Settling in

Now that I have been in Cape Town for 2.5 weeks, I am beginning to feel a bit more settled.  I am working in Bellville which is one of the Northern Suburbs of Cape Town (30 km and about a 30 min drive from the city center).  It felt too suburban and too segregated for me to live there, so I decided to live in Cape Town itself. But since choosing an apartment over the internet is hard anywhere, and esp difficult when you don't really know the city very well, I decided to wait until I arrived to find a place.  For the first two weeks, my work arranged for me to stay in Bellville in a self-catering apartment which was a 10 min walk to work and 10 min walk (in the other direction) to a shopping center.   So after a 36 hour trip (through Dubai), I was met at the airport by my super nice co-worker who took me to the local Pick and Pay (grocery store) and to the apartment.  The next day I rented a car (my first time driving a manual alone, more on that later) and began apartment hunting.  In 2 days I must have looked at 20 apartments (some in Blouberg - along the beach and the rest in the city).  I decided on a place in center city right across from Company Gardens. The big blue thumb tack below marks the spot of my building (this map is in my grandfather's honor), if you click on the map you can zoom in and out to get a better sense of where it is....


View St. Martini Gardens in a larger map

It is completely furnished which saves me a lot of hassle.  Parking is under the building and it is walking distance to tons of great restaurants, shopping, a lovely public garden, etc.  I got a 2 bedroom apartment so there is plenty of room for visitors ;)

A slideshow of the first 2 weeks (if you are reading this on email you have to go to the blog to see the slideshow)....



Which brings me to the car!  I did not know how to drive a stick shift before I got to Botswana but last year I learned under the tutelage of Gelane and Bri on our many trips for our outreach evaluation.  And after our trip to Swazi/St. Lucia, I was feeling pretty okay with stick.  Only a few small problems here: HILLS (and very steep ones), lots more people, stop and go traffic.....all these things make driving a stick shift much harder, esp when you learned in a flat, sparsely populated country.  So let's just say that driving stick when I rented a car was interesting and I was thinking that my life would be simpler with an automatic car.  However those are hard to come by, more expensive, harder to get fixed and harder to sell.  As a result I ended up with a Nisaan Micra (ever hear of that one?)  I think it looks like a bug, but it is nice and small (good for parking around here), supposedly light on fuel (it better be considering it cost me the equivalent of $45 for 3/4 of a tank!!!!), and relatively peppy on the highway considering it only has a 1.4L engine!  So far so good, I am getting better on the hills and each day feel slightly more comfortable driving stick....though I still don't understand the appeal when automatics are so easy.

So far work has been a lot of logistics as well.  Familiarizing myself with guidelines, protocols, training manuals etc.  They have developed a great pediatric toolkit to help healthcare providers when they are treating children with HIV.  It was developed for South Africa but now is being changed to be more generally based on the WHO guidelines so it can be used in many other countries, so I helped with that process.  All my colleagues are very nice and friendly and it seems we will make a good team. My first mentoring trip is next week, so I will have a much better sense of things by the end of the month.

One thing I have seen here are the incredible disparities, which I am sure I will see even more of when we go up to the Northwest Province where we are doing the mentoring.  The city is very modern, has good infrastructure, plenty of pretty buildings, and tourist attractions.  However, though apartheid ended 17 years ago, there are many lasting effects still present today.  Residential areas are still incredibly segregated.  In fact, when I called real estate people looking for houses, I talked to one agent, over the phone, who told me "that area is not for you."  I asked him what he meant by that and he said "Trust me, I try to match the right people with the right houses."  I had never met the guy, but I am guessing that he could tell I was American by my accent and probably just assumed I was white based on that.  I never met him, so I was unable to investigate his reasoning any further.

The inequities are everywhere if you pay even a little bit of attention.  When I was moving into my apartment, I had several boxes of things shipped from Botswana to Cape Town.  They arrived bundled together in a giant cardboard box.  As we were unpacking the giant box in the truck in front of my building, the guard for the building was keeping watch.  When we had all the smaller boxes in the apartment, he asked me if he could have the giant cardboard box.  Of course, I said yes and then just because I was curious I asked what he planned to do with it.  "Take it to Khayelitsha [the largest township in Cape Town] and use it to cover my shack since it is so cold," he told me.  Here I was unloading boxes of clothes, blankets, knick knacks, etc and this guy was trying to get some extra insulation for his shack.  Having driven past Khayelitsha and other townships, I have seen the condition of housing there, but I naively assumed that most of the people living in shacks were some of the 25% of the population who are unemployed (a shocking number that I read in the paper this morning).  In fact here was the guy who is working 12 hours a day, 6 days a week as a guard of a big apartment complex and he too is living in a shack.  The disparities here are even greater than in Botswana where, though there is definitely extreme poverty, people who are working can generally afford something more substantial than a shack.  Highlights once again how far there is to go to overcome decades of forced segregation and oppression and how fortunate I am.