With just under two hours of free time between our afternoon and evening classes, about half of the group decided to stop at one of the cafés on Main Rd, and the rest walked back to the house to cool off and exchange notebooks. For the first time in several weeks, Marita’s class did not include an invited speaker, so we spent the first half discussing the week’s reading assignments and debating the issue of racism in South Africa, as well as the impact and significance of Obama’s presidency on racism in America. While eating another delicious dinner, we watched videos on the “invention” of race and the continued manifestations of racism in the United States. The short films were thought provoking, but I’ll be the first to admit that the food (the biscuits!) had my attention about fifty percent of the time.
After class, as has become customary, most of the house went out for the evening. Five of us went to the Baxter Theatre to see the one-woman play “Red Winter in Gugs”, about a young woman growing up in the township of Guguletu during the struggle against Apartheid. The actress did an impressive job embodying the half dozen characters in the riveting and emotional story of racism, politics, and mortality. About one quarter of the play was in Xhosa and much of the English was spoken in too thick an accent to understand, but we followed the story well enough, and particularly enjoyed the reactions of the audience, most of whom were locals who seemed to relate to the events on stage.
Friday morning, five of us headed for the TEARS shelter, again, around 7:30. The morning was cool and misty, a pleasant change from the stifling heat of the week. The sun had burned through the thin layer of clouds by the time we began walking the dogs around 9:00, but with the other handful of volunteer walkers, we managed to finish the kennel rounds by 11:30, before the worst of the heat set in. We’ve begun to notice that some of the animals we’ve gotten to know in our weeks at the shelter are no longer there when we return each week. This revelation has generally cheered us because the animals’ absence indicates they’ve been adopted. TEARS, as I’ve mentioned before, is located on the edge of a township, several miles from the nearest major town, and as we walk the dogs up and back along the sleepy, industrial road, it is hard to imagine how anyone would know that there were animals in need of a good home, waiting inside the walls of the gated compound. Fortunately, their website and advertising/fundraising campaigns in neighboring towns have been helping to attract local pet-seekers.
We took the hour and a half minibus/train trip back to Rondebosch and stopped to buy groceries at Checkers before walking back to the house. After a shower and lunch, two of us took on the daunting task of scrubbing clean the pool house kitchen, which hadn’t been done thoroughly in about a month. The lack of window screens and the ever-open pool house door makes the kitchen a breeding ground for ants and other bugs, and the crumbs and sticky films along the shelves, countertops, and floor had reached a point at which the thought of actually preparing food in the kitchen was kind of revolting. We worked with a limited assortment of cleaning tools – a roll of paper towels, a bottle of “Handy Andy” cleaning solution, and a broom that shed a trail of broken bristles with every sweep. We cleared the shelves of all our foodstuffs and became ruthless ant-squashers as the little bugs scurried across every solid surface we encountered. For lack of a decent mop and vacuum, we dragged the kitchen mats outside and scrubbed the floor with paper towels and the bleach-based cleaning solution. In the end, it took about an hour to get the kitchen back into sanitary, working condition, but it was well worth the effort.(So after that thrilling description of our afternoon housework…)
Other people drifted in and out of the house all afternoon, returning from their activist projects at township daycares and community centers and heading out to the beach or to run errands. After dinner, several of us watched the latest Woody Allen film Vicky Christina Barcelona in the Common Room, while others went out.
Though there’d been plans to organize a day of kloofing (the South African adventure sport involving a combination of rock scrambling and cliff diving) with a local outfitter, the trip never got off the ground, and Saturday saw people splitting up in all different directions. Some people headed off to a small shopping mall in Claremont, some went to the Waterfront and Camps Bay, and I accompanied Emily A and Faina to Thandakhulu High School, where they’ve been doing their internships Monday through Wednesday. They’ve been involved in teaching a computer class to about fifty students after school on Mondays and Wednesdays, and their students were supposed to be coming into school that weekend morning to take a test for the class. Wanting to encourage and reward the students – all of whom come from nearby townships and very humble means – Emily and Faina had decided to make muffins and crepes for the class, and the baking had begun very early Saturday morning. At 9:30, pressed for time, we took a minibus from Red Cross Hospital to Mowbray, stopped to pick up more jam in Shoprite, and then walked the few more blocks to the school.
I’d visited the school with the rest of our group during our week of internship introductions at the beginning of the trip, but waltzing into the modest building that served as the main office and teacher’s lounge, I was immediately acquainted with the laid back atmosphere of the school. We talked to a teacher, casually dressed in a yellow t-shirt and cargo shorts, who advised us to set up the food on the reception counter. He also informed us that the computer test had been postponed because most of the school was in session that morning, as students from UCT had come to give lessons in the Maths and Sciences. In the middle of talking to us, it suddenly dawned on him that the school was ten minutes passed switching time, and he ran out to ring a bell that signaled the end of the first period.
While waiting for the mid-morning class break, during which the computer students would be summoned to the front office building for the (now irrelevant) treats, Faina and Emily gave me a tour of the school compound. I took pictures as we wandered around the main building, which had two floors and about ten classrooms, and then as we walked passed the two rows of square, satellite class buildings, uniformly lining a long, packed-dirt walkway. 
When we returned to the front building, we talked to a few of the college students running the Saturday session, and then watched the computer students stream in and dive into the surprise pastries. We tried to explain why we’d brought the snacks, but the room grew a bit too loud to make the announcement every time a new batch of students arrived, and eventually we just watched them happily devour the treats before moseying off to their next classes.
After cleaning up the mess of crumbs and jam on the office table, we bid the few teachers goodbye, and walked the half hour back to Rondebosch for lunch. The rest of the afternoon several of us devoted to assignments as we realized the next weekend would be lost to the Plettenberg excursion we’ve been planning for weeks. Once the afternoon heat cooled to a reasonable temperature, I took a long run several times around the Commons, and returned for dinner around the same time as many people who’d been out and about during the afternoon. Enjoying the weekend atmosphere, most of the house headed out again in the evening, and those of us who stayed home took advantage of the quiet to Skype home, relax under the stars on the patio, and watch more movies from the anthology of films we collectively brought on the trip.
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