Last Day in the Township

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My friend Dani told me that her and a few other people were going to go back to where she met some really cool people in Khayelitsha while on her SAS trip on the first day and hang out there.  To explain, they were there with Operation Hunger and were weighing all the tiny boys and girls.  While there, she ran into these two guys who had gone abroad to study dance and theater and then brought it back to the township and were teaching the kids.  However, they didn’t have speakers or musical instruments except drums.  So Dani asked if they would like it if she came back sometimes and brought some gifts possibly including iPod speakers they could use for the day so they actually had some tunes to jam to.  I thought that sounded awesome, and I said I could bring my guitar too so they could actually have an instrument as well even though I didn’t really know any dance tunes.

 

In the morning I wandered around and looked for postcards since the game reserve didn’t have any, and then I wrote them and mailed them to six people and hopefully ya’ll get them!  And I looked for some snacks in the Woolworth’s again and just got some chocolate I think.

 

Anyway, this is actually when I had the really nice conversation with Deirdre over lunch and talked to Clive too about his job on the ship.  I asked her if she wanted to split a cab to Long Street if she had any interest in going there, but she said she was gonna hang around the ship a little bit longer, and so I set off on my own.

 

When I got to Long Street where I was supposed to meet Dani to go to the township there were a lot of people.  Like at least two van fulls.  So probably about twelve to fourteen people.  And Dani hadn’t been able to get in touch with the dancer guys so she didn’t really know how to get back to the neighborhood in Khayelitsha that she wanted to go to.  The other kids had heard of a big barbeque that took place in a neighborhood somewhere that was called Mzoli’s.  I didn’t really want to go because I just wanted to see life in a normal township on a normal day (although it was Easter Sunday).  But I was only with girls and wouldn’t have felt safe walking around a normal township like I might have with dudes like Martin and Gabe, and I was outnumbered so I agreed to just go to the Mzoli’s place.

 

Our taxi driver got lost like five times and it took us something close to 90 minutes to get there even though it was really only 15-20 minutes away from where we were.  A lot of us got really frustrated but oh well.

 

The best part of the whole day was just driving past the townships that I didn’t go to.  Khayelitsha and Guguleta and Nyanga were among them.  And I think I described them earlier, but just in case you didn’t read it before, they’re shantytowns that just go for miles and miles and miles and seem to never stop and you seriously can’t believe that they’re going past your window as long and as deep as they are.  The houses are barely held together and often leaning sideways or missing roofs or panels.  Electrical wire comes in spider webs from a main pole down to the individual households and they look incredibly exposed and pretty dangerous.  Sometimes you could see people playing or walking or hanging around and I could see inside a tiny bit, but not as much as I wanted to, and that was sad.

 

When we got to Mzoli’s it was super packed.  It was in the town of Guguletu and there was a big road going through the middle of it basically and there were cars parked EVERYWHERE for like two kilometers on both sides of the entrance, and you could hear music and see cooking smoke rising from as far away as the cars. The township was on both sides and it was pretty poor like I described the others, although just a little bit better off somehow because I think a number of people that lived right here could work at Mzoli’s and make pretty okay money.  I don’t mean rich, they were still pretty bad houses, but it looked like one that I could see inside had some sort of furniture and maybe even a TV.  There were stores with Coca-Cola posters on them, and I was sort of surprised that the brand had made it this far.

 

There was really really loud music and the place was soooo crowded.  I wasn’t particularly interested.  We walked into a bar and some dude asked me for a “cover charge” and then I saw other people walk in without giving him any money and I was just like, Dude, what’s your problem, and walked away.  I had my guitar with me still and people kept asking me if I was going to play and I really wasn’t feeling it at all, although I did want to go to Khayelitsha more than anything, really.  We walked around a little bit right outside of the neighborhood and talked to a family with a dog, and then ran into some guys with a bit more money who were born in the townships but said they grew up in “the hills” near the city and now went to university.  I talked to them a little bit but not a whole ton.  They were nice, but they were buying beer and then going to go drink it and seemed sort of like they wanted to hang on their own.  Then they went back into the super crowded place which super sucked for me with my guitar on my back, plus I hate crowds in general, so I just left.

 

I went to a little store and got some water and sat in a chair in the corner and passed the time on my BlackBerry for a while.  I smiled at a woman and she came up to me and asked me for money.  Another guy came up to me and asked me for money too and he wouldn’t go away until I shook my head no.  He stayed for almost two minutes.  It was unbearably uncomfortable.  The ball on my BlackBerry got sticky, maybe from the sand, but blowing on it helped.  I was relieved when it was time to go and got up to find out taxi driver.  My friends apparently found a more relaxed and quiet place to talk to the guys that had been buying beer earlier and said they had a really good time.  One of them teared up because she didn’t want to leave.  I was a little jealous but not in particular, and I was glad that at least they had a good time.  I had an awful time but I didn’t care because I knew we’d be leaving South Africa soon and that was all I wanted.  We used one of their friends’ cell phones to call the driver, whose number I had taken, and he found us on the corner within a minute or two.

 

We went back to the waterfront and got a little bit of food (my ice cream sucked) and then I went to the market with Dani.  I walked back to the ship and stood in the huge line and was a little afraid I was too late to make it back before dock time started, but I was fine.  I talked to Gabe who had just walked around a township with some other guys on his own and I was pretty jealous of his experience.  He said a dude came up to them and showed them around and that he was perfectly happy not to rob them or let them get robbed as long as the crew paid them some money at the end, which they were also happy to do.  A lot of kids drank wine in the line and were drunkish when they got back on the boat.