Afrikaners "offrikaners"

The majority of the people I am working alongside are Afrikaners. Which is the dwindling white population. They are the descendents of the Dutch farmers who were forced off the coast by the British and made a pilgrimage to the center of SA essentially becoming  Africa’s white tribe. They speak English fluently, but prefer the more exclusive Afrikaans(which is essentially 17th century Dutch according to a fellow foreign student from Amsterdam). All “G”s are pronounced like you are clearing your throat. Also, they will switch languages at the drop of a hat; this makes collecting information a touch harder. They are at an interesting point in history, with the “recent unpleasantness” being so recent(16 years.) When they turned over the government, many of them left the country out of fear of riot and retaliations (reasonably so, see similar history of white farmers in zimbabwe). However, Mandella orchestrated an incredibly peaceful transition. They still live in a great deal of fear and there is still a great deal of separation; whenever we ask about some activities we are always told about safe shopping malls, casinos, amusement parks… boring things that we have plenty of in the US. They are good people though and I don’t want to paint them in to harsh a light. The physicians I see are offering great care to an incredibly underserved population. One of the attendings I worked with is clearly working well below his qualification in terms of resources. He could have gone private to Cape town or set sail for the US, but instead he spends his days working up the train wrecks that SA delivers to his hospital. They have an incredible command of physical diagnosis forged from a paucity of CTs and a wealth of disease. On the whole, it looks like a tough road ahead, but SA is an optimistic country.