Hermanus

Unfortunately the weather has still been terrible, making it difficult to do much weekend exploring. Even so, we managed to head to Hermanus last weekend for some whale watching. Julia just bought a car, which we decided to test out. Also, I don’t think ours really likes the long-distance highway driving. (It shakes fairly aggressively once you hit about 110 km/hr. Byron’s hands once because numb after being on the steering wheel at that speed for a prolonged period of time, haha. I never drive for that long, but maybe someday I’ll get to experience it...)

Anyway, Hermanus is a quaint little town located about 1.5 hrs southeast of Cape Town, on the coast. The drive is beautiful, with the road winding between the mountains and the ocean the whole way. Hermanus is known for its whale watching, and it being whale season, we definitely wanted to check it out. The town is gorgeous, situated right on the oceanfront and surrounded by mountains. When we arrived, we barely had time to get oriented before the sounds of the whale crier made us rush to shore (the town employs a whale crier who blows a giant horn whenever there are whales nearby). Based on our experiences, I do not fault the town’s tourist department for wanting to claim that Hermanus provides the best whale watching on earth – it was amazing! The water must get deep incredibly fast because there were quite a few whales hanging out just a few meters beyond the beach rocks. Though multiple whale species live in the area, we only saw the Southern Right Whale. It’s their calving season, which made for especially fun viewing. When we were watching the whales near the beach, there were also a number of them breaching off in the distance. It was like watching fish jump, and everywhere you looked there was action...though of course those types of moments are impossible to capture on camera.

We finally managed to tear ourselves away from the scene, only because we had a boat tour scheduled for the late afternoon. We arrived at the dock in time for the pre-trip whale education lesson. It was an interesting crew we threw in with. First of all, the guide asked us where we were from and Heather answered “Canada” (which no one else disputed, for simplicity’s sake), after which the guide said something like “ok...so you guys good with me talking in Afrikaans?” Not quite, haha...The next odd moment occurred when he said “don’t worry, we have a life boat and we will definitely be getting everyone back to shore tonight.” I thought he was just trying to be funny, but then I realized he might not be joking. When he handed us all life jackets and actually made us put them on (as opposed to just having them on the boat), it finally sunk in that our whale watching trip might be slightly different from what I expected. And then I saw the boat. And it was really small. In fact, smaller than the whales themselves…

You’re probably wondering how I could be so naive, but I’ve been on countless commercial whale watching excursions before so I thought I knew what to expect – a very large, stable boat with indoor and outdoor seating, tons of deck space, bathrooms, a cafe, etc. Looking at our boat, I had no idea that commercial operations would venture to take you out in a boat that small, facing swells that were taller than the boat itself. Well, actually, I don’t think they ever would be able to in the States, but you can get away with a lot more in South Africa, haha. Of course the best viewing was from the upper deck, which of course was all the more tippy. Still, despite the boat rocking back and forth considerably and needing to either sit down or wrap at least one arm tightly around the railing in order to prevent yourself from tumbling off (a prospect made even more tricky given the need to devote the one hand to a camera), it was an amazing experience.

Boats aren’t allowed near shore where we had previously seen all the whales, so we had to head further out into the ocean. We happened upon a mother and baby fairly early, which was great. The baby was so cute! It was apparently about 2 months old and was always right by its mom’s side. It even spent a while playing with a large piece of kelp, pulling it around and mouthing it. I always find it interesting that babies of all kinds of species, be it kids, puppies, or whale calves, are universally united by the desire to play. So all in all, it was a great trip, especially since we made it back to shore in one piece (though it was touch and go for Julia who got fairly seasick).

Now keep in mind when you see these pictures how difficult it was to both hold on to the rocking boat and take photos at the same time...

Whale watching from the shore


Heather and Wenli showing off the stylish life jackets

Our lovely tour boat

Mom


Mom and baby side by side

Baby playing with seaweed


So it's hard to tell, but the baby is upside down and its mouth is open with seaweed in it. Isn't it cute?

Baby waving goodbye :)


Oh yeah, and aside from the whales, the scenery is kind of nice too...

Disparity

There was a very depressing article in the New York Times yesterday about the implications of apartheid on South African students today (Eager Students Fall Prey to Apartheid’s Legacy). Specifically, the article detailed high-school students in Khayelitsha and the incredible lack of teaching resources available to them. (Khayelitsha is the largest township outside of Cape Town – probably close to two million people live there, mostly in informal settlements.) These students often show up to class only to find their teachers absent or unwilling to teach, which led to violent student protests last year. Some of them have resorted to teaching themselves. Of the ones that make it to 12th grade (about half have dropped out by that point), fewer than half can pass the exam taken at the end of high-school that determines who is eligible for college. Thus the vicious cycle of poverty continues.

