Driving through southern Namibia

Fish River Canyon

Driving through the Namibian desert

A Namibian sunset

Sandboarding dunes outside Swakopmund

Some friends and I took a tour of Khayelitsha, Cape Town’s largest township. An estimated 1 million people live here, roughly 20% of Cape Town’s population.

This is the list of reasons why being resentful toward the person who pickpocketed me would be a double standard.

At the age of 13, reasonability is scarce. Investing one’s whole life savings in a lava lamp and 8 Pokemon cards not only makes sense to a 13 year old, but has enough worth to become a frenzied passion. It would be awkward to see someone who is not thirteen, such as a 38 year old, drop a stinkbomb in the glass elevator at the mall and then sit laughing on a bench nearby for a half of an hour watching the grossed out expressions on the faces of people getting on. Food fights are not inevitable in retirement homes even with an ample stockpile of pudding cup ammo. My parents have never said “Hey I’m going to go stand in front of 7-11 with a mob of other parents in town and eat a whole bunch of Starbursts, be home for dinner.” Not once in the last seven years have I locked myself in my room, thrown shoes at the door, and cried hysterically about not being able to go to gymnastics camp. Marriage proposals usually do not come around by a guy telling his best friend to tell her best friend to ask her if she like-likes him because he like-likes her.

When I was 13, I did very few things with meaning. Five times a week I was woken up and taken to school by my parents. UNAIDS estimated that there were 1.4 million South African children orphaned by AIDS in 2007, and perhaps even more abandoned by parents addicted to ‘tik’ (methamphetamine) which the professor of my social work course personally believes has become a bigger problem than AIDS in the Western Cape. Having to make the decision of whether or not to go to school, a choice I always wanted but thankfully was never granted, those children living in the townships outside Cape Town without parents choose what I know I would have chosen, along with presumably every other 13 year old who loved to hate school. So if a contributing factor to his criminality was dropping out of school when he was still just a kid, I can’t say I would have done much better.

Even for those with parents, statistics about the townships make it fair to say drugs, crime, and shebeens (shack taverns) are what Bazooka gum, stinkbombs, and 7-11s were to me. With adolescent drug abuse plaguing so many households and shackholds (25% of Cape Town treatment facility patients are under 20 years old), drugs are passed on to siblings like Limited2 handmedowns. Chris, our house’s security guard who lives in a nearby township, explained that for younger kids, mostly between 12 and 16, crime is the obvious living to make because they do not fully understand the consequences. He said he recently had to pick up the body of his younger cousin who was shot when he tried to rob a bread truck early one morning. In my social work class we learned during apartheid 15 times more liquor licenses were issued in the townships than in white areas.

In sixth grade I filled in many crossword puzzles, worked out a bunch of word scrambles, and colored in lots of drug deal scenes in my DARE workbook. I am pretty sure, though, the more significant pressure holding me far above the influence of drugs was the fact that I was never once offered and was as clueless as to how to go about getting them as I was to how bad my taste in music was. Had I been in a situation where being the kid who doesn’t do drugs was as atypical as being the kid who was super into Xena: Warrior Princess and always wore a cape, I predict I would be the normal kid, getting by wearing t-shirts and jeans, or here, using tik. Were drugs or involvement in crime offered by people I looked up to for sorting right from wrong, like parents or siblings, and where using drugs was not seen as wrong but fitting, I do not know what would convince me to avoid what the majority of sources pointed to as the right decision. As much as I would like to think I could reject everything I was taught by my family and friends since birth, and decide for myself that drugs were not okay, it seems necessary to acknowledge that some principles are not understood at 13. It has nothing to do with being a good, smart, or moral person, and everything to do with being a person, the type of creature that is not developed at 13.

The guy who mugged me was a lot older than 13. But if he is who I think he is, which is all too likely considering the effects of South Africa’s trifecta of epidemics (AIDS, drugs, and crime), then he made some, or maybe even one, decision at 13 that governs who he is—a criminal—now. Unfortunately, that is the same time as when just about any person’s sense of judgment hits rock bottom. I grew out my bangs and luckily grew out of my clothes, but growing out of a drug addiction or ties to a gang or AIDS does not happen.

I acknowledge that this whole logic could very well be all wrong. The man who stole my phone could live in his loving parent’s basement or could have made the decision to be hurtful in crime when he was mature and despite opportunities not to. Sadly though, I could be right.

