The Beginning

It's been a week since I've been in South Africa and I've already done so many things. To begin I started my journey by staying up until 5:30am putting the finishing touches on my packing at my home in Potomac, Maryland. Most of the time was spent putting together intricate paylists on my ipod nano, which is for my enjoyment and then a separate educational playlist on my really old ipod for my supposed music education volunteer placement.

The 24 hours of travel included a stop in Atlanta, then off to Dakar, Senegal and then finally Cape Town, South Africa. Along my flight I met up with 3 other Cross-Cultural Solution volunteers and chatted with many other international travelers. Everyone on the flight was very kind and the excitement about traveling to SA seemed to radiate within everyone on that flight. The combination of that, a very enthusiastic conversation with my seat neighbor and having the exit row seat made the flight very comfortable and it didn't seem much worse than taking a flight from Washington, DC to Los Angeles. I reaffirmed this idea after hearing that a couple of the volunteers had 9 hour lay overs in Dubai and London.

My flight landed in Cape Town at 5:30pm on Saturday, August 1st. I congregated with the other 3 CCS volunteers and 2 more that we met at the airport. We all seemed very disoriented from our sporadic naps and lack of movement on the plane. Our driver, Kimmie was their to greet us and escorted us to the car. Everyone seemed very nice as we chatted on the way to the homebase. That's when we witnessed our first glimpse into the overwhelming world of South African poverty. It was a field close to the airport full of miles and miles or tiny, tin metal shotgun shacks. Some of the people I talked to before I left for SA told me stories about this area, but to see it was another experience all together. These structures resembled more of rusty tool sheds that were clustered among piles trash, but were actually the homes of about 3 million blacks and colored South Africans in the Cape Town area. "Colored" meaning a mixture of black and other racial orientation (i.e. Indian, white,etc.).

After a 25 minute drive I was dropped off at 1 of the 2 CCS homebases, which was located in an area outside of downtown Cape Town called Rondebosch. A pretty nice middle class area that is located minutes away from the University of Cape Town. The house was very nice and reminded me of the neighborhoods outside of LA like Silverlake and Echo Park. I met my roommates, Matthew Prokop from Vienna, Austria and Tyler Eversaul aka "Ty" from Vancouver, Washington. Both of them were very nice and eager to be in South Africa.

After I met my roommates and checked out the house I realized my body was so exhausted from the great length of travel that I was able to write a small 3 sentence e-mail to my family, letting them know I was ok and then I went straight to bed.

The next day we started our 2 day orientation where we met the rest of the volunteers at homebase 1 located 2 minutes away from our homebase. The first day of orientation went through a lot of logistics and a bunch of exercises to evaluate our expectations and to get to know each other. Afterwards we had a festive lunch with lots of lamb, chicken, potatoes, vegetables, and a wonderful salad with melt in your mouth avocado slices. From there we did a driving tour of Cape Town in which we drove up one of the many picturesque mountains called Signal Hill. From there we could see beautiful views of the cascading ocean crashing up on the rocks and shoreline of downtown Cape Town. There were also gorgeous views of Table mountain, Devil's peak, and lion's head. After the tour we went back to have dinner and my roommate Matthew and I decided that beer would be the perfect remedy to subdue the intensity of our first full day in SA. We went to a bar we saw earlier that day called the Fat Cactus, which was a perfect evening treat.

The next day we had a 9am meeting to continue our orientation, which focused on our individual placements. We started by talking about the history of South Africa, which lead to a somewhat heated discussion about Apartheid and the current politics of SA. We then took a township tour, which none of us knew what to expect.

For those of you who don't know what a township is, it's basically the American equivalent to a ghetto. During the time of Apartheid, legislation required the 75-80% black and colored population majority to move in these South African ghettos that took up 13% of the land in South Africa. This is while the white minority population took up the rest and the majority of land in South Africa. This forced blacks and colored population into these isolated, dangerously under kept neighborhoods known as "Townships". The field by the airport that I mentioned earlier is what an ordinary Township consists of. Since the removal of the Apartheid system in 1989, the black and colored population are now able to live anywhere in South Africa. Unfortunately many of the families are too poor to live anywhere else in Cape Town.

There are +/- 10 different townships that encompass the majority of the around 4 million total population. We toured three of those townships including Khayelitsha, Guguletu, and Langa. Khayelitsha is largest of all the townships, followed by Guguletu. The structures in the townships varied from tin, metal, wood, and cement buildings that were all mashed together along dirt fields and under kept roads that went for as far as I could see. It was very much like Cape Town disappeared and was engulfed in a sea of this housing, which in reality is only 25-30 minutes away from the center of downtown Cape Town, which is a complete 180 in terms of wealth.

