rambles

Hour Children

2009-11-02T12:27:13Z

Written Oct. 27. Posted now.

Today was the second of two community service days for 11th graders at my school. I led a trip to Hour Children, a sort of transitional community for formerly incarcerated women with young children. The organization’s goal is to help women reunite with their children and help the women achieve stable, healthy lives for themselves and their children. It’s a pretty encompassing and apparently wonderful and successful organization. We spoke to two women who are both clients and employees of the organization. They described the basic structure of the program, and the range of the services it offers. They also told us their own stories.

The first woman to talk, Kelly, had her first daughter (who is now 18) when she was 17. Kelly insisted that she was a good mother for the first ten years of her daughter’s life. Then she started getting more and more involved in drugs, addicted to a variety of things including heroin and crack, gave up custody of her daughter to her sister, did short stints in prison - basically, was a complete mess. When her daughter was 15 or so, she got pregnant again. She was still getting high, there was a warrant out for her arrest, and she was hiding from the law for five months. She eventually realized that if she didn’t turn herself in, she’d just get arrested when she went to the hospital to give birth, so she turned herself in when she was seven months pregnant and was given a 60 or 90 day stay in prison (can’t remember). She said she hadn’t been to a doctor for a prenatal checkup until she went to jail. There, workers from Hour Children reached out to her and convinced her to come live with them when she got out. Her daughter was born while she was in prison (she said that babies born to incarcerated women must stay in the hospital for a week - without the mother. The mother goes back to prison and returns to the hospital a week later to collect the baby. Which seems unbelievably cruel.) She was released when her daughter was two weeks old, and a woman who worked for Hour Children picked them up and drove them straight to the transitional, communal house.

The initial house women live in when they join the program is called My Mother’s House. The women describe moving there as “coming home.” As in, when Kelly said, “When I first came home, I was just amazed… it was the first time I’d felt like I was in a place where I really belonged since my mother died when I was seven.” My Mother’s House is a communal house, where women and their young children live together, the mothers cook together, they share chores, etc. It sounds pretty strict - there’s a curfew, but a lot of women are on parole, so many of them have curfews anyway. There’s dinner every night at 6:30 or 7, and everyone has to be there to eat together every night - trying to instill in the women a habit of cooking real meals and eating with their families. Every woman cooks for the whole house twice a month. They offer a federally approved job training program, providing help with resumes, how to work in an office, basic computer literacy, etc. They help women set up email and checking accounts, which many women have never had before, and help them improve their credit. They offer women internships and then sometimes jobs at the organization - so many of the employees and interns are also the women the organization is helping. They have day care for young children of the mothers in the program, and they bring in teachers and psychologists to evaluate the kids for, among other things, developmental problems related to exposure to alcohol or drugs in utero, which is a common problem among these kids (the women estimated that about 70% of the women in the program were former addicts). They offer mentoring services to children outside the program who currently have a parent incarcerated, pairing kids up with mentors.

And I’m not mentioning everything - they do so much, and it sounds like they’re so effective, at least some of the time. Kelly was absolutely clear that if it weren’t for Hour Children, she would not have her younger daughter (or at least not have custody of her or any relationship with her) today, and she would be back on Staten Island doing drugs and stints in jail. After going through their training programs, she’s a full-time employee of the organization, running the mentorship program, and she lives in their permanent housing with her two year old daughter (she pays rent, but the apartment is owned by Hour Children and everyone who lives in the building has gone through the program). She has dinner every night with her daughter and with several other women and children from the program. She was practically in tears, and she said “I’m never leaving here. This is home.” One of our students /was/ in tears by the time she was done. It was incredibly moving and inspiring.

I just walked through meet market

2009-07-07T01:39:31Z

There's a CTY site at Princeton now. It was a little surreal.

annawheatlie @ 2009-06-22T00:14:00

2009-06-22T04:14:24Z

TMI, Randall Munroe. TMI.

annawheatlie @ 2009-02-22T10:11:00

2009-02-22T15:27:40Z

I just read an NYT travel article about Cape Town. Two sentences in particular bothered me a lot. First, "Then there’s the urban poverty that most tourists, and most white Capetonians, seldom see, except when they pass by it on the way to and from Cape Town International Airport: the squatter camps of the Cape Flats, where tens of thousands of immigrants from impoverished rural areas dwell in shacks beside canals overflowing with raw sewage, and makeshift bars, or shabeens, fill with the alcoholic and the unemployed." This was the only mention of poverty I saw in the 3-page article. First of all, I have massive problems with the sentence, like describing the people who have been in Cape Town for South Africa for millennia as the immigrants - and why are they immigrants? Because they were forced off their land and had to migrate to the cities if they hoped to find work. And why are they unemployed? Because there isn't any work. That sentence had too much of a blame-the-victim feel for me. And "most white Capetonians" don't see the poverty? That's not possible. Most white Capetonians employ people who live in these areas, not to mention that you can't walk down a street without having a kid, or a mother with her small children, or a man with mangled feet, beg you for money or food. It's not that it's not around them. If they don't see it that's just a really special kind of blindness.

