SABC: Mzantsi Fo Sho

Sooo I’m apparently terrible at regularly updating this… I apologize. I’m sure your lives have been totally busy too, though, so I hope you understand.

Also, re-reading that first ridiculously long entry, I was bored, and I lived through it all, so I’m going to TRY to make this shorter (but you know how long-winded I can be in writing).

Right now, we’re in Stellenbosch, which is about an hour inland from Cape Town (that’s east of CT, since Cape Town is on the western coast of South Africa, for those of you who have been pretending to visualize where I am, but really have no idea), but the family my friend Maddy and I are staying with actually lives in Somerset West, about 15-20 minutes south of Stellenbosch (so we’re about 5 minutes from False Bay [i.e. the ocean]). Our lectures this week are on Afrikaner identity, as Stellenbosch is a very white town, and they’ve almost all been really interesting, which is very refreshing after our recent string of really boring, repetitive lectures in Durban. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the number of my stereotypes that are being broken about Afrikaans-speaking South Africans simply by living with a family who usually speak to each other in Afrikaans, and through the information covered by our lecturers, who are able to simultaneously be critical of and sympathetic to the Afrikaans-speaking community.

As I just mentioned, we were recently in Durban, staying in backpackers and studying Indian identity. We had a community action workshop in an Indian township and visited a school there; saw a great one-man play about South Africans of Indian heritage; sat through numerous lectures on the history of Indians in South Africa and how different people identify themselves; took a literary walking tour of Grey Street (which had the potential to be really cool, if we had read any of the books that mentioned the sites we visited); met Univ. of KwaZulu/Natal students and talked about student activism with them; hung out on the beach; and explored the area around our backpackers. I also got to meet a long-lost relative, Jehanne, who is the half-sister of my mom’s mom (essentially my half-great-aunt). She took me on a driving tour of Durban, and it was really interesting to hear her perspective (as an English-speaking, older, white, native South African who learned Afrikaans in school and knows some Xhosa and Zulu) on apartheid and its legacy.

Before Durban, we had been in the Eastern Cape, first staying in Tshabo, a rural village outside of East London, and then staying in a backpackers on the beach (where a handful of us took a surfing lesson from a very stereotypical-looking blond surfer dude named Denver). In Tshabo, Maddy and I lived with a family consisting of a mama, tata, three girls (14, 19, and 22), and two babies (the sons of the two older sisters) in a one-room Rondevaal (round house). Our family was incredibly sweet, and everyone spoke varying levels of English, ranging from our mama, who only knew a few words, to our 14-year-old sisi, who was probably 50% fluent. This gave us a great chance to practice our Xhosa, which I loved, and Maddy struggled with. When we went to the backpackers after this, we had our final Xhosa oral test, and that was the last that we will learn of Xhosa. The first day we got to Stellenbosch, we had a 2-hour lesson on basic greetings and sayings in Afrikaans, but otherwise, we’re totally done with language for the rest of the program. I’m actually a little disappointed, as I really enjoyed learning Xhosa, but I’ve thought about teaching my current host family a few Xhosa phrases (they don’t even know how to say hello!), so that could be a fun way to keep using it.

I forgot to mention that we left Durban for a few days to drive three hours to Imfolozi and Hluhluwe game parks to go on a brief safari. We unfortunately drove through in our obnoxious white 8-passenger SIT vans where not all of the windows open, so we didn’t always have the best views, but we did get to see rhinos, giraffes, elephants, water buffalo, warthogs, wildebeests, and baboons, so it was worth the miserable 4:45 a.m. wake-up.

Later in the evening on the day of the safari, we went to a nearby hotel to watch South Africa win the rugby world cup against England. Since we were basically in the middle of nowhere, this was our only option of a location to watch the game, which was mildly unlucky as we were surrounded by British fans… thankfully, they weren’t overly rowdy, and South African pride definitely dominated the crowd anyway. It’s been interesting in Stellenbosch to talk to Afrikaans-speakers who relate the Afrikaner/British competition back to the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902, saying how great it feels to the Afrikaners to beat the British at anything and everything.

