My host family is wonderful. P Nitt (my mom) is a great cook and is opening a restaurant next Monday from the front of the house. Her english is pretty good as well because she and her husband both work in the hotel industry. They have two children, Faridah, a girl who is 10 and Mussin, a boy who is 7. They also have tons of animals–4 cats, a lots of birds, and several tanks of fish. Last night we went to the opening of a friend’s restaurant not far away. It was outdoors and there were tons of people and a band who was apparently pretty famous. Each table (which was its own tiki-esque hut) had a hot pot with a grill around it and you were able to go to the buffett to get a plate of whatever raw items you wanted to cook at the table. A grand time was had by all, particularly me when I discovered the ice cream portion of the buffett.

It has certainly been an odd transition coming straight from Cape Town to Thailand, but an interesting one nonetheless. It was exhausting for the first day to once again have to normalize and learn simple things like greetings: In Thailand you “wai” someone to say hello which is placing your hands together below your chin as if to pray and then bowing your head. But you only wai someone if they are older than you and it is to show respect. How long you spend with your head bowed and how deeply you do it also depend on how much respect you are trying to show. Some things translated well between the two countries, however. The driving in Cape Town was scary. Here it is also scary, and there are lots of motorbikes and tuk tuks.

A final observation: 711′s are everywhere–more ubiquitous even than Starbucks are in the states–and in all of them you are bound to find tanning oil for the tourists right next to whitening lotions for the local Thai people.

the view of Table Mountain from our street

On Tuesday the group from Carolina and I took advantage of the uncharacteristically gorgeous day and left the office early to climb to the top of Table Mountain. Even on nice days there is usually a peristant fog that hovers over the top of the mountain–Nate had been here for almost a week before he actually go to see the whole mountain. It took us a little over two hours to climb and then we spent another hour or so wandering around on the top. The views were incredible–on one side you could see all the way to Cape Point and the Cape of Good Hope and on the other side the entire city sprawled from the base of the moutain to the coastline. Robben Island is easy to spot as is the new stadium built by the waterfront for next summer’s world cup. We watched the sun set over the water and took lots of pictures before boarding the cable car that took us back to the bottom in an anti-climactic 5 minute trip. The cable car was cool, though because the floor of it rotated while it made its way down the mountain.

At the top of Table Mountain

I might be going back on Friday.

On Tuesday I went to a crèche to go over the financial books with the principal and to play with the kids. The principal was very nice and enthusiastic and greeted me with a big hug. At first the kids just stared at me and I’d catch little heads peering around a corner to see who this stranger was. Then one of them ran up to give me a hug and soon I couldn’t move because there were so many teenies at my feet trying to give me high fives and rub thumbs (they do a little thumb-to-thumb snap as a greeting). There were three separate structures (to call them buildings would be a stretch, and shacks seems condescending) each with about twenty kids in them, grouped by age. When I arrived they went into a room and began doing a song/dance routine to learn the body parts in Xhosa and English. I tried to follow along and after ten minutes of repetition, could fumble through the Xhosa word for “foot.” Then I tried to teach them to play duck duck goose, for which there is apparently no South African equivalent. I held their hands as they tapped each child on the head and then picked up the goose and carried them around the circle, then led the next “ducker” around. Eventually they sort of caught on. Sort of.

Every now and then a child would go outside and the teacher didn’t seem to mind. Because there were only two teachers and three rooms of kids, I guess on days they don’t have an extra volunteer one of the rooms is always without an adult. I figured out the kids just left when they had to go to the bathroom, which was a plastic training potty in the grass behind one of the buildings. These were three and four year olds and I can’t imagine they were able to navigate this toilet arrangement sanitarily. They did all wash their hands in a communal bucket of soapy water before lunchtime, but I was rather alarmed by the cleanliness of the kids in general. The teachers were doing their best but clearly struggling against numbers and infrastructure, and even so, I was entering their establishment with a totally different understand of what was sanitary and what was not.

One of the school rooms also had a sign explaining their policy on HIV positive children. It said that the crèche did not require parents to disclose their children’s status, but if they did it would be kept confidential and the child would receive no different care. South Africa has one of the highest national rates of HIV positive citizens in Africa and it was hard to play with the kids without thinking about the likelihood that a few if not many of them were HIV positive and how this would affect the already shortened lives they would have. Even more disturbing was the obvious normality with which all of these issues were addressed; leaky tin ceilings and barren cement classrooms; kids with shaved heads to expose the signs of ringworm; the solitary poster on the wall addressing HIV; the teacher explaining that she must check to make sure that when a baby is dropped off that it is alive, so that she can’t become responsible for the death. I was caught between being confounded by the shortcomings of the crèche and wanting to let myself accept—at least momentarily—these things as normal so I could have fun with the kids and not be a gawking tourist, interpreting every detail as an indication of a life unfairly worse off than mine. Reaching that balance is clearly difficult and I’m not sure it ever happens. The individuals who have spent years interacting with people in townships or any equivalent around the world do so, one would assume, because they are appalled by the conditions in which a group of people—a group who in time becomes a group of acquaintances and then a group of friends—live. The struggle then is to recognize the distance between your own normality and the reality of the people with whom you interact, while not allowing that distance to meaningfully separate you.