While I understand that that's not what you want to think about on your exotic vacation, I think it deserves more than one sentence, partly because ignoring the poverty leads to thinking along these lines: " it was easy to feel guilty about such shameless self indulgence, but I was paying only the equivalent of $250 a night at a temporary discounted rate, so I didn’t dwell on it." $250 a night?! It's easy to feel guilty about BUYING A CUP OF COFFEE in Cape Town.

I know this is the Travel section. But really, one sentence?

Jailing kids for fun and profit

2009-02-13T18:03:15Z

But there's nothing wrong with corporate corrections facilities. Nothing at all.

Dear Building Services

2008-12-08T14:30:03Z

Our ancestors made a marvelous discovery at some point, or points, in prehistory: insulation. The idea that, whatever your heat source is, you can /confine/ the area it's heating, and not simply heat the entire outside world (directly, anyway). This is the idea behind modern buildings and radiators. Unfortunately, it doesn't work as well if there are gaping cracks around every single single-paned window. And guess what - if weatherstripping windows /prevents them from closing properly/, it sort of defeats the point.

*shivers*

Obama

2008-11-08T22:26:58Z

Bob Herbert
__________

I've come across a number of people, at least here, who seem to be getting a little sick of hearing how incredible this election is. There's the "it doesn't really mean anything; there are still a ton of race problems in America" camp, and the "it's not as big a deal as you think; he's not really black anyway" camp. It's worth remembering that forty years ago people were being beaten, jailed, fired, harassed, and killed for trying to /register/ to vote. At the 1964 Democratic Convention, Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party challenged the all-white Mississippi Democratic Party for their seats at the convention, and they were turned away. Our parents were kids then. This was not that long ago. So this is probably preaching to the choir, but I felt the need to counter the cynicism (thankfully, generally overwhelmed by jubilation) I've seen here.

O.M.F.G.

2008-11-05T07:40:02Z

I can't really believe it. But WOW. *exhales that part of my breath I'd been holding for months, at least*

go vote!

2008-11-04T16:39:54Z

this is my first presidential election. pretty sweet.

Apparently this guy predicted 49 out of 50 states right in 2004. If he's even close this time, we have nothing to worry about, but I'm about to head to philly to gotv anyway.

says it all

2008-10-28T13:49:59Z

Anyone buy art?

2008-10-27T15:01:43Z

Or know anybody who does? A Zimbabwean friend I met in South Africa is an engineering student but paints as well. Her website is http://www.sketchbooktrails.com/gallery-current.html . If you've read anything in this journal (or any news about Africa in the last year), you know that Zimbabwe is a mess. Taf, my friend, is having major problems making ends meet, and really needs to sell some of her paintings. As in, she's facing eviction and is running out of money to buy nice things like food. She asked me to try to find buyers here, so I'm trying to spread the word. If you can think of anyone who would possibly be interested, please pass along the information.

Thanks~

annawheatlie @ 2008-10-06T07:55:00

2008-10-06T11:58:40Z

Good rundown of the state of South Africa today. *shakes head.* Might offer some clue about why I tend to stammer and trip over my words and launch into half-hour discussions when people ask me how my semester went. NYT.

guns, again

2008-09-10T12:30:02Z

The NYT has an edtorial about a bill in Congress to drastically decrease gun control in DC, even though DC is passing its own legislation to respond to the Supreme Court decision. See especially:

"This extreme bill goes way beyond what the high court required. Among other things, it would repeal a ban on semiautomatic assault weapons and eliminate firearm registration requirements, even for such things as sniper rifles and small, easily concealed semiautomatic handguns. Under the lunatic logic of this bill, made to order for the gun lobby, such rifles could be toted around on the street fully loaded.

The bill is a gross trampling on the right of the district to govern itself, but it is far more than that. At a hearing on Monday, Representative Henry Waxman, chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said the bill would make it harder to protect government officials and the thousands of foreign dignitaries who spend time in Washington each year."

