We arrived in Oudtshoorn for the Rotary District Conference yesterday morning and the past 24 hours have been like a giant reunion! We’ve really enjoyed seeing so many of our previous hosts, other Rotarian friends and of course, our German GSE buddies. I’ve even surprised myself with remembering most of their names! However, I’m most looking forward to seeing the returning South African team that has been in Arizona while we have been here. They should be arriving soon.
Last night after the opening reception and mayoral welcome, we went off with folks from the Newlands Rotary Club for a braai back at their guest houses. The food was AMAZING of course and they even had a chocolate fountain for dessert! The Newlands club have nearly 30 people attending the conference. They are such a fun club and made us feel like we are really a part of them. A special “shout out” to Biffy for being one of our favorite people from our whole trip!
Morning came WAY too soon today after only a few hours of sleep last night. We were expected at breakfast at 7:30 and then transported to the conference site. After some more meeting and greeting this AM, the team (sans Randy who needed to be at the conference meetings today) took off for a café to do some more work on our presentation. We’ve got to summarize our experience in 15 minutes! However, I think we have developed a great tribute to our hosts that shares a good overview of our trip. I’m looking forward to giving our presentation on Sunday. Today we’ll watch the German GSE teams (both incoming and outgoing) give their presentations. I’m looking forward to see how they express their experience as well.
Tonight will be the District Governor’s party which has a “Black & White” theme. We’re supposed to come in “costume.” We didn’t really know about this party before we packed for this trip, but I think we’ll manage to pull something fashionable together from the limited contents of our suitcases. J
After our presentation tomorrow, we’ll be heading back to Cape Town for our final night in South Africa. And then we’ll begin our approximately 36 hour journey home. It will be comforting to be back in familiar surroundings, but I think I speak for all of us that we will return home changed. We have seen and done so much in four short weeks. It will be difficult to share and summarize this experience with our friends and family when we return. But I hope that this blog will have provided a small glimpse into this amazing journey and appreciate everyone who cared enough to follow along and share a part of it with me.
As you might have guessed, I've been having trouble getting a good internet connection for the past week or so. It seems like since we left the Cape Town area, most people we've stayed with have only had a dial-up internet connection.
So to catch up a bit, we arrived here in Beaufort West on May 5th. Beaufort West is located in the Karoo Desert area of the Western Cape and looks quite a bit like our area of Arizona. It is much more arid and the landscape is rough and rugged like at home. We arrived here after driving through the Swartberg Pass, a twisty and winding UNPAVED road that took us over and through the mountains. It was a little scary for those of us with a fear of heights!
Since we arrived on Cinco de Mayo, we decided to share a little bit of this celebration with the Beaufort West Rotary Club. I mixed up a little "homemade" salsa using the salsa seasoning mix I brought with me to give as gifts and we bought Doritos since we couldn't find regular tortilla chips. However, the biggest hit of all was the bottle of tequila and limes we bought and used to teach the Rotarians a little Mexican toast as we all did tequila shots together! They loved it!
Early the next morning (we were picked up at our hosts at 6:00 am) we went to the Karoo National Park to do a game drive. It was a bit brisk as we loaded into our open jeep before sunrise to drive through the desert to spot a variety of wildlife including wild zebra, mountain zebra, springbok, oryx (also known as gemsbok), baboons, ostrich, kudo and a few other animals I can't remember right now. It was a great experience and the scenery was beautiful.
In the afternoon, the whole team moved out to a sheep farm to spend the night. Our hosts Andre and Pam were very gracious and accomodating. In the evening they took us to a local sporting field to observe and participate in a popular recreational past-time, the sport of "bowls." This game is a bit like bocce ball, where a player rolls a small ball or marker (called a jack) and then everyone else rolls their balls to see who can get closest. We had a lot of laughs and our instructors were very patient with us as we tried to get the hang of the subtleties of the game. I took some funny video.
We went back to the farm house to sleep and in the morning we were off to explore the sheep farm. We loaded up in the back of a pick-up and spent about four hours driving through the veldt spotting cattle, sheep, springbok and a few other antelope type animals. This farm is also a game lodge where hunters come to shoot the springboks. We drove around to pick up all the dead animals and they were loaded into the trailer we towed behind the truck. It was a great morning. The weather was spectacular, the landscape really beautiful, and of course we had lots of good laughs along the way.
This evening we'll be back together with the Rotarians for another dinner party. This is a very young Rotary Club with several members about our age, so it has been especially fun for us.
