Shake Sugaree

Langa and Aquarium pics up.


Baby, our chicken?



Site of N1 Riot.


This is a home. This is millions and millions and millions of people's homes here.

• With the help of our host mom Avril, Ariel has been crocheting and Kat and I have been knitting up a storm. Get ready for scarves. Lumpy, uneven, one-of-a-kind scarves.
  
• whitney made squash pie for canadian thanksgiving on monday (no pumpkin available). it was delicious, in it's own special way. much like our scarves.
• we have a really cool music teacher named Les. He's one of those artsy, age-less types with long, jointy fingers and clear, piercing eyes. He's taught us about traditional "Ghoema" music and even let us play on his drums and what nots. Apparently he's going to help us organize a concert featuring... us (oh dear). We're going to Ghoema-ize some American songs. Suggestions? For more info go to coffeebeans.co.za. Look for Les Javan.

Yesterday we visited the Amy Biehl Foundation and took a tour of the program sites. It was a great trip and we're hoping to volunteer after official classes end in November. The foundation has set up afterschool programs in the Gugulthu township, where Amy was killed. We got to see kids playing marimbas and singing and dancing and it was really amazing. Some of the girls were doing local Pantsula dance which was absolutely unbelievable. It's amazing how in touch people can be with their bodies and I think we were all pretty jealous.

Kaas Kos, Ndingubani?

so here's a smattering of recent updates/excuse to use bullets. still working on uploading the Langa pics and others.
• last week we went to a poetry reading shindig at school. we got to hear poetry from some pretty amazing guest speakers in a ton of different languages, including the "dead" Khoisan language. a lot of the poetry was extremely powerful and i sat through most of the hour with my heart in my throat.
• we have a chicken. named baby.
• on saturday we went to the aquarium with Johan and my cousin Bianca. !!! It was awesome. There was a scant jellyfish collection but it was made up for by some really sweet giant spider crabs. and don't worry, i've already coerced everyone into watching deep sea.
• i've also coerced people into watching This American Life, which my dad has so kindly taped and sent to me. Jealous? I thought so.
• i've been trying to cook for my host family on sunday's (ie: avril puts some ingredients out, asks for a grocery list and brings things back for me to prepare.) last sunday i made a thai peanut sauce with noodles and it turned about pretty well.
• the other night we went to Johan's cousin's house for a brai (barbeque) and toted our signature 5L box-o-wine along (white this time.... and warm. and gross). when we're inebriated we all decide that we are experts in communicating in different languages. between us we had a riveting conversation in german, french, afrikaans, and spanish. and a little bit of xhosa. and english when we had to. i'd like to say it was a pretty impressive and intelligent conversation and without a sober third party to discredit me i'm going to stick with my story.
• our latest assignment in Xhosa class was called "Ndingubani?" or "Who Am I?" which I thought was a pretty existential assignment for a beginning Xhosa class. Unfortunately, with our limited Xhosa vocabulary, who we are is largely determined by pretty weird details. I mean, maybe a Xhosa person really wants to know that I drink coffee, I arrive at school at 9:00 and I do not study Latin, but I doubt it.
• last week i got my confirmation for study abroad at the American University of Paris next semester.
ps. i can check g-mail/facebook but sometimes can't do anything outgoing (sending e-mails, writing on walls, sending messages, etc). but thank you for the bits of love from everyone. south africa is great but there's nothing like home and the people who make it such. Miss you all.

Langa

Today we went on a fieldtrip to Langa, one of the townships in the area. Langa is the oldest Township in Cape Townn, and also one of the smallest, at a population of about 250,000. The largest township in Cape Town and second largest in South Africa is Khayelitsha(first is Soweto in Gauteng), with a population of over 1.3 million.

Townships were formed during apartheid to separate Black Africans from Coloureds and Whites. Housing was built by the government but homes were not built quickly enough and the result was thousands of informal settlements, or houses built out of scrap and wood by people.

