following the week we came back from Jo'burg was the Street Childrens' World Cup. After that we had the last of the lectures for the Social and Political Transformation Seminar. These lectures focused on the Reconciliation and Development process of SA which included the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and topics on the arts, music and dance, and football. and with for the past week each of us has been volunteering with a respective NGO while living with an Indian family in another township about 15 minutes away from Durban city center.
TIMELINE: end of ngo week on the 31st. we attend Splashy Fen Music Festival in the Drakensburg mountains April 1-4. it will be great. music four whole days, hundreds, maybe thousands of people? and then we move onto the Independent Study Project phase. will be blogging more soon
we are blessed, for during the spring (fall season in SA) there are many holidays throughout the semester. we have had one day off already and will essentially be having four-day weeks for the next 3 or 4 weeks. it really makes me conclude that spring semester is THE time to study abroad in South Africa. not to mention the upcoming Splashy Fen Festival.
during the week of the Street Children World Cup, we moved out of our Cato Manor homestay families on the 20th after spending thirty nights in total with them. it was bittersweet. I really love my african family but I was also ready to move on. I will definitely be visiting while I am still in SA. my family and I were also interviewed to be feature in a local newspaper. the article should talk about our experiences living with African families etc. as I am writing this blog, I really do miss my Cato Manor family (more so my real family). It was a very good experience and is one of the highlights of any SIT program. I had a very good experience with my family and I believe it worked both ways.
we were given the weekend of March 21-23 off, the 23rd was a holiday. we spent the weekend at a backpackers and it was nice to have everyone altogether. the arts lectures during the week did not really interest me. I appreciate the arts, music and dance, a lot. I really do but I don't feel the need to study it so deeply, although interesting. we were able to hear different types of SA music born out of the apartheid era which was cool. and honestly, I was falling asleep during the dance lecture. not that the lecturer was boring, I was just tired.
the very last lecture for our seminar was on Soccer and Reconciliation which had one main person from ACCORD (the conflict resolution ngo we visited earlier in the program) and the technical director of football for AmaZulu FC here in Durban. He spent time as national team coach of Sierra Leone and Rwanda. he spoke about his experiences and football as a tool for reconciliation in conflict-ridden areas. to learn about his life, the dangers and successes, was very cool. he is doing what he loves and at the same time healing nations. he had to leave the lecture early because he is helping out with a soccer tournament for, I forget, but some sector of the marginalized. I will be giving him a call soon to learn more about this tournament project and hopefully get involved and integrate it into my ISP (which is coming up fast!) and then get a trial with AmaZulu and then become a pro-footballer and move to Europe and live the dream…
the other man from ACCORD spoke about various programs in Africa and how football was used for reconciliation in countries like SA, Ivory Coast and Algeria. countries that'll be involved in the upcoming World Cup. it is just amazing how football can be utilized all over the world. and I believe that not other sport has the power to get such a huge amount of people together simply because no other sport is as popular as football all over the world. time and again football has united countries, regions, continents and people from different ethnic backgrounds and making it work. it was good to end the seminar on a positive lecture. it also got me pumped up for the World Cup.
so with the end of the seminar, we are spending the week which is about to come to a close by each doing community service in diff ngos. I am with two other girls and we were inspired by the Street Childs' WC to work with street children. we wanted to work with the org directly involved with SCWC but it didn't work out so we were placed with their rival org. Icare is composed of three stages. stage 1, pick kids from the street and take them into the house where they can hang out all day, are fed, go to the beach, do dance, art and other things together. this is the stage to introduce them to the rehab phase. stage 2 is a rehab phase that lasts for 3 months. what they do for 3 months, I don't know exactly. and when they "graduate" the kids are reunited and reconciled with their families or if it is a difficult situation with the direct parents, Icare finds other relatives for the child to stay with. and they are put in school, the family gets a little compensation, the org also helps the family out by for example, pushing the local government to provide the guaranteed housing, etc. they do good things, but I am not as happy because when we are at the 'house' we don't really do anything but hang out. basically, there isn't any work given. today we spent the day going around a community about 50kms outside durban, looking for a kid's aunt for housing. we spent hours looking for this woman using neighbors, the granny, etc and still did not find this elusive woman. we got a phone number and they got one too and things should get sorted out for that kid some other time.
