J&J Hit Cape Town

Special thanks to Aunt Julie and Uncle John for the extra-special visit! It was my first time in my 7 months in South Africa thus far being able to host anyone from home, so I was excited to say the least.

Shout out to NYC!

The day after they arrived we took a day tour of the Cape of Good Hope. It also turned out to be the first day in my entire month-long-relationship with Cape Town that it rained ALL day. Come on, we can't put on a good face for our guests? However, I got over my disappointment in the city long enough to take a few cool pictures.

Sharing a laugh outside Gold

Combined with a badly-needed haircut, a manicure, a stellar dinner at Gold (and watching Uncle John groove with some African tribal dancers) and a lovely day in the wine country, it's safe to say I was pretty spoiled with diversions and with company. So happy I was at least able to see you two for a few days!

Getting to Know Ocean View

Ocean View, Cape Town, was established in 1968 as a township for coloured people who had been forcibly removed from so called "white areas" such as Simon's Town, Noordhoek, Red Hill, Glencairn etc. by the former apartheid government under the Group Areas Act. It was first called Slangkop and the first resident moved in 1 August 1968. It was ironically named Ocean View, with residents being removed from their previous sea-side homes and views. As a result, its history is embedded in apartheid, and there is still much bitter resentment among many people.

The above paragraph is the extent of Wikipedia's brief article on Ocean View, where my fellow American students and I completed a weekend-long homestay as guests of a "coloured" family. "Coloured" is an apartheid-era, though more or less still accepted, ethnic classification, meaning a South African of Malay or other East Asian descent. The ancestors of most Cape Malay were brought to South Africa as slaves for the Dutch colonizers as early as the seventeenth century.

Some of the neighbors wanted their pictures taken as well.

After hearing of our destination a week or so before our trip, I immediately went to Google, hoping to gain a better understanding of the community. To be honest, there wasn't much to be had. What I did read didn't exactly surprise me, but still made me slightly discouraged: gangs, drugs, HIV, unemployment, alcoholism, teenage pregnancies, even, according to Wikipedia, "bitter resentment" amongst its citizens? One short online profile concluded, "Ocean View is still essentially a township where people eat and sleep, and live very constrained lives."

Yikes.

And so, last Friday, I said goodbye to Aunt Julie and Uncle John (by the way, wonderful visit!) and hurried off to catch the bus to Ocean View, mentally preparing myself for an atmosphere of general dejection.

I'd love to say that the websites were 100% wrong, but yes--I did see significant resonances of poverty and marginalization in the lives of my homestay mother, a woman named Nicole in her 30s, and her son Jayden, age 7. Nicole and Jayden lived in a 2-bedroom flat, which they shared with Nicole's sister and her three daughters. They lived in the very same flats that were constructed by the apartheid government more than forty years ago to house the thousands of Cape Malay evicted from their homes along the scenic coastline, which was was hurriedly transformed into "white-only" residential areas.

The flat, inside and out.

Nicole told me that the city is constructing new, bigger public housing nearby, and she'd thought about applying, but knew of parents with 5 or 6 kids in her building and said she didn't want to be "greedy." She mentioned her mother, a woman who passed away recently without receiving any of her promised property reparation. Nicole has been out of work for more than a year due to an illness whose treatment is rapidly eating up her savings. Jayden's school, the only elementary school in all of Ocean View, suffers from severe overcrowding. The park next to their building is too dangerous to walk through alone. Nicole's small kitchen lacks a stove or oven; she cooks using a hot plate and a microwave. They must scrupulously keep track of their electricity usage, or risk using too much and having it cut.

Yet Ocean View deviated strongly from the grim picture the Internet initially painted me. Whether or not they opted to live there in the first place, Ocean View is home, and they are proud of it. Are they "constrained"? Perhaps, if one uses a very narrow definition. Yes, Nicole doesn't own a car, a big challenge when one is trying to find work in a city whose public transport system is mediocre at best. Yet she woke up at 6:00 am on a Saturday to make upwards of a hundred sandwiches to feed a youth group on their beach field trip. Yes, the dropout rate at the local high school would raise the eyebrows of even some Chicago public school officials. But at our first night at the community center, Ocean View teenagers treated us to what was probably the most creative youth dance performance I have ever witnessed.

Nicole's best friend since kindergarten, Carmen, while driving me home from a bridal shower Saturday night, told me about her parents, both forced out of their house in Simon's Town in the 60's. Carmen grew up in Ocean View; had her daughter, Robin, when she was 17. "Most people here, they aren't very well-off," Carmen told me, her eyes staring straight ahead as we made our way along the dark N-2. "But we make it work."

