The Apprentice

Cape of Good Hope

Just like its name in pre-Napoleanic Wars, Cape Town and its peninsula have a special place in my heart, and I am sure there's an ancestral reason for that.

It's 2004, and it's my favorite time of the week...Friday morning!

I walk to my place of work as a postgraduate UCT student, it's an early fresh morning in January.

The Southern Suburbs are buzzing this 6 am, the university's main campus is still closed for holidays, and much of the traffic congestion is the many commercial buildings that line the streets of the Main Road that lies just below and parallel to the M3 freeway that splits the Kirstenbosch gardens and the foot of the Table Mountain Reserve.

I see a familiar face driving a truck that has a number plate that looks horribly familiar to the place of my high school, and the region of my hometown.

"Hey!"

"How are you doing?"

It's one of those moments where you have a chance to reconnect because I had spent three years obtaining my pre-requisite degrees in another town and province.

I had heard about this particular acquaintance and the frat parties that have made him legendary in this suburb, a combination that I have never tried.

Fridays are my favorite because, it's an early start, I get into the building before the 8 am start, and every Friday we get the chance to have a session with the legendary Tim Noakes.

The smell of the fresh forest floor, then the breeze of salted air, as well as an early morning brewery. This was my reality, and in 2004, many feelings about this place were similar to the national sentiment of post-apartheid South Africa.

I remember the day, around my late father's and my new stepdad's birthday, the 13th of January has always been either a day that paralyzes me in nostalgia or in this instance, my first Noakes Hour in the postgraduate blocks that were necessary for the honors curriculum.

Noakes Hour was great, almost like a book club for those that are dialed into international affairs. It was a week after our introductory week of overwhelming information overload, Noakes addresses the class, and because I had a system of exhaustive notes, sitting in the front row.

He asks the room...

"Last week, we were talking about those chlorine washings and those male doctors in the academic hospitals...what was his name again?"

I flinched as if it was a game show that required the reflex of buying more time, but there was no timer, and this is no game show.

I softly mumble the name, Robert Semmelweis, because it's written down in my notes, but I have not assertively made it loud for everyone to hear.

He asks me to repeat what he had heard...

I speak out like a juvenile that has not found his voice, and then the room goes silent..."Robert Semmelweis!"

"That is correct!"

He looked at me like with the sparkle of enlightenment, I definitely earned some brownie points, for what that meant for now, I was just taking things as they developed, I thought about how I ended up in this room and what it took to get here.

All those years ago from that one phone call!

***

A high school classroom, a traditional physical science block where other adjacent classrooms are half seating and half laboratory, never enough space for an over-full attendance of a model C school in a traditional building that has been standing since 1863.

It's 1997, and it was normal to be left alone and allowed the frustration to disseminate information independently and be swayed by various opinions especially when it feels like the only foot forward was the self-taught route.

But I had a supportive mom, she was well aware of the value of education, and also factored in that my over-active physical lifestyle was to circumnavigate the pressures of adolescence as well as the window for opportunity when the interest for academia would kick in. She was a horticulturist and being a farmer's wife whilst bringing me up must have felt like a single parenting role, but it was great when she showed me what she would do when tasked with the high school assignment for physical science and to research your own original idea independently.

Well...for me...that was simple...

"Creatine supplementation in sports"

"Why would you want to go in that direction?"

"It feels like the only thing that is gossiped about in the monthly SA Sports Illustrated"

"Okay, let's make a phone call to that Research Institute instead of going along with that magazine article?"

Excellent, my Mom knew exactly what she was doing, the surrounding garden that moats the homestead is a design by someone that has been putting botanical concepts to work. It is proof that I should follow her lead, she has transformed a desert and made a "donga"(indigenous forest with water conservation).

"Mom, what do you think about this topic?"

" The best thing for you to do is call Mike, he is currently a Professor at this Research Unit in the University of Cape Town"

"Do I just call?"

"No, you should use the internet to understand the topic from a macroscopic view, and the purpose of this desk research is to make the phone call more meaningful"

Being the 14-year-old I was, I was thinking of the usage of the word "creatine". Creatine sounds like something like a drug that is being abused in the sports performance environment, by not being detected by the relevant authorities.

But then, some of my biology textbooks are using a similar usage of the word the metabolite called Phospho-Creatine. My 14yr old brain was thinking that I am way too immature to understand this stuff, I need to develop a narrative, almost like my Mom and her plants.

Mom set up the home office and said you are going to sit here and watch what I do.

She placed a call to the (021) code that would mean inter-provincial telephoning which would be scrutinized when the bill came in on month end, but this was non-negotiable, I need more support in the form of peer-reviewed publications and access to journals that only tenured university have at the time.

She started the phone call, and it included a good tone, and then after some probing questions like..."What is the difference between the supplemental creatine and the creatine produced in the body naturally", the professor on the other side sounded super helpful, and I just thought that this conversation was like hearing the encyclopedia regurgitating information, to the point where it almost seems machine like (Those days, internet was version 1.0 and there was no AI for personal use back then)...

The fax machine is bringing in pages of articles that the person on the other line has recommended, and I was like, this is so cool, this should be something of a calling, we are gathering information from so many various sources, and then putting it all together like the garden outside, and this farm boy who was looking forward to how the presentation will go already thinking ahead...

"Mom, I wanna be like him...the guy on the phone...I wanna be him"