March 27th

Today is Monday and we have been in South Africa since last Monday. We left Colombo Sunday evening around 7:00 pm. and flew to Mumbai (Bombay) India where we had a 6 hour layover. Oy. The good thing was they provide lounge chairs with thick foam pads so you can put your feet up and sleep which we did as our plane for Cape Town departed at 2:00 am. Oy vey. The bad thing was they have a security rule that requires you to identify your luggage before they will load it on the plane when you are transferring. We started hounding them at 11:00pm to do this and at 1:20 Ron was finally taken to a section of the airport to accomplish this mission. We are not sure if this would have happened had we not constantly inquired about our luggage. The other bad news is we discovered that our luggage had been pilfered when we got to Paarl. Our hair dryer and Ron’s leather tie case and ties were gone. We are fortunate that we had nothing of real value in our luggage. Apparently you can lock your luggage here which we had not done. We will on our return trip. Our flight to S. Africa was an eight hour trip and we took our favorite drug, Ambien, and slept most of the way.

We started out in Paarl which is just outside of Cape Town about 50 kilometers. Cape Town has to be the most beautiful city in the world. It is right on the ocean with Table Mountain as the backdrop. We stayed with our South African family in Paarl, Joan and Abie Sauls and their son Anthony with whom Ron did a professional exchange in 2000. The Sauls’ daughter and granddaughter, Alexis and Zita, are also living with them at this time. Zita is three and bilingual speaking English and Africaans. As a consequence, Joanie and Abie speak a lot more English than we remembered them speaking in 2000. This allowed for much greater communication than when we were there in 2000. As a result we felt an even closer and stronger connection with them. One evening we went with all the family including Abelia, Anthony’s sister, and Mendall, her husband to dinner at a huge casino development. It reminded us of Southern California .

We spent most of our time in Paarl visiting with the family. We took one day and went into Cape Town to look for African masks and other crafts. We were fortunate that Anthony’s nephew was free and willing to take us into town. There is a daily market called Green Market Square where crafts from all over Africa are sold. Each vendor is eager for your business so there is lots of banter to ‘buy from me’. I personally find it tiring to shop in that atmosphere but we persisted. We stopped by a stall where there were masks from all over the continent and found two, a male and a female mask, from South Africa. I believe they are Zulu masks. We also found some potato print placemats. From there we went to the Malay quarter where stucco homes with very flats facades are painted in bright tropical colors, each house being a different color. We will post photos when we can. One house would be painted fuchsia, the next house would be turquoise and the next would be purple. It reminded us of the Victorian ‘painted ladies’ in San Francisco.

From the Malay quarter we went to the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront. Here is where the rich and famous dine and shop. It is a beautiful development with lots of shops in the loveliest setting. Table Mountain is right there with the waterfront in the foreground. We ate a great lunch outside then went to a shop that specializes in African crafts. We bought some gifts then went to a department store to buy a present for Abie’s 72nd birthday. We managed to beat the traffic home. Apparently the traffic into and out of Cape Town during rush hour is horrendous. For Abie’s birthday on Thursday we prepared a typical American meal (his request) so Ron and I served baked chicken, steamed pumpkin, carrots, salad, and squash.

On Friday morning we left for Johannesburg. Our tour books and Lonely Planet online all warn of the street crime in Jo’burg. Consequently, I left all my jewelry in Colombo including my wedding ring and decided that I would not wander around on my own here which is what I would normally do. Friday night there was another organization, Institute for Local Government Management, that was holding its annual meeting with a gala dinner complete with speeches that we attended. On Saturday Ron’s committee met all day, the ICMA International Committee of which he is the chair. While he was working I went on a tour that included another spouse form the ICMA meeting and three men, two from Egypt and one from Lebanon. All three were engineers who are here to work on a light rail system that will go from Pretoria to Jo’burg. In 2010 the World Cup Soccer match will be held in South Africa so there is a lot to accomplish before that date in terms of infrastructure. So we spent the day seeing quite a lot of Jo’burg. We saw the downtown area including where the gold houses are. Some of the world’s biggest gold mines are here in the area. We saw old equipment used in the mining process. It takes 9 tons of material to produce one ounce of gold. Jo’burg is surrounded by these very large flat topped mounds which are the tailings from the mining process. When the price of gold drops, they reprocess the mounds as they are easier to access than the gold in the ground, thousands of feet below the surface. To get one ounce of gold, you process 16 tons of the tailings. They then fill the old mines with this material and can reclaim the land. Keep in mind that originally they used mercury to extract the gold from the dirt and then found a better process using cyanide. Oh my goodness. From an environmental perspective, can anything be good about this process???? We then went to the top of Africa which is a 50 story building to get a panoramic view of Jo’burg but by then it was raining and little could be seen.