Going back even more in time, the weekend after we went to Simonstown, we participated in an amazing workshop led by the Direct Action Center for Peace and Memory (DACPM), whose leaders are former Umkhonto we Sizwe combatants (MK = the “militant” arm of the apartheid-era ANC [African National Congress—the party in power since 1994] which trained in guerilla warfare). It was absolutely incredible—we were taken on a journey to different sites of the struggle around Cape Town, starting in District 6 (an area right in the city center which was incredibly multicultural before the government forcibly removed its residents to the outskirts of the city and demolished the buildings) and moving to Langa (the first black township, where most of District 6’s black residents were “relocated” to), Guguletu (to see the memorials for the Guguletu 7 and Amy Biehl), and a couple other townships. The facilitation was really intense and powerful, and our group definitely bonded a lot that weekend (which we needed, as we were going through what our Academic Director labeled the “storming” phase of our time abroad).

Speaking of our group, everyone on my program is great—even the people who I might not be obsessed with (really only a few people) are essential to the group in terms of adding humor, general ridiculousness, and complaints to bond over. We’re from all over the US in terms of schools and where we grew up, but almost everyone is some sort of social science major, and for the most part, we all get along really well, or have at least found a close group of good friends. I’ve also been able to hang out with Paolo, an Oxy friend who’s studying at Univ. Cape Town this semester, a good amount, and it’s definitely been nice to have a non-SIT person with whom to debrief every once in a while.

I definitely think that’s long enough, but please let me know if you think I should elaborate on something in the future—everything is so amazing that I really have a hard time limiting what information I write about.

I hope everything is wonderful with all of you, and please shoot me an email or leave a comment, as I’d love to hear what you’re doing!

Love,
Jess

A few photos from Cape Point

This weekend we went to Simonstown, a touristy beachfront town with a naval base. We stayed in a converted monastery (3 other girls and I were literally in the old chapel) and it was beautiful. Too bad I felt sick on Sunday so I couldn't go see the penguins at Boulder Beach (supposedly there is a colony of about 4000 penguins there), but I got to see my friends' pictures... (def. did not make up for it).




However, the day before (Saturday), we went to Cape Point / the Cape of Good Hope (the most southwestern point of Africa)... so f-ing beautiful.

Supposedly, if the tides are right, you can see where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans meet.













On our drive there/back, we saw baboons, ostriches, and zebras by the road.... definitely not in Kansas anymore.

















Oh so not TOO far from home.
(dot dot dot question mark font size 2230589)














Perfect pic for SIT brochure?? Mabes.
(L-R: Lan, Rebekka, Will, Tim, Christi, me, Matt)

Fully Orientated & Living with our Homestays!

(written Thursday 13 Sept., 2007)

So I guess I’m not so great at this blogging thing. Maybe once I have more consistent access to the Internet (dot dot dot like when I’m back in the States question mark) I’ll be able to write more often.

I guess I can summarize the program so far, and just go from there:

We (minus my luggage) arrived in Johannesburg, South Africa on the evening of Friday, August 31, and we stayed in Diamond Diggers Backpackers (a hostel) until Wednesday, Sept. 5, when we flew to Cape Town. On our first full day in the country, we got up early and toured the Constitutional Court, drove through and had lunch in Soweto, visited the Hector Peterson Memorial and corresponding museum, toured the house Nelson Mandela lived in with Winnie and his family before he went to prison, and walked through a church (Regina Mundi, the first Catholic church in Soweto) where police used to break up totally peaceful gatherings every year on the anniversary of the Soweto uprising.

The next few days in Jo’burg weren’t quite as interesting, as a large part of it was spent sitting around, going over thrilling Orientation information. However, we did start learning Xhosa, which is actually really cool, even though I keep thinking of Spanish vocabulary (“Hola” is kind of similar to “Molo,” right?). We also took a driving tour of Jo’burg, where we were awkwardly instructed to get out and take pictures at places like Ghandi Square, and we also got to go through the apartheid museum. I was extremely impressed by the wonderful quality, layout, and content in and of both museums that we saw while in Jo’burg, as these museums impressively document the history and tragedy of apartheid, which only officially ended in 1994.

