Whizzing shantytowns

As I type this on the bus, I’m looking out at an enormous shantytown. You get used to this kind of thing after a while, the highways are lined with squatter camps full of one-room, tin-roofed shacks. Many of them have no electricity or water. I’ve been told the squatter camps are full of not only South Africans, but also other blacks who come here from Zimbabwe (which is collapsing), Zambia, and other African countries.

It’s an eye-opener for me to see such intense poverty. These tiny houses are literally made out of tin sheets, plywood, all types of scrap. If I could I’d stop and go walk around inside one, but that opportunity hasn’t come up yet. So, I sit here in the bus, gazing at them as they pass by, looking at the people walking around, the children, the dogs, the trash, the putrid streams of water. I’m struck by their uniformity, everywhere you go in South Africa, the shantytowns look the same—tiny dwellings arranged in square grids, lining pathways of red dirt. During apartheid, the police would just bulldoze the settlements, but now the government is trying to help the people who live here. There’s a sense of real caring in this country, I detect it in everyone I speak to. People realize they have to deal with this poverty, or it will overwhelm the country and everything will fall apart.

I don't have pictures of the shantytowns because we fly by them with the bus windows closed. But tomorrow I'm heading into one with a guy who works for a company called Cell-Life, whose developing information technology systems to track medication use among people with HIV. So, I'll be able to post a few then. So for now, I've included other pictures--our gorgeous hotel in a town called Stallenbosch, where the best South African wines are grown. Try one called Thelima, if you can get it, particularly the savignon blanc. We also went to the innauguration of the biggest telescope in the southern hemisphere. President Mbeki gave a talk there, so I've included a picture of him. Just before the innauguration, a friend and I walked through the local town where I snapped my favorite picture yet, of a woman with her dog. And finally there's a photo taken from a helicopter trip over Capetown..what you see there is the very tip of the Cape of Good Hope. My first time on a helicopter and it was fun but nervewracking, there was an electrical storm going on and lightening strikes were all around us.