July 6

I think I'm doing a really bad job of trying to explain what it's like here. Yesterday, we had a beautiful day at the ocean, taking pictures of ostriches, baboons, and light houses. Today, we spent five hours in the townships being mobbed by street children who want their picture taken and for you to show them the picture on the digital screen as much as they'd like a penny. We saw houses made of corrigated metal, one by two boards, newspaper for wall paper.

I saw bright shiny eyes of little kids who go to a community soup kitchen run by a woman named Rosie, who's own settlement home was burned down years ago and she badly scarred from saving her son.

I saw Vicky who started her own business and has had her husband at a second story to their concrete house so that she can run a Bed and Breakfast, giving tourists a taste of the real SA.

I met Beauty, Vicky's neighbor, who runs sewing classes for local women and children, who is HIV positive, a single mother, and "a woman who loves god."

They all want me to tell you that this is South Africa, people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps working hard and making a good living, but giving back to the communities in which they live. They want me to tell you that what they are doing is worth it, that they believe that it will get better. Beauty is set to have a real house next year. Rosie's hardwood floors up stairs are as lovely as any I've seen. They want me to tell you that they believe in their country.

I'm amazed that our tour guide and bus driver, both technically Coloured, have so little anamosity in them. They say Mandela said to forgive, and so they have. I look at the squaller of even the "Beverly Hills" of Townships and I am amazed. How can they not be angry? Could I be so forgiving?

Remember my professor who said, "the monster of apartheid came and went in one lifetime"? ONE lifetime. It seems to me looking at the young belligerent men on the corners in the townships, looking at the hopeful young faces in the day care, that one lifetime can make great changes. Can they make them for the better as easily as they make changes for the bad? And, if these people, these women in the Townships, can have such great hope for their country, can't we have just a little for our own? Race relationships in Cape Town are not healed, may never be healed, but neither are our own.