I'm sorry... has /everyone/ forgotten the sniper thing? When everyone who lived near or around DC spent days (weeks? I forget) spending as little time on the streets as possible, completely paranoid when waiting at bus stops or doing anything that causes you to stand still, as a target? When DCPS shut down all out of school field trips and we were only ever allowed to leave the building to go to or from school? I know that was an unusual case, but still! argh.

Guns

2008-06-27T01:59:04Z

In 10th grade or so, a kid in my high school class published a piece in the Washington Post about his 25 year old cousin who had just been shot to death because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time on the streets of DC.

Six months ago, a kid who graduated high school with me was shot to death in his car.

This makes me extremely angry.

Zimbabwe

2008-06-25T14:21:01Z

The capacity of political leaders to blatantly, shamelessly deny absolutely everything is really astonishing. This is so awful it's funny. In a really sick way.

"How was Cape Town?"

2008-06-24T20:29:10Z

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n13/disk01_.html

Everything in that essay is true. I don't want to be as negative as the author is, but the picture she paints is frighteningly accurate.

xenophobia

2008-05-24T11:06:38Z

Things are getting worse here. The attacks on African immigrants that started in Johannesburg townships have spread, and a couple days ago began in townships in Cape Town. I overheard someone in a local fast food store in Rondebosch (the pretty upscale area where I live, far from the townships) two days ago on his cell phone. He was saying that his father had called him and told him to leave where he lived, and told whomever he was calling that he was just checking to see if they were okay. I think that night was when the first attacks in Cape Town began. I've gotten about three emails from different places and people asking for donations of food, clothes, blankets, and mattresses for people who were displaced from their homes, most of whom I think are sleeping in police stations or churches. We're talking thousands of people here.

The Mozambique government is sending buses to collect its citizens who want to return home rather than risk the violence here. People are fleeing back to Zimbabwe. Can you imagine fleeing back to a country you fled because the violence is worse in the place that was supposed to be your haven, or the place where you could earn money to feed your family back home?

And the US government's sending a nice strong message that we don't like immigrants in the US, either.

I don't even really know what to say. I'm at something of a loss for words.

And in other horrible news...

2008-05-17T16:55:27Z

Remember the brave South African dock workers who refused to unload the shipment of Chinese weapons destined for Zimbabwe? Well, their government apparently doesn't share their silly qualms about providing more weapons to a dictatorial government that is already doing a perfectly fine job massacring its own people. The m&g yesterday had some horrible pictures of Zimbabweans who had been tortured recently for voting for the MDC. And to make things even better, townships around South Africa have been exploding with xenophobic violence this week, attacking, expelling, and sometimes killing foreigners, including many Zimbabweans. The basic response is "Don't they know we helped them end apartheid?" Apparently not. And I guess Mbeki doesn't feel like reminding anyone.

Sorry for the doom and gloom - it just doesn't look like this is getting much press in the States, and I guess the world has had bigger problems this week, but things don't look good.

(In case I'm scaring anyone, the violence has all been in townships near Johannesburg, waaay north of here. So far away from me.)

annawheatlie @ 2008-04-21T07:20:00

2008-04-21T05:27:19Z

Imagine if Thabo Mbeki were as brave and as articulate as Barack Obama.

That line was the link to the article from the main Mail and Guardian website. If that doesn't say it all, it at least says a lot, especially from a newspaper whose hobby seems to be tearing apart US politicians.

also, chag sameach and all that.

Zimbabwe election

2008-04-01T12:08:55Z

Looks like there might actually be a runoff. This from official ZANU-PF sources, so maybe things won't be completely rigged.

People here are watching the Zim election so carefully (it drives me nuts that the nytimes has had practically nothing on it, though I guess that's understandable). I overheard a girl yesterday saying she hadn't slept at all the night before because she'd been watching the news - her entire family is in Zimbabwe. And I know there are a lot of people in her position here.

And I was actually in Zimbabwe for a day, two days before the election. I was at Victoria Falls, probably the most touristy part of the country, but it was still very interesting. There were actually some signs of the election, and of opposition - a few people wearing MDC (the opposition party) pins and things, which apparently in previous elections was basically asking to be assassinated.

More later. Possibly.

Dennis Goldberg

2008-03-19T21:24:20Z

Dennis Goldberg, one of the defendants in the 1963 Rivonia trial (the highly publicized trial of Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, and a number of other leaders of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed branch of the banned ANC) came and spoke at UCT today. He talked mostly about the trial, about Mandela’s five-hour speech in which he said he was willing to die for his cause, and about various other highlights of the trial. At the opening of the trial, when the judge asked each defendant how he pleaded, every defendant said basically “I am not guilty; the state is what should be on trial, not me and my actions,” without denying any of their specific actions.

