Day 1

Mary and I drew the biggest room of the bunch which was great until we realized that we didn’t have a shower. So my morning started with a cold shower in the room across the hall (who knew the boys would use up all the hot water??). It was nice to walk around and actually see the town a little bit –the hills are amazing! This campus reminds me of Stanford – a lot – the architecture, the climate and vegetation, etc. Also the colors and initials are the same, but the Afrikaans signs most definitely are not!

After a very hearty breakfast we made our way over to the building to meet the volunteers from Stellenbosch, and break up into groups by school. My school is going to be Hector Peterson, and I’m in a group with a woman named Nomkita from the Eastern Cape, a man named Archie from Zimbabwe, and a local named Warric from just down the road. We talked a little bit about our game plan – to split the students into groups and work individually with each group like a workshop, then rotate each day so we each got to work with a different group. Warric had done a similar program the last summer and he said that one big concern was that the students had self confidence problems and so we have to work in the beginning to get them going, and may have a hard time coming up with an idea for their business plans. I am pleased to report that I busted out one of the few things I remember from CIE and said that what we were taught is to take a subject area and come up with a list of problems with it, and then talk about potential solutions. This went over well – the general consensus was that the kids would have no problem talking about the problems in their townships, and that would be a good way to break the ice. We’ll see.

Also the syllabus is quite detailed so we were thinking we may want to play it by ear in terms of how much depth to go into vs. taking more time to make sure that the students really understand the material we do go over and understand how they can really apply it to their lives. Ultimately we want the core content to stick – that’s the most important goal of the program.

After the obligatory visit to the university bookstore to pick up souvenir clothing we met for a tour of the township called Kayamundi outside of Stellenbosch. In a word – odd. Certainly not my first time seeing such living conditions, but the tour actually took us through some people’s houses which was very uncomfortable for many in the group. The locals were talking about us (in Xhosa I believe) saying how we were stupid and had probably never seen such things before. But some were great and actually wanted us to take pictures (especially the kids!). The orphanage was also interesting because the accommodations were much better than what we’d seen of most of the informal settlements. Anyway this reminded me a lot of Cambodia – there is a well-functioning local economy, the only thing I didn’t see that I expected to see was a vegetable market, but maybe the vegetables were sold in the stores. There were a couple of people selling butternut squash and some sort of bok choi. The more I travel the more it sinks in that most of the rest of the world is more like here, and Cambodia, and Cairo rather than like the U.S. or even Oakland. But as always, it’s easy to forget. So hopefully what we do in the schools next week will make things a little bit better for some small number of people.