Under apartheid, the government created “Bantustans” which were “homelands” set aside for black South Africans, separated based on tribe in order to concentrate ethnicities in certain areas. Bantu education systems meant blacks were separated off and intentionally taught at a lower level, the point being that a less educated black population would provide less trouble for a white government and only give blacks the capacity to undertake menial labor jobs. Of course just because apartheid officially went away does not mean the black population’s problems were immediately solved. After all, today’s teachers were educated under the Bantu system…

The incredible wealth and education discrepancies that exist in South Africa today still make it extraordinarily hard for someone born poor to break through the system and succeed. Of course this is true even in the U.S., but it is so extreme here. Consider the fact that 2 in 1,000 children pass a 6th grade math exam in predominantly black schools, and 2 in 3 pass in predominantly white schools. Statistics show only half of 3rd grade teachers are themselves capable of passing a literacy exam at the 6th grade level. As the article more or less states, if you are black, unless you go to a mostly-white school, you don’t stand a chance. Based on the activities I take part in and the places I go, one might hypothesize that South Africa is 50% white (in terms of on where I go shopping, the neighborhood I live in, my memories of attending classes at the University of Cape Town, the office I work in, etc.), though the reality is that only about 8-9% of the population is white. White people simply have infinitely more access to these things that cost money and require a real education.

The article serves a reminder of how vast the problems really are in this county, and it’s overwhelming to think about whether the wealth/education gap really is “fixable.” Of course when you think about these problems in South Africa being somewhat of a microcosm for how Africa fits in to the rest of the world, it’s even more devastatingly depressing. I know it’s essential not to get caught up in simply thinking that the disparity in the world is beyond repair and writing off Africa, but sometimes it’s just plain hard to stay optimistic. Even if you teach yourself to focus on the positive (which, thankfully, is easy to do when working with such motivated and dynamic people as at m2m), I think it’s important to at least be aware of what most of this country’s population experiences and recognize that apartheid’s “legacy” is unfortunately still very much present. After all, if you ignore these problems, then things will most definitely never change. I don’t really know what to say other than that at the moment – lot’s of thoughts running through my head and very few answers…

District 6...I mean 9

I guess I don’t have anything officially exciting to report, as there are no new developments at work and the past few weekends have been mostly spent relaxing and recuperating from an annoying cold. Even so, sometimes I can’t help but ramble...

We recently saw District 9, which I enjoyed (minus the deafening noise associated with endless shooting). For a violence-filled science fiction/action movie, it was actually quite thought provoking, and I found it particularly interesting to watch it in South Africa. For anyone who doesn’t know the movie, the central story is about a man who starts to turn alien (after he accidentally ingests some alien fluid) and his quest to at first redeem himself in human society and then fight back as society turns on him, with various lessons learned along the way. The interesting part is that the story is set in Johannesburg, where the alien ship landed years ago. People took it upon themselves to “take care of” the sick aliens they found inside the ship, which ultimately turned into fencing them off in their own restricted living area. The main character gets “infected” as he ventures out among the alien district (called District 9) with the mission of handing out eviction notices to all of the aliens, trying to force them to move off land that has become desirable to humans.

Though I don’t have to state the obvious in terms of the apartheid allusion, I’m guessing a lot of nuances of the comparison are unfortunately lost on many Americans. In fact, the title is reference to an area in Cape Town called “District 6.” This was a flourishing multiracial (though mostly non-white) community. However, this was very desirable land in the middle of the city, so in the 60s the apartheid government designated the area for whites only and forced everyone else living there to move. Over 60,000 people thus moved to the arid, uninviting land outside of the city called “Cape Flats,” where today’s expansive townships and informal settlements exist. Ironically, after the painful removal of so many people, the idea of building in this formerly flourishing but subsequently abandoned District 6 area became taboo, and even to this day it sits mostly empty and undeveloped. Hence the movie’s title of District 9 says a lot. When watching a movie with aliens involved, it’s easy to get wrapped up in the fantastical elements of science fiction – and thus it’s frightening to remember that pretty much the exact same thing occurred in real life with human beings.

The movie also makes reference to the xenophobia which has occurred in the South African townships of late (violence escalated last year), with people of all races angry about the aliens taking away their tax money, resources, etc. Xenophobia was especially prominent in the South African townships, with South Africans lashing out against their neighbors from other African countries. (The townships not only serve as home for numerous poor South Africans looking for employment in the cities, but also for lots of people from all over the African continent who have either chosen to leave their home countries in search of jobs or who had to leave for reasons linked to conflict – unofficial refugees, if you will.) Here, these foreigners are often targeted as South Africans fear they are taking away their jobs and money, and they are also often blamed for crime and the spread of disease. It’s sad to think how history indicates that human nature always involves pushing someone else to the bottom, be it non-whites, people of other nationalities, or aliens.

