Cape Town - Day 2

Summary:
1 - visit District Six: the neighborhood in Cape Town where homes were demolished by the whites during apartheid because there were people of different races living peaceably. (It is again now a place of mixed and different races.)


2 - drive to three different townships to see neighborhoods, schools, cultural centers, homes, women's health center, artists at work...


3 - lunch in Stellenbosch, the largest wine producing region in SA. (upscale, trendy, Dutch architecture)


4 - Cheetah Outreach (see link to the right) - petting baby cheetahs!!




Animal Sightings:
in the city: guinea fowl (running through the streets)
at the cheetah outreach:
cheetah
meerkat
Anatolian sheep dogs
serval
black-backed jackyl




More:
The contrasts continue. The townships are small areas far from the city with populations in the hundreds of thousands. Families live in makeshift, wall to wall shanties; toilets are rows of cement stalls (picture 5 port-a-potties in a row) with locks on the outside that a family "owns" (has a key to). And the people gather in cultural centers to learn skills (mostly as artists) to sell crafts to make money. Our guide, Norman, says that really it's only those who are children now who have hope of a better life outside the townships.




Cheetah are gentle, peaceful (sleeping 16-18 hours a day) passive animals. And they are quite endangered. The Cheetah Outreach exists to educate people about the issues surrounding their endangerment and to create out of folks like us who visit, more ambassadors for the cheetah. We got to pet two cheetahs - about 6 months old - for a few minutes. They are stunningly beautiful animals (and their fur is not as soft as you'd think - in fact their fur gets softer as they get older).




Food:
Ostrich fillet for dinner (no it doesn't taste like chicken!). It is more like beef, served medium rare, cut in strips. It was not particularly flavorful, but was VERY tender and juicy. (Served with lentil samosas and a warm spicy tomato salsa with a fried banana on top!) YUM!




Blessings:
An unscheduled visit to the Tembaletu School (for handicapped children from all over Cape Town) in the township of Gugulethu where we'll be volunteering - they received us warmly and took us to meet the principal who spent 20 minutes or so with us and then had his psychologist take us on a complete tour. We even chanced to meet Steffan from Hillsong with whom I've been emailing to coordinate our mission work.




People everywhere, upon meeting us for the first time, ALL shake all our hands and want to know all our names. I'm learning to make genuine eye contact, to say my name and to say their name upon greeting and good-bye-ing.




Photos:
I still haven't figured out how to put photos in my posts here. We have FULL days and are exhausted at the end. (And dinner takes a good 2 hours each night.)