during ngo week we have been staying with and Indian family. tonight is the last night and it has been great. there are tons of Indians in kwaZulu-Natal (Mahatma Gandhi spent a lot of time here) and we are staying in an Indian township during apartheid. the families we stay with are considerably more comfortable than our African families. showers, cars, satellite TV, the works but still middle-class sector. our dad has been with TelKom for 33 years, bro works and sister is studying Physiotherapy in Durban. our mom used to have a restaurant by the beach front and works with her friends in a catering business. she cooks very well. Indian curries, spiciness, I love it. her food is amazing so we've definitely been eating well and my tummy has been happy. it has been great and they love to have people over. i'd say it has been less stressful than the Cato Manor homestead because there are less cultural barriers. the families live comfortably and there are things in common in terms of things we do etc.
i'll stop for now but I will try to be better at updating the blog! haven't had much internet time for the past week or so.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Johannesburg march 16-21
We were all looking forward to visiting jo'burg not just because it was another chance to see more of SA and also a very historic place. we stayed at Koinonia seminary under the auspices of nuns. it was a good time at the place. it was quite relaxing with enough space to hang out. seminaries also tend to be one of the safest places. haha this place is also near the Ellis Park stadium which will be used for the world cup. jo'burg is about a 7 hour drive from the dirty durbs so we hung out when we arrived and went to a nearby mall in the evening just to check out the scene. East gate was a nice mall with nice shops and posh eateries. I also noticed there was so many more asians in jo'burg compared to durban. asians probably constituted 15% of the people in the mall. it was a nice mall and we could immediately see the difference between Jo'burg and Durban.
Jo'burg is a much more industrial city and was just different to what I was used to in Durban. its a wealthier, trendier city. well it is the capital after all. the layout included a lot of old brick buildings and more factories and apartment buildings. on the first day there wasn't really much to Jo'burg.
We visited the Apartheid museum on Saturday. I really liked it and I thought that the whole layout and display was really clever. we had studied about a lot of topics around apartheid but this was where it was all put together from the first hunter-gatherers in Africa until democracy in 1994. the had it all and it was a well put together museum. it only should be since it represents such an important part of SA history. I enjoyed myself going through a specifically laid out route organized chronologically.
after the museum we had lunch at a nearby casino. Gold Reef city was the name of the whole area which also had a theme park. I learned that Gold Reef funded the whole Apartheid museum project to develop a good relationship with the local government. I say good business on their part. but anyway, the restaurant inside the casino, it was a little weird because this casino was tasteless and too elaborate. kind of trying too hard. we all just thought "where the hell are we". I think that we have seen so much of the real SA and really have not done such touristy things that we react in certain ways, which I like very much. we go for the real thing and not the most advertised. after lunch we visited the area of Sandton city to see some of the wealthier areas of Jo'burg and really see the polarization of SA. If I am not mistaken, the most unequal place in the world is in Jo'burg.
that night we saw a modern dance performance. I thought they were good dancers but modern dance is not my most favored genre. I got a little bored to be honest.
On Sunday we visited Soweto (South Western Township) another legacy of Apartheid with a lot of history. many protests and killings happened here. most famous was the 1976 school children protest when they protested against using Afrikaans as the medium of teaching in school. SA police and military then open fired on the students and these protests led to numerous other uprisings in SA at that time.
first stop was soccer city, still uncompleted stadium for the WC. The final will be held there. and then we visited the township to see township life. through the years many people have been able to prosper so just like any other place in SA. the wealthy and poor live so close to each other.
we then went to the Orlando area where Mandela's house is (not his current one but during the struggle). however, we did not go inside. we walked through the two schools that were most involved during the 1976 protest and made our way to the Hector Pietersen museum. Hector Pieterson was a young boy and he is famous for being one of the first killed in the protest with a very famous photograph. outside the museum there is a line of grass and trees that lead all the way to where it was said that he was shot and now lies a memorial. it was another good museum but this time very centered on the student protests.
on Monday we saw the constitutional court. one of three courts
in the world that serve for trials against human rights violations. the court is located in an old prison that was converted. the prisons now serve tours, etc. the court was a pretty cool place architecturally. there was a lot of SA art outside the actual court inside the building. and the place was full of African symbolisms. one such example is that when one enters, there are diagonal pillars and leave/branch shaped things hanging from the ceiling. it represents trees and how Africans used to resolve their conflicts centuries ago, under trees. we went around the Number Four prison which housed many political prisoners. it was a notorious prison and showed prison life. torture, solitary confinement, inhumane conditions, etc. the whole place was pretty cool.
we left on Tuesday and made our way to Durban via the Drakensburg mountains. that was pretty cool and such nice landscape. it is the venue for Splashy Fen music festival that we are attending over Easter. the had lunch at a really nice backpackers. it was such a nice place with hammocks, lots of space in the mountains. it looked like a resthouse for the rich that you usually see on TV. but still had that backpacker feel to it. they also had a very pretty St Bernard named Bella. such a nice dog. and then back to Durban for the last few days with our homestead families. It was pretty sad and I should talk more about it on my next blog.
