As I had neither seen a sunrise nor seen us enter port yet, I decided to wake up before the crack of dawn to witness our epic arrival to Cape Town, and it was certainly that. Cape Town is a city on the edge of the ocean at the bottom of some magnificent mountain, towering in the background with very steep cliffs and flat tops. In fact, the main mountain is called Table Mountain because it looks like a large table and when the clouds form along its upper ridge, it looks like there is a tablecloth on it. At about 0630, the sun began to rise and it rose in the perfect spot – right at the top of a small mountain so that it appeared that it was coming out of a volcano or something like that. It was quite spectacular! There was a flash of green light apparently, but I looked down at my camera at that moment so I missed it L. Later on, there was a rainbow that appeared as well as some seals sporadically appearing on the surface. To enter the port, we had to go through a very tight entrance, which was very cool to witness – two tugboats maneuvering us through the opening. What a first impression.
Customs required face-to-face verification to clear the ship so we all had to meet the customs officers to get our stamps. After that was done, I went on one of the first trips to go to a Township (equivalent of a ghetto) to learn traditional Xhosa (pronounced Kosa with a click at the beginning). We had two tour guides, Michael (white) and Mizura (black) and a cool bus driver (colored). In S. Africa, they are not as offended by race identification as we are in the States and actually mentioned this distinction when they introduced themselves. The City of Cape Town is gorgeous and the weather is wonderful, but when you go to the outskirts you come across the Townships. Some of them look pretty nice from the outside, but some of them look like the shacks from Ghana were transported and just dumped there. They certainly did not fit in with everything else. We went to one more towards the upper middle in this scale to learn from our “cooking mamas”. Lucky me, I was in the group with my professor and the Mama who started the trip (this was the first time SAS has done this trip); thus, I got to help cook a chicken from scratch. That’s right, she’d bought two live chickens the day before and had trapped them in her bathroom in preparation for our arrival. So, once everyone was split into their groups and the others left to go with their mamas, we went out back with the chickens. She took a long knife, much like a bread knife but not serrated, held the chicken down by stepping on its feet and proceeded to cut off its neck. Then, she wanted one of us to try but only one of us would go near and she volunteered to help hold the chicken. The only problem was that she cut the second one’s neck higher up than the first; thus, the vocal cords were still attached and it continued to cluck for several minutes while its body convulsed and gushed blood onto the dirt. It was gross. Then she brought it into the kitchen, dumped it into the sink, poured hot water on it and began to pluck some of the feathers off of it. Once she’d showed us how to do it, she left the extremely smelly task for us to do. Surprisingly, most of the feathers came out easily. We were taking way too long though, so she recruited the help of a neighbor to pluck the other bird while she showed my professor how to prepare the vegetables (chopped cabbage, butternut squash and hominy). Once the chickens were plucked, we cut one open to disembowel it – found an egg, several premature eggs, and many nasty organs I was glad we weren’t going to eat (they put them aside to eat later). We put the cut up pieces in water and cooked it for an hour. We ate the food once it was ready and it actually tasted pretty good. I don’t know if I ever want to kill a chicken again but I guess that is certainly an experience I won’t forget easily.
While we were waiting for the food to cook, we talked to Mama Noks (pronounced Knox) about her life. She told us how her husband had died several years ago and so she had to find another job to support her two children. She began working at a bead store but didn’t like something about it (I forgot the exact reason – I think it was the hours) and so she told her boss she was going to leave to start her own store and he told her good luck. So she quit that job and started making her own designs for beads. At first, she wasn’t making much money and was living in a tiny shack. Then some nice people talked to her one day and paid for her current house to be built. She didn’t know them or realize what they did until after the fact, but they gave her the start she needed to grow. Then, at church she met Michael and he helped her expand her clientele. After that proved successful, he helped her start a catering business. Then, he helped her open her house to homestay students. Finally, he arranged the FDP with her as the head ‘mama’. She employs some of her fellow ‘mama’ neighbors in her jewelry business and also helps them sign up for homestay arrangements. For a poor, single, black woman in post-apartheid conditions, this is quite impressive. It is certainly a great example of God’s providence. Even though her conditions weren’t the best, you could tell that she was proud of her home (which originally was one room for everything and now has a kitchen, living room, two bedrooms and a bath – the original toilet was a hole in the floor). She was a very pleasant and inspiring woman and I’m glad I got to meet her through the FDP.
Later that night, I went with some friends on a different trip to go see “Fiddler on the Roof”. As the drama teacher on the trip is from the Cape Town Opera, he arranged a backstage pass to see the stages in one of the theatres where he often has his shows. It was very cool as we got to see how they do some of the effects. The stage has a revolving section in the middle and has three equal-sized stages on either side. The coolest part is the ending of the play when Tevye and his family walk off into the distance, which literally looks like that as the open up the back stage and actually double the distance to create this effect. We also saw the machine they used to move Lazar Wolf’s wife’s ghost around during the show. The play was very well done and the actors were amateurs (aka weren’t getting paid for performing) but they had wonderful voices. It was extremely well done.
What an excellent first impression of South Africa.
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