We’re going on the tour with a company called African Trax. Lisa is going to be our guide and she picks us up at the house around 9:30a. Lisa is a short, solid woman in her forties, I believe. She’s spunky and fun. We start our tour by going to the District 6 museum. District 6 is an area of Cape Town where the Cape Malay were centered, but the area also had Blacks, Whites, Middle Easterners, and Asians. In the 1960’s most everyone was forcibly evicted to make the area a Whites only area. Homes were bulldozed and families and communities were split up and destroyed. Only after Apartheid was an attempt are correcting this injustice made and now there is new construction as descendants of those displaced are given priority to move back in. The museum shows the community and different aspects of it that were lost. There are maps of the area, recipes, pictures of people in the community, information on the laws that were passed and artwork.
To clarify, Cape Malays are an ethnic group. They tend to be lighter skinned and with straight hair. They almost seem like lighter skinned Black Latinos. I have seen more than a few with green eyes.
After touring the museum, we drive up to the Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens. The gardens span about 150 hectares, but only 15 hectares are cultivated. At the entrance to the main building there are a bunch of statues by local artists. Many are really interesting and different and most reflect an African spirit. Lisa walks us into the gardens and points out a few things before pointing us in a direction and letting us explore.
The gardens are beautiful. They abut the Table Mountains and just looking up the gardens to the mountains you imagine you’re in the Jurassic Park movie. We see a lot of interesting and beautiful plants and flowers. After walking around for 45 minutes, we find a quiet spot and Liza takes a nap on the grass.
The next stop is the Karamundi (sp?) township. It takes us about 40 minutes and Liza, of course, falls asleep (2nd time that morning on the tour). I joke that Liza is asleep more often than she is awake. You just need to give her 2 minutes of quiet and SNORE…she’s asleep and sawing away.
Once in the township we go directly to Mama Esme’s home. Grandmother types are referred to as Mamas, peer-aged individuals as Brother or Sister. Mama Esme’s home is not large, but in the township it is a good size. The building is painted a mustard color and you can see a good-sized patio from the road. You enter into a small, cramped living room that has many pictures and some items that have obviously been given to her, like a pair of miniature wooden clogs that say “Holland” on them, or an ashtray that says “Paris” with a picture of the Eiffel Tower that is nailed to an entertainment center cabinet door. There is also a small television, a DVD player and some movies, most of them for children, but she also owns The 40 Year Old Virgin. Behind the entertainment center is the kitchen. Again it is small, but it has everything you need—refrigerator, sink, small table, stove. Next to the kitchen are two bedrooms, one with two twin beds, one with a queen-sized bed. The bathroom is at the back of the house and is tiled in almost baby-blue marble all around and is almost as big as the living room.
Mama Esme has already started cooking when we arrive. The plan is to have lunch with her and hear some stories. She decides to tell us what she is cooking for us to eat. In a small pot is morojo. You make it by cooking onions and parboiled potatoes in oil in a pot. Then you add thinly chopped spinach, salt and pepper. She demonstrates how she cuts the spinach for this.
She also shows us the steamed bread we’ll be eating. She tells us that to make it you would create the dough (white or brown), let it rise, put it in a buttered deep cake pan and then place that into a pot of boiling water (not on top of) and boil the water, covered, for an hour. Interesting!
Afterward we’re ready to eat so we sit in the living room around several dishes on the floor. It is traditional to do this. We get drinks (water or juice) and have the bread, morojo, grilled chicken wings and breast (from a chicken that was killed recently, I’m sure) and chakalaka, which is a combination of onions, carrots and a few other soft vegetables stewed together. The food is delicious! I haven’t had any African dishes I haven’t liked.
Over lunch we hear stories about her grandchildren, the guests (volunteers) who have stayed with her in the past, how a neighbor’s grandson went off to go through the ceremony to become a man and died (the women are not told the details of this ceremony or how he died), the tradition a married woman goes through regarding her attire and how a woman up the street opened up a Creche, or a pre-school. We don’t hear the whole story at first, but are told she just started and needs help. We walk down to see the school.
On the way in, Lisa explained that the townships have changed a great deal, but from the outside it’s hard to tell. The tiny, run-down shacks that you see from the road are the old style and only newcomers tend to live in them. A policy passed years ago was that every South African would be provided a decent home. The farther into the township you go, you see larger and more modern homes. Of course it’s relative as Mama Esme’s home is one of the more modern ones and my description hopefully makes clear that it’s still small and not something we’d be used to living in.
