Home!

We made it home!  After a 7:30 AM bus departure from Tsitsikamma, a three hour bus ride to George, a flight to Johannesburg, rechecking our bags for the international leg, a flight to Paris, an epic layover, a flight to Detroit, a not-so-epic layover, a flight to Elmira, and a short bus-ride home from the local airport, it sure feels like we are ready to be back.  This class was an amazing journey, filled with spectacular experiences, gorgeous nature, wonderful people, and the incredible energy of the dynamic culture of South Africa.  We had a great group of students who put so much positive energy towards the class and their experiences.  We also had a great trip agent, Stephen Abelsohn, of go2southafrica.com.  We come home tired and dirty, loaded down with presents, and ready to be home.  But we also have something that none of us will ever forget--these amazing experiences in beautiful South Africa.

Leaving South Africa

We are sitting at the airport in George, waiting for our first flight of four in our epic journey home.  We left Tsitsikamma this morning and stopped for a few hours in the charming town of Knysna, on a large lagoon off the shore.  We had a chance for one last walk, one last coffee, one last gift purchase, and judging from the number of carry-out containers on the bus, it was the last chance for an especially yummy piece of cake as well.  After another bus ride, here we are at the airport.  We'll fly from here to Johannesburg, then to Paris, Detroit, and end in Elmira.  We should be back on campus by 10 PM tomorrow night.  

Tsitsikamma

Meerkats

Ostriches!

Drive out of Cape Town

The Klein Karoo

We left Cape Town yesterday, driving up over mountain ranges and down through craggy valleys with steep overlooks right off the side of the road.  The clouds in some places seemed to be melting right over the mountaintops, and sliding right down the sides.  Our destination was what they call the Klein Karoo, which is a high elevation flat area, sandy and mostly treeless and scrubby.  This area is famous for being the ostrich farming center of South Africa.  In late Victorian times, the European demand for ostrich feathers pushed their price up higher than gold.  The area boomed and there are some lovely grand old houses; the area now is mostly rural and small-town.  

We had the chance to visit an ostrich farm, where we learned about the different types of ostrich, one of which is indigenous to the area.  We got to hold--then stand on--the surprisingly hard eggshells.  And then a few of us got to try riding an ostrich!  This was really more an exercise in managing to stay on the back of a bird that was running and turning and trying to remove the rider as quickly as possible.  As you might imagine, it was really fun to watch!

Early this morning, we were out just after sunrise to visit a colony of wild meerkats. This colony has been slowly habituated to the research scientist who works with them and without the use of food or other incentives, they are used to him.  As long as we were fairly quiet and were seated in portable lawn chairs we were acceptable too ( if we were standing or moving much, they would interpret us as predators).  So we carried our chairs about a half mile out into a dry sandy meadow with some scruffy little bushes here and there.  We sat down near their burrows and waited...and then one little guy popped up, stood on his hind legs, wrung his hands in front of him, and looked around quite seriously to assess the situation.  If you listened closely you could hear him making a little noise, which he used to communicate with the rest of his family still in the den.  We must have been safe enough, because after about five minutes, the rest of the meerkats emerged one by one and stood up on their hind legs and joined the first in cautiously looking around.  Our guide explained that they were warming themselves in the sun after a cold early morning in their den.  They begin their morning by warming themselves and only when they are warm enough will they begin foraging for worms and bugs in the sandy soil.  One will always keep watch, making a different noise based on the various perceived levels of threat.  It was such a great experience it totally made up for how cold and early the morning was.

This afternoon we had free time and we had four brave students bungee jump from the highest jump in the world.  We got to watch live from a distance, or watch the live video that honed in on each person as they walked out to jump. Lily, Kelsey, Zack, and Grace were our brave ones today and I'm glad to say that they all survived and even thrived.  We had another larger group go tree canopy gliding in an impressive old growth forest.   The rest stayed in the park and walked the trails or watched the waves or caught up in their journals.  

We are now in Tsitsikamma Park, which has to be o e of the more beautiful places inSourh Africa, if not the world.  This park is built into the side of a mountain as it drops down to the sea.  The waves crash especially high and hard against the rocky shore as the drop is so steep.  It's beautiful and peaceful and we are sharing this space with baboons, dossies, birds, deer, and dolphins.  It's a wonderful place to end our time in South Africa.  

Table Mountain Views

Visiting the soup kitchen

The school in Khayelitsha

Table Mountain

We ended our day by going up Table Mountain.  This is the large flat-topped mountain that serves as the backdrop to Cape Town.  We drove up part-way, then took the cable car to the top.  For a short while, we had a good view back over the city and the bay, out into the harbor.  But as we walked around the top of the mountain, we were slowly taken over by a thick, cold, wet cloud that just soaked us as it wrapped around us.  We were literally in the middle of a cloud.  The view out over the city was gone, and many of us were cold enough to duck into the café or visitor center.  But some of us walked a bit on the trails, at least enough to see some of the little furry brown dassies.  These little animals look like a cross between a groundhog and a small capybara, and they have big brown eyes that make them look incredibly sweet and cuddly.  Many of them have been fed by human visitors, and some will come quite close—close enough even to be touched, although that is strongly discouraged.  These little guys are just so adorable though, and it was pretty tempting. 