Goldberg was released from prison in 1985 and left for England. Unlike some of his fellow defendants, he didn’t play a role in the negotiations between of the early 1990s. He said, essentially, “I did my part; I wasn’t fighting so that I could be in power.” He acknowledged the many advances that have taken place in South Africa since 1994, and he said that the problems of corruption and internal power struggles occur all over the world, but that he had hoped his comrades in the ANC had fewer human flaws than they have revealed that they do. In particular, he commented that he though the present situation, with Jacob Zuma the president of the ANC and likely the next president of South Africa, wouldn’t have happened if Mbeki hadn’t insisted on running for another term as president of the ANC; that Mbeki’s candidacy in some ways forced Zuma to run, and forced out of the race others who might be better (as in, ones who aren’t accused of corruption and, at one point, rape, as Zuma is or has been, and who don’t advocate treating AIDS with potatoes and beetroot, as Mbeki has).

So that was quite interesting.

"spring" break

2008-03-18T19:12:58Z

Starting Thursday, I'll be completely incommunicado for ten days (not that that's such a big change).

In other news, if you haven't yet read this, do.

Still alive

2008-02-28T07:15:49Z

27 February 2008

Now that you’ve all decided I was just kidding about this whole blog thing and you have given up checking it, I’ll try to post something worth reading.

NB: The analysis-to-description ratio in this is pretty low, so if you’re looking for brilliant insightful social commentary, you might be disappointed. The first part is about tutoring local high school kids this week - it's long, so click on the link if you want to read it, or just skip down.

It’s been an interesting couple of weeks. Classes started last week, but things are really getting going now. Among other things that started up this week was SHAWCO, the major student volunteer organization at UCT, which runs a number of tutoring programs in neighborhoods and townships around Cape Town. The organization itself is impressive: it is student-run, has probably 500 – 1000 volunteers each semester (out of a student body of about 22,000, I think), and in many ways is extraordinarily well organized and well run. Each SHAWCO project works with kids from one or two schools, and SHAWCO leaders collaborate with teachers at those schools to come up with a curriculum that will complement what the students are learning. UCT volunteers work for two hours, one afternoon a week, ideally with the same group of around five kids, and work through a curriculum that we are given. The kids have tutoring sessions three days a week, with three different tutors, so it ends up being a fairly serious commitment on their part, and hopefully they really get something out of it.

This will get interesting. I hope. I am not just supplying these details to bore you. Though if you’re not interested in teaching or science, maybe skip the next paragraph.

We had SHAWCO training on Saturday, during which we were split into small groups for the different tutoring programs. I went to the training session to teach science to 11th graders. They had a physics lecturer from UCT, who had had experience teaching high school, talk to us about effective teaching methods, ways to get kids excited and interested and really thinking about what science is and how it works, instead of just memorizing things. He emphasized being big, loud, and messy: “If you’re going to demonstrate a chemical reaction that will make liquids change color, do it in a big beaker, not a little one – it’s much more exciting. If you’re talking about different properties of matter – brittle or flexible, transparent or not, conducting or not, liquid or solid - have objects there. Get them to touch them and play with them, and come up with characteristics on their own. Drop a beaker of water on the floor to demonstrate that some things shatter on impact.” He talked about teaching acids and bases, and described to us one theory of acids and bases, based on observation of sharp-tasting things like vinegar and smooth, soapy bases, and the fact that, when mixed together in the right proportions, they became neither sharp nor soapy. The theory held that acids are tiny spiky particles, and bases are tiny round particles, and when you mix them together, the bases stick to the spikes of the acids and so the mixture isn’t spiky but also doesn’t roll around the way bases do. Of course this theory is completely wrong, but his point was that people did once think this – this is an example of how to come up with a hypothesis based on observation, the fundamental way of thinking scientifically (as long as you then test your hypothesis and are willing to throw it out if necessary). At any rate, it was good to have somebody try to teach us how to teach. I’ve tutored in the States before, but I’ve never had any kind of formal training, so even those two hours were helpful.

Students who had tutored with SHAWCO in previous years warned us that things would be pretty difficult. The kids, they said, were generally well behaved and cooperative, but they told us to lower our expectations as much as we possibly could, and that the students would still fall short. They also spent a good deal of time repeating that we would not go in there and save the world, and if we expected to we’d only be disappointed – not much of a surprise.

