Rachele's busy week filled with wide variety of activities

This week at the aquarium I started helping out with the turtles. The aquarium isn’t a formal turtle rehabilitation center but in 2015 they rehabilitated more than 150 sea turtles. This week I only helped with tube feeding one of the turtles, Toby. Toby came in with a cut on his neck and when sea turtles get severally injured they tend to shut down, which is why he needed to be tube fed. There can be other reasons a sea turtle would refuse to eat such as an underlying illness or due to ingesting plastic.

           

Tuesday was Human Rights Day and in South Africa it is a national holiday. This made me think about the importance of this holiday is South Africa, and how in America we have a national holiday for Columbus Day, celebrating the ‘discovery’ of America.  I think America needs to reconsider this public holiday celebrating the genocide of Native Americans; it should be replaced with something similar to Human Rights Day or something like Indigenous Peoples Day.

           

I used my day off on Tuesday to go to Blouberg Beach. I saw the community that Cape Town has when someone had a soccer ball on the beach and everyone who walked by joined in and I even played for a little. I also hiked Table Mountain and everyone who passed us on the mountain was so friendly. The view from Table Mountain was amazing and I hadn’t previously realized how big the Cape Town Area is.

           

Also this week at my activist project, I got a better sense of how I can start to make a bigger impact at the PDSA. Just being there longer I have a better sense of what I can do to help around; cleaning up the kennels, assisting in surgery, and even just unfolding newspapers. During a surgery to remove a foreign body from a dog I even got to put a stitch in!

           

Also this week some of us went to a play where the main actor was a guy Erica and Kat knew through Prevention in Action. The play was called the Holy Plan B and it was a piece that this guy wrote. The basis of the play, he told us after, was to highlight some of the corruption in churches in Khayelitsha. Essentially people will start up churches and when collecting donations will end up taking them for themselves. The play also brought up the point asking why Jesus is portrayed as a white man instead of a black man. This is something I myself have always questioned, why is Jesus always seen as a white man, he should be Middle Eastern. It is something again that makes me realized how white washed the history of the world is.