Kruger Part 1

So, I know I haven't posted in a while, but there hasn't been much to write about, then this weekend was crazy. So, last week was a lot of work, and the weekend was a wash due to bad weather and a broken boat. I shopped and bought a lot of presents (for other people and for myself... :) ) So that was fun, and useful. We went to see the new James Bond movie, and its nice because a movie plus a medium popcorn and soda is R50. Sweet deal. Thats cheaper than JUST a movie in the states, and the theatres are pretty nice.

This week we finished up our first draft of the Atlas, and just received comments from our advisors today. That will be interesting. We also worked on Endlovini TV (Endlovini meaning strength in Xhosa) which was basically Oprah in Monwabisi but it was popular with residents, mostly, I suspect, because people like seeing themselves on TV. But they talked about important issues on it, such as safety in the community, why they moved there and teenage pregnancy and its problems. So, thats interesting. Its a lot of work though, but its filmed and written entirely by community members, so there is definitely a knowledge exchange, they are learning about the video equipment and techniques, and we're learning a lot about their culture.

On Tuesday, we left for Kreuger national park, and our safari. Ten of us went on the trip, and we flew to Jo'Burg on Tuesday night and stayed in an airport lodge. We got upgraded from Kulula to British Airways, which was much nicer and included dinner. I was surprised at the lack of security and precautions taken on the flight. We were allowed to bring basically anything in our carry ons, and they only checked our passports once when we bought our tickets, not at security. The airport lodge was decent, nicer than St. Johns, and in the suburbs of Johannesburg near the airport.

Our safari bus picked us up at the lodge at 6 am and we drove the 6 hours to Kruger. We stopped at several attractions and for food on the way. First was God's Window, but it was really foggy there. Its a rainforest area, so it generally is, but its in the mountains, and when clear offers great views of the valleys below. There were lots of interesting plants and loud insects there. After God's Window, we visited the three Rondevals which are round pieces of land sticking out of a the third largest (and worlds greenest) canyon, and the pot holes which are wierd sinkholes in the ground that are huge. It was all very beautiful, and I've never seen anything quite like these places. Rondevals are the traditional houses made with thatched roofs, and you can see in the picture that the land looks somewhat like them.

We spent our second night in the lodge outside Kruger, and spent time in the pool there, and ate a delicious dinner. There was a crazy bar tender who told the most ridiculous dirty jokes, which was entertaining, and there were children who came in and did tribal dances and encouraged all the guys to dance as well, luckily for me it was only guys who were encouraged to dance and I didn't have to.

And the internet is not letting me upload more pictures, so the safari itself will come tomorrow.

Pictures from top to bottom: Three Rondevals, Potholes, God's Window, Sunset from the jeep

Surfing and a tour of the Cape of Good Hope

Friday was the big Charrette about housing and water redevelopment. We all presented our ideas and work so far, as well as future work to the sponsors and members of the Street Committee, Monwabisi's informal government.

After the Charette we went out to a fancy Italian dinner on the Water front. It was the last day of the Volvo Boat Race's appearance in Cape Town, so the V and A was packed. Its funny because I can see how people think Americans are obnoxious. This restaurant was fancy, as in they took your napkin and put it on your lap for you... awkward. But, because in American terms dinner costs about 15 dollars, we were wearing jeans and sweatshirts, and were seated in the back. It was delicious though. After that long Friday, we went to Springbok the pub out by Newlands and the Rugby stadium. It was a lot of fun. Friday morning, we left on the train for Muizenberg, a very good surfing beach. Apparantly there are a lot of shark attacks there. The train was very sketchy. Apparantly, public transportation is not commonly used if you can take a taxi, you do. But it would have been about a 20 dollar cab ride each way (because it was like an hour away) and it was only R17 ($1.70) to take the trian round trip. The beach was beautiful, and warm because it is on the Indian Ocean. We rented surfboards and wetsuits for R100 for the whole day!! Which was really nice. I caught a few decent waves, although you have to paddle pretty far out to get past the mush which makes me slightly nervous.

