Darrell vs The World

It's Christmas day in Ouro Prêto, Brazil, a peaceful colonial town set amongst lush green hills. I've been fortunate to have met heaps of English speaking (and some Portuguese-speaking) travellers here to spend Christmas with; I'd been experiencing my fair share of solitude, so it has been good to re-establish human contact. I have met a few people here and there - a very eccentric Frenchman (whose name I forgot, so I decided to call him Jean-Claude) who travels with only a tiny daypack, alternating between two very smelly T-shirts, and has no greater plan other than to go fishing at every opportunity possible, fighting the fierce and relentless world with his extremely laid back attitude. He and Guillermo, a Spaniard (also not his real name) provided some welcome company for me in Posadas, Argentina, although they snored in symphony in the dorm room, while Jean-Claude complemented the melody line with some incoherent French mumbling as he slept. Crossing into Brazil, a f...

Since returning from Patagonia, I've been exploring Buenos Aires, as well as nearby Uruguay, before heading northwards towards Brazil. I'm currently in Resistencia, an obscure city that doesn't offer much except for a good place to break up the journey. Perhaps I've configured my itinerary badly, as I find myself too often sitting around waiting a full day in a dead-end town for a bus. I don't like the idea of super-long bus journeys as I have real trouble sleeping, but is the answer to travel this slowly? I was telling some Resistencia locals on a long distance bus that the reason I was going to visit their town was to break up my journey; they then told me they were on day three of a 60 hour bus trip from the far south to the far north of Argentina. I can't fathom that. Seasoned travellers (you know the type: smelly, shirtless, bearded) will tell you 60 hours is easy. I don't really care though - I prefer to sleep in a bed when I'm on holiday. I ...

OK , so I'm travelling again . And I feel mixed about it , because I think I've travelled too much . I feel really privileged to be in a position to go on this trip , but I've already been so privileged to go on so many trips in the last few years that I don't really deserve to go overseas again so soon , and to such an extravagant destination as South America for the second time, especially given that most people in the world will never have the opportunity to visit perhaps even one foreign country , and here I am travelling in every spare moment . So it 's hard justifying the extravagance of this trip just by saying "I've got a job next year so I can afford it ." I just feel that I'm going over the top now . In my last spare summer before my move to Canberra I've chosen to leave for overseas yet again , for the second Chris...

I thought I should write one last blog, mainly because the previous one isn't a nice place to end, with its description of the shooting I witnessed. No need for an update on that business - I'm fine and feel really comfortable, and I visited the site of the incident a few times before I left South Africa, and had no odd feelings. I'll finish my 2009-10 trip blogs with a brief account of the film I made with Justice and Women in the final week of my internship in Kwa-Zulu Natal. You can see it here or at the bottom of the entry. Yanguye High School is plagued by violence, and it has become a pretty bad environment for learning and feeling safe. So JAW's plan was to allow youth to speak on film about their thoughts about what is happening at the school, and what they see as the sources of the violence, and what can be done about it. We wanted a fair representation of different types of students, not just the types who would normally volunteer to come to a workshop abou...

Since my last blog, a few things have happened, mostly building up to making the documentary about youth and violence that we hope to complete by next week. I’m only here for a week and a half more, so we have to move quickly to get it done, but I’m confident we will. There was one incident, though, which deserves a blog entry of its own, and I’d like to share it with you, but at the same time let you know that I’m feeling totally fine and there is no need to be concerned about me. Last Friday, I witnessed a fatal shooting in a supermarket carpark. There are some areas in South Africa where you can sense the dodginess - there’s something about the way people are dressed, about the loitering young men, the rubbish around the place, and general disorder. Such areas are the kind of places I’ve learned to spot since being mugged in one back on Christmas Eve, and the places that I stay clear of generally when I can help it. Melmoth is a small town where the organisation I am working with ...

I’m now three weeks into the Monash-Oxfam internship program in the South African province of Kwa-Zulu Natal, with another three weeks to go. I’m based in the city of Pietermaritzburg, and working with Oxfam’s partner organisation Justice and Women (JAW), a small NGO that works to transform power relations and gender injustice in rural and urban settings here, through HIV/AIDS support groups, an Access to Justice program, particularly for victims of abuse, and a youth program. I’ve been assigned to the youth team, who work in local schools in the rural community of Yanguye to try and encourage dialogue about gender, power and HIV/AIDS. I’ll be training the team in basic filmmaking skills and making a short movie with them and the youth of the high school to encourage debate about schoolyard violence (which is quite severe at this school) and its sources. That’s exciting for me, because the more I think about it, the more I want to shift from my pursuit of a career in straight aid wo...

I finished at CARE Mozambique just before Christmas, and I’m starting with Oxfam in South Africa on the 11th of January. I’ve travelled a bit in between, but rather than listing exactly where I went and what I did I’ll just mention a few things of note. The first event of note was being mugged at knifepoint in the mid sized South African city of Nelspruit (no, Microsoft Word, Nelspruit, not Newsprint). After walking around carefree around even dodgy-looking places in Mozambique, I guess I was a bit more confident about safety, and on my first day back in SA (Christmas Eve) I was walking down a busy street at 9am when three guys surrounded me, held the knife to my throat (didn’t hurt me luckily), emptied my pockets and told me menacingly never to come to that part of town again. White South Africans later confirmed to me that that area of the town is not for white people, ever. What a country. I was treated with a bundle of Christmas kindness, though, when a man called Jono who work...