In the morning we'll be leaving here early (6:00 AM pick-up again!) to drive to Oudtshoorn for the Rotary District Conference. We'll spend about 2 1/2 days there, where I think we are scheduled to visit an ostrich farm (where we might even get to ride them!) and the famous Cango Caves. We'll also be giving a presentation to the Rotarians about our visit and our impressions of South Africa.
I can't believe our trip has nearly come to an end. It has been a truly unbelievable, onece-in-a-lifetime opportunity that has met and exceeded every expectation I had for this trip. I'm not sure when I'll get to post again, but I will definitely try when I get the chance. In the meantime, if you haven't been checking out BJ's photos on the Photobucket site, I think he has been updating it regularly. The link is somewhere on his blog.
May 1
I can’t believe it is May 1st and we left Arizona three weeks ago. In some ways it seems like we’ve been here for ages, and at the same time it feels as if we just arrived. A couple of days have passed since my last blog. We moved out of our “group home” in Hermanus and spent two nights there with host families. Barb and I were hosted together in the beautiful home of Metcalf and Carina Fick. We spent yesterday morning visiting a really nice, small private school and I got to observe a first grade class (the same age as Quincy) and the afternoon at an abalone farm where we saw abalone being bred, grown, harvested and canned. And then last night we presented to the Hermanus Rotary Club. BJ, Sarah and Barb went out to a pub after the meeting with a couple of the Rotarians, but I was anxious to get home and get in bed!
We left Hermanus this morning and were taken by a couple of our hosts about two hours to Swellendam, where we met up with a few of the local Rotarians who hosted a really nice lunch for us. The Swellendam Rotary President, Paula ?, prepared a HUGE meal for about 12 of us in her home. It is amazing that she went to all that trouble and we only spent about 2 hours in Swellendam. We were met in Swellendam by a Rotarian from George who picked us up and transported us for another 2 hours or so to George.
Barb and I are again being hosted together with a family (Ralph, Lynn and Lauren Tarr) that lives about 20 minutes outside of George in a little village called Wilderness. It looks pretty much like it sounds! We are in a beautiful home with amazing views of the rolling hills and valleys. We’ll be here for 4 nights. We don’t have a good internet connection here, so I’m not sure when I’ll be able to post this.
May 3 - South African Idol
I’m enjoying a special South African cultural phenomenon tonight: the final results night of South African “Idols”, the local version of our American Idol. My host family is just as into their Idols as we are in my house. The last two contestants are a a rocker guy named Jason and an urban pop girl named Sasha Lee. It is so funny to see this show in the exact same format as our American Idol (same theme music, graphics, judging process, etc.) but with a distinctly South African flavor. They are about to announce the results. For the record, my choice is Jason. Stay tuned for the winner. (It is Sasha Lee. Oh well. I guess I should have voted.)
We had a GREAT day today! We were driven halfway to Knysna, where we were met by a Rotarian from the Knysna Rotary Club who would be our guide for the day. Mike Mills was a great guy who had been a GSE team leader to Dallas a couple of years ago. He had a very good insight into what we were interested in doing (and NOT doing!) and we didn’t visit a SINGLE museum today! We met up with a group of other fun Rotarians (including the District Governor Elwin and his wife Ena) for coffee and then headed out to take in some of the local sights. We enjoyed a great and leisurely lunch at a seaside restaurant where we all laughed together as if we had known each other for years. The weather was spectacular today which made it all that much more enjoyable. All in all it was a very fun and relaxing day. Thank you Knysna Rotarians!
Today was scheduled as a vocational day. Randy, Sarah and I spent the whole day with two women from the Hermanus Rainbow Trust and although it was really interesting, it didn’t have anything to do with our respective vocations. We had a really busy schedule and visited about 10 different sites, some of which were projects of the Rainbow Trust including a couple of pre-schools, a kindergarten, a senior activities center, an after school program and a health clinic. We also met up with a health nurse and went with her to visit the homes of two of her home-based health care patients. All of these projects were located in townships, informal settlements and squatters camps where the living conditions are beyond what most Americans can possibly imagine.
One of the most memorable parts of our day was a visit to a patient of the home health nurse, an older woman trying to recover from her third bout of TB. She was living in a tiny little tin shack that belonged to her daughter who had quit her job to take care of her mother. There were also two other adult children, two older teenage granddaughters, a two little girls also living in this little shack that was about the size of one of my children’s bedrooms. We were invited into their home and I was surprised to see how neat and organized it was being kept. They had been warned that we were coming, so I think that they did their best to tidy up. They were very proud to welcome us into their home and enjoyed it when I commented how nicely kept it was. Randy had brought along some necklaces that he have out as little gifts to all the family members, and when they found out that the necklaces came from America they were SO excited.