Other sites included Soweto, the township created under apartheid where blacks were forced to move when the whites got paranoid about the number of blacks in the Jo’burg area. The township is about 9-10 miles from town. It is a township of 4.5 million people and ranges from shacks made of corrugated metal and scrap materials to upper middle class homes. It covers 400 sq kilometers. Within Soweto we saw the homes of Winnie Mandela complete with guards and security cameras, the former home of Nelson and Winnie Manadela , now a museum (Nelson’s granddaughter was there at the time) and the home of Desmond Tutu who lives in Cape Town most of the time. Mandela and Tutu lived on the same street and it is the only place in the world that can claim two Nobel Peace Prize winners!

We also saw ‘elephant houses’. These houses were built by the government for the blacks and housed three families. I would guess the houses were maybe 600-800 sq ft and were then divided into three sections, one per family. They were called elephant houses because the roof had a humped shape, somewhat like an elephant. Today the houses are occupied by a single family.

We visited the Regina Mundi Church. This is the Catholic Church where Mandela and Tutu and others were holding meetings when the police attacked the church shooting bullets and tear gas inside. The damaged altar and railings remain as evidence of this horrible episode. Bullet holes remain in the ceiling. This is where the Soweto riots occurred. There was a wonderful photography exhibit of the history of Soweto including some shots of the eventful day.

Next we ate lunch at a shabeen which is a neighborhood pub. Originally they developed because blacks were not allowed to buy alcohol under apartheid laws. A black would give a white some money who would buy the alcohol and the black would take it home and have friends over or sell it from his home. We had a delicious meal and listened to some musical performers. Next we went to the Hector Peterson Memorial Museum. Hector Peterson was a 13 year old boy who was demonstrating peacefully with other children to protest the use of the Africaans language in the schools. The children were going to present a memorandum to the officials asking that they drop the Africaans language requirement. The children were fired upon by the police and Hector was killed. The museum was filled with photos, videos and the like. I spent much of the day with a lump in my throat and ‘teared’ up numerous times. We passed funeral parlors with signs advertising funerals from 25 Rand and up. Twenty-five rand would be $6. One last statistic about Jo’burg is 67 cents of every rand spent in South Africa is spent in Jo’burg. And the saddest of all statistics is that 1700 people die every day in South Africa from AIDS related causes and this number is expected to double every six months. Part of the culture in Africa is you never talk about sex so educating people about safe sex was not an option. Apparently when the education program was started in the 80’s blacks were quite suspicious of the whites thinking that encouraging blacks to use condoms was a ploy to reduce their population so there would eventually be a white majority. Consequently, initially the admonition to use condoms was ignored. Today that has changed and safe sex is openly discussed in schools and elsewhere.

On Sunday I went shopping for sandals and clothes as the choices in Colombo are limited and here there are mega shopping malls, including one within walking distance of the hotel. I was successful in finding sandals but nothing else. I was thrilled as the shoes were the most important. In the afternoon, the committee meeting ended at 2:00 so we all piled into two vans and went to an African crafts market and flea market. We found more gifts and a few things for the Colombo house. Last night six of us dined alfresco at a Jamaican seafood restaurant with Granville, the former chair of the committee who lives here in Jo’burg. Today is a rest day and I may even manage to waddle down to the gym and work off a few calories.

That’s it from the city where the streets are literally paved with gold as they used the tailings from the mining process to pave the roads and the tailings contain minute particles of gold.