Isolation

RMS St. Helena arriving 

It’s Thursday, in the tiny harbor of Jamestown, St. Helena, and the monthly visit of the Royal Mail Ship (RMS) St. Helena just ended; the shops are (briefly) full of fruit, sodas, fresh meat, and produce, and the docks are silent after a few frantic days of offloading and loading containers. This complete reliance on ship-borne materials is not unique to this island – most of the Pacific islands we visited were similarly reliant. But St. Helena’s physical isolation from the rest of the world – borne of its distance from any adjoining land or island-based airports – makes it unique among the world’s populated islands. Anything or anyone arriving here passes through Cape Town – itself relatively remote – and then boards the RMS for a five day voyage. Medical evacuations must wait for the ship. Fruit is at least a week old when it arrives. No one is in a real rush, and the locals exude a sense of resigned pride – or is it acceptance? – in their geographic fate.

Initially, after its discovery by European explorers (there were no natives to displace, evangelize or exploit), the island’s isolation was its appeal: a place where ship, headed to and from India and the East Indies around the Cape of Good Hope, could stop for water, or a place to send unruly Emperors. Its earliest settlers were either sent here or brought here to serve the passing ship traffic; there were precious few “volunteers,” in the sense of intrepid souls seeking a new land. Then and now, there were and are many other places better suited to starting a new life, places not nearly as isolated as this rock in the ocean.

Turk's Bay

Today, that isolation is threatened, one might say, by the big news that the British Government has finally committed to building an airport on this jagged volcanic island 1700 miles northeast of Cape Town, South Africa. Of course, the development-minded citizens and ex-pats of St. Helena see the airport as the harbinger of all things good: better access to the rest of the world, more tourists, more business, and, well, you know the drill.

600 feet of stairs - town to fort

But after spending a week here, I worry that the very thing that a small majority of Saints – as the locals are referred to – see as their salvation may prove, in the end, to be another disappointment, and may, in fact threaten it’s self-proclaimed and somewhat dubious status as “the most extraordinary place on earth.” For aside from its isolation – limiting immigration and emigration, as well as tourism – it is not clear how to define the soul of this curious island. Unlike many Pacific islands, which have their millennia-old native cultures to serve as foundations for their identities, St. Helena’s relative youth as a peopled land leaves it grasping at straws in its effort to define itself. Viewed in that light, the island’s history seems one of successive efforts to define itself to themselves and the outside world, only to have those efforts fall short in the face of its unalterable isolation, its seemingly non-entrepreneurial culture, and its forbidding geology.

Cinder block houses; no termites!

The airport is scheduled for completion in 2016 or so; the plebiscite on its construction passed with a bare majority, with ex-pat Saints in the Falklands, Ascension and England providing the margin of victory. Local sentiments tend toward the skeptical; one local promised us that the airport “would destroy the island;” a mail clerk highlighted that it “would be good for medical evacuations, but that’s about it.” A groundskeeper told us that the airport would be the excuse used by England to reduce and then eliminate its considerable annual subsidy to the island, a goal echoed the next day by the island’s appointed governor in the press conference announcing this year’s subsidy. In so many words, the governor described the new budget as focused on the airport with the goal of economic sufficiency.

Flax, covering a hillside

Hmm. Years ago, the island puts all its chips on flax, the spiked, narrow-bladed plant that can be milled into thread and fabric. Today, the island‘s wet interior is overrun with the plant – a not-unattractive, albeit impenetrable ground cover. In 1966, the island’s six flax mills closed: economically untenable. More recently, an effort to become self-sufficient in lumber – the island has many old forests – fell victim to a similar fate. The cost of transporting timber to a mill, and the cost of maintaining the mill, proved too much. It was cheaper to ship the 2x4s in from South Africa. There are some coffee trees on the island – reportedly, the beans are exquisite – but volumes are not high. There’s a small commercial fishing fleet, but the markets are in South Africa, and depend on the ship.

Tourism and ex-pat repatriations seem to be the dominant source of foreign exchange. Most islanders seem content to eke out a living, growing a few vegetables, driving the few tourists around, re-selling imported items to each other and to tourists, or working for the government, maintaining the narrow roads, rebuilding rickety retaining walls, or, now, lining up to work constructing the airport. Mostly, people like their subsidy from England, content to wait for the occasional influx of tourists.

Longwood House, Napoleon's last stand

Tourists are drawn to this island for several reasons, not least of which are its isolation (I’ve been to St. Helena!), and its claim as Napoleon’s place of exile and death. We visited Longwood, his home away from home, as it were, and were underwhelmed. Maintained in a lackadaisical fashion by the French Government, the home is filled with replica furniture and artifacts, a seemingly random collection of portraits and busts of the Emperor, with just a few pieces of written curation – in French. The local guides do their best to provide context, but too often we heard that this piece or that was a “faithful copy.” Even Napoleon’s Tomb is a bait-and-switch, his body having been exhumed long ago and returned to France. Call me cynical, but I’m not sure the lack of an airport is the only thing responsible for the limited number of visitors to the Napoleon Complex.

There’s talk of a five-star hotel and an 18-hole golf course, post-airport. Maybe so, but the island has no beaches, and aside from a few forts in various states of renovation and decay, there’s not going to be much going on outside the grounds of the resort. Limited access to the internet costs almost US$200/month, and for US$50/month, you get three TV channels. Intra-island phone service is expensive (the phone booths are marked on the island’s maps and there are no cell phones), and fuel is a staggering US$10 per gallon. These are not indices for a vibrant tourist destination.

Northern vistas -- Lot and Lot's Wife formations

What the island does have is magnificent geology – spectacular peaks and valleys, cliffs and bluffs, and a breathtaking diversity of micro-climates. You can practically live anywhere in the world on this island: rainforest, arid plain, desert, seaside – it all depends on where you build your house. Four seasons can be experienced in the same day. There are hikes galore, passing through and across a landscape whose vistas change by the mile. The sea is a constant visual presence. In these respects, one can see the truth in the island’s claim to be the most magnificent place on earth. The geology is a defining and limiting factor: roads are impossibly narrow, carved out of steep cliffs, switching back and forth up sheer walls. There’s no flat land to speak of; the airport will be excavated out of the only relatively level land on the island, and, interestingly for an airport about 600 miles from the nearest (military) airport, is fogged in from time to time during the winter months. There are three herds of cattle on the island – nearly all the land is just too steep for grazing, farming seems out of the question. There are just a few settlements of more than a few dozen houses – most houses are built above or beyond the roads, their access to adjoining houses limited by the need to climb down or up steep driveways and to navigate roads whose sides are defined by rock walls on one side and deadly drops on the other. It’s a difficult place to imagine being developed further.

