Next stop: South Africa

We're getting everything packed up and making mad dashes around town trying to buy the last of our needed supplies for the trip. We're in Vermont right, having just done a fundraiser in Middlebury, and tomorrow we drive to NYC, then on Tuesday we'll wake up and spend the next two days traveling. Whoo boy! Our flight from Atlanta only makes a brief landing to refuel in Senegal before touching down on Jo'burg's sweet soil. In preparation for the rigors of plane travel, we've come prepared with hordes of audio books, crappy novels, and DVDs that we'll watch as long as our laptop has power.

We've both been doing a lot of ZA reading in prep for the trip which has been really exciting. (FUN FACT: South Africa's abbreviation is ZA: the Z stands for 'Zuid', which is apparently 'south' in Dutch, so ZA = 'Zuid Africa'. This is all because Saudi Arabia had already swiped 'SA'. The bastards!) I've been reading this excellent biography of Thabo Mbeki, written by one of David's friends, Mark Gevisser, called 'A Legacy of Liberation'. Interestingly, that is the USA name, A Legacy of Liberation: Thabo Mbeki and the Future of the South African Dream. In South Africa itself, however, it is called Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred. Interesting, non? We've also been reading a couple of papers, the Sowetan (sowetan.co.za) and The Mail & Guardian (mg.co.za). (Another FUN FACT: Soweto, the black township outside of Johannesburg, is sort of an abbreviation, like Tribeca, and means SOuth WEstern TOwnship. Howboutthat??)


This is a picture of Fish Hoek, the small community outside of Cape Town where our dear director lives. His house is somewhere in that first row of house and from his balcony he can see the whales that regularly swim in the bay. Amazing. Also regularly swimming in these waters are some of the worlds largest populations of great white sharks. So, needless to say, we're not terribly disappointed about it being winter there and not being able to swim. Maybe next time, sharks. David tried to comfort us with a story of a woman who swam these waters every day for 40 years. The comforting part wasn't that she never got eaten, which she did, but that it took 40 years for the sharks to do so. Ah, how relieving, how soothing a story.

With any luck, the next posting we put up will be from Africa! Huzzah!

- Shaun