These friends of mine

I have been blessed throughout my working life to have had wonderful colleagues and mentors; my office in Boston was like a second home, filled with people who really celebrated each other. Some of my most important connections were forged there.

My coworkers on the campaign were the warmest group of people I've ever known. A friend, who joined us midway through, remembers thinking, "who are these hippies who keep laughing and hugging each other?" The office here continues my good luck streak, with nice, smart, funny people who are brightening these data entry days.

My friend Emma has taken me up Devil’s Peak, out for a day trip to the winelands, and on various impromptu lunchtime trips around Cape Town. She has lent me books, made me crunchies (faux healthy cookies), and welcomed me into her life with great warmth. On our way to the winelands, we got lost on a detour and ended up in a suburban housing development, turning down streets that were indistinguishable from each other. Her husband, who was driving, was cursing under his breath; Emma, meanwhile, pointed out the window and said, “look at that rose bush! Isn’t it lovely! And out of season, too! We never would have seen it if we hadn’t gotten lost.” She's no naif, and no stranger to the words that were escaping her husband's mouth, but she was dead serious at that moment. It disarmed everyone in the car.

There too is my friend Liesl, who is passionate about the new South Africa and reconciliation. She actively refuses to be defined by her race, not avoiding any area just because outdated laws have lived on in spirit. And so she has brought me all around the Cape Peninsula, taking me to festivals, comedy shows, hole-in-wall bars, and aimless rambles everywhere from the townships to the ritzy Southern Suburbs. Any time you thank her, she responds with “pleasure!” in the most exuberant voice. It makes me want to thank her all the time.

Linda, who brought me to Khayelitsha a few weeks ago, is a force of goodness. She reminds me of a Gregory Peck quote, about how he woke up every morning trying to be a little more like Atticus Finch: the world would be vastly better if we were all a little more like her. Her work, which considers as somewhat separate from her job, is to heal the spiritual sickness brought on by HIV. She’s not referring to faith healing, or alternative medicine -- she’s talking about addressing the profound sadness that the epidemic has brought to the country. Last week, she brought a room of nurses to tears during a session on the spiritual care of orphans; watching them thank her was a spiritual experience in itself.

I could go on with anecdotes about the people I’ve met, but I’ll close by telling you about my friend Sharon. Another generous and hospitable South African, she regularly invites me over for meals and teas. I say this to highlight her genuine kindness. Upon arriving at a party a few weeks ago, she scanned the crowd, looked at me, and said, “Ahhhh . . . I’m certain that at least 80 percent of the people in this room are narcissists.” I really like her.

Toi-toi

1. South African for riots or protests.

2. Near-daily activity since I've been here.

Today's toi-toi is brought to you by all public transit workers. This means no buses, trains, or service delivery, plus abundant warnings against going into the city center. Not to worry: I'm safe in the Ivory Tower, entering what seems to be an endless amount of data.

Mzoli's: it is what it is

Yesterday some friends took me to Guguletu, one of the black townships in the Cape Flats. There is a famous-ish restaurant called Mzoli’s, where you pick out your meat and they braai it for you. The meat comes with samp and beans and mealie pap, which looks like overwhipped institutional mashed potatoes. For about $20, here was our spread:


Note that there are no utensils, which was interesting.

The food was amazing.

The owner was lovely and solicitous.

The music was loud and good, and the people danced at their tables, in the streets, and in line for food.

After lunch, we went around the corner to a shabeen, an unlicensed tavern. It also seemed to be a hair salon, which was a little confusing. There was a big rugby match on—the SA Springboks played the New Zealand All-Blacks, a longstanding rivalry. We/they won! And I had another moment where I wondered what my life would be like here. Is Jaque Fourie the new Tom Brady? Could coach Peter de Villiers ever take the place of Bill Belichick in my heart? Just as with Belichick, De Villiers’s press conferences are an awkward tour de force. He mumbles in thickly accented English and it’s generally accepted that no one can understand him. He smiles the entire time, though, which does distinguish him from BB. He also wears a ridiculous formal jacket, which I suppose is the South African equivalent of the hoodie.

When I tell South Africans that I flew from London on the same plane as the victorious post-World Cup Springboks, they curse me for not knowing who they were. Now I’m cursing myself for wondering “which local soccer team is sitting in business class.” Alas.