We have enjoyed our stay here; we are used to the logistical limitations of islands, to their high prices and short supplies. We are comfortable ferrying from boat to land and back again. We spend our time touring the island, visiting with fellow cruisers, and doing boat maintenance. St. Helena is a wonderful place for boats and ships to stop on their way to somewhere else; I’m just not sure it’s ever going to realize its promise as a tourist destination. The airport’s viability is predicated on increased tourism, and on it not irrevocably changing the essential attraction of the island – its isolation. As we leave here for the islands of the Caribbean, I worry that St. Helena’s airport may, in fact, result in the worst of both worlds: inadequate economic activity coupled with a permanent loss of that which makes this island unique: its extraordinary remoteness.

         

The Turn North

Once we left Thursday Island, Australia in June 2011, we’ve been traveling west and south to round the Cape of Good Hope.  A few weeks ago, we began our northbound trip home, leaving Cape Town for the Caribbean via St. Helena, a small volcanic island one-third of the way between Cape Town and the Caribbean.  Our passage to St. Helena was a classic fair-weather passage, with moderate winds and seas nearly the whole way, and the thirteen days and nights passing in a languorous procession of easy watches, routine sail changes, and the gentle transit of the moon from a bright fullness to its empty newness.

Here are some pictures:

Leaving Cape Town, some goodbye flicks of the tail

Backlit genaker, pulling us along

Diagonal rainbows on a calm cloudy afternoon

Wind coming up; preparing the genaker for hoisting

Another day, another glorious sunset

Red-tailed Tropic bird, flying out to greet us to St. Helena

Arrived at St. Helena

At 1900 GMT, on 20 February 2012, ile Grace arrived at Jamestown, St. Helena safe and sound. They expect to have internet ashore tomorrow, and will post an update soon.

Where We Started

We haven't seen another boat or ship in days, and with the skies clear and the seas calm, we are ghosting along at 5 knots, our genaker filled by an eerily-steady 12 knot wind from dead astern. It's been like this for a few days, and the weather forecast suggests that identical conditions will prevail for the next 7 days. South African sailors had "warned" us it would be like this - blue skies, gentle and favorable winds, and following seas - but that's the sort of prediction you learn to suspect at a young age: "everything's going to be great, just you wait and see!" I don't know about you, but I've always tended to manage my expectations, to hope for the best but prepare for the worst, as they say. Happily for us on this leg of our circumnavigation, even though we prepared for the worst, we're enjoying the best as we head homeward, back to where we started this circumnavigation, northwest across the South Atlantic Ocean.

It's just after midnight; the moon has been waning since we've left Cape Town, rising later each night, its now bowl-like shape hidden at first by the eastern horizon's clouds before lifting into a speckled pin cushion sky. Sailing to St. Helena, on our way to the Caribbean and the Bahamas, we are tracking the length of the fuzzy swath of the Milky Way's edge, our bow and stern lined up with this nightly reminder that our little planet sits inside a swirling disk of billions of stars. It's dark enough to make out the nebulae in Orion's sword, and on nights like these, with no ship traffic, we can run dark, without running lights, the better to see the stars.

Sometimes turning the lights off improves your vision. For me, a quiet night watch lengthens my vision backward, toward the voyages and discoveries of my younger days, the time leading up to this journey's beginnings. Running downwind, across a rippling sea barely visible in the cloud-diffused light from the distant half moon, I'm in a reflective mood; nothing to distract my wandering thoughts, no running lights, no sail changes, no radio traffic, no navigational worries - just a blank mind canvas, gliding atop a big ocean under a sprawling sky.

During one of those younger periods, I tended to follow my nose in developing my musical and literary tastes; an artist would appear on one of my favorite group's albums, and I'd check him or her out, or a writer would acknowledge another in a foreword, and I'd go to the library and look up the new author. Once, in high school, while reading an exegesis of Bob Dylan's song, All Along the Watchtower, the critic highlighted the similarity of one of its couplets to a couplet in T.S. Eliot's Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock. Who was this Eliot?

That reference led me to Eliot -- his poetry, plays, and criticisms, and, eventually, to a set of lines from The Little Giddings, lines that I've carried with me all these years. You and I have since seen it on various inspirational posters and cards, but at the time, as a high school kid looking to sail the oceans, it resonated deeply. It still does: "We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time."

Exploring -- the act of leaving home and then returning - the hero's journey, as Joseph Campbell might call it - seems inevitably, in stories, poems and myths, to generate a deeper understanding of oneself and one's literal and figurative home. In fact, I'm pretty sure there's nothing inevitable about it. It takes a lot of hard work to avoid the sensation and result of "just passin' through," as the R. Crumb character of the 1960s might have put it. When we set out on our circumnavigation, I knew I wasn't interested in "just passin' through," but I imagined more the new places and people we'd meet, and less the inner journey. Tonight, a rising moon brings into focus the difficulties faced by a traveler open to extracting revelations of self-discovery, revelations promised by the poet to a reflective explorer.

I've always tended to be a go-it-alone kind of person, assuming I can solo navigate around shoals and shipwrecks, that I can steer to deeper waters, find new passages and hidden harbors. Now, I see more clearly that any journey of the body, mind, heart, or soul benefits greatly from a guide, someone to hold a mirror up, to point the way, to help one avoid the unseen dangers, hidden reefs, flawed assumptions. It's hard enough most days just putting one foot in front of another, without finding the motivation, energy, and wherewithal to take a step in a different direction, to continue the difficult process of self-discovery, self-awareness, and change. In the journey we call living, pursuing our day-to-day dreams, these guides - or navigators -- take many forms - friends, parents, siblings, colleagues, supervisors, mentors, clergy - and we are better people, parents, and spouses for their insights and prodding.

On our boat-bound sail around the world, outside guides are scarce. We've been on an exploration considerably more isolated and solitary than our prior land-based journeys. Here, we have only each other, for the most part, to serve as a navigator. On this circumnavigation, two of us on a boat, we face not only the physical, financial, and logistical challenges of setting sail around the world, but also the reality that personal growth and illumination depend almost solely on ourselves and each other.