My "host little cousin," for the weekend, Haley, and her neighborhood friend

Ocean View, for all its awful beginnings, is a home. And vibrant, lively, exceedingly resilient one at that. The people make it work. They make it work very well indeed.

(left to right) Sarah, Nicole, Jayden, me, and Michayla (apparently it was Spongebob day)

The Grand Adventures of Bunk 7

15 people. 8 days. 7 hostels. 1,600 kilometers. 3 surfboards, 1 microbus. You can quantify our Garden Route road trip in many ways, but numbers (even words) kind of fail to do it justice, in my book. It was (to turn quite the phrase) a pan-coastal journey of rather epic proportions, from the hills of Cape Town to the hairpin turns along South Africa's rocky southern coast, ending in the beaches of Port Elizabeth. We were a group of kids navigating a foreign country, maneuvering two people-packed, stick-shift vehicles on the wrong side of the road, so I'm still sort of amazed something didn't go wrong.

Two Saturdays ago, I clambered into the back of our minibus preparing for a crisis (grand theft, police ticket, car accident, flat tire, lost in the mountains, you name it), and yet, nothing took a turn for the worst. In fact, it all went rather fabulously.

The landscape varied quite a bit:

...and so did our activities. Day 1, we camped out at a music festival:

Up the Creek was probably the most unique music fest I've ever been to. Everyone brought some sort of flotation device (whether it be an inflatable shark, an air mattress, or a tire) and then literally went "up the creek" to listen to the live music. The stage was situated on top of the ravine, so you could laze the day away floating around on the water, sipping a drink, and listen to some great bands.

We did a lot of swimming, surfing, and frolicking at the beaches of Mossel Bay, Jeffreys Bay, and Port Elizabeth:

We bunked, twice, in the seventh car of a train-turned-hostel, and thus earned the nickname "Bunk 7."

We actually stayed in a number of great places, one being a surfer hostel in Jeffreys Bay dubbed "Island Vibe." If everyone went about their lives at the relaxed pace those at Island Vibe emulated, there would be peace on earth.

We spelunked, we sandboarded, we safaried...

...cruised past an ostrich farm or two...

And when we were too sunburnt and exhausted to do any more, we braaied.

Not to mention we drove.

And believe me when I say there are few better feelings than laughing with great people in a microbus on a sunny South African afternoon, windows down, wind whipping your hair, the music loud, and nothing but the open road ahead of you.

Meeting Table Mountain

It is a testament to the whirlwind of these 20 days that I am only now sitting down to give an update of my "first few days" in Cape Town. In all fairness, I just recently gained regular access to Internet, as we moved into our housing for the semester about 10 days ago. I am living in a four-person apartment in a University of Cape Town residence hall, with one American roommate and two local students. One of my African roommates has yet to move in, but the other, Kwo, is from Zimbabwe and seems to be very cool.

I never really got time to settle in, however, as I just returned from an 8-day travel break, during which I jumped in a minibus for a road trip down South Africa's famed Garden Route. The road trip was pretty spectacular and necessitates a post all to itself, so I'll save that for later. For now, I would like to introduce you to Table Mountain.

Table Mountain is an imposing presence around here. It seems to never go out of view, no matter where you are around the city. I, in an uncharacteristic display of navigational savvy, have learned to discern my general location by a quick glance at its peaks. Devil's Peak, to the east, is the pinnacle closest to University of Cape Town's campus. Lion's Head, to the west, borders the Cape Malay community.

My first real encounter with Table Mountain came the very first day I arrived. While our peers were napping, a couple of friends and I thought the best way to fight off jetlag would be a nice brisk hike to the bottom of Devil's Peak. Not being very experienced in the area of mountainous hiking, I expected it to be kind of a cinch. Little did I know I would be expected to complete the 2,500-foot hike in a little over an hour. I did it, but with the high winds (Cape Town is ALWAYS windy) and the beating sun, I was less than the picture of beauty when we finally reached the base of the peak. Cape Town was, though.

The Cecil Rhodes Memorial halfway up the peak

The view [almost] from the top

The next night I finally got to conquer Table Mountain, but not without a little help. Our study abroad director treated us to a dinner on top of the plateau, complete with the famed cable car ride to the top, and a little advice to the romantics ("You wait until it is sunset, and then you say, 'You are the light of my life!' as soon as the lights in the city come on."). There are very few words to describe how spectacular it was. Though I barely knew the people in my program, we scrambled all over the rocks, giddily shouting to one another to check out yet another fantastic vantage point. Table Mountain had certainly delivered.

What resembled a "cloud waterfall," but is called the "tablecloth," the blanket of clouds rolling off the plateau