Where I Stay

We can't help but delight in some of the differences between American and South African English. Here, the trunk of a car is called the boot and an impatient motorist will hoot at you if you're driving too slow. Our favorite by a longshot is the robot, aka traffic light, for its entertaining mental image, not to mention the irony of reserving the name for such a simple and ubiquitous technology (how about the computer?).

On the way back from the wedding on Sunday we made a couple stops to drop off some friends, and as they directed us to their homes they would say "I stay on this street" or "I stay with Zinhle." I thought it a strange expression for permanent residents of Pietermaritzburgh but brushed it off as another South African idiosyncrasy. As it turns out, more than a semantic quirk, the term speaks volumes about the meaning of home in our largely Zulu patient population. For me, New York City is home (for the last three years), Long Island and Upstate NY before that and so on. Most of us can identify with having a "home town" where we grew up, but Americans tend to designate the place they presently live as home, or at least allow it as one of several places to call home. Even here, Val and I were calling our accomodations in Pietermaritzburg "home" within a day of arriving (on vacation, the hotel is home- ever catch yourself saying that?).

On rounds, Val was seeing a patient with one of the attending physicians (called consultants here), and they ran into some trouble clarifying the patient's social situation. When asked where he lived, the patient gave the name of a rural spot that didn't make sense in the context of ending up at Edendale. They asked several times, but only got the answer they were looking for when the question was posed as "where do you sleep at night?". This is apparently not an uncommon misunderstanding. It illustrated for us the ties that our Zulu patients feel with the land and culture of their upbringing. Especially after being welcomed into some Zulu rites and catching a glimpse of the breathtaking countryside over the weekend, I could certainly undersand where that feeling originates. I also couldn't help but feel a sense of loss when contrasting that bond with our own ties, which seem to be loosening account of our nomadic lifestyles.