We had the afternoon off! So, I borrowed R350 from a friend and went with a group of about 10 to Franschoek (literally, French corner), a picturesque little town that had been settled by the French Huguenots fleeing religious persecution in France several centuries ago. They had come to this part of the Cape colony and settled, mostly in isolation, but had taught the Dutch how to grow grapes and make wine, a skill all the French people seem to have had... Franschoek is nestled in a valley in the mountains about thirty kilometers away from Stellenbosch through a wine farm region.
I had called the previous evening to make a reservation at a place that came highly recommended on Trip Advisor, but unlike all the other places there also seemed to be within college students' budget. It was called Gideon's Famous Pancake House. Gideon himself had answered the phone and had been really excited to take our reservation, and had been kind of shocked at the size of group. In South Africa, pancakes means crepes, so I was very excited for crepe time. I've been missng crepes ever since Norris took away the delicious and affordable crepe bistro and replaced it with the expensive and not as delicious Frontera.
Gideon greeted us at the restaurant and was so excited to have us there. We sat at a picture-perfect outdoor table under the awning of a picture-perfect building. I could have been studying abroad somewhere in the French countryside. It was a suspension of South Africa...and then I remembered that South Africa is just that, it's so diverse that you can traverse worlds from province to province, town to town, neighborhood to neighborhood, street to street.
Gideon told us all about his favorite crepes and how he makes them; he was clearly so proud of his restaurant that it was a delight to be there. And he gave us a 30% discount because we are university students. He made us feel so welcome. He asked us all about Chicago and Northwestern.
We split our orders so we could try halves of different crepes. I had a curry chicken one (Malay influence) and a mushroom chicken one. They were so scrumptious. For dessert, I had half a banana and ice cream crepe. It was phenomenal. I definitely want to go back.
After lunch, we walked around town and looked in little shops and markets and such. It was very very cute, very very touristy, and I kept on losing sense of where I was.
Tuesday was a marathon of class. We had two three hour lectures. In between, I had to run and get a new student card, but naturally, the office was closed. So I ran to the bank and exchanged my $100 USD that I had brought with me from America and kept in the safe in my room since I got here. The exchange rate was not bad, but the commission the bank took on my money was horrifying, so I walked out with around R700, which is probably about $75 to last me until my financial situation could be resolved. In the morning we talked about environmental health and occupational health in South Africa and prepared for our field trip on Friday... In the afternoon, we did group presentations about Stellenbosch community development. It was an interesting day, but lots of class time. My lecture attending brain is getting out of shape!
Wednesday morning, our Politics class watched a movie, but the group of us who goes to Prochorus each week got permission to go to Prochorus for the morning instead so we could sit in on a creche mom training session. It was really interesting. Denise, the training teacher opened up with a coloring lesson about Noah's Ark and the story of it, then she continued on with a rainbow activity in which the kids had to rip out shreds of paper of red, blue, and yellow and glue them to a piece of paper in the shape of a three-stripe rainbow. Using color skills and fine motor skills in one activity while simultaneously preparing to talk about the seasons and completing Noah's Ark story! Denise is really cool. There were about 17 creche moms there and they did the lesson themselves so that they would be experienced by the time they taught it to their children. Denise also discussed a color identification activity they could practice if they had been collecting bottle caps as she'd suggested at the beginning of the year.
In the afternoon, I finally got my Stellenbosch student ID card replaced and then went to a lecture on Art & Identity; we learned about Afrikaaner art/propaganda and identity as well as African art and identity themes. Neha and I went grocery shopping armed for the first time with a list of recipes and a well-planned out shopping list. Finally figuring out grocery shopping here! We celebrated our grocery purchases by having a fajita potluck night with Soad and Nouha in their room upstairs. It was so yummy. It's probably the closest we'll get to Mexican food here - chicken, Spanish rice, fajitas, tortillas, salsa, cheese and guac. And we finished it off with a classic South African dessert, melkterte.
Thursday morning, we headed back to Prochorus for a day of volunteering at the creches. We were sent to two different creches this day in a different area of town. One of them was a creche for differently abled children, and since there were three of us and only seven of them, we decided to send Mariah there while Emily and I went to the other creche. It was a nicer creche than the one we'd been to before in terms of the facility's neatness and appearance. It was painted, was a real building, had a floor and a few windows, electricity, and a real toilet inside the principal teacher's house which was adjacent. It also had a playground and a fairly decent sized yard. Apparently it is affiliated with a church, so it was slightly better off.
