Who is the enemy?
Goodbye South Africa, for now…
“People are human beings produced by the society in which they live. You encourage people by seeing the good in them.” – Nelson Mandela
“The world is truly round and seems to start and end with those we love.”
Madiba.
“It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another.”
South Africa, 25+ years since apartheid
I can’t put my finger on it. The awesome beauty. The rawness. The restaurants with amazing food. The poverty of the townships. The distrust. The incongruity of amazing riches and rampant dangerous street people. The seething anger just below the surface. Young kids, 12, 13, 14, working cars at traffic lights, begging for money. Our local driver says, “Don’t…those are just glue sniffers.” The crime in the papers. REAL CRIME. Violent murders, violent breaking and entry, violent sexual assault. And barbed wire, bars on every door and window, and alarm systems maxed.
And this is the best of cities.
Khayelitsha is a township, one of the poorest areas of Cape Town with a median income per family of R20,000 (US$1,872) a year compared to the City median of R40,000 (US$3,743). Roughly over half of the 118,000 households live in informal dwellings. That’s a euphemism for corrugated metal sheds.
Small world. Open mind. Live it.
Lovely Zulu word
Ubuntu (Zulu pronunciation: [ùɓúntʼù] is a Nguni Bantu term meaning “humanity”. It is often translated as “I am because we are,” and also “humanity towards others”, but is often used in a more philosophical sense to mean “the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity”.
Cape Town. Nearly sans H2O
It is difficult to imagine a city of 3.78 million people potentially without water. You know that last little dripping part of a shower, when you turn off the spigot and there are those last little pathetic droplets? Yup, that. You’ve entered Capetown, 2018.”
Hard to imagine if this goes on and gets worse. One of the most stunning cities on Earth. There will be rioting. It will be like Mad Max, Thunder Dome.
The Chinese invade Africa
The Chinese have invaded Africa for years. One example, Lusaka International is completely transforming. The new airport has multi-level drive up ramps.
Airports like this are built all over Africa using Chinese workers, materials, designers and payoffs…ooops. And this one looks just like the one in Maputo Mozambique, and probably 25 airports in China. Weird.