We push and pull each other along, Jennifer and I, in circumstances that are at once ideal and trying. It's difficult sometimes to convey, much less to experience, the interpersonal intensity attendant to our extended isolation on a broad expanse of ocean, periodically ensconced in foreign lands and cultures. Intensity, in escapable doses, can be a wonderful thing; unrelenting intensity without relief presents its own challenges, and we're still calibrating ways to give each other space, silence, and support. For me, so much more easier said than done.

So perhaps the uncomfortable truth about the process of discovery, of returning home to know it for the first time, is that the mere act of journeying, while perhaps necessary, is hardly sufficient. Pushing through the molasses of ignorance, generating new insights against decades of preconceptions, re-adjusting behaviors and expectations seemingly hardwired into one's being - these processes of growth depend not only on the journey, but on one's ability to navigate the shoals of one's personal history, on one's proclivity for self-awareness or self-delusion, and on overcoming one's natural defense mechanisms and easy explanations. In this, we long for direction, a destination, and a guide, much as a sailor longs for a compass, charts, and a navigator's local knowledge. In the end, we work with what we have, harness the wind, weather the storms, trim the sails.

Our boat sails forth, headed northwest to St. Helena, pushed along by fair and following seas and winds, but we can only go so fast, limited by the laws of physics and the friction of the water against our hulls. No matter how fast the wind blows, no matter how much we want to change, no matter how quickly we seek to know, perhaps for the first time, the place where we started, we are limited by the ephemeral laws of our own natures. Boats arrive no sooner or later than the weather allows. Insight appears on its own schedule; wisdom emerges on its own timetable.

We set sail, leave our homes, undertake fantastic explorations of our world and ourselves, but in the end, learn that we cannot dictate or predict our pace of discovery, or when and how we might return to where we started, or even if, God willing, we might then know it for the first time. Under diaphanous skies, we journey onward, closing on home, or somewhere near it, hoping to arrive safely, among friends and family, a bit wiser than when we left.


Where We Started

What goes around comes around,
So the wind that passes across the deck
Seems destined to pass over us again,
Perhaps wondering why we've moved so little,
Taking so long to sail across these waters,
Maybe thinking it's not blowing steadily enough,
That by gusting more frequently, or stronger
We'd find ourselves closer to home.

But a wind can only push you so fast and so far
Against ocean currents that have their own design,
So we bide our time, trim our sails, wend our way
Through reluctant waters, making our way around,
Yearning for a landfall somewhere close to home.

Personal Milestone

Jennifer, and ile de Grace, passing the 360 degree mark!

At 8:26 pm Greenwich Mean Time, on Friday, February 17, 2012, ile de Grace crossed 1 degrees, 10.2 minutes West longitude. The significance being that both ile de Grace and Jennifer have now crossed every degree of longitude on the planet by sea. On April 25, 2008, she and I, along with Captain Larry and mates Dominique and Alex, left La Rochelle, France on her delivery voyage across the North Atlantic to the Chesapeake Bay. While a circumnavigation it does not make, that is a lot of blue water in just under four years and, for me, a personal milestone.

Tracks

When I started ocean sailing, back in the proverbial day, you used your sextant or radio direction finder or LORAN receiver to plot your position at least daily - but often no more frequently than that. Once the daily position was marked, you then drew a pencil line from your last plotted position, and voila, that was the course and distance you'd sailed. A two-week trip so marked resembled one of those connect-the-numbered-dots diagrams you'd find in a green-covered edition of Children's Highlights, lying on the 1980s table of every dentist and pediatrician in America.

With kids, jobs, soccer games and rowing practice, ocean sailing took a long-time hiatus from my life, but in the summer of 2001, with a little time on my hands, I helped a friend sail his lovely and eminently ocean-capable sloop from his home on the Eastern Shore to Bermuda and then back again. I quickly discovered that things had changed in the position tracking department. By 2001, nautical charts had moved from paper to the computer screen, and GPS had replaced the quaint sextant. In addition, marine engineers had figured out how to plot one's GPS position as a continuous set of points onto the electronic chart. No more the point-to-point pencil lines, the jagged corners and impossibly straight lines of imperfectly recorded movements over the course of a voyage. By 2001, one's course, or track, as it had come to be known, inscribed a lovely continuous flowing line on a glowing screen at the navigator's table, along with data displays of distance traveled, speed over ground, and other sundry bits of useful information. Moving from analog to digital, from discrete quanta to continuous data seems the way of the world, but at the time, I missed the tactile experiences of figuring out one's position and then carefully denoting the boat's position on the durable paper of a nautical chart. In fact, I recall doing just that, and, against the advice of the electronic data and charts, advised my friend, erroneously it turns out, to sail a line further south than we needed to, thus extending unnecessarily the length of our outbound trip. So much for the old days.

All's well that ended well, to be sure, and on that trip I came to appreciate the value of knowing exactly where one is, and where one's been, and to let go of the reliance on those silly position and course approximations of a bygone era. Certainly anyone forced to navigate treacherous passages time and again has come to appreciate the safety of relying on earlier trips, retracing recorded tracks proven by experience to avoid the nasty shoal or the poorly-charted rock. And one certainly becomes a better helmsman, seeing precisely the track of an upwind leg, able to correlate the point of sail with the resulting speed made good to the next mark. But tracks also represent the immutable history of a boat's course through the water, a history that sometimes leaves the captain in the awkward position of "doing a bit of 'splaining," as Ricky Ricardo might have demanded of Lucille Ball. For tracks are stubborn things.

My first exposure to the stubbornness of tracks came on that 2001 trip to Bermuda, when we woke after our first night sailing - this would have been heading south down the shipping lanes of the Chesapeake. That morning, after an otherwise uneventful night, the track laid bare Terry's - it would have been me, had I drawn the night watch -- struggles to disentangle the many buoy channel lights from the many navigational lights on the steady stream of ships bound to and from the port of Baltimore. In daytime it can be tough to avoid the shoals and the ships at the same time, but at night, the constellation of lights in the lower Chesapeake can be downright baffling. Small boats like ourselves often find themselves dodging ships and shoals, darting first east and then west, speeding up to squeeze through a gap in the traffic, or slowing down to let a tanker pass. Bottom line? The morning track showed we'd done at least one 360 degree turn, trying to make sense of the lights and traffic. In the good old days, the circular maneuver would have been lost to history, a forgotten episode on a trip that would have otherwise been noted on the chart as a straight-line passage from the dinner position to the breakfast position. In 2001, however, the track proved a stubborn thing. (Of course, the trip's final track also "proved" that my routing advice to Bermuda was seriously flawed, so my friend and I have tacitly agreed not to discuss either experience in mixed company.)