We walked into the classroom and were met with the sight of 45 small children between the ages of 1 and 5 sitting around small plastic tables and eating oatmeal. There were so many children! After breakfast, the babies left with another teacher to go sit inside the house while the principal teacher taught the older children. They sang some songs...including, yep, you guessed it, Baa baa black sheep! Except they sang it in English and in isiXhosa and it had an ending so they didn't get stuck in a tape loop. The also sang the "if you're happy and you know it clap your hands" song and practiced their counting in both languages. They sang a London is burning song version in English, Xhosa, and Afrikaans. The teacher was very enthusiastic and the kids seemed to respond to that well.
The classroom had posters about healthy nutrition and food choices, about proper hand washing, a typed up daily schedule and typed annual lesson plan on the walls. There were also drawings and art projects the students had done around the walls. Something you see in every daycare or elementary school in the US but probably take for granted. You don't realize how significant that is until the walls are bare. They sang songs about God loving them and said a prayer in isiXhosa. They took turns leading each other in an activity where they pointed to a body part and said it's name in both languages and the other students would repeat in shouting and exuberant voices. They then did the bottle cap color identification lesson that Denise had spoken about the day before. The kids were really sweet and on the whole seemed to be pretty well-behaved, although order in a classroom of 1 vs 35 is not a real thing.
After the lesson, snack time happened, and it became apparent that the kids were from a slightly higher socioeconomic background than the kids at the other creche. They all had yogurt, but some of them had sandwiches and chips and fruit and other things too. The primary school in Kayamandi had received bread and milk but had some extras, so was distributing it to other institutions in town, and the creche mom wanted to go see of she could collect some for her kiddos in the creche, so she left us at the end of snack telling us to take the kids outside to play.
The other teacher did not reappear, but the 10 babies did... Emily and I looked at each other in mild horror as we stared at forty-five very small isiXhosa-speaking children. Two against forty-five. Oh heaven help us! Emily and I ended up breaking up multiple fights. There was 1 toy...not a very good ratio of toys to kids, and certainly not conducive to amicable, peaceful playground time. The babies all wanted to be held. Some little boy was insistent on shyly hiding behind the house until I finally found out that he was ticklish and could in fact smile! And then he decided to read me a book (the book was upside down) and it was one of the cuter things I've seen in my life. About an hour and a half later, I was sitting on the small patch of grass (weeds) in the yard with about 6 children sitting on my lap/legs and Emily was in the same boat. There were a couple kids fighting, a couple kids whining, but no blood, no broken bones (fortunately...despite some falls and tears). Emily and I were sweating and exhausted but still smiling and also not bleeding or broken (although there were some close calls when we were breaking up fights among the 4 and 5 year old boys). Every kid was alive when the teacher rounded the corner and came back. To my elementary school teachers, I am so sorry for not appreciating your patience, your perseverance and especially your magical superpowers that enabled you to do your jobs. HOW DID YOU DO IT?! I was actually quite sad to leave the kiddos at the end of the day, but relieved and a little surprised that we'd all survived. I do not know how that creche mom does it every day with her little, I mean big, flock of toddlers.
Reflecting back on this week, as I ran around Stellenbosch's streets for class, for groceries and for failed attempts at the post office and bank; as I visited Franschoek for a touristy afternoon of Malay/French crepes and visited African souvenir markets and drove past sprawling, scenic wine farms; and as I trudged back up the hill (walking next to an open flowing gutter of sewage) towards the Prochorus center in Kayamandi from the creche where I'd spent the last several hours with forty-five lovely kids from the neighboring houses and shacks - I couldn't help but reflect on the inconsistencies of place in this country. Not even in "this country," but in this tiny area of the Western Cape. Literally across the bridge from where I walked was posh Stellenbosch. Kayamandi's shacks, running sewage, dirty smells, wandering/playing children in the streets, bright red tuck shops advertising electricity could not be more of a contradiction. Or wait. Is it that the fancy old-fashioned Dutch architecture, the predominantly white population, the cutesy streets with old Dutch names, the fancy restaurants, the classy university buildings are the contradiction? I guess it's neither. It's both. It's the two of them coexisting in such seeming peace and calm. It's the fact that people this side of the river don't have running water. t's the fact that people that side of the river do have running water. Yet they all live in supposedly the same city. The inequality is shocking here. No wonder South Africa has the world's highest Gini coefficient (measure of inequality).
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