In December, there will be a movie about the 1995 World Cup, in which the Springboks played the All-Blacks in South Africa. It’s really the story of Mandela and how he used the traditional Afrikaner rugby as a tool of unification. John Carlin, a British journalist, wrote the book on which the movie is based. It was surprisingly powerful. Read it.

Wrapping up

After Kruger, what more is there to say? Most of my time has been eaten up with data entry, not exactly the most blog-worthy activity. I went to a comedy show last weekend, which on top of being lots of fun, taught me a lot about South African politics. The country also observed the first Mandela Day on his 91st birthday last Saturday. There were festivals and impromptu parties around town, although Mandela himself asked for each person to give 67 minutes of service--a minute for each year he spent as an activist.

On Monday, I climbed Table Mountain proper in lieu of working. It was a perfect day, and from the top you can turn around and see down the Cape Peninsula, out over the Atlantic, and out to the Winelands. While we didn't get lost, I wouldn't say that we took the most direct route home. "I think my muscle is breaking down," my fellow hiker said the next day.

I did make it back out to the Winelands, where I conducted interviews, ate well, and thought of never leaving. It is beautiful there, and the weather is autumnal--it reminds me that I'll come back to a month of summer* and then fall, with its cool nights, foliage, and fresh apples. It's nice to look forward to coming home, although I am getting sad about leaving. It's been a lovely two months.

One week to go! Today is an informal township tour, courtesy of my friends who actually live in the townships.

*apologies to Bostonians.

Lions (but not tigers and bears). Oh my!

For some unknown reason, several of my friends have invoked the words of the late, great Judy Garland in response to my trip to Kruger National Park. While I don't think anyone said "oh my," there was certainly a lot of "wow!" on our truck.

The tales of this trip are best told by photographs, but I will relay some of it here as well. My trip consisted of a young British zoologist, whose helpful presence was most welcome; a rockin' mother-daughter pair from Australia; and a very unsettling Canadian man from Bulgaria. Our guide, Jafta, was a prince. He has been married for 25 years, but wasn't able to afford a wedding until he started working for Funky Safaris a few years ago. Last year, he gave his wife and four children a 300-person wedding in their village. I will shamelessly plug Funkys to the death for the good work they're doing in the area, including good pay for their staff.

The best experience came towards the end of Saturday. As it turns out, being on safari is exhausting; you're bouncing up and down in the back of a truck, and concentrating so intently on the side of the road. It's freezing in the morning and at night, so your muscles are tense from staying warm. It is also a long day, starting at 5 a.m. and going into the early evening. By the time we started heading back to the camp around 5, we were all struggling to stay awake. Then we came across the elephant crossing the road. This is not the beginning of a joke.

The first elephant was soon followed by another, and another, until it became clear that a family of some sort was traveling together. One elephant served as a crossing guard (or lollipop lady if you're an Anglophile), while another stood guard at the first car in line. At some point, a minibus got tired of waiting and decided to drive through.

Over lunch, Jafta had told us that before an elephant attacks, it gives three warnings: shaking its head and trunk, roaring, and finally taking one step backwards before charging. Sure enough, the elephant standing at the first car took all three steps before lurching towards the minibus and its shrieking passengers. The elephant stopped after a few steps, returning calmly to his previous post, and the minibus got away with only a scare -- and the disdain of the other humans in the area.

Here is a list of the animals we saw, in approximately the order we saw them. (Yes, I took notes.)

impala (either one male: five females; or bachelor herds, which the zoologist said were the ones "who can't get women." Ha!)
water buck
white rhino
elephants
giraffes (including two pregnant ones)
mongoose
lions
zebras
wildebeest
warthogs
kudu
hippos
African fish eagles
kingfishers
bush pups
baboons
goliath heron
grey heron
darter
tsebe
and . . . not a single mosquito!

Bono was here

The picture I had in mind as we headed out to the children's home and hospice in the township was the one I had seen on the internet: Bono (in red sunglasses, of course) holding a very young AIDS patient. Sure enough, that picture was in the office, as well as a wall of pictures of sports stars who had visited. I'm often skeptical of stars and the places they visit, but this place was extraordinary.