On Wednesday the 5^th of September, I was able to finally retrieve my luggage from the Jo’burg airport, though I had to immediately check it through to Cape Town (luckily/annoyingly the only things missing were silly electronics: headphones with a microphone attached, my camera battery charger, and a bunch of cords: to connect my iPod to the computer, my camera to the computer, and my external hard-drive to the computer). For the next three nights, we stayed in a backpackers near the waterfront (extreme touristy area) and continued/began our orientation in Cape Town. We partook in the SIT classic “Drop-Off” on Friday, and my destination was the Castle of Good Hope (the oldest building in South Africa). After struggling a bit to find it, I joined a fairly interesting tour of the castle, and then spent most of my time in an incredible art exhibit that had just opened the night before.

On Saturday afternoon, we moved in with our host families in Langa, Cape Town’s oldest township, which is just outside CT, on the way to the airport. My host family is PERFECT. My mama is a playwright/director (apparently she’s actually legitimately famous—like a girl on my program from Smith College [via Kansas] read her plays in class), and she’s also a vegetarian as of 12 years ago—she’s so intense about it that she has her own pots and pans for herself, and the rest of the fam uses other pans for meat. She only hosts for SIT when there’s a vegetarian on the program.

So that’s Fatima “Fatts” (“I’m not a carbohydrate—2 T’s!”) Dike, the lifetime Langa resident who does meditation and travels to India once a year. We also live with her hilarious daughter Thembi (36); Thembi’s 4 kids, with 3 different fathers—loud and talkative Nikiwe (Niki), 20; ridic Thundzi (Mapee), 9 (I only JUST learned how to spell, or really even say, his nickname); Ntumba (Lele), almost 8, who loves me for my hair; and Siyasanya (Siya), 18 months, who pretends my alarm clock is a cell phone. My first weekend we also had a woman named Bhusi (I think..?) living here, but she went back to University on Sunday afternoon, and I have no idea how she fits into the fam.

We started classes on Monday, and the SIT classroom is in Rondebosch, the area of Cape Town right below the University (UCT is very much on a hill). I actually was able to meet up with Paolo very briefly on Thursday the 6^th, as we had our classroom orientation that day, but he has been in Durban this week on Spring Break so I haven’t seen him since. However, we should have about 3 hours each day as a lunch break, which is really nice, so we should be able to meet up again. A bunch of us joined a gym right across the street from our classroom, and I’ve already been twice, so paying R350 should be good motivation to go (actually, for those of you who don’t know the conversion rates, $1 is about 7 rand, so R350 is only about $50—and we got an amazing deal, as we only paid once, and our memberships last for the rest of the time we’re here). I ran on a treadmill Tuesday for the first time in my entire life, and I don’t know if it was my nervousness that I could easily fly off the back and die or the amazing view of Table Mountain literally directly in front of me, but that 20 minutes was the fastest time has ever gone by for me while running (PS – Prior to this, I have never in my entire life, outside of maybe organized sports, run for 20 minutes without stopping. Ever. I wish I was kidding.).

Yesterday (Wednesday 12 Sept.) we stayed in Langa and had our Xhosa lessons and a lecture in a classroom at Langunya Community School (the school is named for the 3 original townships that sent students there: Langa, Guguletu, and Nyanga). Afterwards, we walked less than 2 blocks to eat an absolutely amazing lunch at what Fatts later told me was “a tourist restaurant” (though she also called it her favorite), and she said you can’t just stop in there; instead, you have to tell them days in advance so they can go buy all the ingredients. As we ate, we were serenaded by about 6 men playing various drums and singing awesome versions of famous songs (which I was made fun of for not realizing until someone pointed it out). The food was buffet-style, and aside from the two meat options, there must have been at least 15 totally different, gorgeously colorful dishes, all of which were vegetarian.