A beach on the west coast of South Africa

Table Mountain from the west coast

I sat to watch part of a cricket match going on on my way home from campus.  It aided none in my understanding of the sport.  I’m just going to stick to baseball.

This sixth sense—ignorance—was as easy to identify as the other five of bliss. To even see in color or feel down to my toes, I had to argue with a loud mob of knowledgeability to back off for just five minutes. I thought it would be too hard to revel in the beach’s prettiness while keeping lit memories of the country and continent’s ugliest sceneries, so I pretended to be in the dark. I performed the “Do I know you?” piece with all the characters that have starred in the major and minor epiphanies that I have been granted since landing here in July.

Some of these insightful installments had occurred as recently as on the journey to our small beach bungalows on the coast of central nowhere. On our first stop in Johannesburg we visited Soweto, the largest township in South Africa. In some of Soweto’s townships, having a job as taxi driver, for which the minimum and usual wage is R945 per month ($109), means you can strike a tally on the lucky side. In the capital city of Maputo, thousands of Mozambicans over 7 or 8 miles of public beach covered all evidence of sand with their towels, soccer balls, coolers, and plenty of friends and family. Because this was an essentially random sample of the city’s population, I had to believe that 21% of the people enjoying the first warm Sunday of spring were living with HIV/AIDS, which hit harder than a sandy soccer ball to the face. I began to feel van sick on the rough road that took us from Maputo to the beaches of Ponta Mamoli. It was not so much motion sickness as it was the ill feeling elicited by passing a woman carrying gallons of water on her head in a van with empty seats and room for water.

Forbes doesn’t publish a list of the world’s 10 poorest people; it would be a waste of glossy paper. I think it would be pretty easy to make a lifestyle out of ignorance, the way one can out of watching TV. But in either case the only brink I would live on would be the non-thrilling edge of commercial interruption. I would be calloused from so tightly holding out hope that an ad does not break through when I am senselessly deep in a show to devastate me with the reminder that Jack Bauer is just a design or that I am not Jim Halpert or, in the other instance, that one night the Save the Children commercials—that I pretend not to pretend not to hear—do not finally break me. Then, the only way I could get to the peace I’d be dying to have is if I ran all the way back to the yellow wood where the roads diverged and picked again.

When the sky is cloudy like a head full of guilt, even the most royally blue ocean turns a stone-broke tinge of grey right in front of your eyes. Rather than making the wager that guilt and forged ignorance will not catch up to me and unpleasantly spoil the pleasure of unspoiled beaches, I want to put my money somewhere else. Here I have seen the nature of our world can bring me to stagger, in either direction. Sometimes it even feels like I could fall over. On the beach in Mozambique, the crutch that kept me standing, and off the ground where I would have liked to take a life-long breather, was my knowledge of the trouble in the countries that made up the vast African yard behind me.

Yet the extraordinary sights of the beach and its surroundings can, I realized, function the same. Whether it is throughout the marathon of hopelessness that guides my way back to Cape Town, or during my conversations with the people I hear out but cannot now lend a hand because both my left and my right are tied up behind my back with loans of my own, or against the stuff I am bound to see working in the non-profit industry (within which I have been assured I will become jaded by the two spared veterans who taught my class on the delicate discipline last semester), it will be especially meaningful to have a reminder of the good that is abundant and free and bright and beachy.

Some friends and I climbed up Lion’s Head to watch the sunset and see the view over almost all of Cape Town.

