After a disappointingly uneventful weekend (that was also very peaceful and relaxing), I actually did something today!
I called the man Songo that I had been meaning to call all weekend. My supervisor at ISOS-Kayamandi Project strongly recommended that my partner Adam and I take a walking tour of Kayamandi with a man who knew more than anyone else alive about the township.
He gave us Songo's number. Adam didn't really follow up on it, even though he was supposed to, so that he would get the better price. (I don't think I've mentioned on this blog how frustrating it is to be female sometimes). The entire dramatic narrative of how the tour was finally arranged is probably unnecessary, so I'll skip to the part where we arrived at the tourist center of Kayamandi.
Songo wasn't there. Songo didn't answer his cell, and hadn't replied to my earlier text. So we wandered outside the building, hoping to flag down our driver on his way back to Stellenbosch. A man on a bike passed us and said "christina?"
and i said "yes, songo?"
adam under his breath muttered with a smile that it was a good thing we were the only two confused-looking white people in the entire area...
Songo locked his bike inside the building and we started walking.
Kayamandi has about 33,000 residents, with an unemployment rate of over 50%. It was originally established in the 1940s when The Group Areas Act was passed. People from Stellenbosch, Cloetesville, Idas Valley and other smaller towns in regions were kicked out of their houses and forcibly removed to their respective areas (black or colored). The black area was Kayamandi. There are some families in Kayamandi who have been here since the 40s. As time went on, migrant men were allowed to come to find work. They stayed in hostels. After the pass laws (which dictated movement, if you were allowed to leave the "homelands" or come into a white area or do anything of your own accord, basically) were repealed in 1990, families were allowed to come join the men. There is no work or development in the "homelands" (now Eastern Cape), so its the choice between rural poverty and urban poverty.
We visited 2 hostels. People still live in them. Each room was around 8 x 10 ft. (2.5x3m for sander and stefen). There would be two bunk beds in each room. After the pass laws were repealed, there would be 2-4 families in each rooom. one for each twin-sized bed. In the first hostel that we went to, there were men constructing plywood walls (3/4 inch), and painting them blue. Apparently an American had gone home and raised money so that the curtains dividing each room could be replaced with wood. There are just two beds in each room now, I don't know where the bunks went.
In the other hostel, owned by a winery, was built well, and each of the rooms had doors. There still were two families living on two beds in each room. Thats ten families living in a building smaller than my house at home. The families share toilets, a kitchen, and a living room.
...
I also got to see some of my girls as they were getting out of school, which was exciting. On our way back down the hill, I asked Songo what the biggest problems were for Kayamandi. He said housing, unemployment, and maybe AIDS. (>1 in 4 pregnant mothers are infected). Most people live in shacks (informal settlements) but there are houses too. The government has slowly been building the housing that it promised. They have build 600 homes since the end of apartheid. Its been 15 years. There are 33,000 people. Average monthly income in Kayamandi is R1500 ($150). To qualify for gov't housing, you need to earn less that R3500. So basically everyone qualifies. There are also a lot of fires amongst the shacks and you have to walk to common toilets and to get water. Its only like 500m (~500 yards) though, and the kids at the afterschool program talk about how much easier life is here than in Eastern Cape. In Eastern Cape, you would need to walk 5-6 km (a few miles) to get water from the river, which isn't a clean source. They much prefer life in Kayamandi.