After we stuffed ourselves at the restaurant, we went on a guided walking tour of Langa, which, although it was fascinating, led most of us to feel the most awkward and intrusive we’ve felt yet. Our guide said they started the walking tours to encourage people to experience the culture and community of a township, rather than just driving by and taking photos, and though he said many people in the township appreciated this, we still felt incredibly uncomfortable. We were ushered into three different homes at varying levels of socioeconomic standards: the first was a room in what’s known as the “old hostels,” where two families live in a single room with two twin beds, one of which was occupied by a man trying to sleep; the second was the bedroom for a single family in the “new hostels,” built by the government to show that they were improving upon the “old hostels”—in this, a schoolgirl was pulling clothes from a suitcase, clearly about to change out of her uniform; and the third was a shack, in the temporary housing area named after Joe Slovo, who fought to end apartheid. It was just so awkward to be guided through people’s homes as a huge group of (almost entirely) white kids, since it felt very much like they were on display for us to gawk at their “different” way of life. We also felt like tourists in an area that is to be our home for the next month, although I suppose it was also a really good thing that we had the opportunity to walk through areas so close to our houses that we might otherwise have totally missed.

For instance, I didn’t realize that the Joe Slovo area was so close to where we were staying. Our first day of class (Monday 10 Sept.) we were all picked up late because of protests on the National Road #2 (the N2 runs right by Langa and is what we have to take to get to school). Many of the Joe Slovo temporary housing residents were protesting in the middle of the highway about the government’s decision to relocate the residents into houses many kilometers away. I read in the paper a quote from one man that their jobs/job searches are centered around the location of the shacks, and I’ve also heard rumor that there’s asbestos in the houses that the government is providing. One of my friends had heard that the US media was blowing the protests wildly out of proportion, but I haven’t been able to get very good access to the Internet to be able to look this up… any comments on that? I did hear that many people were hurt, but I haven’t really heard much since last week about the protests or its effects.

Today (Thursday 9/13), our group was split up into groups of 3-4, and we went to various schools to observe and talk to people. I went to a pretty new (10 yrs old) “alternative, creative, non-rigid, independent (etc. etc. etc.)school for 8^th to 12^th grade called Cedar House, in a super posh area of Cape Town. The majority of the students were white, with maybe 1/3 of them (that’s being pretty generous) so-called coloured [basically what we in the US would refer to as “of mixed race”], and an incredibly small handful of black kids. The school costs R37.000 per year, not counting the required exam fees that increase with each grade, or the extra fees for photography/art classes, etc. In the graduating class of 34 (11 of whom have been there since grade 8), only 3 students chose to study Xhosa—all the others picked Afrikaans. The Afrikaans teacher whose class we observed said that was mainly because most of the students were more exposed to Afrikaans, so it made far more sense for them to study that language. One of the coolest kids we talked to was Walter, who just moved to SA from Venezuela with his fam last year. His English is perfect, and I guess because he already speaks a second language (Spanish, obviously) he wasn’t required to take the second language class, as everyone else is. Though it seemed like an amazing school/environment, where kids could get an awesome education and be really happy, the obvious lack of racial diversity and the implications for the even greater lack of socioeconomic diversity were horrifying. Even more so, the disparities between this and the other schools our program looked at were insane. The Afrikaans class we sat in on at Cedar House was 13 students, while other SIT kids were sitting in on classes of 50 at Langa High School or other government-funded/public schools.

I’m sorry this is so long—it does cover two weeks of the most amazing experience I’ve had in my whole life, so I guess that’s fair. I’m hoping to update more regularly so the posts will be shorter, but for now, if you’ve made it all the way to the bottom, you deserve two big helpings of samp (a Xhosa traditional meal of beans and maize, which I had for dinner tonight, and will probably be eating TONS of during our rural homestay next month). It might not sound like much, but it’s a pretty tasty treat.

Hope all is well with you, whoever you are!

Love,

Jess

It's a blog!

Ohh goodness, I've finally succumbed to the world of the blog... I leave on Thursday for South Africa, so I thought it was about time.

Yesterday Paul and I forced Joel to take our photo in front of OCB. Joel was far more embarassed than we were, though we were the ones being completely ridiculous... let's see if I can post a picture:

I'll write more when I actually go to SA...