Walking down the street you see some shacks in disrepair and things like that. Just a short block away around the corner, we hear children singing. There is a small house next to the school and there are two girls outside in dirty clothes. One is dancing to the music and is a complete ham. The other is shy and clings to the doorway of the home. The school looks new. It is a basic 15x30 foot building made out of basic cuts of wood. The outside is stained. It sits on small cement blocks and the steps are a pile of those blocks, but very unsteady. It’s on a small hill and sits next to the owner’s home, which is about the size of Mama Esme’s (a bit smaller), but has no porch.
When we walk into the school, the Okuhlu Connies Creche, the children are running in a circle and singing. Immediately they all stop and look at us, almost like we’re aliens. There is an 8-month old boy, but the rest range from 1.5 to 4 years old. We meet the teacher, Constance, and her helper (I’m blanking on her name). The children are all lined up to sing us some songs. They sing them in English, Afrikaans and their own language. They’re great!
After a few songs we take a few group pictures with the children, teachers and Mama Esme. Then we talk to Constance and ask what she needs. She’s very sweet and quiet with us and says she only needs sponge mattresses (foam) and blankets. After suggesting a blackboard and a fan, she gets embarrassed and says those would be helpful also. The children are standing quietly, watching. I have never seen children their age behaving so well.
The inside of the school is sparse. In one corner are a couple of small plastic tables, stacked, with piles of blankets atop them. The adjacent corner has about 10 stacked chairs. The remaining corner next to the door has a bin with a few toys inside. There are about 10 children in the room, but Constance tells us that since school is out there are 12 missing. The walls are covered in green plastic sheets to keep the wind out. The corrugated tin roof is exposed and so the beating sun warms the schoolroom to a slightly uncomfortable temperature. It’s not even really hot out yet.
Constance started the school in March or April with three children. At the beginning of November the schoolhouse was built. It’s grown quickly. The wood floors are exposed and bare and we sit down. We start taking pictures of the children and showing them the results. They get very excited and start posing and immediately running over to see what they look like. After a few minutes the sweet, well-behaved children turn into a pack of animals and start pushing each other and clawing their way into the mob of other children to see the camera. Liza is mobbed by them, some of them stroking her hair (it’s very different to theirs).
I start showing the children how to take photos themselves. Their clumsy hands can’t grasp the camera properly, but they manage. A couple figure out how to direct their pictures through the viewfinder and take some pretty good shots. They laugh at funny shots and are thrilled to be using the camera. One 4-year old girl, who is bigger than the rest and seems more advanced, just amazes Roger and me. Not only does she know how to pose in front of the camera, she also figures out that a standing figure is better framed by making the shot horizontal, so she turns the camera! Who showed her that? The pictures of her are great. She’s very photogenic. Has she been watching America’s Next Top Model?!
After doing this for a while it’s time to get going, so we say goodbye to the children and see the inside of Constance’s home. She ran the school out of there before and still provides their meals there. There are more supplies in her house, but it’s not much. There is no doubt that we will do whatever we can to help these kids. They’re adorable and need our help to have the best opportunities available to them as they grow older.
We leave and go back to Mama Esme’s. We bid our farewells, promise to help the children and say we hope to be back to visit again someday. This one experience has made the trip worthwhile. Doing things for ourselves that are personally satisfying has been nice, but seeing these children and having the ability to help them is worth so much more to me.
I start blogging when I get back home. So much happened today that I want to get it down as soon as possible. Roger and I also share our pictures of the day’s activities. Roger is really good at taking pictures. We both have an aesthetic this is a bit similar, but his talent far exceeds mine (so does the equipment he uses). Either way, I have some good shots and marvel at Roger’s. The next thing I know it’s time to get ready for dinner at Wakame.
Bons runs the restaurant and we drive with Gareth there. When we arrive we meet Gareth’s cousin, Liza, German, Bons and Francois and Duncan, who we met at the Champagne Festival. We have a yummy sushi/Asian fusion dinner and way too much to drink. It was a nice time and we say goodbye to Gareth (who we’ll see in Joburg in a few days) and everyone else for the night. I drive home (without incident, mind you). Now we’re blogging, but going to bed soon. We hope that it’s not windy in the morning so we can go up Table Mountain. If we don’t go in the morning but can do it in the afternoon, we’ll go up with German. We also need to run errands, like last minute shopping and trying to figure out how to ship things back to the US so we don’t have to schlep everything on the plane. I’ll think about it tomorrow since I just want to go to sleep now. Zzzzz.
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