Live like You were Dying

Sunday--The "Shark-bate" chant from Finding Nemo
Ok, so I intentionally didn't inform y'all of my plans for the weekend because I wanted to make sure that I survived before I wrote about it/I didn't want to freak out my parents. But whilst many of you were sleeping Sunday night, I was out and about diving with great white sharks.
We were picked up by a van from this shark diving program and driven 2 hours away to Gansbaai in the Indian Ocean. The owners and boat driver were very nice and friendly. The cost was only $200 (about 50 for transport and the rest for the actual cage diving experience). They fed us breakfast and then took us out near Shark Alley. For those of you who don't watch Shark Week or haven't seen Planet Earth, Shark Alley is home to the biggest population of Great White Sharks in the world! The reason being is because of this island called Seal Island. On this island, thousands of seals were basking on rocks, mating, etc. (Don't be fooled by the cuteness factor...while they are adorable creatures, seals reak to high heaven!). The sharks wait eagerly to have a seal snack. Meanwhile, we were on a boat taking turns in a cage at seeing sharks. We had a chum line that was put out and a ton of sharks would come and try to eat it. Don't worry, they only got the chum line once. I was very pleased at how they ran the program. They fed us lunch and took every saftey precauation. Honestly, you had a bigger chance of dying from hypothermia than from a shark attack cause the water was absolutely freezing! Our cage fit 8 people at a time. The sharks were lured near us, but never bashed themselves on the gage. And they never outright fed the sharks. They recognized that as a safety hazard and didn't want to operationally condition humans with food. I got some stellar pictures from above on the top deck of the boat. Can't wait to show them to you!

Monday--If We Could Only Get Out of our Heads by Sheryl Crow
Yesterday was our first day with Dr. Cook, the econ professor. We have designated him with the nickname of "Captain Cook" (as in the explorer). He seems to be adapting very well to us, although we're uncertain as to how much Dr. Boucher told him to beware of us. yesterday, we went to the township of Khaylelitsha, which is kind of the Cape Town equivilant of Soweto. We walked around and then went to a Kresh (a daycare/preschool) and played with some of the kids. They were absolutely precious! I got attacked when I engaged in a tickle fight with all of the children. We then went and had a wonderful lunch of spinich, beef, this beans and rice mix, and fruit with ice cream for dessert.

we then went to the Slave Lodge. This reminded me of a lot of the Gullah history I had read over the summer. Except most of this history was concentrated around the VOC (Dutch East India Company). The tour guide was interesting. It seemed like she was using a lot of "reverse racism" on the tour. It could have been a lot better, but we didn't get to investigate most of the museam and we received a lot of the same rants we had already heard: how the government wasn't doing anything to help relieve inequality and poverty. But there was a lot more emphasis on color and how she was accepting of everybody. Don't get me wrong, I don't think she was being overtly guilt-inducing, but I thought her talks about how multicultural she was was a little extreme. She did have a good point about the Khoi San people: there are a lot of monuments honoring the Dutch and British governors, but nothing honoring the Bushmen who settled this land in the first place.

Tuesday--She's not Just a Pretty Face by Shania Twain
Today we visited the township of Manenburg, a so called "Colored Township." Colored people were the category of people who didn't fit into the white, black, or Indian categories laid out by the Apartheid government. They are mixed peoples of all different ethnicities from all different continents. And they were brought to live there by the Group Act in the 1950's and 60's, and even 70's. The organization we visited was Self Help Manenburg, a place that focuses on counseling, community empowerment, hospitality training (training people to work in hotels as hosts, hostesses, cooks, waiters, etc), and youth programs that help steer youth away from the huge drug/gang problems they have in the 70,000 population township. Along the tour, we visited the Hospitality class and got to ask them questions and they got to ask us questions. I wish we had had more time to talk with them, because that was the first group of young adults we had really been able to interact with. Most of them were women, and they seemed like they had overcome a whole lot of struggle. They were more than pretty faces. They were hopefuls who wanted to eventually work their way into a vacation and travel the world. I hope they get to do so one day. Also, we stopped by a community center, an environmental park (which was a little sad compared to the ones back home), and a police station. We didn't see any of the prisoners, but got to see some empty cells and some people they were taking finger prints of. That was a little terrifying. The person who showed us around there was also a woman. I wondered at how difficult/hard/scary it was to work in this area of town. Like I've been saying, there is a lot of gendered violence. I don't know if I would feel safe as a woman police officer. But maybe this is speaking as a white woman visiting South Africa.

Our last stop for yesterday was the District 6 Museam. This museam was dedicated to an area of Cape Town where color, religion, and race didn't matter. A nice "Colored"/Indian man gave us a talk in the museam. He told us about his family, how he had had the largest family in the whole settlement (about 400 cousins, 29 aunts and uncles). Then the Apartheid government, in order to maintain power, separated and tore down the settlement and dispursed everybody. Over 11 years, starting about 1970, they demolished the township and removed everybody to segregated townships. They demolished houses whether people had moved out or not. There seemed to be such solidarity in that community before it was gone. But I can understand why the Apartheid government felt threatened by it. If you want to maintain power, you have to create barrieres between people. You have to "other" people, so that you can maintain the line between evil and good.

I don't think much has changed since then. The other is now the immigrants from Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Nigeria, etc. But I'm hoping that more people are learning that we're not all that different. I hope we're learning that our humanity is worth more than the color of our skin or the economic class from which we come.

Love,
Hill