In Langa, as in other townships, the level of housing and economic prosperity differs among its inhabitants. Some of the houses we saw housed professionals such as doctors and lawyers, in homes that could cost over R300,000. On the other end of the spectrum were the informal settlements, small shacks often built out of metal and cardboard where people did not even have running water. In between these were small homes, some sleeping up to ten people (about three families) to a single room, with three or four rooms in a house.

During our tour we visited all types of houses, led by a guide from Langa. Our Xhosa teacher, Nkosinathi, also went with us, as he had lived in Langa for 15 years before becoming a student and then a teacher at UWC. In our tour we visited a pre-school where children gave a little singing and dancing performance for us, which was wonderful. Their dancing was unbelievable, but I can confidently say that small children of any culture are for the most party very tone deaf, and very loud when they sing. We also got to eat a traditional Xhosa meal (tripe, "live" chicken, curry, lamb, etc). AND we got the opportunity to practice our Xhosa speaking skills with people, which was also a great experience.

I took pictures and hopefully they'll be posted up for you guys sometime this week.

Salani Kakuhle (stay well)

Bo-Kaap

On Sunday my Aunt Fiona took me and Kat out to Simon's town and then to Boulder's, a penguin colony along the Indian ocean. It was might windy but really pretty and the penguins were waddle-y, as they always are.

Sunday night we went over to Dan's house to watch the USA/ South Africa rugby team. Score-wise the US didn't do too well but we still played pretty well and it was fun to watch.

On Monday we took a field trip to the Bo-Kaap area, formerly known as the Cape Malay French Quarter, a predominantly Muslim area. We went to the museum there and then on a walking tour. It's an absolutely beautiful area, and the streets are lined with these bright, pastel-colored houses that make the neighborhoods feel like big boxes of candy.

FOF Progress

As I mentioned the other day we are working with the ANC Youth League to help tutor students in a nearby township, Guguletu, on Saturdays. Well last Saturday was our first time and we managed to make plenty of friends-over-fifteen. They are all really nice boys and girls who don't mind humoring us and letting us practice or Xhosa with them. They even gave us all Xhosa names.

My Xhosa name is "Thulisa," since that's what they thought I was saying when I introduced myself. "Thulisa," in Xhosa means "silent one." I'll leave you to judge whether it was an appropriate choice.

Anyways, we didn't get much tutoring done as the program is still getting organized, but we did hang out in the school courtyard for awhile, where all of our friends seemed to have an amazing 10+ Xhosa song repertoire, complete with dancing/clapping routines. We stumbled around and tried to follow them but my attempts were pretty abysmal.

Later that night the boys called us up and picked us up in the Student Council Van (pretty sure that's not allowed...) and took us to the campus bar/club hang out, The Barn. After that we went to a nearby Shebeen to get alcohol (Shebeens are homes that sell alcohol after hours, since stores don't sell alcohol after 5 or so. Some Shebeens are legal, some are not. Shebeens are a little sketch but we were with a bunch of locals so it was fine), and then we hung out in one of the students dorms and had a dance party part two. It's a little embarrassing how bad of dancers we are compared to our new friends, but they were pretty nice about it.

Overall the night was random and awkward and a little crazy but it was definitely fun and I'm glad we're starting to branch out more.

Garden Route Trip

so we went on a three day garden route trip the other week-- a nice long roadtrip through cape town along the coast. we drove in a big VW Kombi, equipped with lots of padkos (food for the road) and nine mix cd's from the group.

Day 1: Outdshoorn

On day one we drove to Outdshoorn where we first went to an ostrich farm. We got to take a tour of the farm and then feed and ride the ostriches, which was really amazing and exhilarating. After that we went to the Cango Caves and took the "adventure tour," which consisted of fitting ourselves through very small, slimy cave tunnels coined fun names like "the devil's chimney" and "the coffin." The caves were huge and part of them used to be concert halls until people did too much damage to them. that night we went out to dinner for ostrich steak, which is pretty... steaky.











Day 2: George, Knysna, Bungee!

