April 10, 2007 - A secure life...

The one thing I’ve noticed most about this country is their devotion to security measures. All of the houses and buildings I’ve seen are behind locked metal gates with spikes topping their posts or electric fences bordering the top. The apartments we stay in have a brick security fence along the outside perimeter with metal pedestrian and car gates that require a key or code to enter. Along the top of the brick wall is attached a metal spiked strip and then above that is about a foot of electric fencing wires. I have a key for my burglar bars, one for the door, one for the bathroom and 2 for the closets.

I mention the security thing because even the University is fenced in. Students (or in our case visitors with passes) must swipe their cards to go through a rotating metal bar door – for both going in and going out. Also, when entering the department you must swipe your card to gain entry. And I’ve noticed that no one here leaves their office open unless there’s someone in it. Even the printer/copier room has a code to gain entry to it.

In writing this I’m not trying to say that this much security is a bad thing or that we’re in danger most of the day. Far from it…the people that we’ve met have been nothing but friendly and accommodating. I’m just commenting on the differences between how life is back home compared to here. I wonder what visitors from here to the US think of all of our open yards and doors. I may show complete ignorance here, but I wonder if all the security measures that are in place are from a mentality leftover from the many years before South Africa became a democratic state. It does seem as if their transformation took place overnight but all of those years spent before had to have taken their toll.

To change the tide of thought, we started work at the University of Pretoria today (locally called Tuks). We met Professor Theo Bothma in the Departemente Inligtingkunde (Information Science Department) who is heading up the IFLA project that we’ll be working on here. He’s an extremely friendly fellow who insists on us calling him Theo, although I’m not able to and stick with Professor Bothma. (It’s this respect-your-elders thing that I’ve got, I still call friends parents by Mr. & Mrs. Just because I feel funny using their first names.) He went over in detail the work that we’ll be performing, which is basically a lot of internet research. So far, they’ve sent out e-mail surveys to the known National Libraries or Library Associations for 170+ countries so as to try and get information back from on the state of freedom of information and access in their country for three separate topics: 1) HIV/AIDS awareness information, 2) information access for women, and 3) anti-terrorism legislation and information access. They’ve received a couple back but not as many as necessary yet.

Our main task to begin with will be locating new contact information for those countries where the original didn’t work or locating any contact information for those countries who weren’t even on the list. Before you think that this is too simple a task, keep in mind that trying to find library information for some of the lesser known countries like Nagorno-Karabakh (a smaller independent territory within Azerbaijan that’s working their way towards becoming a full-fledged country) isn’t easy. Also, sometimes I’m able to find all sorts of random information on the country but not exactly what I’m looking for. For example, I was able to locate the national strategic plan for the Marshall Islands (a way for them to improve their country from 2003-2018), which was amazing to read, but nothing pertaining to their libraries.

We’re fortunate in that we have an entire room to ourselves to work on the items. It’s normally a research assistants room. It contains 4 desks and chairs, 4 computers with internet access and a whole lot of space. We’ve each got our own keys for access as well. (Oh, forgot to mention, we’ve even got keys for the bathroom!) Once we’d gone over what had been done, we 4 sat down and devised a plan of attack on the material we’d been given. A division of labor and we were off. Being the info savvy individuals we are, a database for cataloging what had been completed including color-coded data had been created within the first ½ hour.

When noon rolled around, Prof. Bothma took us on a small tour of our area of campus, enough so to familiarize us with the different things we might be interested in. Since it was lunchtime, he pointed out the plethora of options we might have available to us. We settled on eating at Burgundy’s café which is basically a full-scale restaurant in the middle of this part of campus. We each had a great meal (mine was a ham & cheese quiche with chips [French fries]) and got to relax a little bit.

After lunch we stopped into the UP Bookstore for some shopping where I picked up some souvenirs for family/friends and a new nation patch to go with the others I have on my bulletin board at home. Then we popped over to the Travel Agency they have here on campus to speak with Kathy about different sight-seeing options. Rebecca H. had known Kathy from the last time she traveled here 2 years ago. This woman is quite the character and has an amazingly cool accent! She also offered up a ton of suggestions for us for our weekends. Too many in fact, since we don’t have enough time here to see everything. I’m thinking that we may be off to Capetown this coming weekend as there are lots of options there. Alissa wants to go cage-shark diving, I’ve offered to help feed the sharks so that there will be action for her to see but I’m not getting off of that boat. There’s also the possibility of us driving along the coast, visiting Robin Island where Nelson Mandela was held, visiting a vineyard, and I hear of a place for some mega bungee-jumping. We’ll have to see about all that though.

Back to work, most people in this department leave at 4:30p but since they arrive here at 7:30a, that’s completely understandable. We keep looking for those random country addresses until about 6p. Prof. Bothma dropped by earlier to let us know that we shouldn’t work so hard. We also met a few of his colleagues here, and they mentioned the possibility of sitting in on a class here, which we think would be great!

I recall that today is my brother, Jeremy, and his wife's, Tiffany, birthdays as well as anniversary, so I send them good thoughts and hope that they received the gift I mailed home for them before I left for here. It must be kind of nice for them to have only one day to remember, but then again, if one of them forgets that would be massive considering all of the important occurances at a singular point in time.

Our journey home took us in a round about way so that we could stop at the grocery in Hatfield for more supplies. I was a good student and read through the articles and slides for this upcoming week so that I could try and keep up with the folks back home. And then it was sleepy time to dream of subject vocabulary and African safaris…