We had a tour guide who was from one of the townships that took us around and introduced us to the people, the houses, and the culture of township life. The images were very emotionally intense, as I have never witnessed poverty on that extreme of a level. The first thing I remember that was both heartwarming and sad was the flood of children that saw us and came running up to us to be held and played with. It was really adorable. I remember a little girl around 3 years old came up to me and kept grabbing my hand so I would pick her up and hold her for a little while. Or grab my hand and another volunteer's hand and have us swing her by the arms. That little girl had so much spirit and was having so much fun with us that she never wanted to leave our side. We had to go at some point, which was the sad part. I wanted to know what that girl was going to do with the rest of her day and what was going to become the rest of her life. The other memory was going into one the houses that was a daycare center that housed 70 kids everyday with only 6 people looking after them in a extremely tiny 1 or 2 person sized building. The women care takers were very nice and had some of kids sing for us. They sang songs about the days of the week and other things they were learning in daycare. It was another instance where my heart was very warm with love and compassion for these kids, but also saddened by the conditions in which everyone was brought about. I guess though in the end all they are making the best of what they have, which is wonderful, but I also feel that they deserve so much more. At the end of the tour we were all pretty exhausted and went back to our homebases to have dinner and relax to prepare for our first day of volunteer placement.

Volunteer placement the next morning for me was located in the township of Guguletu where I was to work at a community center called JL Zwane. There the center works to help promote programs for education, healthcare, and the arts. I was to work with the music & performing arts group there called SIYAYA. I met the head of SIYAYA named Bogani and the director of the center, Edwin. Bogani took me out to see SIYAYA do one of their weekly performances at a local clinic that served hundreds of HIV/AIDS and Tuberculosis patients everyday. The patients at these clinics start coming around 5am to stand in line and wait to see a doctor most of the time if they are late they are asked to come the next day and wait once again to see a doctor. SIYAYA performs at these clinics usually 3 times a week to provide entertainment and promote HIV/AIDS education to the patients in the waiting room while they wait to see a doctor. This was an amazing experience as the members of SIYAYA put a drama performance on that had everyone in the clinic laughing hysterically. At first when you entered the room you saw a sea of somber faces eagerly waiting for a doctor's attention, but when the guys from SIYAYA came they whole demeanor of the room changed completely. It was a really amazing experience for me to watch and gave me a great idea of how talented these guys really are.

SIYAYA is made up of 15 young adults both females and males from the ages of 18-26 who are all extremely talented in music and live in Guguletu among the rest of the township people. They sing, dance, act, and perform on all sorts of instruments. I've had the pleasure to work with them on vocal training and introduce them to choral works that they will include in their performance repertoire. I've also worked with them on an individual basis to teach them new music from old moetown pop tunes to mainstream pop to jazz. In another week SIYAYA will do a performance for the volunteers of CCS in which I will conduct a choral arrangement of the Frank Sinatra tune "I've Got You Under My Skin". I sang it in high school and so far I've been able to teach them to sing the tune in 3 days. For some one who has never taught choral music that's pretty impressive, but more of the credit is deserved on their side. They are already amazing and talented musicians and after the first day when I introduced the tune they did a full showcase performance for me personally, which they did all of their musical numbers and I have to say if I would of saw that before I started teaching them, I would have been extremely scared to teach at all! haha.

Other then the placement, my life in Cape Town has been coming together. In our CCS programming we've started our language lessons in Xhosa, which is a click language of South Africa. I've gotten to know and get along with all of the volunteers which has been amazing and I just came back from an amazing weekend trip on the Garden Route, which was organized by one of the CCS drivers. It's a tourist destination about 5 1/2 hours southeast of Cape Town where the drive was surrounded by beautiful landscapes of mountains, oceans, and canyons. We stayed for 3 nights at a really cool backpackers lodge and went around to all the attractions including Zip lining and the world's largest bungy jump (Sorry Mom, I had to do it...but I'm still alive!). We also went to animal sanctuaries where we got to pet elephants and baby cheetahs. Finally we went to the Cango caves and many other scenic areas where we took in all of the beautiful surroundings.

As the journey continues I hope to immerse myself more in the culture and life of South Africa and I hope to share as much as I can with all of you following Kevin Tackles South Africa. Once again I'm thinking of all of you who supported me in this journey and I want to say thank you so much for all of your support. In the next day I will put up pictures on here and my facebook so you guys can get a glimpse of what's going on. Take care and feel free to e-mail me!

-Kevin