Creative Writing – Infected Kin by Ellen Block

This paper consists of a creative exercise based on a thorough reading of Ellen Block and Will McGrath’s ethnography, Infected Kin
You will compose a 1,000- to 1,200-word (4-5 pages double-spaced) paper in which you describe a typical “day in the life” (or a week, or a month, depending on the “story” you want to tell) of a member of the Basotho culture (a Mosotho person).
In other words, you will be constructing a character, and giving your reader a sense of what his/her life is like. You may use first-person narration (“I”), or omniscient third-person narration (“he/she”).
The point of this exercise is to try to understand Basotho culture by reconstructing some aspects of it as seen through the eyes of a hypothetical member of that culture. In other words, it is an exercise in “seeing from the native’s point of view.”
In attempting to give a sense of what life is like for your hypothetical character, of his/her thoughts, feelings, social interactions, daily tasks, challenges, pleasures, hopes and fears, you will need to give page references that provide the basis for your descriptions.
For example, if your character is a Sesotho doctor being challenged by the authority of biomedical doctors, or is a paternal grandmother struggling looking after an AIDS orphan, or is trying a young man trying acquire sufficient bridewealth in order to negotiate a marriage, then you must provide a page reference that explicitly states that such things are actual concerns in the lives of these people. Therefore, your creative license is restricted by the facts as they are detailed in the ethnography itself.

Here is a summary of the book:
https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/94043/block_1.pdf%3Bsequence=1

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