August 27, 2007
Writing from a former convent in Johannesburg, South Africa
This is home for the week.

So begins part two of this crazy, breathtaking , wholly and totally unpredictable year of mine. It started with my longest plane ride, yet, which was not at all as agonizing as expected. Two days to get to the other side of the world really isn’t too bad when you think about it. Despite those 35 or so hours in transit, when our plane landed at the airport in Joburg, I don’t think that it’s really sunken in with me that I’m now on this side of the Atlantic, this hemisphere, this continent, starting this semester in southern Africa. Driving around the city didn’t do much to change that. I felt like I could be driving around Chicago, and the neighborhood where we’ve been staying basically feels like the South Side of the city to me. One of the professors that is going to be working with us in Namibia is in charge of us here in Joburg for our ten days here, and he has been shuttling us around touring Soweto for the past two days. We’re staying in what used to be convent until we start homestays in Soweto for a couple of days before we fly to Namibia. Spending time in Joburg, the economic heart and the heart of the liberation struggle, is absolutely crucial for understanding this place, its politics and it’s history, even though it isn’t exactly the most fun place to visit.

There have been the typical foreign travel novelties, too. It was the first time I’d been on a flight with instructions translated into French (we stopped in Dakar to refuel, pick up and drop off passengers), and this whole driving on the other side of the road business keeps catching me off guard. We turn corners and I swear that trucks are going to come straight at us, and, being a group of American kids, we get collectively startled.

There’s also the novelty of stares like I’ve never gotten before. Our gaggle of white American kids receives a good dose of stares, comments in languages that I don’t understand, and enthusiastic ‘hello!’s wherever we walk. Seeing what it means to have white skin here is obviously a big part of the whole experience, and I think it’s going to take awhile to begin to understand and to realize how we fit/don’t fit in to this place.

Two girls in the group have been to Nicaragua in the past year, and so we’ve had some Nica love and nostalgia moments and resolved to practice speaking Spanish together. We’ll see how that goes, but I am sure that we’ll continue to compare our first impressions and experiences in southern Africa with what we’ve seen in Latin America, too. Something that one of the other students noticed is just how quiet it is here, and it’s true. In Nicaragua, you’d walk past shacks and so often you’d hear that machine gun raggaeton beat or crooning bachata blasting out from corrugated tin walls, but here you walk around dusty roads in Soweto and all you can hear is the traffic in the distance. I guess that I just make sense of new places by piecing them together out of where I’ve already been, and maybe my frame of reference will get bigger as I keep traveling.

We’ve been touring the icons of the liberation struggle so far, walking along the paths of the 1976 student protests, sitting in the Regina Mounde church and looking up at the bullet holes left in the ceiling as a tribute and reminder of past struggles, listening to the people who were there, former prisoners in Robben Island and who were there at the June 16th protests. It’s been an iconic history, and as amazing and moving as it is to be here and experience these places first hand, we had a speaker today who sparked all of our interest in a new way. A scholar and activist who grew up in rural Zimbabwe and worked for the South African communist party, he spoke to us about the realities of post 1994 South Africa. He talked about the some of the failures of liberation and this new government to create real land reform or change migrant labor practices (the things that my independent study project is probably going to be focused on, so I was pretty into it).

No real stories, yet. This has been all about orienting ourselves and seeing things first hand. Retelling what I’ve seen doesn’t really do much justice to the experience of the place. No reason to recap the schedule.

So, after last year’s confusing and drawn out mess of study abroad decisions, applications, a bad case of the flu, a lost recommendation letter and an unread application, I’ve ended up here. I guess that sometimes things actually do work out, and I’m pretty happy and grateful that this one did.

September 5, 2007
Namibia.

We’re here. I felt like I was homesick for this house even though I hadn’t even seen this place, yet. Really I’ve just been wanting to settle into something, to have some independence (a.k.a. not shuttled around in a group of twenty students all day) and start getting into my life in Namibia- as temporary as that is going to be. The whole group was ready by the end of the week in South Africa, each of us antsy and anticipating.

Watching our plane land at the airport in Windhoek, I couldn’t tell the shrubs from the trees. It was all one indefinite expanse, even and flat, cracked red brown dirt stretched out under dry heat. So, here I am, dropped of on the other side of the world in the middle of a desert. Ready, set, go.

Student visas were issued, all of our bags appeared on the conveyer belt (a miracle! Definitely not the case in South Africa), and the group was collected into two vans. We drove past, at most, three or four people, and spotted two monkeys just trotting on down the highway. Springbok crossing signs, mountains, a trailer full of luggage rolling along behind us, and then Windhoek suddenly appeared.

There is serious wealth in this country. Going towards the city center we drove past tremendous stucco houses, gated and neatly gardened with big cars tucked into their garages. The streets feel empty, and it’s a little eerie at first. They’re wide asphalt roads, built for cars, but we only have a couple of people walking around at any one time and not much traffic outside of the city center.
We’ve gotten out of the city and into an area called Katatura twice now. Katatura means, to translate a word that really can’t be, ‘the place that we live where we don’t want to live.’ Less than a ten minute drive, and the roads turn to dirt, house walls turn to tin, and you can step out of your taxi and look out over miles of shacks that have sprung up just in the past 15 years or so. You can see Windhoek from Katatura, but you can’t see Katatura from Windhoek.