On our circumnavigation, some ten years after that initial introduction to tracks, we've had a number of instances where our navigational prowess-and I use the term loosely - has been memorialized by our system's tracks, and it's useful, in the spirit of keeping our egos in check, to recall a few of these. My personal favorite came when I sailed ile de Grace from Bali to Gili Air, a small island across the narrow Indonesian Lombok Strait, a channel characterized by extremely heavy tidal currents. On the day in question, I watched with dismay as our speed over ground slowed to just a few knots, despite having both engines at maximum RPMs. On close examination, as I zoomed in on my chart display, I discovered not only was the boat moving slowly through the water, its bow headed northeast, but it was moving backward -- sliding to the southwest at 2 knots. In a state of disbelief at a current of some 8 knots, I peeled out of the fastest part of the tidal stream, turned the boat to the southeast, and managed to ride the current eastward to the lee of a mid-channel island. The track doesn't lie: paying little heed to the current, I managed to move the boat backwards with the engines in forward.

A more consequential experience was the time we entered a Fijian bay after a grueling passage from Tonga. Our track shows us entering the bay, steering toward its center, and then pushing ahead into waters clearly marked on the electronic chart as being too shallow for our boat. However, we were so focused on positioning our boat relative to other already-anchored boats, and focusing on the murky water that we missed the electronic data. A few hours on the rocks, no lasting damage except to our egos, and a useful learning experience, still memorialized on our track.

Readers may recall the several instances where, in the process of raising, reefing, or dousing a sail, we elected or managed to motor the boat in a complete circle - normally not an issue, except when one's fishing lines are left astern, slack and busy wrapping themselves around our spinning props. Again, our tracks reveal the 360 degree path of the boat, followed by the inevitable squiggles of a drifting boat as I've jumped overboard to cut loose the tangled monofilament line from our props.

More recently, in our first day crossing the South Atlantic a few days ago, we were caught off guard by the strange nighttime movements of a large fishing boat just northwest of Cape Town - taking evasive action, our track, shows us sailing north then west, then southwest -- at which point both of us were on deck trying to sort out how best to avoid a collision. Collision avoided, but the convoluted track still remains.

Finally, in an example of how tracks can help maintain a sense of integrity on a circumnavigation, we used our earlier track of entering Cape Town harbor to assure that Jennifer's circumnavigation will be a true and complete circumnavigation. I had taken the boat from Cape Town to Saldanha Bay, about 60 miles north, for some engine work while Jennifer attended to land-based responsibilities. Thus, she "missed" that part of our trip. In leaving South Africa, we decided to sail together back to Cape Town, cross our earlier arrival track that had been recorded for posterity's sake, and then turn northwest for St. Helena. Thus, our track shows conclusively that Jennifer and I, together, sailed every inch of every mile from Annapolis to our present position, with no gaps.

It is a circumnavigator's goal to "cross one's outbound track." That's what makes it a circumnavigation. It doesn't "count" if you leave from, say, England, sail through the Panama Canal, across the Pacific and Indian Oceans, round the Cape of Good Hope, and make final landfall in Brazil. You've sailed through every line of longitude, but you have not, strictly speaking, circumnavigated. I'm not sure who makes these rules, but it's also, technically, not a circumnavigation if you don't cross the equator twice. No fair circling Antarctica and calling it an around-the-world trip. We crossed the equator just this side of the Galapagos, and will cross it for the second time on our passage from St. Helena to the Caribbean.

We expect to cross our original departure track somewhere in the Bahamas, when we sail, God willing and the sea don't fall, across our 2010 course of ile de Grace's first passage from Fort Lauderdale to the Caribbean Sea. It'll probably be in the vicinity of Georgetown, in the Exumas, where we spent a few lovely days at anchor getting ready for our trip to Panama. Wherever we cross our line, as the expression goes, our not-so-newfangled charts will show a thin red line crossing an older thin red line, inscribed several years and many adventures ago, when our dream was still just a dream.

Tracks are stubborn things. This trip has taken more than a little perseverance - in its planning, launch, and, not least, in its execution. You can say that circumnavigators are also stubborn types - we have to be, with the sea, weather, and circumstance throwing up so many obstacles to completion. So yes - we're stubborn creatures, and yes, we've come to appreciate - even laugh at - the equally stubborn things called tracks, because even though they have recorded some forgettable moments, they are also memorializing an unforgettable experience.

Northbound

Tomorrow morning, we leave South African waters for the tiny, isolated island of St. Helena, some 1700 nautical miles north-northwest of here.  If you paid attention in history class, you'll remember that this is the island that Napoleon was exiled to.  To this day, lacking an airport, it is one of the most remote populated islands on the planet, and relies on regular supply ships from Cape Town to provide its residents food and fuel and other items.  To put this remoteness in context, every island we visited in the South Pacific either had an airport or was within a day's sail of an airport.  It's a bit disconcerting to know that once we leave South Africa, we will be more on our own than at any other time of our trip. Happily, the South Atlantic is known for its bucolic weather.

It should be a relatively easy run, with the winds behind the beam; the South Atlantic high may give us some windless days, but the wind and seas should be moderate as we head northward to the equator.

You can track our progress using either of the two links on the left-hand side of this page.

After a brief layover in St. Helena, we plan to make our longest non-stop sail of our circumnavigation, about 3700 nautical miles to one of the Windward Islands, that mark the southern edge of the Caribbean Sea.

Township

Apartheid, the Afrikaans word for the policy of segregation of races, ended less than twenty years ago, but its evidence and its legacy are impossible to ignore here in South Africa.  Even if one chose to visit only private game parks, golf courses and high end resorts, you would still drive by a Township, Location or Informal Settlement on your way from the airport to your luxury destination.  Today, most foreigners would see them as slums or shanty towns, but for Jon and I, it was important to understand how they came to be, and what they are like inside, given that millions of South Africans call them home and that we had driven by so many of them.  We drove through one township on the edge of Kimberley, but without a guide or an invitation, we did not gain much insight.  So in Cape Town, where tours are easily available and affordable, we signed up to visit two, Langa and Khayelitsha, as well as the District Six Musueum.  Tours are welcomed by township leaders, as they bring both tourism dollars into the township but also make "outsiders" more aware of the conditions and challenges faced by these communities.  Just like the South African media, these tours put it all out there.  Nothing is swept under the rug, not the ugly, not the bad, and not beautiful.

Khayelitsha is home to over 2 million people.

