South Africa was yet another port where I awoke knowing that it was beautiful outside since my roommate excitedly screamed and ran out of the room at 6:30am with her camera in hand. I proceeded to pull myself out of bed so that I could watch the sunrise over Cape Town in the distance, which was absolutely beautiful. There was Table Mountain, a very distinctive landmark in Cape Town on one side and Robben Island (the prison where Mandela was held) on the other side. Cape Town was definitely one of my most anticipated ports so I was pretty excited to finally see it there in front of us. It took us some time to finally get in to the port, and a few hours later we were docked and outside my window was the pier! The first thing that we did though, before getting off the ship (or even being cleared to get off the ship), was hear from a woman by the name of Linda Biehl. One of my largest trips for my service class was to the Amy Biehl Foundation in Cape Town, which is a foundation that supports programs in the townships for children. So, I had done a lot of research on the organization and we had found out the night before that Linda Biehl (who started the foundation with her husband) was coming on the ship to speak and I was incredibly excited for it. We had talked about Amy Biehl’s story in our Global Studies class (which everyone is supposed to attend) and so a lot of people showed up to hear her story from her mother’s perspective. [Mothers reading this: see if you could see yourself doing the same.]
Amy was a 26 year old American that was visiting South Africa and helping the black people fight for equal rights. She had previously spent a lot of time in Africa working for woman’s rights and was an extremely well-known and admired person by people all over the continent and by large governmental organizations in the US. Three days before she was supposed to fly back home to California, she was driving her friends who had no ride home back to their township. At the time, there was a large activist group chanting their motto “One bullet, one settler,” and they pulled her from her vehicle, and stoned and stabbed her to death. Her shirt had so many holes in it that her mother immediately burned it. The four men who had killed her were convicted and sentenced to prison for many years. Five years into their sentence, they were given a chance to redeem themselves due to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission- trials went on that allowed all political prisoners this chance. Linda and Peter Biehl (Amy’s parents) went to South Africa during this time and met the killers family (the video they got of this shows Amy’s parents telling the killer’s parents not to cry) and then proceeded to testify about how they believed that Amy’s killers should be forgiven and released. So they were, and years went by and now, over 15 years after Amy’s death, two of her four killers work for the foundation, one of their kids call Linda Biehl grandma (in Xhosa) and they have reached the unbelievable point of an amazing relationship. The Foundation was created in honor of Amy because her parents knew that she would want her work to be continued. Right now, the Foundation reaches out to over 3000 children every week and makes an incredible difference in the townships.
Shortly after hearing Linda Biehl speak, the ship was cleared and I proceeded to leave and explore the incredibly nice port area. Some of my friends wanted to shop, but the mall was incredibly expensive and since I was not going to be busy on a safari for three days I was hoping to get to a market or somewhere that would have cheaper merchandise. (An example of how expensive things were- $20 for a snowglobe). So I walked around until lunchtime with some friends and got to see how beautiful and great the waterfront was. However, I was shocked by just how similar it was to many beach towns back in the States and that was a little disappointing. I got to stop at a grocery store in the mall which was just like home and amazing (had matzos too!) and then we went to lunch at a diner-esque place where I had a burger and milkshake that was delicious! Next, we went to meet the ferry at the waterfront to take us to Robben Island. There was a video showing on the ride over that gave us a brief history of who was held in the prison and why it is so important to South African history today. When we arrived at the island, everyone was put on buses for a bus tour around the island. Our tour guide was hilarious and extremely interesting and knowledgeable. The people on our bus were from about 5 or 6 different countries and no matter which country it was he was able to relate it to South Africa’s history and how people of all these countries helped to shape the people of South Africa today. I thought that that was really interesting to hear because I feel like we are always hearing about how other countries shaped the States, and especially Africa’s effect on the States, but very rarely do I hear it the other way around. The bus tour showed us the grounds and our tour guide told us about how all the political prisoners were there and how it has been vacant since the 90’s after waves of release due to the TRC. The most interesting and in many ways disturbing part is that it is currently being used for conferences and there are guest houses for those people participating in the conference as well as people living on the island (our second tour guide does). Mandela has actually gone back a few times and stayed there during a conference which must be really difficult. We saw a field where Mandela had done some work- there was limestone in this area and due to a lack of eye protection when working there the suns reflection on the limestone created such an awful eye problem that no one was able to take pictures with a flash of Mandela. After our bus tour, we got to walk around the prisons and see the way that people lived in there. The cells were tiny with a bucket as a bathroom and bed as five blankets on the floor. Some of the cells were different depending on the building- that was one of Mandela’s three cells while he was at Robben Island. We also saw a cell that was much larger and would hold around 30 people. While in that one we learned about the way that the prisoners were treated- blacks and colored were treated differently. It is amazing that even in a prison setting the lines were so clearly drawn between skin color and treatment. Blacks received significantly less food per meal than the colored prisoners, for instance. Our second tour guide that showed us around the prison had actually be a prisoner himself for six years. We had been told earlier that a lot of the tour guides are and the reason is that there are so few good job opportunities for black people in South Africa that they take what they can get, even though it is difficult. We took the ferry back to the mainland after that. On the ferry there were a group of students and they were so amused by the boat rocking (the waves were huge) and they were laughing and jumping around and my friends and I were like, clearly they don’t live on a boat. It was funny.