Everything about Chris can scare me. It is not that he has corrosive eyes or greedy hands or a threatening gait. The kinds of things that rattle my bones are sort of the opposite. He told me about how he was born and raised in the Eastern Cape, where he completed primary and secondary school. He hopefully started technical school, but ran out of funds for tuition and had to drop out. That mentioning did not actually scare me, but sometimes I can be a sappy whimp so I got a little nervous. He played professional soccer in Johannesburg for two years, but when he said he could not get another contract when the first ran out and had to pack up his goals and leave, I think I flinched. He explained to me, in speech more proper than my own, that he learned English “off the street” in a few years. Now he loves to read, and when my friend lent him Into the Wild, he returned and reviewed it two days later. From that I started to panic a little, probably because when I was supposed to read the same book for class, it took me two weeks to get through the SparkNotes. On his off days, he meets up with his young son who lives with his mom a few kilometers away in a different part of Gugaletu. Gugaletu is the name of the township where, for some reason, Chris always says he “stays” but never says he “lives”. I think it is because he does not like to consider it permanent even though he has been there for years, but I am too afraid of that answer to ever inquire. When he is back at work I like to ask what he did with his son on his break. He teaches him English or plays soccer with him or takes the train into Cape Town to visit the Waterfront. They are one half cute and one half alarming. He does not drink, but he has been the life of the party when we have talked him into singing along with one of my housemates who plays guitar. His voice is so buoyant it makes me uneasy. We want him to try out for South African Idol, but his real dreams are more genuine. I failed to sleep the night he told me how much he wants a real profession with decent pay, so he can buy his quickly sprouting son clothes that fit, maybe a warm coat, and move out of the gravely dangerous township. I asked what he would like to do most and he divulged, unaware of his humbleness, that he really wants to be a public defender. The ambition that he actually plans to pursue though is to find his way to the United States, work there for a few years, and make enough money to come back to South Africa and open up a small business. Then he listed the barriers between him and his aspiration: the expensive plane ticket, not knowing anyone in America, not knowing how to find a decent job, not knowing where to live, and so on. The passion that opened the explanation of his dream faded into a conversational scar as his tone darkened into defeat, and at that moment I felt like my life was in total jeopardy.

Each little thing Chris said made it more and more undeniable that he deserved something, everything better than to live in what he calls his “shack house” in a township where he must always worry about getting robbed again, getting stabbed again, and almost dying again, like he did six years ago, and in a social order where there is nothing he can do to guarantee his son will not have to commute two hours each way to get to his poorly paid security guard job that hardly keeps up with the rising maize prices, like he does.

And the reason I was so frightened was because each little thing also made it more and more undeniable that I, who before then had toyed with whether my greatest capability was being able to do a back-flip or having a knack for calculus, that even I, as a pre-diploma, medium-sized town bred, unemployed, kind of short, ex-teenage girl of one year, actually and definitely possessed the power to fulfill someone else’s grandest wishes.

In fact, I was so scared I saw my life flash before my eyes. It was an orderly little mental Powerpoint presentation with whirl transitions between each slide of the things I have or can access and that are also the exact things of which Chris could make radical use. One was of all the ‘Now Hiring’ signs I can spot in a day at home. One was of my SA to USA plane ticket. One was of the real estate page of the local paper and the cheap apartments listed on it. One was of me walking around my town alone and at night, without being scared and without needing to be scared.

The best worst part about it all was that there was nothing to say to stop the man that shook me up so forcefully. I could not tell him to get the hell away like my friend yelled at the man who tried to steal from her. There was no technician to confirm the bungee cord could hold two tons. Even logic, which usually sorts out why the plots of scary movies won’t play out in real life, worked against easing my fear. Having nothing to say—not to Chris nor to anyone else whose karma works like a steel piggybank —establishes I have something to do. With any luck at all, I will find out just what ‘something’ is in the next two months.

I guess it makes sense that I am capable of helping Chris so much. All it takes is the resources shared by nearly any American adequately above the poverty line. But still, it is pretty freaky to find out you are actually a genie that can grant wishes and that knowing this means you can never fit back in your lamp. That’s about as smoothly as I can put it; I think I watched too much Aladdin. Other people have prettier ways of saying it though, and Marianne Williamson, quoted by Nelson Mandela, is one of them: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us… And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

To get to Mozambique for our eight-day overland tour, we traveled first through Johannesburg, South Africa. We visited Soweto, South Africa’s largest township a few kilometers outside of the city.

The first and last days of our Mozambique tour we stayed in the country’s capital, Maputo.

On our city tour of Maputo, we visited the famous Maputo Railway Station, where scenes for the movie Blood Diamond were filmed. The architecture reflects the country’s history as a former Portuguese colony.

On route to the small beach resort we stayed at called Ponta Mamoli, we drove through the Maputo Elephant Reserve. These photos are from an overlook on a small hill in the reserve.

After a four hour drive on a sand road south from Maputo, we arrived at Ponta Mamoli. Outside of the lodges, we were able to walk for hours on the beach without seeing any other developed areas.