On Monday I went and tutored at a school in Kensington, a coloured neighborhood in Cape Town. (South Africa divides people into three basic groups: white, coloured, and black. During Apartheid, the Group Areas Act designated certain areas as coloured neighborhoods, others as black, others as white. Fourteen years of democracy doesn’t seem to have changed the segregation all that much.) After all I had heard about the terrible academic preparation these kids had, and from the glimpses I’d seen of black townships, I was very impressed with the kids and surprised at the affluence of the neighborhood. Kensington is not especially well-off, but it is a different planet from the townships – plenty of good, real houses, no shacks in sight, no barefoot kids. The SHAWCO leaders for this project told us that it was a much more encouraging project than similar tutoring groups in the townships – the Kensington kids, they said, were much better prepared, sort of on the cusp of being able to graduate, maybe go to university, and our tutoring might really help them succeed.

The kids were terrific. After the warnings I’d heard, I was prepared to start from 2 + 2 = 4 if necessary, but thankfully they were pretty well prepared. It was a lot of fun – I worked with a group of six 11th graders, 5 girls and one boy, teaching vectors. We spent a lot of time going over how you can see a vector as a line to a point on a graph, and that got us onto a tangent about how you can use the Pythagorean theorem to find the distance between two points on a graph – that sort of thing. It was great because they had enough background that they understood what I was talking about, but they hadn’t seen the things I was teaching them, and I could see them wrestling with the ideas and working them out. They were enthusiastic and attentive, and I think I actually managed to teach them a couple important things. They said, “Your way of doing this is so much easier than the way we’ve been taught.” So everyone left with warm fuzzy happy feelings. The End.

Or not. Today I went and tutored again, teaching the same material (in theory) to a group of tenth graders in Khayelitsha, a Xhosa-speaking black township, one where most of the houses are built entirely of corrugated metal or crooked, nailed-together boards. There is dust and trash on the sides of the main road that runs along the edge of the town– there don’t seem to really be streets or sidewalks in wide areas where the houses are, just dirt-packed spaces between hundreds of tightly crowded houses, most, as far as I could tell, one-room shacks. We were tutoring at the local school, which thankfully was recognizably a school – a set of real, solid buildings with chairs and blackboards and classrooms and walls and roofs. The whole situation was different from Kensington – there were many more UCT students, and many more kids, of a huge age range. The tutoring program I was in, which worked with the oldest set of kids, had 3 tutors (because 3 others hadn’t shown up) and about 40 kids. We ended up just setting up the 11th graders with worksheets and focusing on the 10th graders. This time I had about 10 kids, all crowded around a cramped table. This was not ideal, but hardly the worst part of it. I was supposed to teach these kids vectors, too, but first I was supposed to work through a couple problems with them in which they were given the time, in minutes, that it took a person to run a certain distance, and asked for the person’s average speed, in meters/second. It took me probably half an hour to get across to them the idea that if you know someone runs 1500 m in 4 min, then if you divide 1500 by 4, you get the distance that he runs in 1 min. They did seem to understand, or at least recognize, the basic rules of fractions, and they were trying, but it certainly demonstrated what the previous tutors had warned us about. It wasn’t completely disheartening: at least for a couple of kids, I could see they were really trying, and I saw the “Oh, I get it!” look a few times, on at least some of their faces, but it did make me wonder what good I was doing, exactly. In order to graduate high school, these kids have to pass a set of exams. I can’t imagine any of them will. Maybe one or two. (I think graduation rate in the townships is 3% or something appalling like that).

It’s so weird: the kids, who clearly came from completely impoverished backgrounds, and whose schools were obviously failing them in pretty much every way I could see, were wearing these fancy school uniforms, with jackets designed for their school, the girls wearing skirts and stockings and the boys wearing good pants – no jeans in sight, except for the UCT students. The kids in Kensington were wearing similar things. I don’t know how it works here exactly, but it seems like they put a big emphasis on acting like the kids are in school. I remember that at Banneker, the administration insisted that the students look “professional,” (meaning that girls couldn’t show too much skin and guys couldn’t proudly display their boxers over their drooping pants, basically. And I still reflexively take off my hat any time I walk into a building) I think with the idea that if you look reasonably respectable you’re more likely to take yourself and others seriously; but there is a huge disconnect here between looks and reality for these kids. I can imagine what the arguments might be for making kids dress like that for school, but I don’t know where the money comes from to pay for those uniforms – the families, or the government, or what – and I can’t help thinking that, whatever its origin, it would be much better spent on hiring more teachers, or more qualified teachers, or something. There also must be a big emphasis on discipline and rote learning (at least the former is probably important – the younger elementary school kids were, as the SHAWCO leader put it, “complete hooligans”); whenever I started scribbling examples of the Pythagorean theorem, or even a number line, all of the kids immediately began carefully copying down my chicken scratches – I eventually told them to stop writing and just focus on understanding what I was doing. But it was obvious that this must be how classes work – the teacher writes things and the kids take them down, blank stares be damned.
____________________________________________________________________
If you’re still reading, you must like procrastinating almost as much as I do (I’m still writing, so clearly I win). Go away and come back later. You’ve just read three pages single spaced; you must have better things to do.

