Goodbye, Cape Town

So. I made it. I have escaped Africa alive, unharmed, and in one piece.  I don’t know exactly how many people actually feared for my well-being during my semester in Cape Town, but I’m sure that there were some. “Don’t die, don’t get AIDS” was some actual advice that I received before my departure to the great continent of Africa. But please, don’t ask me when I return how Africa was. I have no idea. I have barely even skimmed the surface of the largest Continent on earth, but I can tell you about Cape Town if you’d like! 

Kirstenbosch, my favorite spot in Cape Town.

During my time here, I took public transportation every day to and from school. With the walk to the train station on either end, the entire journey took about an hour each way, and let me tell you, I dreaded it every single day. In truth, every time I mentioned that I was taking the public transportation system to a South African student, they wrinkled their nose and asked, “oh wow, how’s that?” At first I couldn’t see what the problem was, but after a few weeks of experiencing being so stuck between the packed masses of sweaty bodies that I could barely breathe, I began to understand what they meant. It was pure drudgery, there’s no other way to put it, but I experienced getting to university the same way that many students whose families can’t afford a car, and experienced the daily commute of a typical middle class worked in Cape Town. I will never again look at the rats in the New York City subway system with disdain.  The large pile of human feces left on the seat by a passenger that I encountered one day, which had been clearly been sitting there for the entire day, was not only more unsanitary but also much more repulsive.  Every day I would lug two large bags, one filled with workout clothes or clothes for the night, and one filled with books for school and my laptop onto the train. I was clearly an outsider: no one carries that much stuff in Cape Town, but I was never robbed or mugged, which just goes to show how safe Cape Town really is if you’re careful. 

That time i saw Prince Charles lecture at UCT

I also took classes at the University of Cape Town: Applied International Trade Bargaining, South African Political Thought, and the Politics of International Trade Relations. I met a plethora of South African students, and in two out of my 3 tutorials I was the only American student. In the third, I was one of two. I was completely immersed in the South African university system, and learned politics and economics from a non-Western perspective. Many of my professors scoffed America and looked down on capitalism, which was a complete departure from the style of teaching to which I am accustomed.

I volunteered teaching Xhosa speaking 9^th graders English in the township of Khayelitsha and found that volunteering is not the happy, rewarding experience I had always found it to be before. Finding proper ways to help people is not easy. You can’t just march in with a pre-tailored plan and expect it to work. A man I met while here in Cape Town put it rather interestingly, “if you want to make God laugh, make plans.” I’d worked with 3^rd and 4^th graders in inner-city Philadelphia before, but was given so much guidance and support on how to tutor and help them. They were under strict rules to listen to me, and I was under given an exact role. Here I was given a booklet and a group of kids and sent to work. That was difficult, and the frustrations I encountered with the program I was supposed to be teaching, as well as with the difficulty I had in actually teaching English to these students made me realize that implementing actual, sustained change in both the South African society and the South African educational system is going to take a long, long, time. 

I did an independent study while here on the relationship between the South African education system and the economy. Though South Africa invests the most money per student of any nation on the continent, it also scores incredibly poorly on international standardized tests.  Since apartheid, students have been able to go to whatever school they would like, but few take advantage of this opportunity and schools are still largely segregated. There is a massive teacher shortage, so class sizes can be upwards of 50 students per class, and the teachers are ill-equipped to prepare their students for the working world. Memorization is stressed while students never learn critical thinking skills. This poor preparation on the behalf of the education system cripples the economy because most of the student of South Africa are not being prepped to be innovative and creative skilled workers who will boost the economy and bring unemployment out of its current slump.

As I look out the window while I’m typing this, I see the Sahara stretching itself out below me. In a few short hours I’ll be in London, and a few short hours after that I’ll be reuniting with Russell for the first time in 4 months. Even though this long distance thing was actually painless for us, seeing him in person will be unbelievable.

