Sunday, July 05, 2009

This weekend was awesome!!!!!!!!!! So Friday Sarah, Liese, and I met up with the Duke and UNC students from my work for a night of Bar Golf. Jessica also decided to hang out with us that night. This was my first time playing and it ended up be a crazzzzzzzzzzy night. So there were 9 holes and the object of the game was to have the least amount of points at the end of the game. Therefore if you were playing to win, which I was, you had to drink mostly eagles, which were -2 points. Each bar had designated drinks and as the night went on the drinks got worse and worse. We had 40 minutes at each bar with 5 minutes walking time to the next bar. A girl named Ainslie at my work was the official timer. And if you went to the bathroom, were late to the next bar, didn’t finish a drink or ordered water you had to add points to the score. Whisky and water had to be the worst drink I ever had in my life. I couldn’t even drink it. I just gave it to someone else in the bar it was so bad. By the third bar, the game had really brought out some personalities….. Me and Jessica snuck into a club through the kitchen because we did not want to pay the cover fee. It had the best music of all the clubs but it was very segregated. All the people in the club were Indians so we obviously were sticking out being the only white and black girl in the club. We danced for a little bit and then ran out the back door again. As we ran out Jessica handed the workers tips for letting us come in.Jessica has by far been my favorite person in Cape Town. She is just really fun and gives a lot of great advice. She also has a really big heart. She is always giving selflessly and you can just tell by the small thing she does. She loves people and she doesn’t judge. She can find a way to feel comfortable in any setting and she is a great people person. It sad to think that it took a flight 20+ hours away from my campus to find the Stanford students I can most relate to. It makes me wonder how many others I have not met.

After a long night out on the row of bars in Observatory we managed to wake up at 8am the next morning. I honestly was not trying to move. I wouldn’t have made it if it wasn’t for my roommate Liese, who has shown to be the most responsible out of all of us. She woke me up with 20 minutes to eat and shower before the cab arrived at our house. Headache and all I was off to Table Mountain, which according to our cab driver is in the running for 7th place to become one of the Seven Wonders of the World. Table Mountain has 300 routes up and down. It is also over 1000 meters high. It takes 2 ½ hours to hike up to the top. Hikers have died every year on the trail; therefore, we were warned to stay on the trail at all times. We went on the hike with people from that Sarah’s work, the Gender Health and Research Unit at the University of Cape Town. Amad was the expert hiker and our guide up the mountain. He made sure we had plenty as breaks as we were hiking. It was really difficult to hike. And for me it was more difficult than it had to be because of several reasons: lack of sleep, hangover, lack of water and food. I had rushed out of the house so fast that morning that I had forgotten water which was the most important thing. The hangover gave me a throbbing headache which was made worse by the fact that I had just gotten my braids in a couple days before and my scalp still felt like it was being ripped from my forehead. It was all good though, I made it up that mountain like none of that was bothering me. I brought my ipod and listened to Beyoncé all the way up the mountain. Comparatively to other hikers we were really really slow. One guy had gone down and up the mountain twice on the path we were taking before we made it to the top. When we got to the top, you could see all of Cape Town on one side and the other was a beautiful view of the Atlantic Ocean. There was a restaurant and a bunch of gift shops at the top. It was a perfect day to hike up the mountain and probably one of the few days while we are here that we will miss the rain so it is good we got ourselves out of bed. We did not end up walking down the mountain. We instead, took a revolving cable car that took about 4 minutes to get down the mountain compared to our 2 ½ hours up. At the end of the hike we were all happy we made the trip up the mountain because we were able to appreciate the scenery and feel a since of an accomplishment after hiking up the mountain.