I wanted to write down some of my impressions about Cape Town, or things I’ve noticed, not necessarily from doing things but just from watching, or being around people or places. I guess I’ll start with Khayelitsha, the township I was writing about before. After the poverty, the first thing that an American suddenly tesseracted into the middle of Khayelitsha would notice is the language: people here speak Xhosa, a language whose name I can’t even properly pronounce. Xhosa, like many languages in South Africa, is a click language, and the X is a click. I butcher it every time, as does every non- black South African I’ve heard. At the beginning of the tutoring session today I got the kids to go around and say their names, and about half of the names had clicks in them; they tried to hide their smiles when I attempted to repeat their names, but it was a fairly lost cause. They didn’t seem too offended.

Generally I’ve been very surprised at the diversity of languages here. I had no idea that native African languages are still so widely spoken here; I had assumed that, like in Zimbabwe (as I’ve been told) and other places, English was completely replacing indigenous languages. I’ve heard people comment that English is doing its very best to accomplish that, but it has certainly not succeeded yet. Most people (except, I guess, for native English speakers) are bi- or multi-lingual, speaking their own language, frequently several other African languages, and English. Walking along the streets, in stores, even all over UCT’s campus, people speak in Xhosa, the main language in the South, or in Zulu, or in one of the other nine official African languages in South Africa. At this point I can’t distinguish one from another, even though many of them are quite unrelated to each other, but it’s interesting to hear anyway. Afrikaans, too, is much more widespread than I realized, and I was surprised to learn that it is the native tongue not just for Afrikaners but for much of South Africa’s coloured population. I was talking to one guy on campus, for instance, a Muslim who is part of an ethnic group called the Cape Malays (people descended from slaves brought over from India or that region), and it turns out he speaks Afrikaans, and many people in Kensington, the coloured neighborhood I mentioned a few pages ago, speak Afrikaans as their first language. It’s also interesting to note that, despite the prevalence of Xhosa in Cape Town, and despite the fact that Zulu, I’ve been told, is more widely spoken in South Africa than even English is, at least as a first language, almost every bilingual sign I’ve seen is in English and Afrikaans, not any of the native African languages. Although there are exceptions to that too; I think in part it depends on where you are, so in the supermarket in the pretty upscale neighborhood where I live, things are in Afrikaans and English, but, for instance, I’ve seen a number of newspaper headlines, or posters about HIV/AIDS prevention or university scholarships or any number of other things, in languages I don’t recognize at all, that I assume are Xhosa or Zulu. Xhosa-glish seems to be pretty widespread around here; I heard a good deal of it today, as when one of the girls I was tutoring leaned over to someone and said a string of syllables and clicks with the word “pencil” inserted in the middle, and the other girl dug around her bag and lent her one.

It’s also interesting to see what is in South African news. Generally I’ve been doing an even worse job here than I do at home keeping up with any news of any sort, but there’s a pretty good weekly paper here that I try to read, and it gives a sense of what South Africans are thinking and talking about (mg.co.za, if you’re interested). Right now energy conservation and environmentalism are very big topics – it’s quite different from the US, where everyone talks about global warming but nobody talks about making any sacrifices to address it. This is partly by necessity: as I experienced my first night here, there’s a major energy crisis right now, and South Africans have no choice but to conserve electricity (there have been no more blackouts, at least in Cape Town, since I’ve been here, but you can tell it’s in the air: people are afraid to use elevators, for instance, because they don’t trust that the electricity won’t go out in the middle of their ride). The secretary of the treasury just came out with a new budget, in which gas and electricity taxes were increased significantly, and in which a good deal of money was allocated for improving public transit systems, to encourage people to use less electricity. Other major issues are crime, and, especially this week, crimes against women – a young woman in a miniskirt at a taxi stop in Jo’burg was attacked, stripped, and sexually abused by a group of male cab drivers for having the audacity to dress as she pleased. The general reaction, along with outrage, seems to be, “At least people are paying attention to this one.”