That night I went out to dinner with some fellow Jews to a kosher for Passover restaurant in Cape Town. It was one of the most delicious meals that I have had in a while. Then I went out to one of the big bar streets where a few hundred SASers were and that was my night!
The next morning I woke up for my service trip to the Amy Biehl Foundation. The bus that we used was like a plane- three and two across, very strange. We filled in all the seats and had some people double up because so many people wanted to go. We started off the day going to the foundation office, watching a video that gave us some background on Amy’s story, met and talked with the managing director who gave some interesting insight as to how he keeps the organization functioning financially, and then were given an opportunity to purchase some items in support of the foundation. The managing director was actually really, really interesting to hear from because he runs this non-profit organization as a normal business. He has managed to get the office space that they use for free, they have many different businesses supporting them by producing and selling products (Amy’s Bread and Amy’s Wine) that will have a percentage of the profit given to the foundation, and there are a few hotels in the area that add a fee a little less than 1 USD to the bill per night. All together, these few things create approximately 2000 USD per month. He says that it’s because he stresses the importance of social responsibility with other businesses that he works with and doesn’t want to rely strictly on direct donations. It was interesting. Next we drove into the townships and stopped at a school. The children are currently in the middle of school break so we knew going into the day that we would be seeing just some children doing activities that they don’t normally do when school is in session. So, at this school we walked up as the kids were in the middle of this interesting circle game and so we joined in and were dancing and chanting some word. One of the men in the middle kept stopping at certain points and grabbed two or so people from the outside and gave them some sort of fortune. We asked one of the South African inter-port students that was with us about it afterwards and he told us that they were calling on the ancestors and giving some sort of fortune from what they knew about the person. We figured as much. Unfortunately, we couldn’t stay there for too long as the kids were about to go eat lunch so a half hour later we left to get our own lunch. We ate at a place in the townships called Mizoli’s (don’t know how to spell it) that is a really well-known township eatery and a popular hangout. It was an amazing meal with some great meat that I have no idea what animals they were exactly. But excellent. There was a fan bus there to pump people up for the World Cup which would be in South Africa over the summer and some of the people on our trip were taking part in dancing and singing competitions and it was really fun.
Finally, we went to another site in the township area where we would be spending the remainder of our day with the kids helping them prepare for a mini world cup tournament that they will be having soon. So we met them and spent just a little bit of time by these storage buildings before walking through the township over to a big field. The kids were really excited to play soccer and a lot of them immediately went over to play when we got to the field. Others were much more amazed by our cameras and video cameras and spent the next hour or so playing with them. Then there was a group of kids that were playing with the crayons and painting their skin which was really cool. I spent a lot of time playing with kids that were taking pictures and it always amazes me how smart kids can be at figuring out how the camera works so quickly. I got some great pictures from the kids taking them and spent some time with some really, really adorable and happy kids. After some time doing that I went over to where some people were drawing on their skin and there I met my new friend for the afternoon. I was sitting on the ground and he came up behind me and started hanging on my back. For the rest of the afternoon we played some games and took a lot of pictures with him hanging on my back. He became very possessive of me and every time that we would get separated he would come running back. We were playing these circle games with the entire group at the end and my friend got an amazing video of him smiling and laughing while I was jumping up and down in the game with him on my back. It was amazing. It was really hard to leave all of the kids that we met, especially because a bunch of them chased after our bus as it drove away. It was a really amazing afternoon. On the bus back to the ship, one of the men that killed Amy Biehl and that works for the foundation now came on our bus to talk about it. It was really interesting to hear from him and see how he has changed his whole life and now has a family and has truly reconciled with his past.
That night, I joined some of my friends who are big salsa dancers back home at a salsa club in Cape Town. We started out the night taking lessons- so I went to beginner lessons on how to move your feet with a friend while they all went to more advanced lessons on how to actually do some sweet moves. Afterwards we all met up for “social salsa-ing” and they showed off all their skills while I showed that I can now move forward and backwards, attempt to spin, and count in salsa numbers (1,2,3..5,6,7..). It was an awesome night though. After we were done there it was about midnight and since we were on a big bar street we went to walk down it and see if we could find some good bar for a little while. On our way, we passed a big group of men that were clearly in some sort of conflict gathered on the sidewalk so I used my common sense and street smarts and kept walking but my friend stopped to see what was going on because as it turned out there was a girl at the center that it seemed like they were trying to mug but she was being stood up for by a few people who were telling everyone else to get away from her so we grabbed our friend who was our token boy that night (or as the administration likes to say, at least the illusion of a tough man, kind of like having Jason there for scare factor) and kept walking. It was definitely hard to decide whether or not to walk away though- at least at home you can call 911 but the police in SA don’t uphold the same safety standards. We ended up stopping at a food place and I spent some time talking with a friend to a local about how even with Mandela’s efforts, there is still so much to be done in the country to change the racial segregation issues. It was really interesting to hear him talk because he was really frustrated and passionate about it. At that point I was starting to fall asleep at the restaurant and so I headed back to the ship with some friends who were going back.
So, that was day 1 and 2 of Cape Town adventures! More to come later…
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