Around 1913 and 1936, the British, who controlled South Africa at the time, began to segregate Black Africans, Asians from India and Indonesia, and people of mixed race, into reserves to contain these populations and to preserve most of the remaining land for those of European descent -- much as native Americans were forced onto reservations in the US.  When the National Party (Afrikaans) came to power in 1948, this policy of segregation was formalized into the creation of "Homelands" for the dark skinned people.  They got about 13% of the land, and the white-skinned people got about 87% of the land.  But the English and Afrikaans wanted cheap labor to work in their mines, factories and farms, so they created segregated places for this labor (men only) to live.  Their families had to remain in the Homelands, and the men lived in newly- created "Townships" near work, and usually along a major highway for ease of transportation.  There were separate townships for Black Africans, Asians, and Colored (people of mixed race).  All Townships were -- and are -- enclosed by tall fences.

Old dormitory at Langa awaiting renovation.

Originally, townships consisted of dormitories.  Langa, founded in the early 1920s under the Urban Areas Act, is one of the oldest townships around Cape Town.  An older unit (within one building) we visited initially housed about 18 men; three men to a room that is smaller than a typical college dormitory room, and about six rooms per unit which had a small common room and kitchen area.  These men would work from January through November and go home to visit their families in December.  Their families were not allowed to visit them and they had to carry a Pass at all times indicating where they were allowed to go.  After Apartheid ended, families were able to join their husbands and fathers, and now, where three men once lived, three families now live.  That is one small room, three single bunk beds, with small children on the floor, adults sharing the bed and older children sleeping out in the common room.  The beds are high so that there is storage room underneath, and some storage suspended from the ceiling.  It is not a lot of space and there cannot be much privacy.

An old dorm room, now accommodating families.

Sign from the era, District Six Museum

But not all who live in a Township arrived there under this method of labor camps giving way, post-apartheid, to family homes. In Cape Town, there was a neighborhood called District Six.  It was close to the waterfront and people of different races lived there together.  From the 1960s to 1980s, the government -- seeking to make Cape Town more white, removed all the dark-skinned people who lived there out of their homes and into one of the several townships around Cape Town.  Their homes were destroyed, much of the area is still vacant, and only the churches are left from the original community.  Today, the Methodist Church, which had been a liquor store before becoming a church, has been turned in to the District Six Museum.  This museum is dedicated to preserving the memories of what the community once was like, the memories of those who lived there and to serve as testament to the extent to which the Apartheid regime would go to keep different races segregated from each other and from the white community.  Our young guide was born in Langa Township, but his family had been evicted from District Six and moved there against their will.  People did not have a choice to where they were moved, and neighbors were separated from each other indifferently, and due to the Pass law, were not free to visit each other.

An individual home, view to the left.

That is how Townships came to have homes other than dormitories.  What looks like an individual shack is a family’s home, cobbled together from what ever materials they could get.  They are sometimes no more than 10 feet by 10 feet and are very, very close together.  They are hot in the summer and cold in the winter, because they are made out of spare wood, cardboard, tin, and plastic.  Those who cannot afford the pay-as- you-go electricity cook their food and heat their homes with small burners, which often results in fires and loss of life.  Access to water and proper sewer are also major issues.  For the most part, we saw port-a-potties, but the occasional out house was also evident.

The same home, view to the right.  All very combustible.

Renovated dorm for single family.

Some homes in some townships are nicer and were built by the companies that employed the workers.  Some dormitories were, and are being, renovated by local governments to accommodate families.  Those that live three families to a room, pay 20 Rand a month in rent.  That is 6-7 US dollars.  A renovated single-family apartment costs about 300 Rand a month (about $37).  If someone makes enough money, they can buy a “mortgage” home in a township and live “upscale” compared to their neighbors.  What struck Jon and I as being so different from America was that people more often than not stayed in their township, even if they made more money.  They either added a second floor, or moved to a newer home within the township.  In America, if one makes more money, one often moves to a more expensive neighborhood.  Here in South Africa, people love their communities and, even though the community was founded against their will, it is now their home and many choose not to leave, even if they can.

Brand new houses along the edge of Langa.

Woman carrying sheep heads for the grill.

Life and business is vibrant in a township.  Small convenience shops are within walking distance, barber and beauty shops are nearby created from an old shipping container.  Local food is grilled for the equivalent of fast food carry out.  While grilled sausages seemed appealing, the sheep’s heads were a bit hard to imagine as being yummy.  But it shows the extent to which people will go to get protein.  The sheep heads are discarded from butcheries, but are put to good use by people who are too poor to afford a mutton roast or a leg of lamb.  Our guide told us that the cheeks, tongues and eyeballs were the best, but that even they would not eat the brain.  There is also a lively music scene at night.

In Khayelitsha, we visited the first Bed and Breakfast located in a Township.  Vicky is an entrepreneur who saw tourists visiting the New South Africa and thought she would go after some of their business.  Her first customers were young people from The Netherlands.  For those who want an authentic township experience, and some good food, she comes highly recommended in the Lonely Planet guide to South Africa.  She has inspired others to go into this business as well and puts some of her earnings back into the community by supporting school children who pass to the next grade.

We visited a nursery school, founded by a local woman who wanted the children to be prepared for primary school.  The population of these townships is very large, with Mitchell's Plain and Khayelitsha being among Cape Town's largest.  In Langa alone, with close to a million residents, there are four high schools; Khayelitsha is home to over two million people.  The human density is hard to imagine and is difficult to capture without aerial photography.

A shebeen, in Langa

Like any neighborhood anywhere in the world, township neighborhoods have their local pub.  It is called a shebeen, which comes from an Irish word used the world over to mean an illegal bar that sells home brewed alcohol.  In South Africa, some shebeens are legal bars, but the names still holds.  In townships, the local sorghum beer, called utshwala,  is definitely homemade.  And, we were told, the best beer is made by women.  Like drinking Kava in Tonga, Fiji and Vanuatu, drinking homemade beer is a social experience, where the men sit in a circle according to senority, the eldest drinks first and they all partake from a communal bowl (or bucket in the shebeen we visited).  I gave the local brew a try, but not being a beer drinker to begin with, I found it a bit too yeasty, thick, and sour for my taste.