First, though, I should tell you how we got there. While I've been driving all over the metropolitan area for interviews, my site mentor insisted that I go accompanied by a (black) social worker. There is so much I could say about how race works in South Africa. What you need to know for this story is that the apartheid government divided townships into black and coloured (mixed race), and this is a black township. It is recommended that you visit the townships with a local, or at least someone who looks like a local. And so it was that Linda and I set out this morning for Khayelitsha.

Another story about race: one of my friends here wants to take me to a snoek braai* in a black township. She is coloured, but under apartheid her family members were classed as white, coloured, black, and Indian, depending on where they lived. She said that she will call her black friends to see if some of them can accompany us. It would be okay if she went on her own, she explained, but my clearly white presence demands an escort.

Back to this morning: we get off the highway a few miles from the hospice, and the secondary road is filthy beyond anything I've ever seen. There is trash piled up on the sides of the road, and as we near the hospice, the trash starts to show up in the middle of the road, then in the driving lanes, so that you have to wait for oncoming traffic to pass before you can drive. The streets are also lined with people, as though a parade might show up in the midst of the garbage.

Three police cars drive by with sirens wailing. "I hope they're going somewhere important. Sometimes they just want to get around the traffic," Linda says, by way of explanation.

"Police in America do the same thing," I say.

"They do?"

Now there's a dumpster in the middle of the road, turned over, with trash spilling out. We encounter several more until we get to the road we need.

We take the turn to the hospice, and there are about dozen police cars blocking the street.** Linda asks out the window for directions and a man jumps in the back. I'm not sure what's going on; they're speaking Xhosa, of which I understand approximately 20 slowly spoken and well-enunciated words. But they're laughing, so I assume everything is fine. The detour means another 5 minutes of driving through the dirt roads of the township, which are packed with people, including kids who play chicken with the car. Outhouses and collapsed homes line the street.

The man -- a hospice employee, as it turns out -- brings us in so that I can do my interviews. Afterwards we get a tour of the compound, which includes an orphanage, a health training centre, and a school. There are at least a hundred children in the orphanage, and when we go in, some of them start climbing on me, using my dress and bag as a rope and ladder. We can hear shouting and sirens in the background, but the kids are just being kids. As we chat with the staff in one house, the kids spontaneously break out into a loud song-and-dance that we soon recognize as the English alphabet. I put down my bag in the 2-3 year old house, and turn around to find one boy rummaging through it while another tries to carry it over his shoulder.

There are very few places in the area that care for children, so this home is unique just by its mission. What made it more unusual was the respite centre, where HIV patients could spend 6 weeks getting on antiretroviral drugs, regain strength, and receive care that their families were unable to give. Beyond that, the centre trains locals to be home-based carers (community health workers, accompagnateurs, caregivers) for AIDS patients, and maintains a full school for its kids. On top of the large staff, there are volunteers from around the world who come and live there for a year.

We walk back to Linda's car and smell tires burning. A police helicopter hovers nearby, lowering a rope. The kids are going crazy at the gate. The helicopter is beyond exciting to them, and they're trying to get out to go see it. "I'm gonna climb it," one of them tells me, jumping up and down.

The whole scene was mad, but my tolerance for disorder is unrecognizable after five weeks here. I'd been told that sometimes doing a summer project abroad is just about learning to cope in a different environment. I've been fortunate to find my work here fulfilling and interesting, but I've learned a lot just by being here and interacting with other people. So now I know to tip the guy who sits near my parked car because he'll guard it; that I have to leave room at red lights in case I need to get away suddenly; that red lights are in fact just a suggestion; and that in the right company, I am not only safe, but welcome anywhere in the area.

Driving alone, I think I would have turned around at that first dumpster and opted for phone interviews. What a loss it would have been for me.

* an elaborate fish bbq
** it turns out that the citizens are protesting the lack of municipal services, starting with the irregular trash pick-up. In another part of Cape Town today, the taxi drivers ended an unrelated protest with rubber bullets from the police, possibly in response to actual bullets from the taxi drivers.

Recent highlights

*Hiking Devil’s Peak (1003 m) on a beautiful sunny day, breathing in the clouds at the top, and looking down the Cape Peninsula, east to the snow-capped Franschhoek mountains, and west to Robben Island. As I looked behind me to the trail we had taken up the mountain, I saw the Southern Suburbs (L), and as I looked ahead to the route down the mountain, I saw the city bowl and Table Bay (R).











