Molo, faithful followers

While I won't bore you with the details of my egregiously long travel to Cape Town, I would like to take this opportunity to plug for KLM Royal Dutch Airlines (Northwest), whose complimentary cocktails made the trip infinitely more enjoyable. Cheers, KLM.

Arrival day was mostly a blur, for a few obvious reasons, however all of the other volunteers are incredibly nice. Most of them, anyway. My room, essentially a garage that is not attached to the house proper, is known informally as the "man cave." Though daunting at first, it turned out to be a perfectly fine cave, comparable to all other bedrooms in the house, even if it does smell a little like a locker room. Observe:



Continuing right along, the following day consisted of a tour of the city. There are 11 official languages in South Africa, several of which have one of those clicks somewhere in their pronunciation. Obviously, this is an incredibly diverse place, and when you add in the mountains and coastline, well just look at pictures.


The following day commenced the Township tour. Township is loosely defined in South Africa as meaning a "non-white" community. Though not made compulsory under the law until 1948 under the Apartheid system, the separation of races began in 1902, when, because of extreme racialization, the food of black people was regularly infested with rats and their fleas, which led to the spread of the bubonic plague among black communities. Thus, the separation of the races was intended for the isolation of a potential epidemic. It, of course, resulted in racism and extreme segregation, individuals needed permits to leave their township.

Now, though all residents of South Africa are free to come and go from their communities as they please, the damage has been mostly done. Poverty, unemployment and crime are abundant in the townships, and the wealth on the other side is just as extreme.




Though township residents have been dealt a shitty deal, they are remarkably happy people. In fact, they are more creative than most people I've met when it comes to ways to get by happily. Below are a couple of pictures from the center for visual and performing arts in the township of Langa:



The kids are all really friendly




They even brew their own beer....



That is a communal bucket of beer brewed by hand by some entrepreneurial girls in one of the townships. Srsly.

And so, fearless readers, I will leave you with that for now. Blogging, as it turns out, requires significantly more bandwidth than I can comfortably come up with here in the Cape, and bringing you the pictures you see here took about 3 days. Fear not, for I will not abandon ye, but keep in mind that posts may not be prompt. I begin work at my placement at this organization doing marketing for the income generation program very soon.