Illegal shanty, OK for now, but not eligible for new housing

When one lives in a township legally, you are entitled to an electric box, which is used like a pre-paid phone card.  It is pay as you go, but for those who cannot afford to use electricity, they get 50 Rand worth per month so that they can get light without burning lamps.  There is also a grandfather clause that allows those who built their own homes prior to a certain date, to be eligible for a newly-constructed government home, government budget permitting.  If a home is built after that date, a blue circle with an "x" through it is painted on the home and it is ineligible for (legal) electricity and services.  This is the government’s way of handling squatting, the building of homes on land one does not own and tapping into the electrical grid without paying for it. It is OK to build, but you have no guarantees and no official services.  Adequate housing, like jobs, are in short supply, and the blue circles do not keep people from living there. Nor has it been possible to keep people from moving into the townships from rural areas in search of jobs, and ending up in squatters locations (known as informal settlements) when they cannot find work. And of course, the spaghetti nest of electrical wires illustrates that people will figure out ways to get electricity, whether it is sanctioned or not.  But it is not without personal risk.  Just as the housing material is often combustible, the illegal wiring is not always done properly and electrocutions and fires result.

South Africa's future is its children.

Though the government is slowly making improvements, there is not enough money to make it all happen over night.  There is progress, but there is still a long way to go.  Still, after nearly 20 years, some are angry with ruling African National Congress (ANC) for unmet expectations.  Complicating this housing shortage has been the influx of refugees from other African countries that make South Africa look like the land of golden opportunity.  There are many refugees from Zimbabwe, followed by the Congo, Malawi, Nigeria and other countries.  Sometimes these informal settlements are destroyed and its inhabitants evicted.  But new ones emerge, and will continue to emerge, until there are enough jobs and houses to make informal settlements a part of South Africa's history and not its present.

As we visited the District Six Museum and heard the stories about the creation of Townships, it was impossible for me not to feel the familiar pain and shame of the racism I witnessed as a child in Wichita Falls, Texas where public schools were desegregated under court order nearly 20 years after the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education.  As the recent American film, The Help, reminds us all, racism in parts of America remained pernicious a century after the Civil War and it took one hundred years after the end of slavery and the ratification of our 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution for Black Americans to be guaranteed the right to vote and for our own apartheid signs and policies to come down.  While there are still racists in America, and anyone is free to hold racist views, it is no longer socially acceptable and most people find it repugnant.

It is with this historical baggage as an American, that I look at the segregation of the races in South Africa and cannot help but feel heart broken by the sadness and cruelty of it in such an otherwise beautiful country.  And yet, what truly astounds both Jon and I, is just how little animosity there is among those who were most oppressed for those who oppressed them.  Such forgiveness is awe inspiring, and I believe for them, liberating.  And for those who do hold malice, the case of Julius Malema stands as a lesson.  He was the leader of the ANC Youth League, who spouted racial revenge and thought he could get away with it.  He was recently censured by the ANC, demoted from his position, just lost his appeal and his political future is in tatters.  As Jon wrote in his earlier blog on Pride, all the South Africans we have met love their country, love their families and look forward (some rather patiently) to a better tomorrow.

Pride

Most of us are, in some way, proud of the community and country we live in, and find regular occasion to express or re-affirm this pride – a local Community Day, our Fourth of July, various charitable events.  Our experience in South Africa, and especially here in Cape Town, has exposed us to a seemingly relentless procession of affirming and celebratory expressions of pride in South Africa and Cape Town by all walks of life here.  There are few conversations that do not include a version of the following:  “How are you liking South Africa/Cape Town?”  … response … “I am so happy you love our beautiful country/city; we are blessed to be part of this glorious country with its beauty and shining future.”

 Concert at Kirtstenbosch,  Cape Town's Public Garden

It is striking really, the pride we’ve witnessed in this country’s geography and emerging “rainbow” political and social climate.  While everyone – black, white, so-called colored – acknowledges the continuing uphill battle for a society of legal, political, economic, and social equality, the overwhelming majority are optimistic and unafraid to be vocal celebrants of this “new South Africa.”  Recently, we went to an outdoor concert, where there were frequent exclamations from the stage to “stand up and celebrate Cape Town and beautiful South Africa!”  The crowd, otherwise rather sedate, responded enthusiastically.  Not 20 years after the end of apartheid, and despite genuine concerns about the ANC’s ability to transform itself from its role as revolutionary party to being a part of a multi-party political landscape, nearly everyone we’ve spoken to is optimistic about the future.  They love South Africa, what it’s becoming, where it’s come from, and they aren’t afraid to express it.

Of course, my sample might be biased. Many white South Africans who were not happy with the end of apartheid or were pessimistic about its democratic and economic future have emigrated, finding creative ways to take their wealth out of the country, often leaving behind unpaid mortgages and racked up credit card bills.  Some are still keeping their emigration options open, but for the most part, those who are still here are here because they absolutely adore their homeland, and we saw a billboard the other day proclaiming that more “former” South Africans were returning than “current” South Africans are leaving.  The real challenge is to keep the newly-educated class in the country.

It’s a beautiful country – we’ve been to many of the coastal cities, with only Johannesburg and Pretoria on our “to-be-visited” list.  Jen and I spent a few days touring the Cape Peninsula, south of Cape Town, and were again astounded at the natural beauty available to Capetonians, beauty just an hours drive away – beaches, mountains, hiking, surfing, fishing.  Other attractions – sports, theater, concerts, walking and hiking trails – are also all around Cape Town, at reasonable prices; with just a few exceptions, I don’t think we’ve paid more than $15 US for any professional sports, headline concert, or tourist attraction. 

Ironically, at the several sporting events I’ve been to – a cricket match and a rugby match – I did not hear the South African national anthem.  That these are “colonialist” sports may be one explanation, but I don’t think the football (soccer) matches, traditionally the province of the non-elites, lead off with an anthem either.  At US sporting events, we all stand and acknowledge our national anthem, but, compared with what we’ve experienced here, I've rarely sensed the degree of palpable optimism and pride in the US ... not since the 1980s at least, when politics and public relations spawned a surge of “I love America” slogans and commercials. The immediate post-9/11 period also springs to mind, but that seemed to me to be more a sense of solidarity than national pride.

The Cape Peninsula's Atlantic coastline

Of course, George Carlin may have put his finger on this matter of national pride, and why it rings so true to a visitor to this country … “I could never understand national or ethnic pride, because to me pride should be reserved for something you achieve on your own.  Being Irish isn’t a skill, it’s a genetic accident.”

There aren’t many slogans and commercials here in South Africa – just a deep, widespread and vocal grassroots optimism about this country, a pride at what they have achieved in ending the policies of apartheid and setting the nation on a new course.  It’s refreshing, invigorating, and fills the visitor with a sense of possibility about the country’s and mankind’s future. 

