Louw Profile

She lights up a cigarette, takes a long drag in and stares at me through her blue eyes, her mass of eyeliner highlighting just how intensely blue they actually are. Nicolene Louw is no ordinary first year, yet she is just like the rest of us. She gets homesick, she sometimes feels as though she cannot cope with the workload and she occasionally feels claustrophobic in little Grahamstown. But she could not imagine being anywhere else at this point in her life. So what makes Ms Louw so special?

Nicci, as she prefers to be called could not answer this question herself. “Dude, I honestly don’t know what you’re interviewing me for. I’m just crazy and I haven’t ever done anything special”, she says as her cheeky blonde bob blows in the wind. If the truth must be told, then Nicci is half right. She is extremely crazy. But she has done some special things for the friends she has made at Rhodes, both human and canine. As she strums her long fingernails varnished with black on the table, she begins to tell me of the day she walked home and found a lost puppy. “This furry thing just started following me when I was walking past B.P.”, she says with a fond smile on her face, “He looked very lost, so I was just like, whatever, I’ll keep him.” This puppy she decided to name Rova, and she spent three weeks taking care of him, until she returned home one day and discovered that he was missing. “I don’t know what happened to him or where he went to,” she says with a hint of sadness, strumming her fingers on the table now at a much faster pace.

However, you do not need to be a “furry thing” in order to attract Nicci’s attention, or to become her friend. Admittedly, she is a bit of a rebel. “I gave my parents hell,” she says with a twinkle in her eye and a wicked grin on her face, the Madonna piercing glinting just above her lip. But this is what makes her admirable. “I really just don’t give a damn about what people think of me. I’m loud and crazy and I smoke too much and I swear too much. But I don’t need to fit in with everybody. I just want to be me.” It is this attitude that makes Nicolene Louw seem like a superhero to the rest of us. While most of us here spend our days trying to find the perfect outfit, the perfect hairstyle, or trying to do things that will merit the acceptance of others, Nicci throws her energy into things that she enjoys doing. “I love writing stuff and playing my guitar. Stuff like that makes me happy, and that’s all that really matters,” she says with a shrug of her shoulders, “and I don’t care if I don’t fit in.”

This girl is not going to preach to us Oprah-style and try and be a role model for younger generations. “I’m going to be myself and stay true to myself. I’ve made awesome friends here at Rhodes. It’s like we have a little family. And I didn’t have to change for either of them. I’m myself around them and they’re themselves around me. That’s all we really need,” she says brushing her fringe out of her eyes. Nicci is not perfect, but she does not claim to be, and it is quite clear that she truly could not care less about what anyone has to say about her. She is a hero in her own way, just like Einstein, who did not care about what people thought of his hair, and Noah who did not care about the fact that everyone laughed at him while he built the ark in the middle of summer. Nicolene Louw does not care if she does not fit in.