Man vs. Fence

It is winter here in the southern hemisphere, which for South Africa typically means rain nearly every day. Until this last weekend though, it had honestly rained twice in the five weeks I had been here. While this type of sunny weather is quite nice for us short term visitors, I have been told that the dams won’t be full after this winter like they usually are, and water supply will run low during the inevitable summer drought. Over the weekend though I’m sure the water levels caught up a little bit in the dams because it was not just raining off and on, it was downright pouring most of the time.

One of the side effects of the weather finally catching up to us was that our weekend excursion with our study abroad group, interstudy, had to be postponed a week. On the agenda for the weekend were oceanic kayaking, quad biking (ATVing), whale watching, paintball, and shark cage diving. The fun filled weekend wasn’t cancelled though, just postponed to this upcoming weekend, so I will be blogging about all those shenanigans next week.

Since our weekend was postponed I thought long and hard about making the trip to Jo-burg (Johannesburg) to go to the Tri-Nations rugby match between the South Africa Springboks and the New Zealand All Blacks. In hindsight I wish I would have so I could have avoided the imminent danger to my leg that would occur on that fateful Saturday afternoon. Since I did not purchase a round trip ticket to Jo-Burg I settled for planning on going to a local pub to meet some guys, rep my Boks polo, and cheer on the squad! That seemed like a very good plan B in my mind.

Saturday ended up being a very relaxed morning, filled with sleeping in and not much homework. Paul and I decided to walk to Rondebosch and eat at Steers, a chain burger joint, for lunch. After our meal of burgers and chips (French fries) Paul and I walked back to our flat on Upper Liesbeek Road in Mowbray. Now, the city had the power shut off on our block since 10am, and was planning on doing maintenance until about 3pm. The gate outside our building wasn’t working since the electricity was out, but the gate in front of the building adjacent to ours had been propped open all morning so people could get in and out. When we got back from lunch we came to realize that both gates were shut, and neither of them would open.

There was a girl about our age standing just inside the gate which had previously been propped open, and she informed us that “some idiot closed the gate, and I really need to get to the library to write a paper!” She ended up passing us her backpack and the rest of her belongings over the 7 foot fence, and proceeded to climb to the top of the fence at the corner in front of our building. When she got to the top she kind of froze, and a few more of our American friends had crowded around trying to help her out. Me being the tallest, and strongest, obviously, took charge and lifted her off of the fence and placed her safely on the ground. She was very grateful, but Paul and I still needed to get into our building so we could get our homework to have a study session at our friends’ house across the street.

Paul went first, scampering up the fence and hopping over very gracefully, and I followed suit. Little did I know that the small snag I got in my jeans was just the beginning of my issues. Since theft is so common here literally every housing building has a gate around it with spikes all over. I caught my jeans on a spike on the side of the fence, but I didn’t think much of it. I grabbed my books and jumped over the fence to the other side so I could study study study. Once I got to Grace and Judy’s house I realized that my jeans had blood on them by where the snag was, so I rolled up my pant leg to check out the damage. To my utter surprise, there was a legitimately open wound on the inside of my left knee.

Judy and Taylor graciously accompanied me to the ER down the road in Claremont where we got to sit around for about 4 hours. But on the bright side, Taylor learned how to do stitches so if this ever happens again we won’t have to go to the ER! Now, four days later, my wound looks very clean and isn’t infected at all so there shouldn’t be any complications, but surely I will have a sweet scar with a funny story to boot!