

Kompasberg from Ganora Farm, in the Karroo

What else… the weather has been right dreadful. As I write, the rain has been pouring non-stop for two days straight, with no indications of cessation anytime soon. I have spent many days hanging out watching movies and ‘scratching around on the internet,’ to borrow a phrase from my friend Stephen. I did an ecology project on hermit crabs; I wrote a massive project on the evolution of sex-determining mechanisms in reptiles and gave a presentation on this fascinating (bold= sarcasm) topic in front of the assembled zoology department; I extracted and sequenced frog DNA as a part of a larger biogeographic study on Strongylopus grayii, the clicking stream frog. I saw a pod of dolphins and a pod of whales. I saw a chameleon on my way to school on my birthday! Stephen took me to a reptile collector’s place where we held giant reticulated pythons (sorry, we didn’t take pictures) and we saw black mambas (eeek!). I’m reading copiously. I’m still volunteering somewhat regularly at the penguin rehabilitation center. Oh! I'm also volunteering teaching reading at a township school. I'll definitely talk more about that later.

 

For now, I’m mostly trying to enjoy the time here without worrying too much because home is little more than a month away. Although the end of the year is approaching quickly, this has been the longest year of my life, I think. Time has never been so reluctant to cooperate with me. Under expected circumstances, I would have wanted the year to go by slowly so that I could enjoy each moment to the fullest.  In actuality, I never foresaw how much I would miss the comfort of home. The familiarity, yes, but mostly the sensation that I know what to expect of the coming day and that the people I love the most are within arm’s reach.

I don’t know that with my knowledge of this year I would make the same choice to study abroad. I have made many mistakes and experienced some great sorrows. That being said, this has been an enlightening experience. The fact that it wasn’t a wholly positive lesson does not diminish its importance as a learning experience. I keep using that word. I know now that as much as I would like to volunteer with the Peace Corps in my future life, I am not a strong enough person to go on my own. I’m not giving up on that dream, just altering it slightly. At some point, I’ll make a list of everything I have learned this year. I do that every year, usually at the end of the school year but this year will be especially poignant. A recapitulation of this year, in one liners. I think that will explain the lessons I learned but leave out the nuances of the year, which I'm fine in keeping for now.