After our long hike up the mountain we went to eat at a café and the rested up for the night. I had to go to sleep if I was going to go out on the 4th of July. So for the 4th of July we celebrated with a group of Yale students that live in Sea Point. They had a barbecue with 4th of July balloons and drinks to top it off. We ate hot dogs and some other American style food on behalf of the holiday. Most of the Yale students work with me at SAEP (Austin, Adanna, and Ellie). There are also some other Yale students that are staying with them that are working with other organizations. The Yale students live in luxury. They live in one the nicest places in Cape Town in an apartment that faces the ocean. They have personal drivers to take them to and from work and have organized trips designed by their school for some weekends while they are in Cape Town. It must be nice…. After this party we went to another party with people from Sarah’s work..... I just could not hang. By the time we got to this spot I was so out of it…. I tried to be social…. They had fireworks and everything for the party…But I had to turn in early and I just caught a cab home along and went to sleep…

The next morning we all went to church with Jessica in Guguletu. I am starting to understand the organization of the service. They always start with a little AIDS education and then they go into empowering the people, introducing visitors, etc. Nosi, Luzuko, and Knesa, the kids I had gone with my first weekend did not join us this time because their mother had forbidden them to go to their church again. It was sad because I was excited to tell them about R Kelley, since they were really into celebrities. We ended ups topping by their house to say “hi” afterwords. I told them I have been learning some Xhosa, and they laughed when I told them the words I knew because it made no sense. After our visit to the township for church we went home and just rested…. It was a long weekend…

Sunday, June 28, 2009

Saturday, we woke up late after a long night and went on a late tour of Robben Island. Visiting Robben Island is something everyone must do when they come to Cape Town. It highlights the political activists of the apartheid era. The Robben prison has been often been compared to Alcatraz in San Francisco. Today people still live on Robben Island which mostly includes the tour guides and their families. Children in elementary and middle school have school on the island. We took a 45 minute boat out to the island and then had a 2 hours tour with a guide that was actually a prisoner in the jail during the apartheid era. His name was Michael Ntando Mbatha. The political activists were regarded as more dangerous than murderers and rapists. I thought the tour was an amazing experience but I was a little disappointed in my guide. His presentation was very impersonal and sounded too rehearsed. He used words like “in conclusion” and “thus” that were just a little awkward for the type of speech I expected. He talked little about himself so I really could not tell you about what he was actually in prison for… Most of the information he gave highlighted Mandela. This was frustrating because many people already know something about Mandela before going on this tour and therefore, I was more interested in learning about the other people that were in the prison. After the tour we had lunch on the pier and happened to see fight at the restaurant at the bar next to us. They were fighting over a soccer game....silly... Anyways while we were waiting for the cab to come pick us up I thought I was going to have to use my mase. This man was begging for money but we said no and I gave him some food instead. But then he got mad and jumped at us and swung his arms in our faces. He was speaking another language so we could not understand what he was saying. We all got up real fast and ran off...

We later had dinner with Jessica and her friend Ntombi. Jessica cooked for us at her house. Ntombi works with Jessica. I met her at church my first weekend there. She lives in Gugulathu. Ntombi also invited us to an R Kelly concert before the night was over but we will see if we can get tickets for this week. We stayed there for a couple hours and then went home and watched a movie. Sarah, Liese, and I were all tired but we stayed up all night talking after the movie, knowing the next morning we had to wake up at the crack of dawn for a wine tour.

Sunday, We got up at 8am to leave for a 10+ hour wine tour in the surrounding suburbs of Cape Town. The Boogie Bus took us around to the wineries. The Bus is a taxi/cab service that was referred to us by my advisor at school. Our driver’s name is Steve; he is a character….He gives us really cheap fares and does not try to rob us like most of the cab drivers here. I cannot tell you how many times I was cheated out of money before I met him. Luckily most things are cheap here so cheating me out of money means like I paying $12 opposed to $8 for cab fare. Steve took my roommates and I and a group of Notre Dame students to 5 farms in three different small towns. We also went to a cheetah farm. I got to pet an adult cheetah. Cheetahs are endangered because of poaching but mostly due to the evolution of its habitat. There is only 850 cheetahs left on the continent of Africa. Cheetahs also only live for about 8 years. Later we continued to go from farm to farm wine tasting. To test about 5-8 different kinds of wine; it costs around $2-4. I found that wine is very much an acquired taste. Most of the wine tasted like finger nail polish remover to me… I learned today that I only like the sweet wines which were mostly desert wines. I also prefer white wine. We finally got home around 8pm. We were all tired and some of fell asleep on the Boogie bus. Sarah's head was on Emily and it was kind of funny because we had just met her and the other Notre Dame students that morning and we had grown so comfortable over the course of the trip. We got home we talked to Janine about our day and then went to bed...

