Cape Town, day 2

True to our normal study habits, Josh and I were up till about 3am finishing homework last night, so I began the day slightly groggy. After breakfast we had class in one of the sitting areas of our hostel, discussed S. African history, the book we are reading, and shared some of our creative writing pieces. We each wrote a piece from the perspective of a museum object (from either the holocaust museum or the art museum we visited afterwards), stories have such a unique power of communicating nuanced truth. I'll probably post my piece after I send it to my dear friend Christo for some editing (little does he know that I intend to use him for his superior writing skills throughout this class). It's nice to have smart friends. 

After class we were going to go to Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned, but the boat broke. So we took a walk instead to the District Six museum. District Six was an interracial township nestled into the foothills of Table Mountain. Our museum guide was a coloured Muslim man named Noor. He told us of how much he loved the community of District Six, how he would attend synagogue with his Jewish friends, who would in turn attend Mosque with him. "We are all human beings," he emphasized as he described the tight knit community of intermingling religions and races of his township. In the 1960's the apartheid government declared Dist.6 as a white's only area and tehre was a huge forced removal of all non-whites from the community. Dist.6 was especially viewed as a threat because of its embrace of racial diversity. Noor spoke of watching his home and the rest of his community be bulldozed, of being forced to move farther away from town to a designated "coloured community," where transportation to the city for work was costly and time consuming. While Noor bought a home for his family in his new township, many were relocated to small concrete barracks. Families were torn apart-a black man married to a coloured woman were forced to live in seperate locations. 

Noor prays every day that he will live long enough for his land claim to be filed and for reentrance to District six to be granted, but the list of claims is long, and the government has little money to spend on filing reports because it spends a third of its budget on paying off the debts of the apartheid military. Ironic. 

"It struck me that our history is contained in the homes we live in, that we are shaped by the ability of these simple structures to resist being defiled." Achmat Dangor, "Kafka's Curse"

On a more entertaining note: 

We made dinner. It took us 3 hours to make stirfry for the group, but I feel it was a success. 

Kaitlin's answer to everything was "more oil!" with the excuse "I was raised in the South! This is how we cook!" 

Josh educated us both on the complicated art of rice cooking. "Don't lift the lid! You'll ruin it!"

I just splashed soy sauce on everything. 

The end.