Instead of seaweed being everywhere on the beach, there are large strands of kelp because there are kelp forests just off shore. The strands are about 20 feet long, and 4 inches in diameter and are scattered on the beach. There were also large jellyfish, but no sharks! After a long day of surfing and sunning ourselves we headed back on the train. We stayed in Saturday night because Sunday was planned as a tour of the Cape Point.

The tour of Cape Point picked us up in vans early on Sunday. We started by driving through Green Point (where we are staying, which is also apparantly frequented by American Celebrities), Sea Point, through Camps Bay, past Muizenberg and to a place where we took a boat to seal island. Which is literally a very very large rock COVERED in seals. Its kind of gross. We drove to Boulder Beach afterward to see the penguins! Which was slightly more exciting because you can get a lot closer to them. One of the people on the trip got bitten after trying to pet one. We drove to the Cape of Good Hope after, and biked several miles to the place where our picnic lunch was. There were LOTS of baboons. In the parking lots, in the roads, everywhere, just wild baboons. There were also ostriches on the beach. I never considered that these animals would just be wandering around outside of nature reserves, but they are.

After lunch we drove to the end of the cape, to the most south western point in Africa. That was fun, then we continued down the cape and climbed up the hill to the tip of the cape where the lighthouse is. (The funicular tram was broken) The views were beautiful and we could see the rock the Flying Dutchman ( and many other ships) crashed on. There we re artifacts in the little museum up there too. Despite popular belief the Cape Horn is NOT the southern most point in Africa. But it is where the Indian and Atlantic meet, and you can see a line in the water where it gets darker. After the hike up, we climbed back down and took the bus home. Overall a busy, but very fun weekend. I think that we have seen almost all of the touristy things in Cape Town now.


Pictures as follows: plant on a fence put there by a witch doctor, beach shacks on the beach at Muizenberg, where the oceans meet

What we've been doing in Monwabisi

So I guess a post about the work I'm doing here would be appropriate. Its kind of hard to explain, but I'll do the best I can. So, instead of writing our IQP report, our professors decided that we should combine all the group work and create an Atlas of Monwabisi Park. Since I am on the Communications Team, our job has been to initiate a co-researcher program in the park, and make it sustainable. We also had to analyze communication among the sectors involved (see diagram that I had to create to do this) and create a database logging all communication and contact information among the groups. We are also responsible for updating and re doing the Cape Town Project Centre website so that it is useful to current students, alumni and prospective students. Right now, its kind of useless. The other component is to create a "voice" for the community by using photos and their words to tell their stories which will be used in sponsor presentations and in the atlas. We work 40 hours a week on this project, or about that much and have weekends completely off to travel.

Tomorrow is the big Indaba/Charette involving all of our sponsors, advisors and other members of the park, and the rest of the students. In the morning, we will be giving our presentations about our projects (there are 6 groups of three or four students) and in the afternoon we will be drumming, getting our hair braided and eating. It should be a very good time, as well as a productive one.

Today I toured the Shabeens (or bars) with a member of the Mapping team and three co- researchers. Some were nicer than others, some had clients at 9 am on a Thursday. Deb got a marriage proposal (some man asked what he would have to do to make her stay in Africa and be his wife), we both got hit on quite a lot, but I guess we stood out in the bars, as definitely foreigners and probably Americans. We also got handed condoms by AIDS prevention workers, and this got our advisor Scott very excited and asking lots of awkward questions. But this is a step in the right direction, as very recently South Africa was denying that AIDS was a real disease and refused outside help.

We finally got to work out our presentation with the Co-Researchers, and we shall see how it goes tomorrow.

Wine Tours and Table Mountain

Friday night was fun. We went to a rugby club called the Springbok (which is South Africa's rugby mascot) and it was a good time, finally a club with people our age! We also tried absinthe, which is entertaining to drink. You pour a wine glass about a third full with it, and hold a spoon filled with sugar over the glass with a little bit of the liquid in it, then light the spoon on fire. When the sugar carmelizes, you stir it in, blow the flame out and drink the glass.

This is a picture of the first (and best) winery we went to in Stellenbosch.

