Cape Town day 5!

Hi friends and family!

I don't have any pictures at all to share from today, but we had a super busy day. This morning we headed to a lower-middle-class township to play with kids in a daycare.  Working with children in disadvantaged areas is very moving.  Although these kids all seemed to have clean clothes, fresh haircuts, and lunch boxes with food in them, many of the kids came from single-parent homes. Many of the parents had drug and alcohol problems, were unemployed, or left their children in the daycare so as to not have to deal with them during the daytime.  

The kids could all speak English and Afrikaans. Many were interracial. They were age 4 and younger.  They sang us songs like the itsy-bitsy spider and that silly "I love you, you love me" Barney song.  They said the Lord's Prayer. When it was snack time, the kids all willingly broke their sandwiches in half and shared with other kids who did not have lunch that day. 

It was so fascinating to watch them... Children have no grasp of social concepts. I wish I could remember what that feels like. You can be the grossest-looking person in the world, and no kid will give a damn about it as long as you play with him. They don't care about projectile-vomiting in front of each other.  They have no concept of race, and economic status is irrelevant to them. They just love everybody, and they love attention.

One of the kids climbed on my lap, and pretty soon I had six kids fighting to sit on my lap.  I had to rotate them so they could take turns. "Auntie!" they screamed. Auntie, watch me! Auntie, draw me a car! Auntie, draw me a dinosaur! Auntie, play with me! It was so cute, and so exhausting. The wonderful woman running this daycare is a saint. She has 20 kids to herself. The facility itself was better than the daycare we saw in Soweto; this one had running water and a box of toys (although they were pretty beaten up). The kids drew us pictures, and we signed a map where volunteers list where they came from.  Our names joined a few from Canada, Switzerland, Sweden, and Brazil.

I am curious to compare this to our visit to another township tomorrow - one that is extremely poor. I a sure the two experiences will be very different.

After this, we went to two lectures at the university of Cape Town.  The first was from a professor regarding the abysmal state of the education system here. Almost HALF of high school students drop out. Teachers sometimes just don't show up. Some schools have no textbooks at all. In elementary schools, at any given time, only 25% of the students will understand the language that the teacher is speaking (there are 11 official languages in SA). Most fifth graders cannot read.  This lecture was so insightful and really shed light onto the collapse of the infrastructure here in SA.

After, we listened to a lecture on public health and then visited an HIV clinic for men. HIV is absolutely rampant here - at least 12% of SA residents are HIV positive. Among youth, that number is closer to 25%. HIV affects an equal number of men, women, and sadly, children. The clinic we went to does some amazing things with key populations that are otherwise overlooked; specifically, younger men who are at risk or who are HIV positive. 

To contrast this nurturing and open facility, we visited the nearby community health clinic. People line up here at 4 am to get a spot to treat their colds and dress their wounds.  The walls were painted in gaudy colors that reminded me of 1970s sitcoms. Someone with tuberculosis could be sitting in the waiting room next to an HIV positive woman with a suppressed immune system, which is of course life-threatening. The exam rooms were run-down and looked less than sanitary. Ugh. 

In a country so beautiful and full of history, the relentless inequality here is astounding.

Anyway, we had dinner downtown, and I'm so sleepy now. I will update tomorrow. I only have 2 days left here. Hard to believe!!! Goodnight all.