Township Tour

Today, "Mamma Ivy" came to the house and taught us more about the culture/traditions/and religion of the South African people. It was so interesting! After her presentation/lecture, she took us on an educational tour of the townships around the city. These are the places where the poorest people live. There are several different townships and each of them have thousands of people who live in them. It's unreal how many shacks are lined up against eachother. They seem to go on forever. Although these people don't have much, they are proud of their communities and seem very happy. Mamma Ivy lives in a township herself and she loves where she lives. There is much room for improvement, but from what she taught us, it seems that these people are very connected to their roots and don't feel much of a need to move to the suburbs. It was so interesting and eye opening to walk around these communities and talk to some of the people. One of the homes we were brought into just had a cement room with 6 other tiny bedrooms and a bare cement room for their bathroom. Six families shared this space. One of the men who lives there told us that some of them just sleep on the cement table because there is no room in the bedrooms. It was heart wrenching to see the living conditions and almost just feels like a dream. But its not a dream at all; this is reality for the majority of South Africa.

In the final township we visited today, we went to "Vicky's Bed and Breakfast". Vicky is someone who has converted the top part of her place into South Africa's smallest hotel. She uses the money she makes to help the children in her township. She is so warm and welcoming and is doing a great thing for these children. After showing us her place, she took us behind it into the local "creche" (daycare or preschool). This was my absolute favorite part of the day! The kids were beautiful. I can't think of another word to describe them. And once they saw we had cameras, they went crazy! They LOVED seeing themselves once you took a picture of them and were doing thumbs up, posing, making faces, jumping all over us, and just loved the attention we were giving them. One girl in particular loved me holding her and she would play with/pet my hair constantly (probably because it felt so different than her own) and she would just look into my face with the biggest smile. I loved these kids after our time of being with them for just 20 minutes. Their energy and spirits were so contagious and I couldn't wipe the smile off of my face. They sang us some songs too and by the end of our visit, there was no way the teacher was going to get them under control again...woops!

The sign of the creche. It says, "We Shall Build and Brighten this Nation".