The wine tour on saturday took us around Stellenbosch, to 4 different wineries. The first one was the most beautiful, and most stereotypical plantation. De Leuwen Jagt was the former name of it, which means the Lion Hunt in Afrikaans. We sat at tables on a lawn that overlooked the entire vinyard, and had mountains in the background. It was gorgeous. The next two wineries we went to were more modern, and very chic, but also beautiful. I don't like wine very much. So, all day I bought one bottle of dessert wine because it tastes like candy. It was a fun trip, and we got to check out the Cape Dutch architecture and enjoy all sorts of wine. We stopped in Stellenbosch for lunch, near the university and had some delicious food.

When we got home, a bunch of us took a taxi to Camp's Bay beach and watched the sun go down- the perfect ending to our day. We then went out for sushi, and since I hate the way seaweed tastes I got raw fish on rice which was much better. I had pad thai with it which I also enjoyed. I'm getting better about new foods.

This is a picture of the sunset on Camps Bay beach.

Sunday was Table Mountain day. We went to bed early so we could get up at 7 to get on the mountain and be done with it before noon. Table mountain is the wierdest mountain I've ever seen. We went to the botanical gardens then climbed up Skeleton Gorge to one of the highest points. We met a group of South African climbers who warned us not to take the cliff side route since it was difficult and made it seem like you could fall off the mountain. Having heard that from our friends who had climbed the week before, we opted for the resivour route.

This was a poor life choice. The boys who had the map kind of ditched us, and I ended up climbing with Kelly, Steph and Marcella. We walked past lakes with sandy beaches and red water, on the top of a mountain!!! It was extremely weird. After we passed them, we saw people laying out tanning, on top of table mountain in their bathing suits by the water. We kept hiking, and reached another summit, thinking it was the last one. It was not, and we headed downhill looking for the cable car lift to take us down. We climbed several summits this way. And by climbed I mean climbed cliff faces via the laddars that were bolted into them, or climbed along the cliff using chains bolted into it. We didn't know that we'd accidentally taken the advanced challenge trail. Poor choice. Basically we ran out of water, got scared, and luckily we decided to keep going, and as soon as we made it over the last ridge, we saw the cable car and restaurant off in the distance. Matt was waiting for us with chilled bottles of water, and we ate lunch and took pictures. We took the cable car down, which was also scary, considering that it had no glass windows on half of it. Oh dear.


This is a picture of the lake on top of Table Mountain. Wierd. You can see the city below in the distance.


After that rough morning, we went to Camps Bay, ate Kauai and spent the day at the beach. Glorious. Although the water was freezing.

Today was some what productive, we went to the Park and talked with the co researchers about our final project, and worked with them on gathering life stories of people. I went with three of them and we talked to people in about five houses and took pictures, and asked them information about themselves. The insides of the shacks are sometimes nice, you'd think it was a tiny regular home from the inside.

This is a picture from the look out station on Table Mountain, overlooking Camps Bay and the Atlantic.

Staying Optemistic in Monwabisi

Sometimes, this is an extremely difficult task. Its hard to see the discrepancy between the millionaires play ground and the shacks, and wonder how people can not understand the problem. This picture is a view from Signal Hill, where they fire a cannon every day at noon, and you can hear it throughout the main parts of the city. We've had some good, and interesting dining experiences while in Cape Town, yesterday we went to a fancy Thai restaurant, ordered dinner for 7 and two bottles of wine, and the final cost was 800 rand, or roughly eighty dollars, including gratuity. It was delicious, and I'm going to have to try more Thai food in the future. Most nights we watch movies because the night life is pretty slow, and there isn't much to do that doesn't involve going to bars. We have a projector screen we set up on the porch, and watch tv shows and movies when its nice out.