Which reminds me, transportation is another thing that works differently here. There are trains that go from the suburbs to Cape Town – above ground, not subways – and there are public buses, but there is another common way to get around, a sort of public/private system of taxis, or minibuses. Erase the yellow cabs from your head – these are rickety old buses that technically hold around nine passengers and frequently hold closer to fifteen, that creak along the main roads into and out of Cape Town. There are a few major roads that all begin in Cape Town and spread out through the Southern Suburbs, and these taxis just tear from one end of the road to the other and back again. All of the taxis are operated by two men (I have never seen a woman in the taxi business): one man drives, and the other sort of hangs out the window, shouting “Kaaaaptooown,” or, going in the other direction, crying the name of the last stop on Main Road, near where I live, “Wyyyyyynbeeeeeerg.” The second man is responsible for opening the door whenever anyone wants to get on or off, collecting fares, and collecting passengers from the street. This can get interesting when two or three taxis are all competing for passengers – I have had one taxi guy very insistently walk me past another taxi guy to make sure I got into his taxi and not the other one. They have relatively consistent stops, but will stop anywhere along their route if you ask them to. (This means you have to recognize where you’re going. I’ve had a couple adventures this way. Luckily, since they stay on one road, if you miss your stop you just walk back toward where you came from, and it’s hard to get too lost). They also don’t operate on any set time table, and frequently refuse to leave until they have a full load of passengers; they’ll just sit at a stop, especially if it’s at the end of their route, until they get enough people. The fare collector guys get out at each stop and walk up and down the street near their taxis, whistling these incredible whistles through their teeth to get your attention – you can hear them for a block. It sounds like the first half of a catcall. They also whistle like this, their heads out the window, while the taxis are tearing down the road. And when you get in them, you’re quite possibly in for an interesting experience – I have literally heard the gears crunching in these things, and you sort of bounce around and hold onto the seat in front of you and try not to squash the person your sitting next to. But plenty of people take them and somehow they seem relatively safe, though I’ve been warned not to take them alone at night (although since we’re never supposed to be anywhere alone at night, except safe in our locked, gated apartments, that’s not very surprising), and only to get into taxis that have a number of other passengers in them – these aren’t official transportation vehicles, and as the incident with the woman in the miniskirt demonstrated, these guys don’t necessarily have terrific respect for the law or for their passengers. They’re extremely convenient, though; they’re fast, cheap, and there’s never been a time when I wanted to catch one and couldn’t find a man walking up and down Main Road, whistling.

Dispatch # 2

2008-02-05T07:02:06Z

// I wrote this over the course of the day yesterday (Monday Feb 4) but didn't get to post it until this morning

I'm sitting in an internet cafe on a gorgeous, mild Monday morning. This week is orientation for the international students (the American and European ones, anyway). Yesterday was the first day of orientation, and it was sort of nuts. Turns out there are about 500 American students here for the semester. I have a lot of thoughts about this and about how we're being treated (like royalty, it seems), but I guess I'll try to start at the beginning.

My roommate, Luannie, is great. We're living in a ridiculously huge apartment in a big, gated apartment complex; we have a large bedroom and a similar sized living room, plus a kitchen with a stove, and lots of cooking stuff, and a bathroom. The sinks and things are old and the water pressure is almost non-existent, but the idea that a place this nice is student housing is insane. Luannie is originally from the Philippines, but has lived in the Central Valley of California for the last few years, and goes to UC Merced, which opened the year she started. She's very active politically, and we've already had a bunch of conversations about the election (which I'm really annoyed I'm missing) and also about life here, especially the way the American students are treated. Which brings me to my next point.

Yesterday was the first day of orientation for the international students. There are a bunch of UCT students who are each assigned a group of us to keep track of. Yesterday we all gathered in a huge room at UCT (only about 3 or 4 blocks away from where I live) and were herded off on probably the most comfortable buses I've ever been on, to be taken around the city and the nearby areas. A lot of it we spent staring out windows at the passing scene. A tour guide told us what we were seeing. It was the first day I got to see any of the actual poverty - the difference between the poor and the rich here is just astounding. We drove past large, bright houses and huge apartment complexes on the waterfront and elsewhere, and then we drove past a township, populated mainly by poor blacks. On one side of the highway were wealthy gated houses, almost mansions; on the other was a dense cluster of what were basically shacks, filling at least several blocks (it was hard to tell how large the township was). The houses in the township were made of wood hammered together haphazardly, corrugated metal, and other materials. Some were literally tilting on a hillside, and some looked ready to fall down. We really only got a glimpse of this, and then drove on for more sightseeing. We drove past a large, mostly empty grassy area near the center of the city; our tour guide told us that this was District 6, what used be a thriving black community. In the '60s or '70s, the Apartheid government forcibly relocated the residents to an area called Ocean View (no ocean in sight), and bulldozed every building except for the churches and mosques. The residents, already poor, lost everything. There are apparently attempts underway to compensate the former residents and their descendants, and maybe to allow people to move back (I'm not sure I'm right about that), but there wasn't much evidence of life in the area.