With all the adventures I had in Cape Town, when it was time to start saying goodbyes a couple days ago, I was ready.  I didn’t have any emotional, tear filled goodbyes in my last few days. I was too excited to be sad. I’ll be back to Cape Town, but for now I’m ready for my next adventure and the final chapter of my junior semester abroad. Bring it. 

Cape Town as I was taking off.

This week

A few weird things that have happened to me lately:

1.       I looked at the coffee a barista handed me thinking it was massive, then realizing it would only be a size small in the U.S.

2.       While watching an American movie, I wondered why the steering wheel was on the wrong side, then realizing that’s where the steering wheel is in American cars.

3.       I’ve realized that I’m so used to the yoga every morning, café every afternoon lifestyle here, I don’t think I can switch back.

4.       I’ve realized I only have 18 days left here.

5.       I went to McDonalds for the first time here, and just ordered a cup of corn. Their two side options: fries and corn.

6.       Being charged at by a man with a stick isn’t actually normal here (thank you to the lady who pulled over and saved me).

7.       My professor took all 150 of us out to a bar after our last class and bought us all tequila shots. Each tequila shot was a “fine” for all the things we did wrong representing our nations in a World Trade Bargaining Round. I was one of only 3 Americans in the class, it was so much fun spending the entire afternoon with South Africans, although all they wanted to talk about was America. (Oh, and we were dressed as our respective countries, which explains the costumes below. Cowboy hat=USA. I was representing the Czech Republic...). 

Can you spot the professor?

   8. My last day of classes happened on October 22 (a Saturday). Both of those things are weird.

9.       I’ve realized that with all the weird ups and downs that I’ve had this semester,  I think Cape Town is my favorite city in the world.

10.   I’ve grown used to sitting outside at a café doing my homework, having waiters come and offer me cozy blankets if it gets chilly, telling me I can pay next time if they don’t want to break my R100 notes, having the mountain looming in the background, sampling a million different scones, having avo and feta as a given in every salad.

11.   “Take me home, country road” is playing in the café I’m sitting at right now. I was just thinking about how much I’m looking forward to my family’s annual Christmas celebration in West Virgina.

12.   I’ve realized that any weekend where I didn’t go to a single market is a rarity.

13.  I had my last day of volunteering on Thursday. The entire semester just flew by. 

The Africa I know and love

For an assignment for a class that I’m taking while here, I needed to take pictures of several things that I thought were either obvious or curious about South African society and to make a note on why. I thought it would be interesting to post the pictures here for everyone at home to see.

The first picture I chose was of a hippo crossing sign that my mom and I came across while driving along the Garden Route. The sign was obvious in that it is a safety precaution to warn drivers of animals that are likely to cross the road, but it is curious in that it was for a HIPPO. We have those for deer at home. Imagine having to look out for that tricky hippo who always crosses when you’re late for work…

This picture has already been posted on this blog, but I thought it was worth bringing up again. It’s an outhouse on Kilimanjaro with some bathrooms marked for porters and some marked for tourists. It’s crazy how there is still blatant segregation like that in a place that is  frequented by so many people from the outside world. There’s no hiding the hierarchy on Kilimanjaro, its plain for everyone to see. It was weird for me to see such clear differences in terms of status.

This picture is of a bird that I saw while walking through Arusha, Tanzania. This picture is curious for SO many reasons. First of all, that is not a nice looking bird. Have you ever seen something so weird looking? Poor guy.  BUT I didn’t feel too bad for him because he was the size of me. I’m not kidding. He was my height. Walking around the city like he owned the place. And everyone else thought it was normal that a bird their size was strutting around the music festival we were passing though. I had a serious WHERE AM I moment then.

This is the food court at school, decorated with hundreds of paper cups. There was a sign right next to it, explaining how much we waste as a campus just by drinking coffee out of paper cups. It was cool to see how proactive the university is. Villanova doesn't do things like this. And all the South African students thought it was normal. Barely noticed that there was a chain of paper cups dominating the entire food court. 

