The Eco-village Organic Fruit Loops

On the bus to Cape Town I sat next to the whitest African I have ever seen. He was day-glow white with blonde hair. So fair that at 17 he was already beginning to wrinkle up. I wanted to get back to Western culture based conversation after the disappointment of having met a Sangoma (a witch doctor). But Sangomas, I have now begun to understand are among the saner folk in this land. My blonde cultural cousin spent the entire ride telling me about his spiritual visions, talking to the dead and other worlds. His mother had been thrown out of the local church, but it wasn’t a problem because he had a self taught spiritual guide he met at an electronic gaming store. After a day in the mountain listening to a tribal witch doctor talk about drinking the blood of a slaughtered goat and throwing bones to heal, I was now talking to an educated Westerner about healing with energy and spirituality. At least the witch doctor had a bunch of bones he threw around, so in some way his diagnostic method was related to the real world.

I couldn’t get off the bus fast enough. I thought it I went to a hostel inside an eco-village I would meet interesting intelligent concerned citizens of the world. As it turned out the village hosts the same bunch of wierdos many very cheap hostels have. A bunch of drifter men, social misfits sometimes painfully unaware of how they apparently have earned no place in society. They all imagine themselves to be leaders of something. Let me explain by walking you down the hall. Names have been changed to protect the innocent. Namely me.

Room number twelve is Richard. I met him in the kitchen and he asked me what I did. After admitting I was a medical doctor he informed me that I knew nothing about nutrition. He then proceeded to lecture me on how based on one paper written by a dentist he knew more about nutrition than I did. His nose lifted so high I could literally see into his nostrils, he told me he had been in charge of many doctors in an NGO. “Which NGO?” “A highly, highly influential one.” So why was the head of an NGO at this backpackers eco-lodge I wondered…”What is the NGO called?” “Well, it no longer exists…” I wondered if his superiority complex was informed by being a white South African.

Across from him lives Brianna, one of the few female residents. She is 32 and has already survived throat cancer and gangrene of which there is no medical evidence because Jesus has healed her. She has no need for doctors because G-d heals everyone who just prays for it, or so she says. She also notes that South Africa was better under Apartheid without adding one important phrase: for white people like me.

Down the hall lives Professor Chapel. Professor Chapel is only here because it’s difficult to concentrate on his work when he is in fancy four star hotels. Or so he tells me. He is a visiting professor at the most elite science universities in America. He prefers to be a visiting professor so he can take time with his research you see. Perhaps this is why he has not bothered with a wife or husband or children…more time for his important research no one has ever heard of.

Next door to Professor Chapel lives Sandy. According to the front desk woman Sandy came in and explained he was living on his trust fund and needed somewhere to stay for the moment. Sandy is however not just a trust fund baby. He did at one point have a real job. He was a paramedic. According to the front desk lady everything was going well with his visit until his brother Dan showed up and started living in the same room. Dan is a track marked skinny guy with a sense of fashion that can most charitably be described as ironic. Soon after Dan came money started going missing from the front desk. Perhaps to throw everyone off his scent Dan is constantly mentioning how he comes from a rich well placed family of doctors.

Across the way lives Jack who wants to learn Hebrew from me because he is Jewish or Christian depending upon who and when is speaking. He came for a Hebrew lesson and spent the entire time complaining in English to me about how he suffers from a disease that has turned him into a rock in a river, tumbling, tumbling down the stream. The disease has no name, but everyone has it. He’s convinced the cure is in the bible.

Yesterday the Professor invited me to coffee. I thought perhaps we would discuss science. Apparently he is an expert in the lost “sciences” of the Nazis. When I told him I was Jewish he said he didn’t realize, but now looking at my nose he could see it. He then went on to ask me questions about Jews and intelligence.

Over a beer last night the front desk woman and I pondered if we were inside a mental institution, but just hadn’t been told about it. What we are actually inside is the froth of our system, or the run off depending upon how you look at it. Either our society is so decadent it frees people to be as crazy as they can or it is so impoverished it has no use for many men. These men, and they are mostly men, have detached from anything approaching a normal lifestyle…but are somehow unable to simply go find a shed in the country and plant some food. Instead they have taken up a sort of parasitic lifestyle strangely free from the society they depend upon. But perhaps the same could be said of me. None of these people seem to want a scientist around. Perhaps I need to just go find some land, and start farming.