Jo'burg is a much more industrial city and was just different to what I was used to in Durban. its a wealthier, trendier city. well it is the capital after all. the layout included a lot of old brick buildings and more factories and apartment buildings. on the first day there wasn't really much to Jo'burg.
We visited the Apartheid museum on Saturday. I really liked it and I thought that the whole layout and display was really clever. we had studied about a lot of topics around apartheid but this was where it was all put together from the first hunter-gatherers in Africa until democracy in 1994. the had it all and it was a well put together museum. it only should be since it represents such an important part of SA history. I enjoyed myself going through a specifically laid out route organized chronologically.
after the museum we had lunch at a nearby casino. Gold Reef city was the name of the whole area which also had a theme park. I learned that Gold Reef funded the whole Apartheid museum project to develop a good relationship with the local government. I say good business on their part. but anyway, the restaurant inside the casino, it was a little weird because this casino was tasteless and too elaborate. kind of trying too hard. we all just thought "where the hell are we". I think that we have seen so much of the real SA and really have not done such touristy things that we react in certain ways, which I like very much. we go for the real thing and not the most advertised. after lunch we visited the area of Sandton city to see some of the wealthier areas of Jo'burg and really see the polarization of SA. If I am not mistaken, the most unequal place in the world is in Jo'burg.that night we saw a modern dance performance. I thought they were good dancers but modern dance is not my most favored genre. I got a little bored to be honest.
On Sunday we visited Soweto (South Western Township) another legacy of Apartheid with a lot of history. many protests and killings happened here. most famous was the 1976 school children protest when they protested against using Afrikaans as the medium of teaching in school. SA police and military then open fired on the students and these protests led to numerous other uprisings in SA at that time.first stop was soccer city, still uncompleted stadium for the WC. The final will be held there. and then we visited the township to see township life. through the years many people have been able to prosper so just like any other place in SA. the wealthy and poor live so close to each other.
we then went to the Orlando area where Mandela's house is (not his current one but during the struggle). however, we did not go inside. we walked through the two schools that were most involved during the 1976 protest and made our way to the Hector Pietersen museum. Hector Pieterson was a young boy and he is famous for being one of the first killed in the protest with a very famous photograph. outside the museum there is a line of grass and trees that lead all the way to where it was said that he was shot and now lies a memorial. it was another good museum but this time very centered on the student protests.
on Monday we saw the constitutional court. one of three courts
in the world that serve for trials against human rights violations. the court is located in an old prison that was converted. the prisons now serve tours, etc. the court was a pretty cool place architecturally. there was a lot of SA art outside the actual court inside the building. and the place was full of African symbolisms. one such example is that when one enters, there are diagonal pillars and leave/branch shaped things hanging from the ceiling. it represents trees and how Africans used to resolve their conflicts centuries ago, under trees. we went around the Number Four prison which housed many political prisoners. it was a notorious prison and showed prison life. torture, solitary confinement, inhumane conditions, etc. the whole place was pretty cool.
we left on Tuesday and made our way to Durban via the Drakensburg mountains. that was pretty cool and such nice landscape. it is the venue for Splashy Fen music festival that we are attending over Easter. the had lunch at a really nice backpackers. it was such a nice place with hammocks, lots of space in the mountains. it looked like a resthouse for the rich that you usually see on TV. but still had that backpacker feel to it. they also had a very pretty St Bernard named Bella. such a nice dog. and then back to Durban for the last few days with our homestead families. It was pretty sad and I should talk more about it on my next blog.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
apologies for not having updated my blog in a while. the week after we got back from the rural areas was one filled with assignments. not to mention our zulu written and oral exams. we did not have any lectures except zulu class that week so that we would have a lot of time to complete everything before we left for Johannesburg that friday.
that week we visited possible accommodations for the Independent Study Period (ISP) where we will be living independently together, doing our own research, interviews etc, and then coming up with a thirty or so page paper at the end of it. many of us are looking forward to living independently and it will be a fun time living altogether (let's hope). by this time, most of us have more or less an idea of what we want to do for ISP (there will be a separate blog for what I want to do).