The Adventure of Yesterday

I heard from Nora (from Ohio) that the House of JC LeRoux was within biking distance from Stellenbosch. I knew Sander really likes champagne. I learned that JC LeRoux was a good sparkling wine farm. (Champagne isn't allowed to be champagne if its not from a specific region of France, so they call it sparkling wine here). So, Sander, Carly, Karen, and I, decided to go to JC LeRoux. Its definitely doable on the map, and although the website says that tours and tastings are only from 10 to 12 on Saturdays, if we leave early enough, we'll get there in plenty of time.
The night before this, I had gone out with my roommate Laura and a few other people. We went to Aanklas which was having an "oldies night", so they played 60s and 70s American music... and 80s and 90s too. and then The Killers got thrown into the mix too. Whatever. Some songs from high school can be sort of considered old now, I guess. The point of this sidenote is that we didn't get back until late, which made the 9:30 starting time a little unrealistic for me.
I was out the door by like 9:45 maybe. Showered and wearing a nice skirt and nice shirt (to make up for the fact that we showed up on bicycles to a nice wine tasting). The sky was overcast, and it had been raining. We set off on our little jaunt, along the small roads of stellenbosch, out to the main highway. We go for a ways, looking for the sign for the turnoff. Cycling Cycling Cycling. Up some slight hills, slightly coast on the downhills. Lovely day for a bike ride. After a ways, we think that we've gone too far, so we decide to ride to the top of the next "hill"/roll/slightly high point. We look down and see the wine estate Asara. We find it on our wine tour map and realize that we've gone twice as far on the highway than we needed to. So we turn around and go back. Of course, coming from the other direction we notice a HUGE billboard for JC LeRoux at the turnoff that was barely visible when you came from the other direction. We jovially cross the highway and get on the right road. We've gone about 200 meters when Sander looks down at his tire as it rapidly goes flat.
We stop and assess our options. We look at the map and think that we are closer to JC LeRoux than home. Some nice German bikers stop and offer to help, but their tubes are for road bikes and we have mountain-y bikes. It is decided that Sander will lock his bike up on the side of the road (with two locks), take his front tire with him (using a third lock to loop it onto his back) as he rides Karen's bike to a shop in town where he can get the tire fixed. The three girls will walk on without him, with the remaining two bikes.
So we walk.
And we walk.
And we keep on walking.
We meet some kids who live on one of the wine farms (children of the workers). They have tires with sticks that they are playing with, and really like our bicycles. I want to let them ride it, but I don't. I guess I don't want them to steal it, but I don't think they would have. They didn't have anywhere to go with it. We were kind of in the middle of nowhere. We take pictures with them and talk to them a bit. Karen is Dutch, so she can speak Afrikaans with them, and they tell us we have a looooong way to walk, and ask why anyone would want to walk that far. We don't really believe them, so we keep walking. The scenery is breathtakingly beautiful. The cloudy sky means that we don't get sunburned or too warm or anything. I grab a bunch of grapes off an inviting vine along the way. Maybe we walked a lot slower because we had the two bikes, or maybe the distance was longer than posted... But it took us two hours to get to the champagne tasting.
Along the way, we hear back from Sander a few times. He got to the bike shop and was told to wait 30-45 minutes. After another hour, we call him, and he tells us that he had gotten the first tire fixed, had gotten back to the broken bike, had started riding both of them, only to have Karen's bike get a flat tire. So then he was on his way back to the bike shop with Karen's tire. Then we got a text that the bike shop was so busy that he was fixing the tire himself.
Somewhere around this time, we start getting tired of just walking, so we decide to try to get 2 people on one bike, to make it go faster. it was hilarious. Guys bikes have a straight bar between the handles and the seat, and usually if someone doesn't have a bike, they sit there sidesaddle, and the guy pedals like normal. But we were stuck with 2 girls bikes which have a slant, so you can't sit on it. So we did the thing where someone sits on the seat and the person pedalling stands. It was exhausting!!! So we would do that for 50-100 meters, stop and untangle ourselves from our bikes while laughing hysterically and then walk a while longer. We got better at doing it on top of a hill in order to roll down faster.
We walked and walked, and kept asking directions from random people along the road. They kept telling us just to keep going.
We finally get there around 1. We order a nice lunch, and Sander arrives around the time that we finish. So he cleans up everyone's plates, and the food ended up working out perfectly. We head downstairs to do the long-awaited champagne tasting.
It is quite good. The couch is also quite comfortable. We had a good talk and also switched seats with every glass so that people could take turns sitting on the couch that had a back as opposed to the cushion-y chair things. We didn't really pay enough attention though, when she was telling us the names of each of them, we just remembered what color the label was. My favorite was the last one, with the darkest label. The actual sparkling wine was red, it was fruity and yummy. i also really liked the first one that was extra dry champagne. it had a normal label.
After our tasting, we went to the gift shop and bought wine and candies. We also remembered to pay the 20 rand ($2) for the tasting.
We walked outside planning to lie and take a nap in some grass somewhere. Then Carly discovers that her tire is flat....
yeah.
THREE flat tires in one day. And we'd been mostly riding on the street, we'd just ridden on dirt or grass or gravel in just a few sections....
so.
(sander had ridden with both bikes for most of the way to jc leroux but had gotten tired and locked karen's bike to something random on the side of the road a little ways away)
we walk the two good bikes and 1 flat tire bike a km or two to karen's bike. then we get her bike, and walk with all four bikes for a ways. We pass some plum trees. I help myself. (and share too). Sander and I talk about how satisfying it is to pick something off a tree or bush and then eat it. its also still amazingly beautiful weather and surroundings.
We eventually work it out that carly can sit on sander's bike, and i can bike with my hand on the other bike. it turns out that i can do it, which is good because it was the first time i'd ever tried it and i was about 15 feet (5 m) from the top of a big hill when i started. so then i went down the big hill really fast, but it worked out fine, and i didn't crash it or anything. Karen and i switched off for a while, and then carly tried on my bike while i rode with sander.
we made it back fine to the big highway. then carly fell when we went over this pothole thing in the sidewalk (i screamed when sander went over it, but carly screamed and then fell). then we walked bikes for a while. then when we were crossing the highway, i tried to bike through a curb that i didn't see. then i fell on my face (and my nice skirt flew up). and that was pretty funny too.
Then we get to a gas station and karen and carly get these two nice men to fill carly's tire (cuz we assume its a slow leak since it was only flat when we came out)
Then one of then men turns out to be the owner of the shop where I had bought my bicycle (but the others had got their elsewhere). Then the bike shop owner fixed the flat on carly's bike.
It really worked out well, actually. Sander and I sat on our butts on the grass as Carly who is super friendly and open and Karen who speaks Dutch and thus sort of Afrikaans made new friends of these two men. Sander was a little upset that no one had helped him with any of his flat tires, but I assured him that it was because he wasn't wearing a short dress like Carly. (this morning Carly's tire was flat again, and then Sander felt a little better)
So we finally made it back to our dorm by six or so.
We ordered pizza
ate it.
and i showered and then fell asleep.
and slept for like 10 hours.
it was a truly beautiful day.

