Postcard from Cape Town, South Africa

2/19/08

Table Mountain – it's huge! …flat on top, as its name implies, and it's the first thing you see when pulling into Cape Town's Victoria Harbor. The harbor area is gold and blue, clean and inviting, with upscale Victoria Mall, street singers, players and dancers entertaining while pitching their CDs, blue skies, perfect temperatures and a great place to be a tourist.

There are eleven languages spoken here, but the major ones are Afrikaans (sounds like Dutch), English (with a British accent), Zulu and Khosa (the language that has tongue clicks represented by the letters ,K and X). The most universally spoken is Afrikaans, but the national anthem is in all four languages. The monetary unit is the rand, which exchanges for about 7.5 rand to the dollar. The prices in the city are comparable to the US.

Thanks to apartheid (which became law here in 1948) and the convoluted rules that accompanied it, people here are classified as Afrikaaners (white), black (African), or colored (includes Indians, Malays, Chinese, and any interbred combinations of the above). Unlike Brazil, the colonials here imported their slaves and servants from Malaysia and India as well as from other parts of Africa, so there are a wide variety of cultures here. Slavery was abolished in the 1830s, following the British example.

On our first day, Jim took 19 students to visit a Psychiatric Hospital outside Cape Town, so we got to see a little of the area surrounding the city. The townships, where the colored peoples were relocated during apartheid, are as poor looking as you would imagine, and there are shantytowns very reminiscent of the favelas in Brazil, where rural people who want to move to the city live until they can improve their lot by getting a job. We were told that, unfortunately, people whose only skills are farming or herding sheep don't have an easy time acquiring the skills needed to survive in the city.

The hospital dates back to the days when mental patients lived long term at the center, so it has acres of grounds and lots of ward buildings. Around the perimeter is an electrified barbed wire fence, which we were told is not to keep the patients in, but to keep the gangs - who wish to steal drugs and methadone – out. The doctor who hosted our visit is an Afrikaaner who is passionate about his work, and is very upfront about the amount of post traumatic stress caused by the civil unrest in the country. He let the students interact with the psychotic patients (a no-no due to HIPPA laws in the US) and the students rated the trip "outstanding".