As I scan the news back home, I hope my sense of possibility survives our return to the US political season, which, by the time we return this summer, may well be filling our airwaves and public discourse with rancor, frustration, anger, and resentment, all seemingly couched in pious pride in a country many of us seem to take for granted. Let's hope it's not so, and that we can take a lesson from South Africa, who, despite the long path ahead, are filled with pride at what they have achieved, having chosen to rise above the anger and injustices of their past.

Games

Preseason rugby match, Cape Town

Hopping along the southern continents of this planet, we’ve managed to spend time in two large countries that are fanatical about their sports:  Australia and South Africa.  Last year, during the austral summer, I managed to catch the Australia-England cricket Test Series (known as The Ashes), a marathon of 5 matches, each lasting 5 days.  England won, and in the process, gave me the chance to learn the game.  Here, in South Africa, they are also wild about sports – cricket, rugby, and football.  The former two sports are prevalent in the country’s traditionally elite white boarding schools, while the latter is played nightly along the grassy strips that separate the highways from the townships and temporary settlements.   In England, they say that rugby is a hooligan’s game played by gentlemen, while football (soccer) is a gentleman’s game played by hooligans.  I far prefer football to rugby, and have concluded that cricket is akin to watching turtles mate.  It may be interesting to see how it happens, and it’s certainly complicated, but once it begins, it goes on forever, and there’s not much that’s interesting.  Rugby is obviously more action-packed, as they say, but it shares with American football the annoying habit of frequent stoppages of play; unlike our brand of football, however, the reason play is stopped is often far from obvious to even a careful observer, and depends critically on qualitative judgments by the referee.

These sports are not popular in America, and I wonder if the American eyeball and brain isn’t better suited to games with frequent set-pieces, with near black-and-white rules, and with a start-to-finish duration of between 2 and 3 hours.  Baseball is like cricket, but takes less time – less time between pitches, less time between innings (in cricket, play is stopped mid-morning and mid-afternoon for tea), and less time overall.  Football is like rugby, but has strict starts and stops between plays, unlike the continuous nature of rugby – which resembles hockey in important ways, another sport that has only a niche audience in America. 

I’ve always thought that basketball and soccer are similar in their fluidity, their passing patterns, and their demand for overall athletic excellence – the clear differences being, of course, the size of the field, the size of the team, and the ease of scoring … but basketball caught on in the States like soccer never has ... perhaps because basketball's rules play to the US attention span and appetite for scoring.  Every 24 seconds or less, the ball turns over; not too many players to keep track of; a see-at-a-glance 92 foot court; and lots of scoring.  Strangely, basketball is barely evident in South Africa – we’ve seen very few courts in the cities, townships, or countryside.

For a number of post-apartheid years, South African national sports teams operated under a formal quota system – a policy that sought to redress some of the racist exclusionary policies of the past.  Today, it's not entirely clear what the story is with quotas; news stories are a bit mixed, but it seems the quotas are at least viewed as “gentlemen’s agreements” – sports in South Africa is still overwhelmingly defined by men and for men – and football (soccer) teams are loosely expected to include a few white players, just as the national rugby and cricket teams are loosely expected to include a few players of color.  As odd as this might sound to the American ear, we need only recall the days of Jackie Robinson, or, so much more recently, the National Football League’s prevailing sentiment that black athletes were not suitable to play quarterback (!), or, even more recently, the “Rooney Rule” requiring NFL owners to interview African-American candidates for head coaching positions.  Globally, it is plain that sports are seen as both a reflection and a driver of culture and values.

Newlands Cricket Stadium, Table Mountain National Park

South African football (soccer) suffered a humiliating defeat in their efforts to qualify for the African Cup of Nations, currently being played in Equatorial Guinea and Gabon – a defeat made all the more embarrassing because the players and coaches celebrated after their final qualifying round defeat, thinking, erroneously, that they had nonetheless qualified for the tournament.  This week, as the rest of Africa – including Libya and Sudan (!) – play in the tournament, South Africa’s “bafana bafana” can only watch and wonder what might have been.  

The cricket team recently stomped on Sri Lanka, a victory made a bit hollow in the face of revelations that the Sri Lankan cricketers have not been paid in years.  Meanwhile, the South African rugby season is just kicking off, after the country’s respectable but disappointing performance at last year’s World Championship, held in earthquake-ravaged New Zealand.  Happily for the Kiwis, which we also had a chance to visit just after the second Christchurch earthquake, the Blacks from New Zealand won the Championship, bringing a well-deserved dose of post-earthquake national unity to a country which reveres its rugby.

One of the unexpected pleasures of this circumnavigation has been our ability to immerse ourselves in a variety of local cultures – and in most countries, Indonesia being a notable counter-example, sports plays a major role in defining our hosts’ culture.  We’re fortunate to have been exposed to new sports – cricket and rugby – and may just peek at the US sports pages for the results from forthcoming Test Series and rugby competitions – that is, if our sports pages even cover these quaint colonialist competitions.

Safety Vests

ile de Grace, hauled out and being spray-cleaned

One of the blessings of our trip has been the chance to get to know people of other countries and cultures, something we looked forward to as we planned our trip.  Since we lived on our boat, and relied on local transportation, shopped for food, and generally interacted with people working in the local business infrastructure the locals we’ve spent time and interacted with on our trip have been the people that work in boat yards, the people that drive taxis, the people running small vegetable stalls, and the people using public transportation.  It has not been a “business trip,” so we never really spent time with business leaders, and it has not been a typical 1-2 week vacation, where we might have otherwise spent more time with hotel, restaurant, and tourist attraction staff.  For the most part, by circumstance and preference, we’ve found ourselves “blending in” to the local culture, the local businesses, and the local workforce.

In a country like South Africa, where we’ve lived for three months, these day-to-day interactions fill our storehouse of experience with extended exposure to the manner in which nearly all humankind is forced to live day-to-day on a subsistence diet, eking out the bare minimum income needed to survive, and yet, against all odds, manage to retain a sense of optimism about their future. 

Here are a few vignettes and reflections on this, using South Africa as the prism.  It is important to note that the economic circumstances and opportunities of most of the poorer South Africans are measurably better than many of the people we’ve met and spent time with in the French Polynesian islands, Tonga, Vanuatu, and Indonesia. That said, South Africa is a country of polarized economies:  most whites and a few blacks enjoy first-world income, wealth and amenities, while nearly everyone else struggles at the nexus of poverty, subsistence, and the absence of opportunity.