In total, I found the movie to be quite provocative. The allegory was so overt and included such candid portrayals of racial hierarchy and township life – yet it felt weird that the official purpose of bringing up these issues wasn’t to document them but rather to use them as a background for creating a make-believe story. It made me feel a little uncomfortable to watch the movie amongst South Africans, as I couldn’t imagine what you would be thinking if this was actually your country and your ancestors’ history, as opposed to a foreign history that you can remove yourself from. Anyway, the long and the short of it is that it was an interesting movie and I recommend it if you can deal with lots of modern day action movie violence.

In other news, my official boss, Monica (the head of the Department of Strategic Information and Technical Support), has just returned from maternity leave. With 3 days back in the office, we’ve already had numerous productive meetings and I feel I have a much better understanding and appreciation for the role of DSITS and particularly M&E (monitoring and evaluation; my assigned focus) within the grander m2m vision and mission. Turns out the DSITS team is pretty much entirely new (consisting of 2 Princeton Fellows, 1 Pfizer Fellow who just started, and one new M&E recruit who only joined in July as well, plus Monica), as the Department itself is very new and recently lost 2 people to standard employee turnover. Monica thus spent a lot of time debriefing us on the organization as a whole and DSITS in particular, which was incredibly useful. We are also doing some team-building exercises together. Such official “team-building” I’ve never really experienced, and I must admit it has always seemed like a bit of a fluffy idea to me. I mean, how hard can it be to work together without officially knowing everyone’s Myers-Briggs personality types? In retrospect though, I have enjoyed learning more about management and working together and I very much appreciate that Monica is really trying to listen to what people hope to accomplish and how they want to grow over the year. It’s comforting knowing she wants to help us each achieve our goals.

Taking aside the intellectual aspect of working at m2m, I am additionally learning a lot professionally about how to work in an organization – specifically, an organization that isn’t a University department or whose primary goal is not scientific research. m2m really is an incredible foundation and it’s very interesting to take part as it expands exponentially. And the people here are so great. Not only do they hail from countless backgrounds both culturally (South African, American, Canadian, Egyptian, Indian, Italian, British, Australian, German to name a few) and professionally (investment banking, medicine, show business/entertainment, non-profits, pharmaceuticals, etc.) but their work experiences have taken them all over the world – all in all combining for a very dynamic group of people which I’m really enjoying getting to know better.

Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens

We’ve had a pretty relaxing time lately. The other weekend we drove to Kirstenbosch, a botanical garden located on the mountainside in the suburbs near us. It’s actually a pretty big area, and we spent a good 3 hours just wandering around looking at all of the plants. The plants around here are really quite the spectacle, at least to those of us foreigners who have truly never seen anything like them before. In fact, this region has its own floral kingdom, one of the six unique floral kingdoms in the world (so says Wikipedia). And according to another website: “The smallest of the six floral kingdoms, the Cape Floral Kingdom is a global biodiversity asset of great importance. It is home to more types of indigenous plants than any other similar sized area on Earth. At least 70% of the 9,600 plant species of the Cape Floral Kingdom are found nowhere else on Earth.” Anyway, Kirstenbosch has a nice feel to it because you can sort of wander around as you please or just pitch a blanket on the grass and enjoy your own picnic, as opposed to being one of those garden areas where you’re not allowed to touch anything/walk anywhere. I’m already excited for the summer concert series held in the gardens every Sunday night.

And once again I crossed another huge mental barrier by not only driving us to Kirstenbosch and back, but also dropping Julia off downtown afterwards. Of course the only reason I drove downtown was because no one else drives on Sundays, but oh well. Aside from a few screeching tires and the incident when I stalled approximately 5 times in a row trying to start on a hill before realizing the car was in 3rd not 1st, I would say it went ok. If only it weren’t for the ubiquitous hills!

Of course I took a million photos of weird plants…

Traveling to Cape Point and Other Cape Town News

In case you haven’t noticed, my blog posts don’t entirely correlate with the exact days that things take place. I tend to be a little behind the times with my writing, but I get there eventually. Anyway, I’ve been back in Cape Town for about 2 weeks now. Spring is starting to arrive, as we’ve experienced a nice run of 60-70 degree, sunny days...though it doesn’t mean the occasional rainy, 50 degree day won’t still show its face. But at least overall the weather is moving in the right direction. And the first day of Spring here is Sep. 1st, so that must mean something!

What else...well, the strike season has persisted. Yes, pretty much any major agency/constituency you can imagine has been involved with strikes or near-strikes. This includes taxis (=minibuses), trains, students, electricity companies, miners, you name it. I guess it’s that lovely time of year when contracts are renewed! In Pretoria even the South African National Defense Force went on strike, only to end up in a show down with the police, resulting in a mess of rubber bullets and cars set on fire. Gotta love it when the army battles the police...in the same country.