One of our other stops was the local land fill where people were “mining” for any item of value that could be sold or used. Dozens of people, including pregnant women and small children, were sifting through mountains of garbage while a bulldozer plowed through the area. It was really distressing to see this kind of poverty up close.
After we had visited about 5 or 6 of these projects, the dump and the home of the woman with TB, we were taken to another private home of a man who was dying of lung cancer. When we arrived, I was just totally overwhelmed by everything we had just seen in a matter of a few hours, and I decided I really couldn’t see any more suffering. My head was reeling and I was trying to process everything that we had seen and heard. I decided to stay in the car while the rest of the group went in. I had a good cry and a good conversation with our driver, Johannes, a very nice man who lived in one of these townships. He told me that he too sometimes cries at the situation he sees all around him.
I’m still trying to get my head around everything that I saw today. It was just SO much to take in. One can’t help to be affected by the conditions of the people here, and want to do something to make a difference. But what?! I really need to spend some time thinking about what I can reasonably do. How do I fit this in with also trying to help my own community and raise my own children? It is a lot to think about.
April 28 -
We have thoroughly enjoyed our little break and I think used this time well to rest, relax and reconnect as a team. Today we enjoyed a great breakfast out, a nice and invigorating walk along the Hermanus cliffs, shopping and wandering around the little seaside village, dipping our toes in the ocean and laying in the sun, a huge tapas lunch, several hours of internet access, preparing our own homemade meal of soup, salad, pasta and bread, and other mundane activities such as doing laundry, reading magazines and playing cards. As a team, we’ve had some good discussion and debates, begun our conference presentation and shared many, many laughs. Many thanks to the Rotarians who thought to schedule this break for us. It was definitely needed and will ensure that we can fully participate in, enjoy and learn from the rest of our trip.
 Paragraph.
 Goofing around in Kirstenbosch national botanical gardens
 The team with Table Mountain in the background
April 26 - Freedom Day
Today is Freedom Day in South Africa, a national holiday celebrating the end of apartheid and the first democratic elections in South Africa fifteen years ago. However, we noticed and were essentially told that Freedom Day is not widely celebrated in the Western Cape where much of the population is white. Very interesting. This topic provoked some very interesting conversation among our team members about our impressions and perceptions of racial attitudes in South Africa. What is clear is that we really have only experienced a narrow view of what South Africa is from our generally older, wealthier and white Rotarian hosts in the Western Cape (which demographically and politically is quite different from the rest of the country). We have had very few opportunities to interact with young professionals, black, white or colored (as people of mixed race are called here) and don’t really have a sense of what your average, middle class, mixed race attitudes are. And just visiting the Western Cape would be like just visiting the deep South, or New England in the USA and drawing conclusions about what the rest of our country and its people are like. So while we have seen and done a great deal here, I don’t think we can really say that we know about and fully understand South Africa and South Africans. I suppose that is what travel is all about. The more you see, the more you realize how little you know about the world around you and it just makes you want to travel more.
Freedom Day has a double meaning for us. Our team has moved into a private home for a day and a half and we have NO scheduled activities! We are so excited! This little break was planned to give us an opportunity as a team to have a little down time and to be together to process our experiences so far in our trip. We are really looking forward to this little break and to be able to explore Hermanus on our own. It is the simple things that we have been missing: doing our laundry, being able to prepare our own meals, being able to spend as much time talking to each other or typing on our computers without appearing rude or disinterested in our hosts. For us, this really has been a freedom day!
Tonight our team went out for dinner to an Italian restaurant and ordered a whole variety of pizzas with really unusual toppings including pumpkin, blue cheese, salmon, goat cheese, chili sauce, pine nuts and cilantro (not all on one pizza, mind you!) They were all really delicious! We had a great, fun evening laughing, telling stories and remembering some of the funny things that have happened on our trip. It was really a relaxing evening and confirmed again how much I really like these people with whom I’m sharing this GSE experience.
I'm writing this from a restaurant with wifi access called the "Mugg & Bean." We're in a little seaside town called Hermanus and are getting two days of completely unscheduled relaxation time! The five of us are staying in a private home all by ourselves and are practically giddy at the thought of being totally on our own for a little while. The first thing we did after moving into our bedrooms was to walk down to the town center to look for internet access. Since most individuals pay for the data usage in addition to their internet access, we've tried to be very conscious of not over using the internet when we've stayed with our host families. But now, with two days of living on our own and the ability to get to an internet cafe whenever we want, we are all very excited about having "unlimited" internet access! Wahooo!