I climbed to the top of a mountain today.
I feel so accomplished.
please view photos here:
www.picasaweb.google.com/neenydidit.

I went to Kayamundi, the closest township, for class on Tuesday.
I'm sure that it looks the same as all the pictures you've seen. The corrugated metal shacks, the dirt roads, the people walking everywhere, the women with the bags of laundry on their heads, the roadside vegetable stands. There are minibus taxis that have seats for 8, that carry at least 15. There were stray dogs sleeping in the shadows of the trees. There were many smiling people everywhere.
Some unexpected things that I saw:
cell phone shacks. Vodacom is the biggest brand, but MTN competes with it too. But scattered throughout the township of tiny shacks were the occasional shack that said "Authorized Vodacom Community Telephone" or something to that effect. I need to ask what they are next time I'm in Kayamundi, but I think it could either be a) a really cool social entrepreneurship program that gives an income to someone with a cell phone or two that the entire community can use. or b) evidence of commsumerism taking over the world and infiltrating this area of extreme poverty trying to get people to spend nonexistant money on a new necessity.
I've also learned that Kayamundi is the meth capital of the country, which makes me feel like I'm right at home again, aww Fresno.
. . .
So the reason that I was in Kayamundi in the first place, was for my first session of my Service Learning/Community Development class. We met our lecturers, we had a nice lunch in the botanical garden. Then, we were told that we were going to do the following activity.
We were led silently to vans, and split up into three grooups. We were given notebooks and pens and told to observe the entire journey.
We drove past a prison with gardening convicts in the yard. We drove maybe five minutes until we entered Kayamundi. We drove a bit, dropped two people off. Kept driving and winding through the township, dropping pairs off at seemingly random places. Each pair was told to be silent for the first 15 minutes, just to observe. Then we were allowed to walk around and talk to people and see what was happening at the 'random' site where they were placed. But if we were approached, we could talk back. The van would return in 30 minutes. We were also told of a 'safe place' where we could go if we felt threatened. There were only four of us left at the top of this hill. There was a construction site across the street for a nonprofit named Legacy. It was gorgeous standing there. The mountains and green hills in the distance, the hope of a new building. I dunno. It was good.
It was around 2:30 when we were dropped off, which is also right about when the kids get out of school. So no sooner had I settled myself in the shade under a tree, some kids came by and were curious. They stood at a distance, and slowly got closer, and once they were pretty close, I said Hi. This encouraged them, and they came over right up next to me, and were chatting away. I think my silence lasted maybe 2 minutes. The girls were really sweet, i think they were around seven. I haven't figured out how to judge age yet here; all the kids are so small. We played hand games, and one girl had two little sisters with her. One could speak and one was too young. I played high five with them.
Then some boys walked by in their crisp new uniforms (the new school year started a few weeks ago), and they wanted to know what was going on, so I talked with them for a while too.
highlights:

baby peeing in the middle of the road. Just walked away from the group, down into the road, pulled her pants to her ankles and popped a squat
the girls started playing with my hair. They discovered that my scalp has been peeling from a sunburn. Like huge chucks of skin. So they started picking it all out.... that was probably the most awkward part for me. The rest felt perfectly natural and exactly right
a boy pulled out a kitchen knife to chop a palm frond off a nearby tree. whatever. no big deal.
the same boy took his belt off and then rehooked it with his front loops of his pants, and the top of the belt around his head. It looked like he was an old man with his overalls/pants pulled WAY too high. Of course all the other boys did it too.
They wanted to write in my book too. One girl wrote the alphabet. They all wrote their names. Another wrote out the vowels followed by Sa Se Si So Su. A girl named Precious wrote a sentence for me "I like you. you are the best.thank you?" She was at least nine.

When the van pulled up again, they all clamored to give me the last hug, and then some of the boys tried to get in the van, just for kicks. and i went home with so much more peace than I'd had for a while.
We still don't know our exact placements, and we don't know what we'll do at the place. But I know that my place speaks Xhosa, so thats the language that I'm going to take.
Its going to be good.
Much love from christine