Chinese, Shona & Women's Heritage

Well I feel a bit of a hypocrite as I am doing a 100% better now and so many people continue to send me encouraging words. Thank you to all who have. I realize what an amazing support network is there for me. Need to think about that next time and try stay focused on the good. Watched this TEDx talk here on "Why aren't we awesomer?" and it is food for thought and to think about how one thinks - quite a good challenge. Think I need to try talk about my thoughts more before they become too overpowering and destructive sooner. Will be seeing my psychologist this coming week.

Yesterday was a busy day. I made a rare appearance at Lucy's Writing Group and shared my poem (will post it in a minute). There was the Winter Fair on at the same time at the Christian Counselling Centre and I saw another good friend who also suffers from depression and who had had a not so great week too. In the afternoon I went to my first Chinese lesson at the Confucius Centre at the UZ. I didn't realize that the other half of the lesson was a Shona lesson so I had a double whammy of languages and culture. The Chinese was really interesting - it was explained that the different characters in writing stem from drawings of shapes. Mountains, eyes, moons and body postures all are involved and there are literally thousands of strokes forming words and letters. The most complicated with all eight strokes pronounced yong means forever and as our teacher said, if you want to learn Chinese it will take forever as it is so complex. Eeek, a bit daunting. The pronunciation really is something. I did actually already know ni hao and xie xie - hello and thank you, from teaching a Chinese boy English.

For Shona I really need to get over my prejudice and try again at learning it. After learning it for 9 years at school my vocab is embarrassingly pathetic and I still have trouble with basic conjugation and negatives and tenses. Will try and see how I get on. The lessons were free so I will try keep going and it is a great opportunity if a little ambitious. The Shona theme continued into the evening as I had been invited to go to a "Women's Heritage Society Hall of Fame Inductees' & Society Inductees' Congratulatory Winter Dinner of the Year" - yes quite a mouthful and a half!!  I hadn't been home long before the friends who invited me came to pick me up. I had misread the email they'd sent inviting me and I missed the part saying dress smart. I went to get in the car in my jeans only to see they were dressed in black tie attire. I had to back track and quickly go get dressed up smarter.

I needn't have worried about making them late as when we got to the Rainbow Towers Hotel we were the first people there and the event only started 2 hours later. Ran on true African time, it is a bit of a given. We were the only pale faces but it was an interesting evening. A Women's Heritage Society World Organization had apparently been started - not sure by who. Some women from Zim had been nominated to the "Hall of Fame" and then others as "inductees". They ranged from Augustus Chihuri's wife to the lady from the Zimbabwe Energy Regulatory Authority (ZERA). The lady from ZERA hit home by saying as an outreach they were providing sanitary towels to women in a refugee camp as the women there had had to use leaves as a make do solution. A lady from the Tourism Authority though went a bit off track by giving us a sales pitch for titanium pots which are supposedly healthier to cook in. It was an interesting evening.

I found it interesting that in both Shona and Chinese culture the woman has lower status. The Chinese symbol for woman is based on a woman kneeling.

Facing Monday and a new week. Got to just try not let things get on top of me and have things to look forward to.