This was really weird for me, going to Catholic high school and college, where sex, condoms, and AIDS simply weren't mentioned. There are free condom dispensers in every single bathroom, in every dorm, and in random places scattered around campus. My university isn't even allowed to keep any form of birth control on campus, even in the health center. Here, the health conditions necessitate the ubiquitous distribution. 

If I had placed this picture in front of you and asked you to tell me where in the world it was taken, chances are that the last place you would say is Africa, right? The market culture here was surprising at first, but now its expected. I've become such a market snob. There's nothing like them at home, and I'm going to be heartbroken to leave them behind. Gourmet food, that the people who prepare it are passionate about, in such a happy atmosphere, decorated in the funkiest and most aesthetically pleasing way. Oh, and adorable clothes, jewelry and crafts. What more could you ask for?

Another thing I love about Cape Town that was surprising: the cafe culture. Globalization hasn't hit here to hard, and, I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'd take a cozy independent coffee shop over my Starbucks skinny vanilla latte to go any day. It's crazy seeing what America must have looked like before Starbucks and Dunkies hit. I want to do a blog post about all the cute little cafes that I've been to, but I never have my camera when I go. They're all gorgeously decorated, delicious, and very conducive to doing work. Above is Cafe Mozart in the center of Cape Town. So cute. 

Lights will guide you home

I'm currently sitting in University of Cape Town's student center, drinking coffee and watching a guard walking around campus with an AK-47. Imagine seeing someone with a gun the size of your torso walking around Villanova's campus....

I'm recovering from the minimal amount of sleep I got last night last night: I went to see Coldplay play their first ever concert in South Africa. Pretty much the entire city came, especially the university population... friends even ran into their professors. It was in the world cup stadium, and it was PACKED. I think there were about 60,000 people there. The entire experience was unreal. My friend Abbey took the picture above at the fireworks at the end.  How awesome is that picture? I forgot my camera, as I am wont to do whenever I do something cool, but it probably ended up making me enjoy the experience more. I was watching the concert first hand instead of standing behind a camera. 

Being Outdoorsy

Last Friday after school I went for a hike with my two neighbors, Dan and Zack. Dan and Zack live 3 doors down from me with another home stay family in Diep River, the suburb I live in, so we commute back and forth to school together. We got out of class at 1 and had to be at the busses headed for Ocean View at 6, so there was no point in going all the way home and back. Instead we wandered into the forest right next to campus and started walking towards Table Mountain. It is incredible how close hiking trails are to UCT. It took us five minutes to get from class to the trail. We didn’t know where we were going, but we followed the trail to see where it would take us.

We first stumbled upon an abandoned zoo. This zoo was literally right off the road leading to university, but there wasn’t a soul in sight.

I’m not sure how long it had been abandoned for but the walls were covered in graffiti and artwork.

Graffiti here is a bit more poetic.

Natural dip in a massive rock. 

We climbed past the zoo through a field.

We came across a water falll…

Me and Zack looking out over the entire city. 

This is just a hike we happened upon. We had no idea where we were going, but we followed the trail and made sure we had enough time to get down before the buses left. It was incredibly beautiful, but we ran into only 3 or 4 other people along the way. It was crazy to see how few people take advantage of all the hiking that is so close to the comings and goings of the city. I plan on doing as many as possible before September so that my climb Kilimanjaro is a piece of cake. 

Ocean View

Sorry its taken me a few days to pull this post together. 

View of the ocean and of Ocean View from my temporary home stay parents bedroom. 

As part of my study abroad program (CIEE) students are required to spend a weekend in Ocean View, an underprivileged colored neighborhood in Cape Town.  As I said in a previous blog post, the people who live there were moved from various neighborhoods around Cape Town during the 60s and 70s when white people decided they wanted to live in their neighborhoods.

Overlooking Ocean View.