Day two was mostly scenic driving through hills and along coasts and what not. It was really nice and our final destination was the Bloukrans River Bridge, site of the world's highest commercial bungee jump. I wasn't planning on jumping before we got there, but driving up i got really excited about the whole thing and decided to go for it. they set it up in a way that you don't know when you're going to jump until about one or two people before you, so there's not too much time to get nervous. then you're getting all strapped in and stuff and before you know it your toes are hanging off the edge of a bridge and you're looking into a giant gorge and people are counting down and screaming bungee and just as your clenched toes are leaving the cold cement and you see this great, green, tree-y expanse below you, you think to yourself "i am jumping off a bridge right now." but then it's much too late to do anything about it save enjoy it. which is what i did.

that night we went checked into our rooms at the garden route game farm, had a big big dinner and proceeded to consume a 5 liter box of red wine, apparently a favorite past time of ours.










Day 3: Game Farm, Aloe, Home

We woke up really early for a game drive and got to see elephants and lions and wilderbeast and giraffes and all of that. we also went to a snake farm and i got to hold a half burmese python/ half black mamba snake. then we went to a cheetah park and stood in the same enclosure as the cheetahs, which i didn't find to be the wisest of decisions but it was nice all the same. after that we made a brief stop at an aloe factory and then we set off for the long drive home.







The trip was really great overall and a nice break from school. I don't think I could ever get tired staring out the window of a car here in South Africa, everything is so beautiful. Unless of course I were squished in an eight seater car with ten people. for three days. But really, it was awesome and I wish you all could have come along.

See all the pictures at http://picasaweb.google.com/shareatoothbrush

kisses and hugs.

Updates

hey guys

the internet is getting pretty sporadic so i'm probably going to be in and out of communication indefinitely. i'm slowly posting pictures up and i'm working on the captions so hopefully you guys will get the updates.

this past week has been pretty action packed but the long weekend before that was pretty awesome too, which is the extent of my picture posting so far.

last friday we went on a class field trip to the berry farms in stellenbosch with our afrikaans teachers. then on saturday my auntie cathy, uncle raymond, and their daughter bianca took me and kat around cape town to a flea market and to the scratch patch (mineral gem thing place). on sunday kat and i attempted to cook chinese food for our host family which went pretty well. and then on monday the group went to table mountain where we proceeded to climb all 1085 glorious meters of it, my asthmatic lungs protesting pretty much the entire way. it was quite a task but totally worth it, and it's absolutely beautiful from the top. it's very cloudy up at the top and the mist and clouds roll in and out so one minute you're looking at a beautiful blue sandy coastline and the next minute you can't see five feet in front of you-- it's like nature is playing hide and seek with you. anyway so that was that weekend, and the pictures are under the SA 6 album. said album also includes pictures of Tumali, one of our many "fufs" or "friends under fifteen" as we like to call them. big kids are a little intimidating for us, or are maybe a little intimidated by the nine of us, but little ones (host siblings, kids in the park, etc) are more than willing to hang with us and school us in soccer in the afternoons. Tumali is the grandson of Felicity, who drives us to and from school. he is adorable and mostly likes to have nothing to do with us, but we go to great lengths to coax a smile or sentence out of him.

however, today we did make some "fofs" (friends over fifteen). this past friday we saw a poster for an ANC (african national congress) Youth League meeting so we went and got to see people debate on two centers of power and democratic centralism and other things. it was pretty interesting, and the group was also organizing a tutoring programing in guguletu, a township nearby, so today we went with them to go help out. the program is headed by a neighboring university, UTC (university of cape town) and is working with the government to set up an every-saturday tutoring program over the next few months to help 11th and 12th graders study for their final exams since they missed out on a lot of instruction when teachers went on strike a few months ago. i have a feeling it's going to be pretty cool so i'll keep you posted with that.

our other way making fofs is luring them with kat's hacky sack, which we take with us pretty much everywhere. i'd like to say that after a month of playing pretty much daily we've improved, but sometimes it's hard to tell.

so, that's a wrap up of that.

i still have to post up pictures of our baie lekker three-day garden route trip we took this week. so i guess i'll tell you guys all about that when i get the pictures up. stay tuned because you won't be disappointed!



Tumi and Me <3



Jam



Scratch 'n Patch


Table Mountain



Nippy.