Parking guide at Table Mountain

The first time we parked a car in South Africa, we were taken under the wing of a guy wearing a safety vest, gesturing madly that you are to park here, or here, or no, over there.  We didn’t know what to make of this, so we parked where we were told, and promptly heard him ask us for 5 rand or 10 rand or 20 rand – “entirely up to you, my friend.”  Being reasonably astute in these matters, and frankly, having heard the many horror stories about crime in South Africa (more on this later), we paid up … and returned a few hours later to find the same gentleman there, ready to help us back out of the space and direct us out of the lot.  We asked the next local sailor: “What’s with the guys in the parking lots?”

It turns out that in a country of 25 percent unemployment – surely an understated rate in the urban areas, and much higher among young people –  jobs are virtually unobtainable. Thus, a business is born:  self-appointed parking monitors.  Except for parking in sketchy areas at night, parked cars in South Africa are as safe as anywhere in the world.  And I might add, I would hesitate parking my car in any sketchy area in any city in the world.  So these monitors are little more than a form of private welfare for private work – a little income re-distribution on a decentralized basis.  In a country where semi-skilled employed labor makes 100-200 rand a day – that’s about US$12-24 a day – helping 20-30 cars a day at 5 rand a car yields a respectable income.  I’ve come to be happy to give a 5 rand piece to these monitors, but I must admit it took some getting used to.  

In Cape Town proper, the arrangement has become more formalized, with the City hiring parking fee collectors for each side of each half-block of street.  You park your car, and someone wearing – yes – a safety vest comes walking over with a small handheld printer, and voila – you pay them 5 rand, and they give you a slip of paper.  No meters, no parking stations – just more jobs for the local government to take credit for.

On the highways, we notice men and women in – yes – safety vests standing on the shoulders underneath the overpasses, protected from the summer sun.  At first, I thought they were homeland security types – in case suspected terrorists came to photograph or bomb the highway bridge.  Alas – nothing nearly so paranoid.  These were road safety monitors – ready to phone in any breakdowns or accidents.  More jobs.

Jobs are a primary focus of many of the township programs – and seem universally centered on teaching people the arts of ceramics, wire figurine making, or, bizarrely, the construction of origami-like birds and other objects using recycled aluminum Coke and beer cans.  Apparently the tourists can’t get enough of these kinds of objets d’arte, because we see these training programs and local “entrepreneur” shops everywhere.  Jobs.

A cleaning crew in Langa township

We also notice that the country is remarkably litter-free, including roads and highways that as often as not border the townships, with their tin roofed shacks, and the even-poorer “temporary settlements” – unsanctioned squatters’ camps.  During the day we see the reason:  groups of 20-30 people wearing – yes – safety vests and carrying bags, patrolling the shoulders and grassy strips of the highways around Cape Town. 

Like everywhere else we’ve visited, the local workers in South Africa take their jobs very seriously – parking monitors, road safety monitors, gas station attendants, toll collectors, trash sweepers.  Like everywhere and everyone else we’ve seen and met on this trip, people want to work, to provide for the families, and build a better future.  In townships especially, independent businesses are everywhere – a barbershop housed in a former shipping container; a fruit and vegetable stall aside a roughly-tended patch of poor soil; a car washing service using buckets of water drawn from a local well.  Township residents – especially those with steady incomes – make a point of patronizing these businesses; it’s understood that patronizing local businesses benefits everyone.

Kimberly diamond mine, entirely
 hand dug -- millions of tons

One of the dominant job sectors in South Africa is the mining industry – diamonds, platinum, gold, coal, etc., which collectively contribute about 15 percent to the GDP – making South Africa as dependent on its resources as Australia and Canada.  In conditions that are no doubt improved from the slave-like apartheid era, tens of thousands of miners work the rock, as industry takes advantage of extremely low wage rates and abundant natural resources.  We visited South Africa’s original diamond mine in Kimberly, where the DeBeers company offered a surprisingly candid perspective on its shameful history of mining practices; we did not visit a working mine.  In fact, in Botswana and Namibia, we know that once you drive a car into a diamond mine, it can never leave.  

The DeBeers Company and other mining operations, as well as other labor-intensive industries, have always relied heavily on native African “black” men and the Malay and Indian “colored” men for labor, and thus the creation of townships – to house the men-only communities.  Pass laws restricted movement of black and colored South Africans, assuring continuous and reliable supplies of labor.  Women and children were forced by the white regime to remain in their so-called “Homelands.” After the end of apartheid, families were re-united, and most chose to join their breadwinning husbands and fathers in the townships, so that now these huge and densely populated townships are home to the families and extended families of these original workers, nearly all of whom struggle to put food on the table.

People here want jobs – but Jennifer and I have noticed, as we walk through the craft shops and bazaars that the South African capitalist zeal pales in comparison to what we experienced in Vietnam and Thailand – what we now see as ground zero in the entrepreneurial movement.  In Cape Town, shop owners and craft producers take a relaxed attitude to would-be purchasers – we are free to wander and browse and look with nary a glance or word of encouragement to buy.  In Ho Chi Minh City, we were almost assaulted as we entered a store, and soon grew wary of even glancing sideways as we walked down a street.  On the other hand, compared to the laidback “just enough” lifestyles of most of the South Pacific islanders, like those in Nuku’alofa, Tonga, South Africans are workaholics.

Walking to school

I should also note that South Africa and the people we’ve talked to are maniacal about education.  Mornings, the rural roads and highways are filled with students in uniforms walking – often for kilometers – to school.  Recently, there were near-riots at a university as parents clamored to get their kids admitted and enrolled.  Obviously, the long-term solution to South Africa’s economic challenges is education – and then retaining the newly-educated in-country, rather than losing these leaders of the future to other countries – like the US – with higher wage scales and income potential.  This is a huge challenge.

So with all that as background, imagine my disbelief when I walked up to a pizza shop in Simon’s Town on a Saturday night, and ordered a pizza – only to be told by the counter person that the cook didn’t want to cook a pizza since it was too much work.  Wow.  I left without ordering a simpler meal, but spent the balance of the night reflecting on what South Africa – and yes, the United States – struggles with:  providing enough jobs for a nation eager to work.  Here, with skyrocketing unemployment rates, the challenges can seem insurmountable, but the country seems to be grinding its way forward, relying on harvesting its natural resources, international investment, government jobs, local entrepreneurship, and yes, a steady supply of safety vests.