Week #2 Guguletu Day 2 Monday May 30

Slept well and had a breakfast of cereal, eggs, bacon, toast, and tomatoes. Freshly cooked by Titi. A little about Titi and Mamela: Titi has been a 5^th grade teacher for 33 years, has to leave the house by 7 to get to work by 8:30, taxi to the train and then train to her school. Mamela works at an insurance agency in Stellenbosch and she has to leave her house by 6am to get to work by 8. Cab to the train, train to the bus, bus to work. Titi is so sweet, you will hear this more than once in my blog, she says good morning angel to me every morning. Noxie is one of the other host moms and picks us up to take us to JL Zwane. We are taking a tour of Guguletu and neighboring townships.

First stop is TAC, the Treatment Action Campaign Center in Khayelitsha. To get to the office, we had to park our two tour vans in a tiny parking lot and climb up some damp cramped stairs to this bright office upstairs of an unmarked building. Dogs are a common sight around here and signs with “No Dumping” with piles of trash beneath them, bugs, and wet. It is winter here and rain is everyday weather. We began a dialogue with a woman who worked at TAC about what they do and how they are in partnership with the communities to work against HIV/AIDS. Shortly after, our appointment with Lumkile began and he told us his HIV story. He was diagnosed in 1994, but did not accept the fact that he was sick until 2001. He denied this fact and continued to have unsafe sex until 2002 and he began ARVs in 2004 after feeling sick. He began working for TAC and was sporting his HIV Positive t-shirt. We asked him what reactions he gets when he wears his shirt and why he wears it. He says it is not for pity but to break the silence of the stigmatism of HIV/AIDS. The shirt represents the people that live with HIV everyday and not just him, but also everyone. That was powerful to me because I feel that if someone were to wear that shirt in my high school or at the University of Minnesota, they would get looks and no one would want to ask them their story. Lumkile was so open to complete strangers and willing to share his story and answer any questions we had. He cared about the collective before worrying about himself.

He told us that 2 rapes are reported per day and 60 per month. AND that is just reported, many more happen that are not reported. It is inspiring to hear these stories that people are not afraid to share with us. They are willing to share for the purpose of education and awareness. We then chatted and asked if we could have some HIV Positive shirts and he told us his nickname was “AIDSMAN” and he was laughing while telling us. At this point I was feeling not happy but content with how much people were willing to share with us and their attitude about resources available to them and how to distribute the ARVs. Next we had a visit from Mandla with the Social Justice Coalition.

He works with the community on issues that plague them day and night with their homes, safety, and human rights. Sanitation, safety, children’s school rights, and equal treatment in jail are a few issues that he works on everyday. Now these offices remember are in Khayelitsha, a neighboring township of Guguletu. Khayelitsha is the newest and largest township consisting of 500,000 to 1 million people living in shacks. These shacks are a little smaller than an average dorm room for a family of 7. They are less than a foot apart from each other. Trash everywhere, and dogs, mud. Shipping containers are randomly placed in town for Vodacom (Local cell phone provider), hair braiding salons, and food marts. People rent them and sell services or products out of them for some extra cash. A couple things that SJC works for is windows in the bathrooms of shacks, better materials to build the shacks, better jobs for the people living in the shacks, etc. This man also had his HIV positive shirt on.

Back to JL Zwane for lunch. Lunch. Food yummy. Simple as that. Consisted of rice, fish, chicken, beef, fat-koeks (a fried bread), beets, mango juice, guava juice, Coke, and a few other things. You all should have been there; it was amazing. After undeniably stuffing my face with food, we hopped in the van for a tour of Guguletu. It was raining so we did not get out, but some pictures were taken from the door of the van. The Guguletu Seven statues, a statue of 7 people who were killed during protests and boycotts in the 1960’s, the Amy Biehl Memorial is at a gas station on the main street of Guguletu. Amy Biehl was a white student studying abroad here and she was beaten to death because she brought her new black friend with her to get gas. Her parents in honor of her life created the Amy Biehl Foundation.

Next we went to the Kiki hostels and the township market. The Kiki hostels are tiny little apartments that families can rent, but the catch is during the Apartheid families had to rent them for 99 years. You could not get out of the lease for 99 years and if the renter died, the next family member would have to take over the lease. Currently the 99-year lease contracts are not in effect anymore, but to get out of the lease you have to tally up the rent and then pay it. It is hard for people to find jobs and receive a steady income so they are not able to pay the rent. Right next to these hostels is the township market, which has meat, veggies, and fruit and smilies! Smilies are sheep heads that are cooked over a campfire and then boiled in water and spices and eaten for dinner. We are going to have one this week probably on our last night.

Back to JL Zwane in our vans to get a tour of the Rainbow After School program lead by Brenda. The first classroom had all five grades in one 10-20 foot room. Now they have 4 classrooms with the grades split up. We helped the kids with their homework and played with them. At five oclock we got picked up by Noxie to get dropped off at her house for dinner. Each host mom or dad had made a dish and we had the largest potluck ever! The sixteen of us plus five host families and the church staff all ate our hearts out. One of Aaron’s South African friends who formerly worked at JL Zwane came to dinner also. He brought his friend from Oregon who is the CEO of “These Numbers Have Faces.” This is a scholarship program that provides students in Africa full scholarships to go to university. In return the students have to do a community service project or give back to the community once they graduate. This organization began in 2007 and they had enough money to sponsor one student, now in 2011, they have 16 students in the program.

~Riise