Another early day! Buske spent several hours this morning in a borrowed office working while Carol worked making our arrangements for the final leg of our trip — Cape Town.
This morning we met with a group of UFS faculty — both from the law school and the language school. They are re-evaluating how to teach legal writing & research to students who speak different languages with the added complication that professors are often not teaching in their first language. Very complicated! It was an interesting discussion!
From there we had an informal lunch meeting with a smaller group of law faculty. They took us to a student dining hall — we were clearly the only faculty in the place! We’re not sure what we ate — it was a cross between a big biscuit and a pancake and was stuffed with eggs, cheese & bacon. Then we had donuts for desert!
AFter lunch Buske guest lectured in a couple of classes. UFS students must write a major thesis before they can graduate. Buske lectured about developing a thesis — she used the topic of embryo adoption as the basis. Embryo adoption — as a legal and moral concept — was something none of the UFS students had ever heard of. It was interesting to hear how they framed the issue and what sort of things they took for granted as being a non-issue. Most students, for example, simply assumed that an embryo is “human” and were surprised at the idea of framing the issue as a property or tissue/organ issue. What an interesting class — not in the least because it was held in the agricultural/farming building and we could smell the dead animals stored in the basement!
Late this afternoon we went to Leborne — an orphange for children infected and affected by HIV/AIDS. There were about 40 children, ranging in age from birth to 16, who lived there full-time. There’s another 40 or so children who attend the day care center on a daily basis. Some of the children are HIV+ and some of them have lost their parents to AIDS. The youngest was a set of twins who are about 8 months old — they weigh about 7 pounds. It was both sad and encouraging — sad that there’s a need for such places and encouraging because these children seemed cared for and cared about.
It was another emotional day — up and down. The poverty and need here is so overwhelming. But there’s also great joy and hope here too.
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