Lions, no tigers, no bears

Did I mention I saw lions in South Africa? I totally saw lions.

Soweto

One of Mia's coworkers, a soft-spoken man named Terence, took me around Soweto today. Soweto is the largest township in Joburg. No one knows exactly how many people live there, but the 2001 census says well over 800,000. Mia said people can live their entire lives in Soweto - go to school, college, get married, have children, work, die - and never leave the place.

A township is basically where poor blacks live, a result of apartheid and evictions of black Africans from municipal centers. They are usually just outside cities, informal settlements made up of pitiful shacks. The poorest ones don't have electricity or toilets or much of anything really. Some townships are extremely dangerous, especially for white people, and there are some that even blacks are afraid to go into. They recommend tourists take a black friend or guide with them when travelling in certain townships. Terence was my black friend.

But Soweto is an up and coming township. It has street names, paved roads, a hospital, a university, shops, restaurants full of white tourists. People who have become financially successful are coming back to Soweto and building homes there. So while there are still areas with a township's tell-tale shacks, there are also nice homes.

I was interested in Soweto mainly because it was hugely significant in the struggle against apartheid. An uprising that took place there woke the rest of the world to the oppression (and brutality) of apartheid. Many say it marked the beginning of its end.

A very brief history: on June 16, 1976, the black students of Soweto carried out a massive march, striking against the new law that required them to be taught in Afrikaans.

What started out as a peaceful children's demonstration became a massacre. The police shot into crowds of kids. It's thought that as many as 500 were killed, but the official number is a ridiculously conservative 23. Thousands were injured. The chaos continued for the next two days with police randomly shooting into protesting crowds while angry and frustrated blacks torched anything in sight.

It spread to other townships too, including Alexandra, where Terence grew up. Terence was in first grade at the time.

I asked him if he remembered it. He did.

Was it scary? Oh yes, it was very scary.

That's all he said. Terence is a man of very few words.

I eventually got up the nerve to ask what it was like for him living under apartheid. He said it was "very hard."

"Everybody was poor," he said.

I asked if it was better now. "Oh yes. Everybody has equal rights now," he said. "It's what you do with it. You go to school, you'll be all right."

I asked what else needed to be done. He said they needed to get rid of the corruption in the current government.

I think everybody in the country would agree with that.

Sobering South Africa

So here I am. I made it to Johannesburg. I was in South Africa three whole hours before I bought something. Yesterday, soon after I arrived, my friend Mia took me to a market that had lots of African "curios" from all over Africa. I bought a few of them.

Today though, Mia took me to a place called Boikarabelo (pronounced boy-kara-bello, which means something like "a community working together"; Boikarabelo was formerly called the Botshabelo Community Development Trust, Magaliesburg). It was a sobering experience to say the least.

Boikarabelo is a charity organization that helps orphans, many of which are orphans due to AIDS and are also HIV positive. Marion and Con Cloete began it in 1991.

Con explained the place to me this way: They basically do everything that would normally be done to raise a child, except they are raising anywhere from 130 to 200 children.

Boikarabelo provides them food and shelter in the form of dormitories. Con and Marion also live in the dorms, along with their twin daughters and a few other volunteer workers spread out in different dorms. There is very little room and virtually no privacy for them as they have babies and very young children sleeping there too (many of the older children there are responsible for looking after the younger ones).

The school-age children are given an education to the ninth-grade level (the mandatory school-leaving age in South Africa), and they have extracurricular activities such as soccer and karate (with a few black belts).

The children are also learning skills that will help them to get work. Everything that goes on in that place, the children are a part of so they can learn. They call it skills-transference.

For example, Con and Marion want to start an official website (there are many places around the world that use their name, but they have no control over the contents of those sites. They also have no idea if they're even receiving their fare share of donations that come through those sites). So Mia's cousin Alister is going to make one for them (I'm writing the copy for it and will post a link to it once it's finished). Alister will then teach Marion some code so she knows how to maintain the site and she will in turn try to teach the children. The site may also contain a blog, with the idea that one child will write in the blog what they've done each day for a week. That way, they will learn writing skills.

That sounds pretty high tech, but they are also teaching the children extremely basic things. Some didn't know how to use a toilet, for example. Con told a story where three children came in and had never seen one before. When they saw it flush, they ran out for fear of their lives.

They are also learning things like farming, since they have to grow their own food. They're also starting a fishing hole.

They do everything they can for themselves and their resourcefulness is amazing. The merry-go-round in the small playground also pumps water into the nearby village.

It's a wonderful organization, but it's clear that it is a real struggle. It's not hard to see they need help. The entire thing is run on donations of money, clothes and goods, and it's never enough. The dormitories are stuffed to capacity, their blankets are worn and it looked like some of the bunk beds had garbage bags for sheets. The buildings are sturdy, but glass panes are broken ("glass and children with soccer balls don't mix," Con said) and they're just generally run down. Con says they're so busy with the day-to-day, that maintaining the place is almost impossible. Some days, there is absolutely no food.

Many of the children have AIDS, which is rampant here. Some, both boys and girls, have been raped at a very young age and so are dealing with horrible traumas (there's a myth in South Africa that sex with a virgin will cure HIV. As a result, children as young as 3 months old have been raped). Marion counsels them and does her best to bring them back.

It's horrible what some of these children have lived through. Con said that every child, every building, every animal that's there, has a story.

They're doing what they can to give the story a happy ending.

Leaving on a Jet Plane

Almost every time I get on a plane, I end up spending a ridiculous amount of time on it.

I went to Australia; that was something like 20 hours of flight time. Taiwan, 19 hours. Tomorrow, I'm off to South Africa - 18 hours. And none of that includes all the time spent in airports, waiting.

It's a strange phenomenon that only recently developed. But I'm not complaining. I don't really care what it takes to go somewhere.

Travel is what I live for, what I work for, what I go into massive amounts of debt for. It is my one and only passion. If I didn't love to travel, I'd be comatose. Nothing else interests me all that much.

I find it liberating. I seem to be more in my element when I'm out of it. Traveling is really the only thing I know I'm good at.

You learn a lot too, not just about the world and the people in it, but about yourself.

For example, sometime during the 19-hour flight to Taiwan, I woke up from a nap and thought for sure we were almost there. "No more than an hour," I thought. Then I found out we had at least four hours. "At least," they said. At least.

That's when I learned I'm claustrophobic and susceptible to profuse sweating.

I also learned that in Taiwan, I'm hot. At home, not so much. Yet another reason I love to travel.

But I don't want to be just a tourist. Tourist stuff barely scratches the surface. I want to get to know a place as deeply as possible, which means that if I spend less than a few months somewhere, it makes me sad. I feel like I haven't really been there at all.

I'll only be in South Africa for two weeks. Obviously, not near enough time.

But I'm making the most of my two weeks. I have an amazing friend, Mia, who lives in Johannesburg, and she has a friggin' fantastic trip planned for me (and for my boyfriend, who has been down there for the past month, lucky bastard).

I'll get to see Cape Town for a few days, where I'll meet up with my man Kevin and hug him tight enough to break his ribs. I'll meet some of Mia's friends and co-workers, who will show me places like Soweto, which was hugely significant in the struggle against apartheid. And I'll get to see Kruger National Park, where I'm hoping elephants and lions and stuff will come out to play! And will play nice.

So I'm thinking that I'll get a good glimpse of South Africa, and for that I'm grateful. A glimpse is better than being blind.