More quick posts.... we are in the captial of Lesotho right now, stopping for a night on our way to Johannesburg. Here's a quick run down of our past week:

July 9-11: Grahamstown festival. We saw tons of amazing, amazing shows. Very inspiring. One show was more of an installation, called "Blood Diamonds"; we were walked through the old train station that still divides white Grahamstown from the black town ship, seeing different living exhibits, led by a small black child from the township. Very moving. Saw a nice combination of white and black performers, which was a nice break from the exhausting segregation of the country. Still, most of the shows had white directors, even if the entire cast was black.

July 12: Woke up to find all of Grahamstown had no running water. Still don't know what happened there. David then took us on our three or four day journey to Johannesburg. We stay the night in the historic town of Graff Reinet in a nice little B&B. We go to a game park and see all sorts of critters. In between Grahamstown and Graff Reinet we see just along the road a couple dozen monkeys and a family of baboons. Amazing! David takes us up to The Valley of Desolation, which is advertised as being a place of "spiritual oneness" which seemed suspicious to us, but it was actually incredibly moving. It was a canyon of stone spires overlooking a vast, vast vista. Incredibly beautiful.

July 13: In the morning we drive into the Karoo (the semi-arid desert) on our way to the ranch of a friend of David's. The Karoo is amazing, full of seusian plants and amazing koppies (mesas). David's family at the ranch were lovely and we had a grand time. They took us on a walk up some crags where we could look down on a black eagles nest and see the egg inside of it. The black eagles there were huge, wingspans over 2 meters. The distrubing racial segregation the country permiates throughout, so even this lovely, church going family lived in relative sumptuousness with their whiteness, while they were only just putting in electrical wires for their workers and their families (about 13 black people all together). To their great credit, the workers had already had electrical lights and they were installing the wires out of their own pockets but there had been workers houses their for 50 years of their family history already and only now were these improvements being implemented. It was actually a pretty dicey time for them to be getting into farming at all, as threats of land redistribution are frequent and some white farmers have even been killed by uprising farm hands. The mother of the family had her brother just killed in such a way but it seems it might have been for personal reasons. It all just goes to reinforce how insane this country is. My goodness.

July 14: We wake at the ranch and get on the road for Lesotho. We have an extra couple of nights on our way to Johannesburg so we decide to stay a night in Maseru, the capital of Lesotho, for the night. On the way we had a particularly disturbing experience when we stopped in the small rural town of Stynesburg for pees and refreshments. Stynesburg (pronounced "Stainsburg") was a small rundown town, with a wide township surrounding it. The shabby convenience store that we stopped at was surrounded by the black residents of the town and everyone we saw was black except for three people: the manager of the store and his stoogie and the light skinned colored woman who ran the cashregister. This is the regular situation throughout ZA but something about it felt even more sinister here. Abigail used the bathroom across the street and when she came back she was stopped by a black child, maybe 8 or 9 years old with trails of snot down out his nose. The boy came up very close to her and raised a gun to her, pulled the trigger and only then did we discover it was a toy. We found out from David the snot was from the child sniffing glue. He was definately not well. He came up and repeated the same thing to be and I gave him a copper (20 cents or so), which felt like a strange thing to do, too. That's the thing about this country, there is just nothing that you can do on a day to day level. It just leaves you feeling so utterly defeated sometimes.

Entering Lesotho was amazing as it immediately felt like a different country despite its being surrounded entirely by South Africa. It feels more properly what I would suspect an African nation to feel like, with much less apparent European influence or people of European descent. We've checked into a hotel and will do a short driving tour of The Mountain Kingdom tomorrow. Lesotho is a place of deep poverty and sickening HIV+ rates, but it didn't suffer apartheid and feels to me to have maintained some sort of dignity because of it. I'm very curious to see what little we can tomorrow.

People are talking up a storm about our Johannesburg shows so it sounds like we'll have good crowds. Very excited about it! David is talking seriously about how to bring us back later this year for a longer period to create an entirely new piece of theater, which we are incredibly excited about. Lets keep our fingers crossed... regardless, we both really want to get to know this country on a more permanent level.