Sunday, June 21, 2009

More surprises…. I did not come here with any expectations, so if you ask me if Cape Town is what I expected, I really do not know. I honestly just came with a really open-mind. However, my one assumption would have been that there is a lot of unhappiness. The pictures that I see of African people are usually of African children starving and the stories that are told are often of the widespread disease and poverty, so a grim picture is often painted. But despite the fact that all of this does really exist the things I have seen in the past two days are of people that are happy and getting through what we as Americans would see has extreme hardship. It is really funny because American do everything possible to make themselves comfortable, whether it is by buying things or avoiding situations they do not want to be in. But the people here cannot do that, they do not have the luxury. People here just cope... I do not know how yet, but I think it just finding joy in what they already have.

For the past two days I have been hanging out with Jessica Vernon, a Fulbright Scholar and Stanford graduate. She has spent the last year in Cape Town doing research and working. On Sunday, Jessica took me to church in the township known as Gugulatu. The townships were like nothing I ever have seen before. I saw people buying chickens to be slaughtered at home and eaten, stray dogs that looked like they hadn’t been fed in months, and horses roaming freely in the residential area. I saw playgrounds made from scraps and children in the streets with bare feet. I witnessed people living in overcrowded shacks the size of my room at Stanford. Women were standing outside squeezing their breasts at the passing cars. I am assuming that they were prostitutes….This is just the beginning of what I know I will see much more of. The church was very nice. It looked brand new and had fresh artwork maid by the manager of the church. The sermon I could barely understand, as it was given in Xhosa and some parts in English. However, from the limited parts that were in English the message I got was that the people of SA need to stop enslaving themselves and take responsibility for themselves. He stressed the importance of self-empowerment and a move away from dependence on others to improve the people’s circumstances. Church is an important part of everyone’s life in the townships. There was at least one church every 2 blocks we drove. There were even people dressed in all white gowns celebrating their church in an open field on their knees in a circle.

We went to church with four children that Jessica works closely with. When I told them I did not go to church as home they were in shock. They were really bright, one of them ranks 2nd among high school students in Cape Town. All of them go to schools that offers the best education in the area, all that was made possible by the organization that Jessica works with, which is run by a white Afrikaner. Jessica says that in the year she has worked in Cape Town she has only come across only three Afrikaners that take steps to improve the circumstances of the African people, all of which work at her organization. She cannot understand the rationale behind this but assumes that the white Afrikaners believe themselves to be separate from the African people and view themselves as the target of black crime. This is sad to here as I believe that white Afrikaners should be the primary people assisting in the development of African communities. This makes me think of the Amnesty that was granted to people after the apartheid era as a means of reconciliation, many of which were white Afrikaners. It makes me think that the Amnesty should have been tied to the condition of required involvement in the development of Africa communities that were so deeply torn apart by white Afrikaner apartheid system.

The kids were really intrigued with me. They thought I came from the show America’s Next Top Model. They said we received a lot of stares while in church because they thought I was someone famous. Janine says it was my straight hair, which is uncommon among the African people here that fascinated them. The people here are really into American celebrities. The children knew all the facts about celebrities, more than I knew about my own American celebrities. They asked if I had met any celebrities and if I wanted to become a celebrity. I told them that I once tried out for America’s Next Top Model. Jessica later said that she thought the kids believed that was the “coolest” thing they ever heard. I really enjoyed hanging out with them because they are so amazed by everything you tell them. All the things that my friends in America would never care to hear, they wanted to know all about. I have to admit, I was very much scared to meet them. The thing that continually ran through my head was, what do they think of me? I did not want to say or do anything to offend them, but within minutes of meeting, they started asking me all sorts of questions.

These kids go through a lot. Jessica tells me that the youngest one was kidnapped but was able to get away. Her sister, suffers from cerebral palsy and on her way home from school, the handicapped bus was hijacked and all the kids were left on a street corner. In my eyes, there is so much for them to fear as children. To my surprise, despite these circumstances, they all are such happy kids and excited for the next day. My fear of spiders seems ridiculous in comparison. I guess it would not actually be a life if every day was lived in fear.