Soup Kitchen

Before we left Khayelitsha, we had another stop, this one was quick but important.  The day before we had stopped in the Bo Kaap neighborhood of Cape Town to stop in a bulk food store.  We were there to purchase several very large bulk bags of rice and beans to donate to a small soup kitchen in Khayeltisha.  When we got to the kitchen, it turns out that it is not really a kitchen in any Western sense of the word.  Instead, it is a small shack, built in the tiny front yard of a tidy two room house.  There is a small table with two longer benches in the front yard, all in a space of about 15 feet by 10 feet total.  Rosie, the Xhosa woman who runs the kitchen, feeds almost 200 hungry children every morning and evening, and in the middle of the day, if there is enough food, she feeds local hungry adults when she can.  She does this on her own, relying on food donations.  She has no funding source or government support.  Years ago a local church donated the large pots and pans and gas grill she uses to cook the food  (before that, local kids would bring whatever small cookers they could for her to use, and then run them back home after she made the food). 

Kids here are largely unsupervised—or rather, are supervised by the larger community—and parents often will be forced to leave for days at a time to work.  Jobs are scarce and money is extremely tight, often leaving children hungry except for food that can be scrounged from neighbors or school or community centers.  While children are not starving here, there is extreme food insecurity, and the average child lives on one meal a day.  Rosie began informally sharing whatever she had with hungry kids who were friends with her own kids, and her mission expanded from there.

When we got there, we unloaded the bags of rice and beans we were donating, and Rosie started crying.  She told us that she had just been praying, as she had literally run out of food that morning and had nothing to serve for the children in the afternoon.  She was so grateful for our donation, and I’m not sure any of our students had seen such a huge need filled by so little.  Some of us were crying too. 

The Itsitsa School in Khayelitsha

We had an amazing experience at the Itsitsa Primary School yesterday morning.  Before we left Elmira College, we broke up into two groups and planned some activities with either older kids or younger kids.  Our students who worked with younger kids planned some games and songs and storytelling (keeping in mind that the younger kids at the school wouldn’t speak much English).  Our students who were working with the older kids planned to do small group discussions on general topics such as politics, gender, schools, and stereotypes.  So we showed up at the school with a plan.  Of course, the moment we arrived, everything was different—and really fascinating.

We drove through Khayeshilita to a different neighborhood than we were the other day.  We could see, above the single story shacks and small two-room houses, the outline of a larger and modern looking brick building rising up in the immediate distance.  As we got closer, we saw that it was the school where we were headed.  When we arrived, we saw that the building was not yet occupied and was still had workers on site.  The school was in temporary quarters, trailers for the most part, on the grounds next to the building.  There were a lot of trailers set side by side, forming small dirt courtyards of a sort.  As we walked in, we could hear the sounds of hundreds of kids at work.  As they spotted us, a kind of cheer went up and suddenly there were kids at all the windows and doors yelling and cheering and laughing.  We could actually hear teachers trying to keep order in the classrooms.  Those kids were so excited to see the Americans that it felt like we were some kind of Hollywood royalty or something like that. 

Our first stop was one of the few buildings on site, it was a longer cement block building with plain wood beams on the roof.  This double classroom also served as the music room, and rickety plastic chairs were set out for us.  As we walked in and sat down, we could see the school choir—kids ranging from about 8-18—standing at the front of the room in their uniforms.  They looked serious and very very nervous.  And then they started to sing.  Wow.  They really came alive with the music, singing and swaying, and dancing, and they were amazing!  All the songs they sang for us had the multi-part African harmony, sung absolutely beautifully.  As it turns out, the school’s choir is a competitive and award-winning choir, and they proudly brought out their trophies to show us. 

We were welcomed by S.W. Ulana, the young and energetic Headmaster of the school.   The school has 1500 students from grades 1-12.  It is considered a ‘no-fee’ school, which means that it mostly serves the poorest of the poor.  Schools in South Africa are all free, but parents are usually responsible for fees for books and lunch and uniforms and other related expenses.  But in some townships, where poverty is very concentrated, the government subsidizes those fees.  It helps a lot in urban areas, but schools in rural areas often see kids unable to pay school fees and having to skip years while money is saved up (some grades will have a few much older kids in them, some of those students even in their early 20s).  Itsitsa School is subsidized.  But money is clearly still an issue.  Many of the kids were wearing uniforms that were clean but patched or visibly mended.  The trailers were sparsely equipped and packed with kids.  The Headmaster told us that they have some lab equipment but it doesn’t work so they have to teach science without labs.  Everyone is looking forward to the moving into the new school, but the government paid for the building and there is not yet any money for equipping it.  There isn’t even money for books for the new library.   It is clear that the teachers and Headmaster are working really hard to support these kids, and working in extremely challenging conditions.

After the choir sang, we were prepared to meet with the kids, but it turns out that many of the younger students at the school had their lunch period.  So our EC students went out while the kids were eating, and stood and talked with them in the courtyard.  We were immediately swarmed by kids who wanted to talk, touch, kiss, or hug us.  Those kids wanted to touch our hair and faces, hold our hands, or just stand near us.  Everyone was laughing and talking and smiling, and there was some dancing and singing, and lots and lots of hugging.  At one point, I looked out and saw that every single one of our students was literally surrounded by a swarm of young children and I could hear the happy sounds of laughter ringing around the courtyard.

After the children had their lunch, we broke off into our groups.  The EC students meeting with the younger kids played games and sang songs back and forth, and Corey read them the book Green Eggs and Ham.  The children didn’t understand the words, but repeated them back after each line.  Our other group broke up into small discussion sections, most of quickly turned into question and answer sessions with the older students.  We got asked about President Obama (the ‘Yes We Can’ idea has a lot of fans here, understandably.  President Obama is clearly seen as more of a symbol here than an actual policymaker).  We got questions about ourselves, our goals and plans, and we got some questions about pop culture too—Beyonce being a particularly favorite topic it seems.

At the end of our visit, the Headmaster did a question and answer session with us about education in South Africa, and we gave the school a gift from the class.