Community Engagement

For the last month I have been volunteering at the Direction Action Center for Peace and Memory (DACPM or DAC for short), an organization run by ex-combatants who were part ending the apartheid. I work with a man named Yazir Henri who has done some speaking around the United States and started the organization so that he could be a part of rewriting the history of the people who he fought with for freedom. I work with three other students, Ashley, Martin and Rebecca. I am there four days a week and we have been working on organizing a conference in March.

The conference focuses on the idea of masculinity and how years of violence perpetuates cycles of violence within communities in South Africa. I have been doing a lot of work inviting speakers and getting down the basics of what the format for the conference will be. I am also working on getting the text put together for the DAC website. This is exciting to do because I am able to learn about all of the different program that the DAC does.

Port Elizabeth

Last week was great. On Thursday morning my whole class drove to the airport at 6:45 am and jumped onto a plane to head to the Eastern Cape. There is another University of Washington program in Port Elizabeth. They stay in one big apartment complex, with 2 bedrooms (2 people to a room), a kitchen, bathroom, living space with a TV and a porch. The first day we were there we had a BBQ with the two groups. Each apartment group paired up with students from Cape Town and we all cooked specific dishes. My group made appetizers. We ate and sat around and got to know one another until late into the night. The next day we went to the Steve Biko Foundation. It was a long drive there, we got lost on the way and were pretty late to our meeting. We went to the foundation, Steve Biko's grave and then went to his house. We ate dinner at his house and talked about memorialization and how to pay respect and give acknowledgment to important figures in history. That night we all went out to the clubs around Port Elizabeth in a huge group and around 5 in the morning went swimming in the Indian Ocean. On Saturday, the third, we had a session with Erwin (our traveling artist on the program). We talked about going to the Steve Biko Foundation, did creative exercises and acted out different areas like the Ave, war, prison, a hero's grave and some others. Then we talked about freedom and what freedom tastes, smells and feels like. It was a good way to get to know the other group. We flew out on Sunday afternoon and it was sad to leave because it was so much fun and nice to get to see students from the UW again.

The weather was pretty miserable in Port Elizabeth. It was raining for the first two days, sort of sunny on the third day and then rainy again. We were excited to come back to Cape Town to get back to the sun and when we landed it was pouring rain and it's still pouring. It's funny because we're all so used to Seattle, but have gotten so accustomed to the sun that the rain is horrible.

We're all recuperating today and trying to get back the hours of sleep that we lost while we were away. This week at school we're focusing on museums and looking at how the space constructs the history of South Africa.

Right now there is a group of high school students from Isilimela (a school in Langa in the townships) who are here to bake cookies for a bake sale for the Hands for a Bridge program. The students are sining Justin Timberlake right now, it's pretty amazing. The Hands for a Bridge program brings students from Roosevelt High School in Seattle to Cape Town to meet students from Isilimela and Belleville for two weeks. The students from Roosevelt will be coming on the 16th of this month.

Hope all is well in the states and lots of love from Cape Town.

Black Outs

We had a our first night time black out last night. There have been a few daytime black outs where they cut out power to certain neighborhoods for 2-3 hour periods. In some of the farther out regions they can have their power cut for the whole day. Last night we were all sitting around getting ready to go out and the power flickered a few times and then just went out. Apparently the power throughout all of Cape Town went out at the same time. So we stayed in, lit candles, had our friends over and hung out in the dark. It was a pretty fun night. The power came back on around 2 in the morning.

It can definitely be challenging to be without power. The restaurants can only serve cold food, the grocery store runs on a generator and we're not supposed to open our fridge because we'll let the cold out. The power outages have been in the papers a lot and I am pretty sure they're also being published in newspapers in the states.

But, I'm safe and happy and I hope all of you are doing well.