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.