On Tuesday night we had a house meeting for the first time in three weeks, and the unusually melancholy atmosphere was indicative of our mental shift towards the final-days countdown. The darkness has crept earlier into the evening hours, now, as well, so the single working light bulb in the common room muted any positive energy that might have been lingering there, anyway. The meeting was short and succinct, working out the logistical details of the house fund and the last twenty days in Cape Town. Afterward, we made our way back to our corners of the house to continue watching movies or working on the papers we had to finish for Thursday.
Wednesday morning, Kevin and I left the house at 6:45, again, to run up to the Rhodes Memorial for the sunrise. The cool night air had caused a thin layer of white mist to settle over the Commons, making for some very eerie photo ops. (I was glad to have brought my compact camera along.) We took the 2.5+ mile run to the memorial at a very brisk pace, and it was quite arduous to sprint the last three flights of steps to the top of the memorial, where we tagged the statue of Cecil Rhodes to mark our victory. From our mountainside vantage point, I took more photos of the gilded suburbs and townships, awash in the first rays of morning sun. About ten minutes later we began the descent back towards town, up Belmont Avenue to the Commons, and around the open field toward Loch Rd. During lunch, later that day, Cassidy and I walked to the chemist down the street from Black Sash so I could pick up Epsom salt for a foot soak that night.
All three of Thursday’s classes included guest speakers, and we met in a UCT classroom with a projector so that the first speaker, Bea Abrams, could hook up a PowerPoint presentation. Bea was part of the anti-Apartheid struggle during the ‘80s, and lived in exile in other parts of Africa and Easter Europe for fifteen years before returning to work with the victims of torture and human rights violations in southern Africa. She presented us with case studies of past conflicts in Sierra Leone and Democratic Republic of Congo, while making a case for why truth is “gendered” – that is, how men and women are targeted and affected differently by war and human rights abuses because of the structural inequalities that exist in these countries even before the conflicts.Over our hour break for lunch, I hiked up to the Rhodes Memorial, again (just ten minutes from campus), with a few other people who’d yet to see it. Then we walked back to our usual classroom for a lecture on disabilities and the education system in South Africa, delivered by Vernon’s wife, Esmé. At 3:00, most people left for Main Rd, where they planned to spend the hour and a half before Marita’s class began. Faina and Emily A have been working on a mural at their internship placement, Thandakhulu High School, however, and the three of us walked to the school in Mowbray to pick up the keys that Faina had left there the day before. It took about an hour to walk to the school, which is closed for a 2-week mid-semester break, and then back to Loch Rd in Rondebosch. We had a few minutes to drop of notebooks and check email before we had to head back out across the Commons to Marita’s flat for our third class.
The speaker in Marita’s class was a women we’d met at the Slave Lodge Museum our first week in Cape Town. She spoke with us for a little over two hours about the history of slavery in the Western Cape and the importance of learning and identifying with one’s personal history. We watched a short film on the colonization of the Western Cape by the Dutch East India Company and the English in the early 18th century, and learned about the diverse roots of the people living in the Western Cape, today, as well as the “creole” language of Afrikaans. The class ended a bit early because of the darkness, giving us the chance to walk back to Loch Rd. before the night enveloped the Commons and made it unsafe to pass. As per usual, most of the house went out around 9 o’clock, contributing toward their unstated goal of keeping Elite Cab Service in business.
On Friday, I decided to join in the mural painting at Thandakhulu, so at noon I left with Dan to run the 1.5 miles to Mowbray. The temperature rivaled the summer heat of our first months in Cape Town, so we arrived at the school in need of a few minutes to cool down before grabbing paint brushes. Faina and Emily had spent three days measuring, drawing, and cutting out the lettering stencils for the mural – a large rendition of the school logo – and they’d just begun painting that morning. Having little to no experience using acrylic paints or crating giant outdoor murals, Dan and I were a bit apprehensive about jumping right in with our plate of blue paint and clean white brushes. Fortunately, Faina instructed us to begin on a large, uncomplicated section of the logo “background”, and we got a handle on the painting technique as we worked.
We painted for about two hours before all four of us decided to break for lunch. Dan and I had actually spent almost half of that time climbing the spiky pomegranate trees in the schoolyard, trying to shake down the ripe fruit with a mop handle and a lot of cautious maneuvering. We'd managed to knock a few free of the top branches, but all but one split open as it hit the black top below. Nonetheless, we'd feasted on fresh pomegranates (and one big worm – ick) for a while before we actually decided to go to lunch.
We had been cramped into the tiny space around the wall, leaning off of ladders or wedged in behind them for quite a while when we broke for lunch, so it felt good to stretch as we walked the ten minutes down Main Rd. toward Pick ‘N’ Pay in Obs. Despite the fact that it was holiday, the grocery store was open (and crowded), and we bought individual containers of freshly prepared pickled fish and vegetables, which are the popular Good Friday meal. For lack of anywhere else to sit down and eat, we walked across the street to the Main Rd. McDonald's (yes, they are everywhere; they even help to sponsor Thandokhulu School) and ate outside on two picnic tables.Dan left for Loch Rd after lunch, while the three of us continued painting for another four hours until the light grew to dim to work. When we stepped back to take stock of our progress at the end of the day, we were surprised by how well it was coming along. The main color, dark blue, was complete by 6:15, and we called Tokyo, the school custodian, to lock up as we left. We took the long route home up Main Rd. so that we could stop by the Baxter Theatre to see if there were any good plays we might want to see in the next couple of weeks, and then, despite the semi-darkness, we decided to take a one-lap run around the Commons before dinner.
The holiday weekend extends to Monday, here, which is designated National Family Day, so we’ve got three unscheduled days ahead of us. The group has a lot to accomplish on their to-do lists before we leave in two weeks, so I imagine there will be some interesting activities planned for this weekend.
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