At the gym yesterday in Rondebosch, the neighbourhood where the SAEP office is, I noticed someone wearing Duke shorts and after strategically snagging the treadmill next to hers realized it was the graduate resident from my freshman year dorm. How bizarre! She is here on a two year fellowship after graduating from the Duke Div School and works close to the SAEP office.

I have now been in Cape Town for a full week, which has gone by quickly. The first few days were exhausting because everything was new and I was constantly trying to figure out where to be, how to get there, what was safe, etc. I feel much more settled in now, although there is certainly much more of Cape Town to familiarize myself with. The lodge I’m staying at consists of four separate houses that are all within the same two or three block radius. I am living with six kids from Chapel Hill, a guy from Duke, and two German girls. We have a great house dynamic and have had a lot of fun together thus far. On Tuesday night a few of us went to UCT to hear the orchestra play and met a few students who gave us tips on where to go and what to do. Wednesday night we went to a café in Observitory, where we live, to watch the soccer championships and eat half priced pizza (for students’ night). An entire pizza was roughly 3 US dollars. The place was full of soccer fans and it was a great atmosphere.

One of the most difficult things to figure out has been transportation. Our options to get around are the train, van taxis (they carry many people at once and one man’s job is to hang at the window yelling at people on the street), or private taxis which are a bit harder to find and take a while to arrive. The trains are safe in the daylight, although around 6 they become really crowded and are impossible to squeeze on. I even had trouble getting off one the other day because so many people were pushing to get on. The van taxis are an experience and are generally safe, although their driving is a bit erratic, particularly at night when there are fewer cars on the road to slow them down.

SAEP has several programs, one of which is a “gap year” program for students who need to study for one extra year before entering college. One of these guys, Thobela has offered to give the American volunteers Xhosa lessons two days a week. The kids we work with in the townships all speak Xhosa so it will be really helpful to have some vocabulary, limited though it will surely be. Xhosa is a language with clicking, which is an added difficulty for me. I have been practicing, but have not improved beyond my awkward initial attempts. At least the kids have a good time watching me call out the role before class. Qaqambile, Phelisa, Luzuko, Mphou–I call on Victor a lot…

I hope that this afternoon I can explore the Observatory (a neighborhood in Cape Town) and get a better sense of the place.

The real traveling begins on Wednesday, from Greensboro to London (with an intentionally long layover just long enough to explore Twickenham, England, where I hope to discover whether residents prefer to call themselves Twickenhamians or Twickenhamites, either of which I find charming), and then on to Cape Town. I’ll be seven weeks in Cape Town working on an initiative called Hope Scholars with a South African NGO, South African Education and Environment Project (saep.org). From there I’ll go to Thailand for four weeks, teaching English somewhere near Phuket. (I say “somewhere near” not because I assume a lack of geographical familiarity with Thailand on behalf of my reader(s) (hi, Mom…), but because I don’t yet know where I will be). 

I’m not sure how to prepare for the summer, but I found some great shoes that give me the false confidence to believe that I’m ready. I bought said shoes at Great Outdoors and immediately liked that they looked like the sort of thing a college-age solo traveller would wear (but with odor-eliminating soles). They kind of look like Tom’s, those trendy good-for-humanity-chic, material bound “shoes” you see stepping out of Priuses at Whole Foods. But again, these, unlike Tom’s, have odor-eliminating soles. They’re called Sanüks which is THAI for “happiness” (Investigation continues as to how the umlaut made it to Thailand). How fitting! I feel both ideologically and literally comfortable in these shoes. What’s funny is that I’m completely aware that in purchasing these shoes, I have fed into the impulse to buy a product and the persona evoked with it. Sure, I wanted something comfortable and spongy to kick around Thai beaches in, but I’m also psyched to look like a legit hostel-jumping traveller having embarked on the journey to find herself and save the world etc. I’m not going to save anything short of the inevitable kitschy keepsake bought at the side of the road stand. I’ll hopefully build some relationships and make meaningful progress with the projects I work on. (A feat I’m not trying to trivialize–if I’m able to accomplish both I’ll feel successful). But the myth of the shoe is still so appealing and I knowingly buy into it. Literally. 

It’s not exactly about the shoes, but how you are supposed to prepare for a trip where the point is to be unprepared. So far I’ve got an image of myself as the proverbial traveller a la Jack Kerouac novels (sans inappropriate behavior, obviously). But I know that’s not at all how the next three months will unfold. I’ve done enough traveling to know that however you imagine a place, the reality is a little less glamorous and a little less exotic, which is not to say worse. After however many hours of travel to whatever location, the moment ultimately arrives when you sit alone at the end of your day and the most extraordinary discovery of the journey is that you could have easily travelled no where at all.

This is the first blog and I may contradict myself in future entries. But for now, I’m excited just to take off. The promise of subjects more exciting than sandals awaits in places that are not Lewisville.