"From South Central College to South Africa"

“From South Central College to South Africa” is the name of my story about our trip to South Africa that came out in the Mankato Magazine this week.  The biggest problem  when working on the story was cutting it down to fit the magazine!  It could have been a novella. I’ll try to fill in some gaps here.

First, I talked about Fresh Start, the youth recycling program in Smutsville, the township in Sedgefield.

Here’s a link. The story tells how kids can bring glass, paper, plastic, and aluminum to Fresh Start where they earn tokens to spend in the Fresh Start store. Clothing, toiletries, school supplies, toys, and much more are purchasing options. The day they opened, 112 kids were standing in line with bags of recyclables.

The first child in line, receiving his tokens, walked wide-eyed into the store (in a storage container–thing boxcar-sized). He looked around, and his eyes lit up. What did he select? Toilet paper! With many families sharing toilets in the townships, toilet paper is at a premium. What a perspective that gives us on first world problems  like slow internet!

I’ve talked about our bike ride in Soweto, eating cow cheek and drinking home-brewed beer in a shebeen. Here are a couple photos of that:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here we are at the most southern tip of Africa. This is Cape Agulhas, where the Indian Ocean meets the Atlantic Ocean. It’s so strange to look across the sea in a southern direction and know that the next land mass is Antarctica.

 

 

 

 

 

We stayed in the Cape Agulhas Backpackers, which was one of our favorite stay-over spots (we had MANY, so that may not be a fair thing to say, but we loved it). I’ll post more pictures of that in the next blog post.

 

 

At Afrovibe Adventure Lodge on Myoli Beach in Sedgefield, another of our faves.

 

 

 

 

Our greeting committee in Langa Township, and typical township shacks. That’s all for now, but more very soon.