The Wizard of Oz

Ok so I have 20 minutes to write 200 words... that is 10 words per minute excluding the breaks during which I stop to take a sip of the BOILING hot water next to me.

I have never, never, never experienced heat as extreme as this. I live where it is known to snow one month and then two months later it is a scorching day but this is something completely new to my blood. It burns! I can't think, can't sleep and definately cannot concentrate on that bloody Journ portfolio which is due tomorrow.

We had our Res photo today. Dress code- wait for it- black. Black?! Why?! After two minutes in the sun I was sweating more than a fat man on a tread-mill. It is intense! Grahamstown is known to throw out some pretty strange weather patterns but this is just too much!

Thank goodness for my granny's old fan. Cranked up to full blast (screw the electricity bill- I'm hot) it relieves my sticky skin. Without it I worry that I may melt away like the Wicked Witch of the West.

Yours in melting,
Lauren

Lies, damn lies and statistics

by Lauren Roodt
Am I the only one who chose Rhodes instead of WITS because I was under the illusion that it was a quaint little place with relatively safe surroundings? Whoa, was I falsely informed! The year started off with an explosion of rapes. Now we are moving towards muggings on campus, attacks in town and even more rapes. Things are happening which should be beyond any reasonable human's capability and they are getting worse. Our Student Zone reads three stories on crime affecting our students. What type of message is this sending to future Rhodents?

I have noticed that CPU (Campus Protection Unit) have put up more SOS buttons but are these going to make any difference? Yes, it is very reassuring to know that you can hit a button to call for help when the next sub-humanoid leaps in front of you, but when push comes to shove how many of these attacks happen in the vicinity of the SOS buttons? Not many I recon. "Use in case of emergency". But when does something become an emergency? Is it only once you have been pulled to the ground and pinned down and had the blood sucked from your veins? To refer to Cannibals story "Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean I'm not being followed...": If one is feeling insecure are they entitled to push these buttons? An ejector button in a space ship is there to be pushed before the aircraft crashes... surely these buttons should work in the same way.

With the rapid swell of crime in Grahamstown I believe we need act before the emergency arrives. There is no use in hitting the emergency button once you have been stripped of all your possessions. Yes, it is stupid to go walking alone at night and perhaps we do put ourselves in places where only the dead would dare walk, but even so we should not have to walk around in fear of what is going to emerge from the next crack in the sidewalk.

But, before becoming hermits who refuse to leave our room we also need to remember that small towns have big impacts. Here, everybody knows everyone- it is then that nightmares become reality because it all hits closer to home.

Dilemma of the motor heads

Recently I was given a car by my Tallests (Parents to you earth-a-noids) and I filled it with pathetic, inefficient, polluting earth fuel and made the slow and inefficient journey to Rhodes. My feeling of elation could not be matched, for I had successfully completed a 1500km journey and hit 8 pedestrians on the way, but this joy was short lived, for when I arrived at my destination I saw there was an increase in the amounts of earth grubs (some call them students) who now possessed various pathetic earth vehicles. This resulted in a parking crisis for yours truly. I attempted to purchase the services of one of the pariahs on the streets to make sure the parking I was eyeing would not fall into the hands of one of my inferiors. However the job was not completed successfully and I had to dispose of my parking slave. So on a clouded evening I disposed of the corpse in the reservoir to further contribute to the pollution levels of the water... Sorry, I seem to be straying off my topic. When you are blessed with superiority over a certain species you find more time to worry about these important issues in life such as parking. However, let me continue. Thus I have attempted many other brilliant plans to acquire parking, such as destroying some of these earth vehicles, but for each one I dispose of there are two more that try hustle my parking. Is there anyone out there with a solution to parking problems? I might just have to swallow my pride (Heaven forbid) and ask the institution to make more space for earth vehicles to park. Pft, get real, that will never happen!

Getting Down and Dirty

by Lauren Roodt

Ah, you have got to love us Ruth First girls. What a team we are! On Saturday a couple of our girls teamed up with the boys from Centenary to plant a veggie garden for Cynthia's Soup Kitchen in Joza. Cynthia feeds many children in the area by providing them with regular meals. If only we had more selfless people like her in the world.

Putting the little old bakkie in danger of defying legal carrying codes we all enthusiastically piled into the back. Benita balanced precariously on a rake while I steadied myself against the sharp edge of a spade. With our spades, rakes and watering cans my alter ego - farm girl came out to play. My body sang to have a spade in hand as I put my back into it to turn the soil. My nose flarred to take in as much of the smell of newly turned earth that it could and my fingers itched to dig deeper. Pressing the soil firmly around the baby seedlings was like sealing a promise to the children of good food and care our the next few weeks. So humbling.

Everybody was having a blast! Passers-by stopped to chat and give their advice and many asked when they could have us visit their gardens. It dawned on me how important it is to be able to speak isiXhosa and made me revisit the abandoned thought of taking it to second year. Although we could communicate roughly it would have been fascinating to speak to the vibrant young boys and to ask the old man with the crinkled yellow hat where he had been. It was beautiful to see us all getting stuck in with the common bond of producing something worthwhile.

Ruth First and Centenary are considering taking this on as a fixed project. We will help Ma-Cynthia to maintain the garden and to provide the necessary gardening tools she might need. We also hope to start up more gardens in other areas of Grahamstown. With 70% of our town unemployed we all need to pull our weight to reduce the massive amount of hungry kids.