Many host families took their students to show them the houses in which they grew up. These houses were in places like Fish Hoek and Simon’s Town, which are towns right on the coast that now host beautiful summer homes. It is crazy to see how close Ocean View is to these extravagant summer mansions on the coast. One man I spoke to, who was forcibly removed from Simon’s Town when he was ten, dated a white woman for three and a half years during the Apartheid, but her father forbid them to marry. Years later after he had separated from his white British wife, that same father married a colored woman.

I’ve seen many townships since I’ve been here, and I was honestly expecting to spend the weekend in a one or two room house with a family that had little plumbing and no electricity, but the families that we stayed with lived in small but cozy houses with running water and full electricity. The house I stayed in had three bedrooms and a bathroom. My roommate, another CIEE student and I had a room to ourselves. We unknowingly kicked their 19 year old son out of his room, but he didn’t seem to mind too much. The bathroom consisted of a toilet and a bathtub, so we did everything that you would usually do in a sink in the bathtub. It was surprising to realize that something as simple as a sink is a luxury, yet I had no problem going without one. A bathtub does everything a sink does, it’s just a little bit closer to the ground.

Katy and my bedroom for the weekend. 

My roomate Katy and I stayed with the Corker family: Veronica and Cedric, their three children Elreza (age 24), Elrenzo )age 19), and Elretha (age 12), and their granddaughter, Schyler (age 4).

Schyler in the Corker family’s living room. 

They are a deeply religious and close knit family. Veronica just quit her job because she said she had a calling from the Lord to do ministry work. Cedric is self-employed and does construction work and odd jobs. Veronica says because their house depends on a self-employed salary, their well-being is very closely tied to the ups and downs of the market, and they tend to fall on rough times every now and then. Elreza has a job in a factory that makes high end outdoor gear and is like the South African version of The North Face. Elrenzo, who graduated from high school last year, works at Pick n’ Pay, a popular chain of grocery stores.  

I wasn’t expecting to see such a close community in an area that is so wrought with crime. My host mom for the weekend explained to me that everyone here knows everyone else. This means that when her son was robbed of his cell phone a few weeks ago, it was probably by people that he knew.  When they held him at knifepoint they were wearing balaclavas, so he couldn’t tell who it was, but it’s very possible that he said hello to them on the street at some point the very next day. Even with poverty and crime the way it is, people still watch out for each other. A few doors down from where I stayed there was a family of fourteen living in the exact same 3 bedroom house I lived in. My host mom was joking that they must take shifts when they sleep. A few children of the house stopped by and we gave them food, and my host mom explained that one was a victim of fetal alcohol syndrome and the other was a child of a tik (crystal meth) addict. It’s common for the children of tik addicts to be neglected, and so the community will take care of these children. Several other students in my program mentioned that their families took care of “lost children” whether it was providing them with a meal on a Sunday afternoon, giving them pocket change, or taking them into their homes full time. 

Tik is what they call crystal meth here, and there is a major crystal meth addiction crisis in Ocean View. Everyone there knows multiple people addicted to it, and many have passed through phases of being addicted, including my host sister Elreza. This crystal meth addiction problem breeds crime and violence, even within families. My host mom explained that though she allowed her brother, a crystal meth addict, to live with them for a few months, they had to lock up everything of value that they owned because he had a habit of stealing from his family (including their mother) in order to feed his habit. He couldn’t explain or control this compulsiveness to steal because his only thought was on where he could get his next fix.

 Alcoholism is also an enormous problem in Ocean View, and many students got to see that first hand. We stopped by a neighbor’s house at two o’clock on Saturday afternoon, and about 8 women were sitting in the living room drinking whiskey, and had clearly been doing so for several hours. Many of the host families took their students to parties throughout the weekend lasting late into the night. It was so much fun for these students to see an Ocean View party for the weekend, but it’s clear that in some cases the drinking is excessive and cuts into their daily lives.

Ice, the family dog, smells meat cooking in the kitchen. 