The Co-Researcher project has been working out really well. All of the project groups enjoy working with them, and we're beginning to become friends. I can have a small introductory conversation in Xhosa, consisting of Hello, How are you? Good, and you? etc. Matt is working on an interactive audio dictionary to put online so that we can all learn the basics and maybe some additional interesting words. The co researchers love laughing at our attempts though, but they are always willing to help. As a group, we've decided that we are most likely combining the efforts of all the groups and making a publishable atlas of current situations and possible redevelopment strategies for the park. along with a human component, consisting of photos of people and their life stories. It will be a source of pride for members of the community and will also be appealing to possible donors to the cause and useful for the government. We've learned that in many cases, the civil services of Cape Town have no idea of the problems with bathrooms and electricity, and the photos the energy and water teams have taken are helping them realize they exist.

Yesterday, I went with Marco to the public library again so he could work on the contact database and I could work on the graphics of the communication network, which our advisors have pushed. It was productive, and on the way back we had an interesting experience with a cab driver. When he found out we were Americans, he immediately asked what we thought of Obama. We replied, and he went on about how he had wished McCain had won because Obama had no respect or experience, and was not militaristic and would have no control. He also said that South Africa does not have an active armed force, which I hadn't known, and that since they eliminated it the country had fallen into chaos. This is the opposite end of the spectrum from our sponsor, Di, who was estatic that a black man was leading the United States. So there is a wide range of opinions on the matter, as there are in the US.

A scary incident today reminded us all that we aren't perfectly safe here, when one of the students got very sick quickly and couldn't breathe. He was with co researchers in the middle of the settlement, and we didn't know where our advisors were, as they had also left with co researchers. Luckily, they were able to get him back to the Indlovu Centre and an electrician was nearby with a car, and he was rushed to the hospital. But, since Di was not there today, we have no transportation other than Fachme. (yes thats our bus drivers name, and YES we make jokes about it all the time. Even our advisors love to pronounce his name strategically.) Hopefully he will be fine, but its scary. This is the same guy who a woman threatened to kill a few days ago when he wouldn't give her cigarette money because we are always strictly instructed never to give to beggars and to tell them we are giving our time and hard work. It has been a long week, and the weekend is much needed, and I'm excited for the wine tour at Stellenbosch tomorrow.

Also, there is a famous around the world sailboat race at the V and A water front now for the next few weeks. I think we'll be checking it out soon.

Second Weekend in Cape Town

The braai on Friday went fairly well, except that we followed all the instructions given to us by Buyiswa and still managed to offend people because we only provided food for 30- ourselves and the people in the park we work with. We didn't know that we were supposed to be feeding two other groups of workers as well. Hopefully our faux pas doesn't affect us too much. I cooked all the chicken (it took several hours) and Matt made the salad. Next time, we are making it a pot luck.

This picture is of Cape Town City hall and library.

Friday night was halloween, and they don't really celebrate that much here. We went to the News Cafe for dinner, the food was decent but not exceptional. Afterward, we headed out on the town to see what was going on for Halloween. We went to Long Street, and the Dubliner, but after an hour or so, about half of us left to go to a club. We went to Hemisphere, one of the nicer clubs in Cape Town, located at the top of a 32 story building, with windows on all sides. Unfortunately, we didn't know the minimum age was 25, and that most of the people in the club were over 40... but they let us in anyway. It was fun, but there weren't other people our age to dance with. We left around 2 am and headed home.

The next day was low key, I went out to lunch and to the waterfront with Laura and Debra, and we went to the Two Oceans aquarium which was nice. It was smaller than Mystic, but had sharks, penguins, giant rays, a sea turtle and a kelp forest, so it ended up being enjoyable. We stayed in on Saturday night because we'd planned to climb Table Mountain on Sunday. The weather didn't work out however, so we went shopping on Sunday instead because it was raining and there was now view. I bought a gold Africa pendant for my necklace, its really nice and has a diamond on it. And it was cheap. Sweet deal.

Monday was the ZERI orientation in the park,which consisted of learning about radical methods of water purification (naturally spiraling) and changing production processes. It was interesting to say the least, then we worked on different design aspects of how to rebuild an area of the park behin the community centre that was damage in a fire this weekend.

Today we are meeting with our advisors, hopefully coming up with an acceptable project and going to the Cape Town library. After some Kauai burgers of course. That is most definitely my new favorite restaurant. And theres gelato right next door.

The project aspect is frustrating. Really frustrating. But hopefully things will work out this week.