*Discovering Maharajah, a fabulous and dirt-cheap vegetarian Indian take-away. They are known for “bunny chow,” in which they fill hollowed-out bread with a curry dish. Legend has it that the dish came about during apartheid, when non-whites were not allowed to sit in restaurants, requiring portable dishes served through back doors. They also have the nicest owner, who has posted numerous articles about the ethics and environmental impact of eating animals; it's pretty harsh reading for a restaurant wall.


*Going to Robben Island (in part inspired by seeing it from the mountain) and hearing the story of Mandela and his fellow political prisoners. All guides on the island are former political prisoners, and so they use their own stories to tell the history of the island. It was so powerful. Below is one of the cells that housed multiple prisoners, and to the right is the prisoners' menu, segregated by race.





*Seeing the sun rise from Signal Hill, yet another amazing viewpoint along the Table Bay shoreline. An artist was there too, and he called the guinea fowl over so that I could take a picture. Happily, my fear of birds is ebbing.

*Day trip to the winelands: beautiful view, lovely, creative food, abysmal service--as in, we waited 90 minutes to get our food. We consoled ourselves by watching glass-blowing and climbing goats.

*Coming across a Michael Jackson dance memorial. Unfortunately, I had left my camera at home, but it was covered on the news.

*The Woodstock Neighbourgoods Market, an interesting two-mile walk from my flat. It’s one of Cape Town’s many markets, but the only one I know of that focuses on local farmers, as well as local crafts and young artists (see the pillowcase on the left). Mostly I went because I heard the food was outstanding--and it was! Here are some of the delicacies we sampled: raw chocolate, goat cheese (vanilla, oak smoked, chili, olive), goulash, smoked olives, goji berries, raw muesli, Dutch almond cake baked onto a spice biscuit, rye bread with olives, raw honey with hazelnuts, Moroccan harissa, avocado almond pesto, almond rocket pesto, bacon-wrapped mushroom kebabs, and a fresh spring roll with butternut squash, pineapple, and smoked chicken. We bought the last two items once the guilt of free samples became too much to bear.

*Going on pain rounds at a pediatric hospital. Admittedly, it's not in keeping with the touristy nature of this post, but it reflects how I spend 5/7 days--just not the picturesque ones. It was heartbreaking and a powerful motivator to do my small part to help.

*Booking a two-day safari to Kruger! In the meantime, lots of interviews this week, and some local traveling. Hope everyone enjoyed their holiday weekend.

Where I'm actually from

For eight (very specific) years, when traveling abroad I would occasionally tell people that I was Canadian. It wasn't always an apology; more often it was a way to defuse the conversation with a stranger. I didn't always feel like carrying the weight of such a powerful country on my shoulders, particularly not while browsing at markets or renting windsurfers. I wasn't alone: one friend put a Canadian flag on her suitcase.

Of course, my relationship to our northern neighbor was more complicated than just a few white lies. In both 2000 and 2004 my friends and family threatened to move to Canada. One of the best weekends of my life was in Toronto. And I have a persistent and rather romanticized notion that Canada is more civil, more humane, and happier than the U.S.

By that measure, yesterday brought the email I have been waiting for:

"Hi Signe, It was a pleasure having you . . . I also wanted to know whereabouts in Canada you are from. "

But this year feels very different. South Africans are keen to know all about Obama; my office mates have pictures of his inauguration above their desks. I'm proud when I talk about his election and what it meant to me and my friends. I'm not a flag-waver by any means, but I am not Canadian today, either.

Happy 233rd.

Where are you from?

"The States."
"Yes, I hear your accent. Where in the States?"

At this point, I have a choice: Boston or Pittsburgh. My friend's husband, an architect, was one of the few who got "Pittsburgh" as an answer. To my delight, he not only knew of Pittsburgh, but actually said, "have you been to Fallingwater yet?" More typical is my interaction with a street vendor, who was wearing a Steelers parka:

"Oh! I'm from Pittsburgh!"
"I'm from Harare."

And so I've said "Pittsburgh" to enough blank stares that I usually just say that I'm from Boston.

It has yielded a few good responses:

"Is it snowing there now?"
"No, it's actually summer now."
"So it snows less?"

"Do you hate the Yankees?" I'm glad to see that globalization applies to the Red Sox -- including the Coco Crisp jersey I spied the other day at the grocery.