I'm King of the World!

Table Mountain is a flat topped, 3500 ft. mountain that looms over Cape Town. The guides told us we could climb it if we were in good shape, had a couple of hours to burn, wore the correct clothing, and brought plenty of water.
We decided to take the cable car.
Unfortunately, the cable car closes when it is too windy. Several of us thought it would be nice to walk up the trail for a few minutes. Then we walked a few minutes more. Then an hour. With visions of “Into Thin Air” dancing in my head, we continued to the summit, unsure whether we could make it down or not. There we saw several elderly women, people even older than me. While we had been hiking, the cable car had begun running.
The trip down was a lot faster. If you look closely in the distance, you can almost see the Cape of Good Hope, the Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean. Almost.

Auntie Doris

The most difficult thing to deal with in South Africa is the great disparity of wealth. There are beautiful sections of every city. The highways are good, you can drink the tap water, the airports are new, and there’s abundant shopping and a wealth of cultural opportunities. There’s also crushing poverty, ranging from merely poor to destitute people living in makeshift temporary housing that sprawls over nearby hills. It was here that we met “Auntie Doris.”
Auntie Doris is being helped by a group called Afrika Tikkun (look them up for more info). Her story is sadly a common one. After raising four children, things fell apart for her when her daughter died three years ago, likely from HIV/AIDS, leaving her with 4 grandchildren to raise. Her husband disappeared about the same time. Because of the demands of the children (the youngest was only 8 months at the time) she lost her job. She’s a proud woman, and didn’t want to ask for help, but, in her words, “I had to make myself small” and ask for food. She’s scraping by now, but her pride and strength are intact.
Her house, about the size of a classroom, is made of cinder blocks with a tin roof, but she’s lucky. She’s lived there since 1994, the year Mr. Mandela was elected president, and has several rooms, a microwave, stove, a refrigerator. She also has good neighbors. When we arrived, she was at the clinic getting her blood pressure medicine (“if you had to raise four kids, you’d need blood pressure medicine too”). A neighbor called her and sent a car to get her, since there were 4 white people standing outside of her door! Apparently we’ve given her something to gossip about for months to come.
Auntie speaks two languages, English, and Xhosa. If she appeared on Oprah she’d be a star. Her story gave us hope, but others in our group visited homes nicknamed “microwaves”, since the all metal structures heat up so quickly. Here they saw as many as 8 or 9 people crammed into tiny spaces, suffering from every problem imaginable. Toss in drug addition, crime, family violence, and HIV, and it was a tragedy. Despite this, thousands of people are moving into Cape Town and other large cities every month, living in conditions like this. Obviously this is probably the country’s greatest challenge.

Robben Island

You may never have heard of Robben Island, but Nelson Mandela did. The island is a 45 minute boat ride from Cape Town, and we rode over the rocking Atlantic in the same boat he and other inmates did- without the chains and shackles of course. It was here that he spent 18 of his 25 years as a political prisoner under the system of apartheid. Kept in a single cell, his days were largely filled busting rocks in a lime quarry under the blazing sun. Despite this, he and his fellow inmates communicated, educated one another, and kept their spirits of hope alive until the eventual closure of the prison in 1991. Today it is a historical monument.
The most remarkable thing is that these men emerged from prison wanting reconciliation and peace rather than revenge. In fact, our guide for the tour was Ntando, a prisoner from 1986 – 1991. He now lives on the island and describes the prison to visitors. His story is a testimony to the resilience of the human spirit. He also had a great baritone voice and would make a great teacher.

Cape Town

Dominated by the aptly named Table Mountain, Cape Town is one of the most spectacular cities in the world. Founded by the Dutch in 1652, it is known as the "Mother City of South Africa". The downtown waterfront is beautiful as well, and the surrounding area includes the Cape of Good Hope, the wine country (not that I'm interested), and several penguin colonies. Penguins! Awwww!

But there's more than that. We're scheduled to visit Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela spent 18 of his 25 years of imprisonment, and sprawling shanty towns, where crushing poverty can depress even an optimist like me. Stay tuned.

Rugby

Rugby is football without pads. Rugby players eat their dead. The local team, the Sharks, enertained us today with their unique brand of misbehavior in a gentleman's game played by hooligans. But Rugby is hugely popular, and can bring people together, as shown in the film Invictus. Go Springboks!

Trees

One of the environmental challenges here is the deforestation of the region for sugar cane production and other agriculture. At a local landfill, they have an innovative program planting a buffer of native trees around the landfill. Rather than just hire some random group to do it, they encourage local residents to grow trees from seeds and plant them in the area. These "tree-preneurs" are paid in goods and services, like housing material and schooling, rather than cash. This seems to work well- the woman here has 1000 trees ready for planting, which will give her 5000 rand (look up the exchange rate) to use for bricks or books. A good deal for all.

Sugar

This isn't sugar, although Kathy, a media specialist from South Carolina, is very sweet. The Durban area is one of Africa's largest producers of sugar cane, the lovely green stuff growing in the background. Originally, thousands of indentured servants from India came to the area to work the cane fields. They and their descendants have made Durban the largest urban Indian population outside of India. Even Gandhi once lived here as a young attorney.


Sugar cane fields aren't fun places to work. If the cane rats, the size of a shih tzu aren't a problem, the black mamba snakes are. Add in summer temperatures around 100 degrees and the challenges are obvious.

If you look in the background, you can see the Indian Ocean