This one likes to play

Wow, a lot has happened since last weekend, so bear with me. Just after that post I went to Hout Bay and along the way visited Africa’s second largest bird sanctuary (with a couple of monkeys and a wallaby thrown in for good measure). Very much unlike anything that could happen in the states, the sanctuary was set up such that people walk on a path through room-sized cages with the birds. In some of them there is a waist-high fence, but that’s more for the people than the birds. This provided a really cool experience, until we met an owl who would have none of it. It was chilling on the fence right next to the door to the next cage, and I guess was feeling territorial. We tried to walk by it several times, and it dive-bombed our feet, presumably thinking our toes would be a good snack. We had to step over it trying to eat us and run away into the previous cage. We tried scaring it off by shaking a giant leaf at it, throwing sticks near it, and spraying it with water, but it didn’t budge and kept trying to attack us when we came close. I haven’t laughed that hard in a long time, and our screams attracted one of the workers. “This one likes to play,” is all he said, and we were able to get to the next cage. The next day we went to a concert in the botanical gardens and hiked up most of devil’s peak. The view is amazing, and we could see for miles over the Cape Flats.

Classes are starting up, which is really a shame. It’s hard to get out of this camp-y mentality and get into school mode. It’s going to be even harder because I’m trying to get out of Cape Town most weekends and go exploring. Xhosa is quite a challenge, especially because it’s pronounced with the click that you use to call horses. That didn’t make much sense to me either, but the way you do it is to keep the tip of your tongue right behind your front teeth and click with the side of your tongue. Anyway, I had the first meeting with my service-learning program head a couple of days ago, and I’m very pleased with what I’m doing. I’m working at Beth Uriel, a social work organization run like a family for disadvantaged 16-25 year olds still in high school. Some are orphans, some are coming from the street and were addicted to drugs, and few have other homes. I’m pretty excited to get to know them and hear their stories, and I’m heading in Monday to hang out all afternoon from 3 on. I’ll also be helping them run their business to try and make some money for the house.

In the past week we’ve been on another two tours of the city. The first was a historical bus tour taking us around different parts of the city, including the Muslim section, the beaches, and the top of signal hill. From there we had views of the new Green Point stadium where world cup games are being held, table mountain, devil’s peak, lion’s head, the city bowl in between all of them, and the cape flats stretching for miles, where all the townships are. Interestingly enough, many South Africans are actually quite bitter about the World Cup. It was sold to them as something that would bring prosperity and economic growth to Cape Town, but that’s not what is happening. There is actually quite a lot of construction, but Fifa (occasionally called the maFifa) has been ridiculously controlling. Anything sold with a soccer ball on it has to be approved by them by law and they take a significant portion of the proceeds. Any hostel or accommodation registered with Fifa (which have to be to take World Cup guests) has to give up 30% of their profits, and the ticket system totally screwed South Africans. To buy a ticket, which were prohibitively expensive for South Africans in the first place, you needed both internet and a credit card. Many South Africans, especially those in the townships, have neither. Fifa finally changed this requirement and lowered the price significantly, but only after most of the tickets were sold out. I couldn’t get one either, unfortunately, but plan on hitting up a huge fan park in the center of the city with a big screen.

The second tour was this past Thursday, and took us through District 6 and the townships. It actually was a little off-putting finding myself in a forced “tourist role” observing the poverty of the townships; it felt a little zoo-like. I guess the challenge in coming to South Africa for service-learning is to not act the traditional American stereotype and go beyond to actually try and make a difference in communities around Cape Town. This seems the only way to distance yourself from the traditional outsider stereotype. Two of my friends here are working for Philani (pronounced with a hard p), a childhood nutrition NGO in Khayelitsha, and I’m a little jealous that they’ll be spending so much time in the townships. Anyway, our first stop on the tour was District 6, where our tour guide lived when she was a kid. D6 was a primarily coloured neighborhood that was the subject of forced evacuations at the beginning of apartheid. The government just gave people eviction notices and then bulldozed their homes, regardless of whether they had moved out or not. My tour guide then said that she lived in 24 different homes before she was forced out on to the Cape Flats. One note about the Cape Flats is that they really are not suitable for living; they’re miles and miles of sand and sparse vegetation with rare access to water. They also house most of the population of Cape Town: out of a total 4.8 million residents, 1.1 million blacks live in the biggest township Khayelitsha, and 800,000 coloureds live in Mitchell’s Plain. I think there are ~230 townships total, and most are either exclusively black or coloured. I want to stress that the terms black and coloured are racial distinctions here, and are not offensive here in any way. Coloureds are the descendents of dutch settlers and slaves (mostly from Asia or Indonesia because Cape Town had few African slaves) and usually speak Afrikaans. Black Africans usually speak either Zulu, Suthu, Xhosa, and several other African languages. I think there are 14 official languages in South Africa, though English, Xhosa, and Afrikaans are the most prevalent. Back to the matter at hand, we were driven into Nyanga, Guguletu, and Khayelitsha and saw that the living conditions are very poor. Bathrooms only exist in the form of portopotties every few blocks, along with access to water. In Khayelitsha, which stretches on as far as the eye can see in all directions, the majority of residents are living in small corrugated metal shacks which I’m sure can’t protect from rain or cold. Though the countrywide unemployment rate is 30%, there are townships where the unemployment reaches 90%, creating high crime rates. Our tour guide did take us to meet a couple of people in Khayelitsha. One was an entrepreneur who created a bed and breakfast for tourists (Vicki’s) and who had won several businesswomen of the year awards, and the other was a woman named Beauty who was surprisingly open about the fact that she had AIDS and who ran a second B&B and sewing company. AIDS here is super stigmatized by the way, partly because former president Mbeki denied its existence, so admitting to be HIV-positive is very rare. The coloured township we went to was nicer, which Afrikaaners arranged to create animosity between racial groups on the flats. The difference between townships could even be seen just across the road.

One last note. As I’m writing this, I’m currently on the road heading to De Hoop sand dunes and Cape Agulhas, the southernmost tip of Africa. We just stopped at a stoplight at the highway –bear with me here – which unsurprisingly created a huge backup of cars. Walking among all the cars were people selling a mix of cell phone chargers, sunglasses, flags, giant tennis balls, airplane mobiles, beaded wall hangings, miley cyrus backpacks, and framed butterfly collections? Unbelievable scenery though.