that week we also attended one of the events of the Time of the Writer's Festival at the University of kwaZulu-Natal (UKZN). the event we went to was a discussion at the Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre and there were five invited speakers. the event itself commemorated Dennis Brutus, an activist during the apartheid era who did a lot of work for equality in SA. all the speakers were writers/author. they were professors, journalists, etc and all knew dennis brutus personally. each of them was given time to speak about dennis brutus and whatever social and political issues they felt strongly about. it was an interesting time and they all had things to say that related back to what we have been studying in our Social and Political Transformation seminar as well as other things that we have observed. I thought that it was a pretty good time. up on the stage were six intellectuals that felt strongly about what they spoke about and they had voices of influence, each with something interesting to say. btw, one of the speakers was Mahatma Gandhi's granddaughter (Gandhi spent many years in the province of KZN). in the future, i just wish that my voice will be a voice of influence for other people and that it can make a difference. how do I achieve this? we'll have to find out.
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
rural areas -- best week so far
like I have mentioned in the video, the rural homestay was quite an experience. first, immediate living conditions. I shared a bed with Andrew, the only other guy in the group. we had a basin and probably three inches of water in it every morning and night. it was impossible to bathe the whole body. so my approach to it was to wash my face every time, and then alternate my hair and body. also, feet was always last because our feet would get really dirty from walking around in flip flops. so needless to say, no one in the groups was ever very clean. it was a reality that we all faced and embraced and just enriched our experience more.
secondly, the bathrooms. we were instructed by our little brother to pee by a tree. the number 2 business was to be done in an outhouse with no flush, which we later gave a codename of LongDrop (get it?). so living in the rural homestay was definitely an experience. our mama would cook us food and there would always be so much. probably my favorite meal there was steamed bread (which is very similar to the bread used for siopao back in the phils) and mutton (which is what they call lamb/sheep here). we finished all our dinner that night.
the rural areas was a very wholesome experience. it reminded me a lot about rural areas in the philippines. the third worldliness of it all. locals not speaking much english. our little brother spoke very good english for an 11 year old in the rural areas. definitely better than some 9th graders at the high school. the location was stunning. we had a view of hills and the beach which was a 30-40 minute walk. we visited on our fist full day. and on the other side of the hill where some others stayed at was also a stunning view of farmland and hills. it was all so surreal.
I had a very good feeling when we arrived. it just seemed so peaceful. it was a nice, relaxing time away from the city. we hardly ever knew what time it was. all we knew was that soon after sunset would be dinner time. hanging out with our neighbor homestay families and playing soccer with kids and our host siblings was fun. it was very chill a very good rural experience. at the same time is was fulfilling and overwhelming. the school and prison experience was a lot to take in. everyone's personal experiences varied but I am certain that everyone has a great time and learned a lot. when it was time to leave, many of us weren't ready to leave the rural areas yet. it had been too soon. but it was also a good time to leave with that feeling rather than leaving when we were all ready to leave.
over the weekend we stayed a a backpackers near Hluhluwe game reserve. the game reserve is 100,000 hectares large, the size of the Netherlands. it was nice to do the cheesiest most touristy thing to do in Africa after the kind of week we had. we saw rhinos, zebras, participated in a herd of giraffes migrating (we were literally in the middle of a giraffe herd while they were moving), lots of birds, deer-family animals, etc. unfortunately no big cats and we only saw elephants from very far. it was still a successful tour which started at 5:30 in the morning! in the afternoon we took a boat ride on a river to see hippos and crocs. frankly, they were kinda boring. after seeing a couple of pod of hippos and crocs, you've seen them all since hippos are nocturnal and weren't very active during the day. they were all in the water keeping cool we didn't even see one in full size.coming back to Durban from 3 1/2 hours away kind of felt like going home again after being away for a while. some of the peopel in the program are very ready to leave our homestay families. this is not the case with me. I am still having a good experience with my homestay family and they greeted me very warmly after we got back from the game reserve. we go to Johannesburg this weekend and come back next Tuesday. and that week we get back from jo'burg will be our last week with our homestay families so there really is not much time left.
I am quite excited for Jo'burg and after that we are moving out and then staying at a backpackers and then staying with an Indian family for a week in a new area. We finish our Zulu class this Thursday with the written and oral exams as well as our Social and Political Transformation Seminar. We are inching closer to our Independent Study Project time and that should be a good time.
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