Pictures...

...are now on Facebook!

http://www.facebook.com/notifications.php#/album.php?aid=378314&id=548055240&ref=mf

(Let's hope the link works.)
It's been a busy week. We've finished up most of our touristy-sightseeing expeditions and are getting into the swing of things as far as school goes. Earlier this week we went to orientation camp with about half of the Cornerstone kids, which was so much fun. The people here are warm/welcoming/absolutely hysterical and I'm excited for classes to start on Monday so that we can get to know them better. For now though, we're pretty bogged down with homework from our interim course. I've just finished up a 2100 word paper and am about to embark on a 2400-word exploration of the church's role during the apartheid struggle. Homework, I'm finding, is much harder when you're in a new, gorgeous place and the weather, incidentally, is 76 and sunny every day.

Sunset from my house's front window. And yes, I have climbed that mountain, thank you very much.

Down Platteklip

So as some of you may know, one of the things I was looking forward to most about Cape Town was getting a chance to climb Table Mountain, the colossus that looms 3,563 ft. above the sea-level city. Yesterday I got my chance. Our group woke up early to hike up Skeleton Gorge, a trail that runs along the back of the mountain out of the Kirstenbosch Gardens and which is, thankfully, largely shaded. Then we hiked across the top of the Table to the cable station on the other side (where you could tell which tourists had taken the cable car up by their flip-flops, skirts, perfume, and otherwise pristine appearances). The hike up was beautiful and I'm not even going to try to do justice to the view from the top. Suffice it to say that by the time we left the cable station I was so in love with the experience that I was pretty much ready to hike up every other mountain in the larger Cape Town area (which would probably require about a hike a weekend between now and the time we leave in May).

This was all before the hike down.

We left the top of the mountain by about 1:00 PM--when the sun was out in full force--to climb down Platteklip Gorge on the north side. This trail was NOTHING like Skeleton Gorge. For one thing, there was absolutely no shade, and since it's the shortest way down the mountain, it's also the steepest. Essentially, we're doing narrow switchbacks down huge stone boulders with loose rock and sand, with briars and thistles on one side of the trail and a steep drop-off on the other. But don't worry: should you lose your footing and slip off the side of the mountain face, there's always a barbed wire fence to gently stop your fall. (Did you catch that? Barbed wire.)

So I'm in these huge hiking boots which were lovely for the route up but now are making my feet feel overlarge and clunky, so I'm making sure to put both feet firmly on each boulder before moving to the next one--meaning that I'm dragging behind the four or five friends that I've been hiking with. My legs are shaking like the world is about to end, I can't see anybody above me or below me, I can feel my skin starting to burn in the heat, and I'm starting to wonder why God in his infinite wisdom decided that mountains were a good idea in the first place.

So about forty-five minutes into this trek downwards, when I've run out of pleasant things to think about and am beginning to psych myself out about balance and my seemingly high center of gravity, two or three schoolboys and a group of African guys with long dreds come up behind me. At this point, I have lost all sense of shame and have decided that unless I scoot down the trail on my butt, my bones will become just another trail marker on Platteklip Gorge. An excellent time for company, really.

Needless to say, my fellow hikers (who, unlike me, still warrant the name, seeing as they are practically skipping down the mountain on their own two feet) find me delightfully amusing. Thankfully, God has spared me a shred of my sense of humor, so I can relate.

The first guy goes by. "It's a little steep, eh?" he says jokingly, and continues hopping down the boulders. He probably could have done cartwheels down the mountain if he had wanted. I laugh and continue my awkward crabwalk.

The next one comes up. "Is this your first time mountain climbing?" he asks, laughing at me. No, I think to myself. One time I climbed a perfectly legitimate mountain a fourth this size in New Hampshire, thank you very much. I laugh. "It's not obvious, is it?" He finds this hysterical.

One of the schoolboys goes past. He doesn't say anything; he just looks at me and giggles.

The last guy. "So you are American, eh?"
....Ouch.


But the end of the story is that I made it to the bottom. I was pretty tempted to kiss the earth like an astronaut does, but some of the other students were there and I had regained a little bit of my personal dignity by that point. I suppose the day might have seemed nicer had we taken the cable car down; I would have ended the day much less sore, and without the severe sunburn on my neck and the blisters on my toes (and might have slept better last night because of it). But then again, I wouldn't have had the stories that I have (or the bragging rights. A good number of people climb up Platteklip, but as far as I can tell most of them prefer to take the cable car down, for obvious reasons). I also wound up with a new appreciation for Habbakuk 3:19: "He makes my feet like the deer; he enables me to go on the heights." Before, I never really saw the allure of that verse. I think I've got a better idea of it now.