April 26 (I wrote this yesterday, but was just able to post this to the blog today)
We’ve been able to spend the past few days with the GSE team from Germany as they are also being hosted by the Heldeberg Basin Rotary Clubs at the same time we are here. They are here in District 9350 for the same dates as us, but they spent the first 8 days in Namibia. We will go our separate ways again after we leave here tomorrow but reunite with them at the district conference at the end of our trip.
We’ve had a lot of fun getting to know them. They have a great sense of humor and we’ve enjoyed laughing with them about our similar experiences on this GSE journey. We’ve had many of the same impressions and challenges. However, they are also having to deal with the language barrier which makes this experience even more exhausting for them. They haven’t had any rest days at all and definitely look like they need one.
We spent yesterday together at a wine farm in Stellenbosch, part of the beautiful wine region of South Africa. Unfortunately, we had a steady rain all day, so the otherwise magnificent countryside and vineyards looked a little dreary, but it was still very beautiful. The Solms wine farm was really interesting because the owner decided to make all the workers (many who have lived and worked on the farm for generations) part owners of the farm. He convinced a local bank to loan the workers money to purchase shares in the farm using part of the farm as collateral. Now the workers have a real investment in their work and a sense of equality has been restored. This is the kind of thing that will help bring South Africa out of the troubles of its past.
Last night two of the local Roteract clubs (a division of Rotary for college age and young people) hosted a braai and social get together for the two GSE teams. We were at the student center at the University of Stellenbosch. We were also joined by three women who were on the GSE team last year from South Africa to Italy. It was very interesting to hear about their experiences and reflections, also so similar to our own.
Today we went with the German team and a group of our hosts and other Rotarians to the Spier Estate, a wine farm and wildlife center with cheetahs and raptors. Barb and Sarah paid extra for an “encounter” and got to get up close and pet an adult cheetah. We got a great tour and got to learn more about cheetahs and their unique physiology that makes them such fast hunters. We enjoyed a wonderful picnic lunch and some shopping and then got to see a bird show with some different types of hawks and eagles. We got to hold and pet the birds and I’m pretty sure got some great photos.
We’ll be heading out tonight for a little “farewell party” hosted by the Heldeberg Basin clubs for both our teams. We’ll be saying good-bye to our new friends Arne, Martin, Sandra, Turin, Marian and Gunther, but will look forward to seeing them in 10 days at the district conference.
I want to tell you a little about the people that I’m sharing this experience with. I feel really lucky to be traveling with this group as everyone is very easy to be with and no one has any weird issues or hang-ups that make it difficult. We’ve formed a very tight group I think, and we each are looking out for each other. They are a group of genuinely good, fun, intelligent and sensitive people, and I am so glad that we were brought together by Rotary and GSE.
BJ is probably the most genuinely thoughtful and caring 30 year old guy I’ve ever known. He truly has a heart of gold and is always thinking of everyone else. We’ve been teasing him since we arrived at the airport and his suitcase was considerably overweight. We’ve since learned why. BJ brought more gifts than you can imagine! He’s produced half a dozen hard backed books, a case of nutrition bars, a whole bunch of toothbrushes, and a variety of random souvenirs from Tucson that he has given out along the way to everyone from bus drivers to pre-school children to Rotarians.
Barb is very sweet and bright. She always has a glow about her. You can tell she is sensitive and wants to please others. She’s got a great sense of humor and quick to laugh at herself. I’m so impressed that she’s started her own business at 29 years old without the safety net of a husband and second income. She loves her coffee and her wine, two things that she has received a great deal of teasing about. But she is a good sport and has taken it all in stride. Barb feels a little like a younger sister to me.
Sarah is still a bit of mystery. She is clearly very intelligent, but rarely talks about herself. She has traveled extensively all around the world, but really hasn’t talked much about those experiences. She is a thinker and not a talker, a quality I admire but fail to emulate! She’s got a sharp sense of humor and will from time to time pull out a zinger that surprises us all and puts me into hysterics. Sarah is someone I definitely want to get to know more.
Randy, aka RanDELo, is our team leader and kind of like that funny, favorite uncle. He has a great, but slightly warped, sense of humor, and is always making us laugh. He’s got a huge heart and is always quick to say a kind word to people around him. He is obviously committed to Rotary and making a difference in the world. He plans to return to this part of the world to spend six months or so volunteering.
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