It is overwhelming how many issues are present in this community, and this was a colored township. The African, or black, townships, have many, many more problems. It made me wonder what could possibly be done to change the living conditions there, and how much time it would take. It’s honestly hard not to get discouraged by the ongoing list of factors preventing the children in this community from having better lives than their parents. As I’m studying international development, my future job will have to do with improving the crippling situations present in marginalized communities. But where do you start when there’s so much to be solved?

Caleb, one of the neighborhood kids who stopped by to see the white people, playing hide and seek in front of the house I lived in for the weekend. 

My temporary homestay Dad, braaing (grilling). 

Even though there certainly are many issues within this neighborhood, I wouldn’t want you to pity this community. I spent the weekend getting to know the community as people. The people who live in Ocean View are hard working and honest. Although I didn’t find this surprising, I think I should mention it as well. Ocean View families are just like every other neighborhood in the world.  Kids are kids, no matter where you go. Students participate in after school activities: there’s a high school band, a net ball team, countless dance groups (a South African form of hip hop is extremely popular), vocal groups, training for bicycle races, church groups and ballet. As a whole the community is a happy one. They watch out for each other. The father of my host family did the laundry and washed the dishes: men and women aren’t confined to their stereotypes. They share their food and their blessings. They say hello to everyone they meet in the street. They laugh and joke constantly. They welcomed us to their community with open arms. My host mom happily answered my never ending stream of questions, even when they got personal.

Pot luck lunch after church… Such yummy food. This was after everyone had eaten their fill. 

My host family took us to church, which was Pentecostal and a total culture shock. One thing I haven’t mentioned yet is that here in South Africa I am in the minority as a Catholic for the first time. It’s the first time in my life being Catholic hasn’t been the norm for my community. People are intrigued by my religion, but I’ve also found myself having to justify it for the first time. It has forced me to think about why I chose to be Catholic. Before church on Sunday, my host Mom warned me that sometimes they were called the “happy clappers” and that it might not be like the church that I am used to. That was a major understatement.

One of Ocean View’s two primary schools, where church took place. 

Most of church was very long passionate songs, and the audience participated and yelled responses like “Amen” to the pastor as he preached. Two of the most unusual parts of the two hour service were at the end. First, the pastor called all the men up to the front of the church, and had the women of the community gather around them in a circle and pray for their commitment to their wives and families. It was nice to see such an emphasis on commitment, but when the women got up to pray for them they stood in a circle yelling their prayers. Some became so passionate that they began to cry. It wasn’t like any experience of prayer that I’ve ever experienced. Instead of being peaceful and consoling it was loud and chaotic. At the end of the service, the pastor called up a specific boy from the congregation. He was 19 ,just about my age, and had impregnated a girl without being married. The pastor explained this to the entire congregation as the boy was standing in the front. He said that the boy had been punished for 9 months, but now the baby was born and he had realized that he had done wrong, so he would no longer be “punished”.  By punished I think that meant in addition to being publicly humiliated regularly, he couldn’t play the drums in the church band. From what I gather playing the drums was his passion, so maybe this was a hefty punishment. I know I felt humiliated even watching his personal life shared with the entire church as well as about 10 American outsiders. He didn’t look particularly happy to be up there, but he wasn’t surprised either…Well. That’s one way to dissuade teen pregnancy.

Katy, Schyler, and I at the Sunday lunch with the church community. 

I’m really frustrated with this post because I don’t think that I can put my experience this weekend into words. I learned a great deal about problems prevalent in disadvantaged areas, but I also learned so much about the meaning of community. There was a lot that was discouraging to see, but so much of what I saw was positive and inspiring. These people haven’t had 5% of the opportunities that I have, yet they are still so optimistic about their futures. Every day that I’m here I appreciate everything I’ve been given more and more.

 

Family gathered by the fire after dinner Saturday night. 

There’s so much more I couldsay about my weekend, but this post is already almost three pages single spaced, so I think I’m going to stop here. If any of you have any specific questions about anything, I’m so so happy to talk more about this weekend. Living with a family in Ocean View was a completely different experience from driving through it. I learned so much and I am very thankful that I was able to participate.