(P.S-- this is Jill, a new crazy/hysterical Cornerstone friend. And yes, this is a typical interaction.)

Seven Days In

Okay! So we’ve been here in South Africa for seven days now, but it honestly feels like much longer than that already. We’ve been running around like mad for the last week, getting our fill of South African culture & history, but in the midst of all that I’m also starting to get into the daily rhythm of life and school.

To start off: I love my host family. Joelle, my host “mom” is actually British; she’s been living in South Africa for seven years, working with a soccer ministry and studying at Cornerstone part time—and being our host mom, and being a foster mom full time (with more girls coming to stay over holidays). Lindo (who’s Xhosa) is the youngest of my new sisters; she’s ten. She and I are having a Karate Kid party tomorrow since it’ll be on TV. Ode is Congolese and is hoping to go to Tennessee for college in the fall on a soccer scholarship; Mimi is also Xhosa; she’s the oldest and is working in downtown Cape Town right now. I’m also staying with Mourette, a Bethel junior on the program. We have a twenty-minute walk to and from school together each day.

School itself has been really engaging so far. We’re currently on interim, so it’s just us Americans taking a course on South African history and culture right now (in February the Cornerstone students will return and we’ll be on a regular school schedule). The class has been fascinating. I always took for granted the multiculturalism of South Africa, but they really aren’t kidding. It seems like there’s people from everywhere here, except maybe Latin America. The coloured community (it’s not a derogatory term here, don’t worry) has ancestors from everywhere and everyone—the British, the Dutch, the Germans and Scandinavians, the Khoisan, the Bantu peoples, Malaysia, Madagascar, Indonesia, India… it’s incredible. Genetically, they’re apparently the most diverse people group in the world.

But the history has been really interesting. I’m beginning to come to terms with the fact that I’ve really romanticized Africa all my life (I can’t currently think of anyone who hasn’t, but I know that’s not an excuse). The reality that I’m living in now seems to be much more nuanced than I ever imagined. There’s been so much tragedy and struggle here and it’s easy from afar to paint any one people group as martyrs and blame everything on the Europeans. And there really is a lot of truth to that: we haven’t even reached the apartheid in our historical study and already the British and the Dutch have been guilty of horrific atrocities (early versions of the concentration camp, for instance, first appeared during the Anglo-Boer War). But not everything is as clean-cut as all that; the Bantu peoples, who we normally think of as those poor oppressed indigenous people, were also invaders, settling in South Africa in about 600 AD and pushing out the Khoisan. So I’m trying to break down all the assumptions I’ve had all this time—no one is pure oppressor, pure victim, or pure martyr.

So that’s the gist of what we’ve been studying. We’ve been going out on excursions most afternoons; so far we’ve been to Bo-Kaap (an old neighborhood in Cape Town that was originally home to the Cape Malays), the Slave Lodge, the fort built by the Dutch East India Company, the Afrikaans language monument, the seminar at Stellenbosch (which was originally used to justify apartheid but eventually produced a good number of liberation theologians), a Dutch Reformed Church, a mosque, the French Huguenot settlement, and the Cape of Good Hope (where our lunch was cut a little bit short by a group of baboons looking for food). It’s been an incredible week—but I don’t know if I’ve ever been so excited for the Sabbath.

This is just to say

We've arrived! Actually we've been in Cape Town for almost a week now, but I finally got my computer hooked up to Cornerstone's wireless today. I'm all settled into my host family, who I already love dearly, and have three classes under my belt. We're actually leaving now to visit the Slave Lodge and a mosque, so I'll write later.

Tomorrow Tomorrow Tomorrow Tomorrow!

So this is my last night of wool socks, thick quilts, and heated corn bags until next December. The temperature in the Twin Cities tomorrow, when we leave, will be 7 degrees (windchill: -10). When we arrive on Saturday, Cape Town will be sitting pretty at 82. Is there a culture-shock equivalent for drastic weather change? I suppose we'll see. The cold has been something of a drag this week, but I know I'm probably going to miss winter at some point along the line (although 80-degree weather sounds fantastic right now).

My bags are all packed and weighed (48 pounds!), I've got my passport and itinerary set, and I've said most of my goodbyes. By this point, I'm itching to actually get on the plane and go. The trip is going to take us about two days, with an extra-long layover in London. My aunt has loaded me up with snacks and I have a new book to start on the trip, so maybe it'll just fly by. (Maaaybe.) We arrive in Cape Town at about ten in the morning and have all day to stave off 8 hours of jet lag-- we'll see how that goes. So long until Cape Town!