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