It is 1:00 a.m. My body has not gotten the "adjust and sleep" memo yet. The morning and afternoon hours (8:30-5:00) were spent at our hotel---our larger group was arranged in "clusters" so we would be able to process the information from several of the speakers that we heard. For me the theme was really "Jamaica Kincaid--esque." Meaning that the interpretation given of Capetown today offered a well-defined point of departure between the observations of "tourists" (a position that we occupy, albeit one of increased awareness) and the realities of "locals." In one of our required texts for Humanities 305 at Heritage, we read Jamaica Kincaid's text, "A Small Place" in which she traps the reader in her memory and perspective of growing up on the island of Antigua. My students at Heritage relate to her "angst" in that they can understand the power of "two complex tales" that claim an experiential truth. Kincaid brings us (tourists) down for a landing with her narration----when you arrive and get off the plane, this...

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...