We then went to Ocean View. The poverty was visible, though it didn't seem as pronounced as in the township we passed on the bus. On the other hand, we got a pretty sanitized view, so it was hard to tell. We were welcomed into a large community center and given a buffet barbecue lunch - all 500 of us - prepared and served by local residents. A hip-hop dance group of underprivileged kids performed a bit, and one of the coordinators sang karaoke-style to a few American songs. Generally it felt very welcoming, but also very forced, a sort of “Let’s show these American kids Real African Culture with Real African People.” There was more of that today, an African drum session being the most obvious. Luannie and I agreed that the people running this show must feel like they’re in charge of a summer camp.

On the other hand, we have already seen some really incredible things. We went to the Cape of Good Hope, the most south-western tip of Africa, and walked along a trail along cliffs above the water. It was stunning. It looked like the scene in every travel advertisement in every magazine in the US: a light blue sea, waves washing up on the shore, wind blowing through your hair. It was a nature reserve, and there were signs around warning not to feed the baboons (although we didn’t see any). We did encounter a few ostriches. As with many other times in the past three days, I thought of a comment from the radiologist on the plane from Joburg. He had been talking about all of the problems in Cape Town and in South Africa generally, especially the crime, and said, “It’s a catch 22: Cape Town would be paradise if it weren’t for the crime, but if it weren’t for the crime there’s not conceivable way any of us could afford to live here.”

Today was a more formal orientation, and just reinforced the sense that UCT deals with its American and European exchange students very differently from its other students, including other international students (mostly from other African countries). A number of people talked to us about UCT, about culture shock, about safety (a recurring theme here. But they told us that almost all of the crime was theft, and that there were very few cases of violent crime, and they didn’t seem to just be trying to reassure us). Today also reinforced most of the bad stereotypes I have about privileged white American college students. One of the coordinators told us that in the first three days of the international students being here, she had already received two written complaints about those American students making too much noise, and several of the speakers made comments along the lines of, “We encourage you to buck the trend of previous American students and actually get to meet and know locals and local students, instead of just going out clubbing and getting drunk all the time with other US students.”

But I went exploring the UCT campus for the first time today, and the beauty just blew me away. You can see the entire city from upper campus, which only reinforces the contrast between the wealth of the university and the poverty of the city. There seems to be a huge emphasis on bridging that gap, though: we were told over and over ways to get involved in local communities, and the Student Representative Council (like our ustudent government) president talked about how a main role of the SRC was to encourage student activism and participation, and that the SRC and SRCs from the other universities participated heavily in national discussions about issues of higher education, like access to universities. The USG at home talks about getting more money for study breaks. So over all, I’m encouraged, and excited to be in this beautiful city, and looking forward to really getting started with school and with everything else.

Dispatch from South Africa

2008-02-02T14:34:29Z

// cut and pasted from a mass email

I'm safely in Cape Town, although it was a bit of adventure getting here (did you see the NYT article about the blackouts in South Africa? Yeah, well, when my very delayed plane finally got to Cape Town from Johannesburg, Cape Town plunged into darkness. Just to welcome all the American students). But things are settling down - I've moved into my apartment and met my roommate, and things seem good. The apartment is in big complex within walking distance to UCT, right near Table Mountain - this enormous mountain in the middle of the city.

A few UCT students have been showing groups of us around this afternoon, although just around our neighborhood, Rondebosch. But the city looks beautiful. Things don't actually feel all that foreign yet - the grocery store and mall seem pretty much like their American counterparts - down to the American muzak piped in and the Kellogg's cereal on the shelves. But there are reminders. I talked to a Cape Town radiologist on the flight from Joburg, and he went off about all of the problems - the crime, the poverty, the disease. He said that people were predicting the current power crisis ten years ago, and the government did nothing. He also talked about the flight of well-trained professionals - at forty, he's the head of radiology at his hospital, which he said would be impossible in any first-world country, but he just has practically no competition. And he talked about the crime, which is also evident - everything is gated, there are grates over every possible opening to any house or apartment, there are metal grates outside the doors of houses. But it's beautiful here, too. So far (as in, under 24 hours) the weather has been warm but not boiling or anything, and sunny, and generally gorgeous.

So that's my report. More will probably follow, but I don't know when.