By Mellon Mays Fellows on
12/18/2012 10:16 AM
Coordinators are on a tight schedule here, and so it is now 10:30 pm (South Africa time).Capetown is a city of contradictions as one of our required reading articles suggests. As our plane made its descent, the reality set in that we had left the “Americas” and was not approaching a small, rural African settlement on another continent, but a dynamic historically significant city located at the western tip of the continent of Africa. We walked through the airport and spotted our driver, Denzel, who proceeded to act as tour guide once we entered the main highway. One of the contradictions of Capetown is the visibility, just outside of a comfortable, modern airport terminal, filled with people speaking languages from around the world, of the shanty shacks with tin corrugated roofs---little townships, communities of abject poverty, filled with the voices of South Africans who have still not recovered from Apartheid (which means we were told, "separateness"). The people of South Africa do NOT seem to be stuck in the...