Day 3 Langa and Athlone
5 January 2005
The past day and a half we have been enjoying good food and sleeping. Our travels have not extended too far and it didn't really seem like we were really in Africa. However, today we certainly realized we weren't in the United States anymore. Today's events really threw us into the culture and history of South Africa. We started at the District 6 museum that commemorated the 60,000 people that were forced to leave their homes so that it could become a white area. The buildings were demolished and former residents only had their memories of their former home. On a cloth that displayed messages from former residents one person wrote, "Happy days. District Six. Living was cheap. Life Precious. Now in Hanover Park, living's expensive and life is cheap." It was signed 29 De Korte Staat, Distrik Ses, Ronnie Cloete. Her quote speaks of the uniqueness of the area and the tragedy that was to come after District Six.
After our visit there we went to visit an old black township, Langa, which is still unofficially a black township today. We started the tour at the cemetery which was full of fresh graves of people in their late 40s and early 50s. The guide said the cemetery had filled up in the last ten years due to the AIDS epidemic. From there we moved to another sad sight, an orphanage where most of the children have physical disabilities and mental impairments. These children have been found in drains and dropped off on the doorstep. A new child arrives almost everyday and now there are 62 children and a 16 person staff. For the most part, the children die in the orphanage, before the age of 18. Not far down the road we visited a place with a little more hope. It was an organization called Love Life and it is a place for young people to hang out and get educated about AIDS prevention.
Finally we drove though the townships that were essentially shacks and we witnessed an appalling level of poverty, up close and personal. The conditions were slightly better in the colored area, for people of mixed descent. For our journal today were asked where we would live in Cape Town and it seems like the only answer is a white area. Though official laws are no longer in place about where one can live, unwritten rules seem to apply.
Today was eye opening and leaves us with many questions to be answered in the next couple of weeks. We are very much enjoying the weather and many of us got our first taste of sunburn. We discovered that the oven does not work. And we are getting used to driving on the left side of the road as well as recovering from jet lag. All is well here and we hope all is well at home as well. Thanks for checking up on us.
~Kaelyn Sullivan