Mostly we haven’t been too affected by the strikes, aside from sometimes noticing large crowds of protesters on the streets and running into a few transportation issues. The train and minibus strikes made it particularly hard for some people to get to work. Some m2m employees who already travel almost 2 hours from the townships faced near impossible commutes without the trains and minibuses operating. Apparently when the minibuses strike, the drivers additionally threaten or at least put pressure on people not to take other forms of transportation as a replacement, making for an unpleasant dynamic in certain areas. I actually just heard on the news this morning about a shooting in Joburg involving minibus drivers taking aim at bus riders. The minibus drivers are acting out against the government trying to promote more official forms of transportation, for fear of losing their livelihood.

The only inconvenience we really had to deal with was a temporarily reduced train schedule, requiring us to drive to work and face more traffic than usual for a few days. However, driving in traffic certainly seemed preferable to the unknown world of trains running at reduced capacity, after experiencing one long stuck-in-the-train-station evening. One day last week we left the office and got on a packed train which was supposed to depart within a few minutes. We waited for about 15 minutes without moving, at which point an announcement was made and everyone started filing of the train and onto another one, so we followed suit. (It’s impossible to understand what the announcements say because the only loud speakers are outside of the train, as if it’s not hard enough to understand people when faced with the combination of bad quality sound systems and heavy accents.) After waiting on the new train for another 20 minutes or so, another announcement was made and people once again started filing out of the train and heading towards another one. In order to beat the crowds, the guy standing next to us even reached across to the train next door and opened the adjacent doors, then hopped through that train towards the destination train as opposed to going all the way around on the platform. Some people are born risk takers, I suppose! Once we managed to get to the third train, we prepared to wait again. A few minutes after boarding the new train, which by now was absolutely jam packed with annoyed passengers, the train we had just left, which was now 100% empty, departed the station. Go figure. We waited for a while longer until a horribly smelly drunk man shoved his way onto the train and stood right next to Byron and I, and with absolutely no space to breathe we quickly decided to abandon our efforts and just have dinner downtown before catching a taxi home once the traffic had cleared up a bit. Fortunately we have avoided any similar situations since, and at least the train strikes seem to be resolved...though I have a feeling we’ll still get to experience our fair share of similar incidents throughout the year.

Well, on to more exciting (or at least scenic) news. Last weekend Byron, Wenli, and I drove down the Cape Peninsula to the Cape Point Nature Reserve, located at the tip of the Cape of Good Hope. To orient you a bit (though you might just have to look at a map yourself), the City of Cape Town is actually (counter-intuitively so) located on the northern edge of the Cape of Good Hope, which itself is located on the South-Western corner of South Africa (and the continent for that matter). There are thus beautiful beaches that stretch about ¾ of the way around the peninsula, on the north, west, and south-eastern sides. The water on the eastern side (though technically not the Indian Ocean) is much warmer than the water on the western side, and at the very tip of the peninsula at Cape Point, they like to bill it as “where two oceans meet.”

Regardless of false advertising, it’s spectacularly beautiful. It took us about an hour to make the drive from our house down to the nature reserve, where the first thing we encountered in the parking lot was baboons. They are actually not something to be taken lightly, and you have to make sure you don’t have any food with you or else they may go for it and can be somewhat vicious in the process. Wenli and I were also told to keep our handbags close to our sides because apparently they have learned that women keep interesting things in those weird pouches they hold on to, and sometimes they will try to run off with them. Despite dire warnings, I have to say it was great fun to see the little baby baboons – so cute!

We spent the whole afternoon just wandering around the portion of the park that is at the very tip of the peninsula, exploring various trails winding between the light houses, rocky cliffs, and pristine beaches. Mostly we just stared in awe at the beauty of the scenery and of course took tons of pictures of the same thing. I guess that’s one of the luxuries of having a digital camera! Describing the scenery doesn’t come close to doing it justice, but hopefully some of the pictures below will help. Harsh cliff faces plunged down into spectacularly blue water, occasionally making room for a few beautiful bright white beaches, and mountains could be seen in every direction off in the distance...all in all, it’s pretty idyllic. It’s easy to see how so many ships have met their demise near this area though – with constant wind and sharp rocks abound, it certainly doesn’t look very hospitable to sea-farers.

Aside from being very windy, the day was perfect. We even managed to see a wild ostrich. And perhaps the most monumental event of the day, for me at least, was the fact that I actually drove us home half way – a huge step! I may not be any better at driving these days, but at least I’m braver!


This is actually a photo of Hout Bay, one of the myriad seaside communities that line the Cape Peninsula. We had lunch here (excellent fish and chips) a few weeks ago.

Cape Point




I know it's impossible to tell, but that's a lighthouse down there



Some of the local flora and fauna


Ostrich - yum!

Ok, so you can't really see anything, but there's a baby baboon in her lap!