Cape Town

Well, in the interest of getting up to speed, let me recap some of our first 2 weeks in Cape Town rather quickly...

We left Johannesburg on Sunday, June 12th - an early drive to the airport, and very smooth flight and transition to the University of Cape Town campus (including a MUCH roomier bus...nice!).  The group was ushered into Fuller Hall, their residence for the program where each of them has a room to him or herself, and we were shown the very imposing wood-paneled dining hall, and the even more Hogwarts-like Common Room with a breathtaking view of the valley below campus. 

(yes, that's my photo - it's pretty easy to take a good one on a Sunday day on campus!)

Monday morning, UCT ID cards for access to the gym and library, and an orientation with Ms. Angela Mias, our Community Coordinator, who has worked hard to ensure that the students will have an enriching internship experience.  That afternoon we went, as a group, to several of the Cape Town townships, to get a glimpse of the context in which many of them will be working.  Beginning in the small but impressive District 6 Museum, we added to our understanding of the Group Areas Act (one of several 'pillars' of apartheid) and the forced removal of the coloured population of this area to the outskirts of Cape Town.  A former resident now works full time at the museum, Noor Ebrahim, gave the students an impassioned narrative about seeing his childhood home destroyed in front of him, and the controversy that still surrounds the open land of District 6 - many are on a waiting list for housing the government has promised, for years, to provide, even as somehow it is parceled off for development little by little...



From there we headed on to a community center in Langa, where they have a functioning kiln, drum, dance and singing lessons for kids after school, and lots of arts infrastructure for people in the area to come and take advantage of.  We even tried our hands at it...

We spent some of the afternoon touring three of the student sites as well - but more on those in another post.  AND we got a taste of the famously mercurial Cape Town weather.  After leaving this sunny spot, by the time we got to the Amy Biehl memorial, it was raining...