Last Day

Tomorrow is our last day in South Africa. After a couple of meetings with the Provincial parliament in the morning, we are headed to the airport in the afternoon.

Today's meetings were at the National Parliament and were fairly interesting. We met with several different party leaders and had lunch with the Deputy Mayor of Cape Town. They were having a speaker on the American Presidential election. He didn't add anything new to what we already knew about the election, however I would have liked to be able to stay for questions. Unfortunately, we had to leave to get back to an appointment.

I'm sure tomorrow will be a very similar day. And then the long flights home. I'm hoping to sleep quite a while on the plane from Johannesburg to Amsterdam. We'll see how that goes.

I'm guessing I won't have time to post again before I get home. Most of the rest of my week will be running somewhere or another.

Cape Town

We made the successfully journey from Durban to Cape Town. We are having a very nice weekend in Cape Town. The city is absolutely gorgeous and we’ve had a pretty relaxed schedule thus far. There is a great waterfront area not too far from the hotel and we’ve spent a lot of time there. We were not able to go to Robben Island because the weather was too bad and we were not able to take the cable trolley up Table Mountain because it is under maintenance. However, we have found other activities to fill in the time.

Yesterday we went to Long Street and shopped at a flea market. In the evening we took a drive up the coast and ate at Hout Bay. Today we drove up the coast again, over the mountain and visited a winery. We start back again with meetings at Parliament on Monday.

You can definitely see the end of the trip coming. We were talking about the long day ahead on Tuesday/Wednesday. That is the day we are traveling back to the States. I’m wishing we had a couple more days in South Africa. I would have really liked one more day in Durban and probably one more in Cape Town. But I can’t complain, it has been a great trip so far.

I do have to say that getting Internet access is harder in South Africa than I thought and it is much more expensive than most places. This is due to the isolation of South Africa, ie it is not on the way to anywhere as far as the Internet is concerned. However, I have heard that they are in the process of laying some new fiber optic cable to South Africa and they will be much more connected in the future. That doesn't help me much.

Durban

Well it doesn’t seem like I have been in Durban very long and we are already headed to Cape Town tomorrow. I am very impressed with Durban. It is a beautiful city right on the ocean with a great sky line in the background. It’s a bit humid for my taste, but since it is winter here, I’m still pretty happy with the weather. They city has 3.5 million residents and is the third largest city in South Africa. It has the largest sea port in Africa.

When we arrived we had a presentation to attend. It was not the best and we skipped out a little early to get settled into the hotel. We are staying at a hotel and casino, so it is pretty nice. The beach is right next door, but unfortunately, we don’t have any time built into our schedule to spend time on the beach. Instead, we have the weekend in Cape Town to do fun stuff.

Today was another really good day on the trip. We traveled to Pietermatrinsburg, the capital of the Province of KwaZulu Natal. We met with the speaker of the Parliament. We had a pretty frank discussion with him about the problems in his province and the politics of his province. It was nice to have that honesty, as politicians are usually fairly hesitant to say too much in meetings with us. I can’t blame them, I would be the same way, especially when the media is there.

From the Parliament building, we traveled to a medical clinic at Soihizo. The take care of AIDS orphans and try to do outreach to the community. We got to mingle and play with the kinds and they danced for us. It was wonderful to see the kids/teenagers perform traditional Zulu dances for us.

After about an hour, we walked through part of the village near the medical station. I don’t have words for what we say. Or if I did, I would take me a long time to think about what we saw and how to describe it. Although it was not all that remote from traveling to an Indian reservation, but with an African twist. The poverty level was quite high and most of the people living around there are subsistence farmers. The houses are very small and several people live in them. There are not roads, running water, and there is an outhouse at each house.

Beyond that, I just don’t have the worlds to describe the experience at this point. It was definitely a highlight of the trip and something I would never have gotten to do elsewhere. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity. The landscape was very beautiful and the walk was interesting.

One the way home and throughout the evening, we all commented on the impact that the trip through the village had on all of us. There wasn’t anyone that wasn’t moved by what we saw and the poverty they live in.

It will be a long time before I can forget that afternoon.

Tomorrow we visit an AIDS clinic, meet with the City Council, and travel to Cape Town. I may not have access to the Internet tomorrow also.

A Really Great Day

Today we headed out to the City of Mogale (pronounced Moe-hall-ee) for a meeting with several members of the City Council. They have 64 members of the city council, so we met with about 20. Many of the members were from the young ranks of the council.

We had a presentation on local government that did a wonderful job of explaining how local government works in South Africa. There were some similarities and some differences. I would say they have some advantages and we have some advantages. I don’t know that one system is better than the other, just different. Just like the City of Billings, they have several wishes that their provisional government would work better with them similar to our wish for the state government to pass laws that would benefit the city.

After our meeting, we toured city hall and the cities museum. Then we headed out to the Marepang to visit the Cradle of Humankind museum ADD LINK. Marepang means to “revisit the footsteps of your ancestors” in the African dialect that is prevalent in the region. Once the formal meeting was over, we got to visit and socialize with the young elected leaders from the Mogale city council. We had lunch with them and toured the museum with them.

That was the real highlight of the day. Getting to spend time with people like us and trying to visit, compare and contrast, ask questions, and really bond with leaders that are a reflection of our group in South Africa. There was a great dialog and exchange of ideas and the highlight of the day was getting to spend the day with a peer group from South Africa. I felt like a real connection was made and I got a real sense of South Africa from this group. I had a really great time all day discussing a vast range of issues.

Tomorrow we are at the Constitutional Court and then we fly to Durban. I’m not sure what the situation will be in Durban, so I’m not exactly sure when I’ll post next. Hopefully tomorrow, but it may be the next day.

Cheetah

We had a great day of meetings and exploration of South Africa. The day started at IDASA a non-profit group that is dedicated to promoting democracy. They started during the negotiations to end apartheid in South Africa and have now grown to include work not only in South Africa, but also in neighboring countries. They have a number of great programs that deal with the problems of a young democracy.

We had an interesting discussion about democracy and education. One of their speakers had noted that education is not all that integral to democracy. Of course one of the members of our delegation started to ask questions about that theory, as most of us Americans assumed that education would be at the heart of democracy. After all, the stereotype in America is that it is mostly educated people that are involved in civic activities.

He stated their research had shown in South Africa, that it was primarily the poor, uneducated people that voted and that the educated people tend not to vote. He noted that education wasn’t required for democracy, just the willingness to be involved and educated about the process. What I drew from that showed the difference in age of our democracies. In South Africa, democracy is only 14 years old, in America, well over 200 years old. Perhaps how we see being in involved in government has a lot to do with their brief and our long history in that type of government. Anyway, it made for an intriguing and thought provoking discussion.

We got a great overview of the structure of government in South Africa and had some insight into the FIFA World Cup I had mentioned last time. Not only does South Africa see the World Cup as a chance to show off to the world, but the government is also using the World Cup as an economic stimulus plan for the country. The South African government runs a pretty good surplus and they thought this was a good way to inject some much needed government dollars into the economy. While they have been shy about doing that for ongoing entitlement dollars, they felt that putting money in the economy for material and construction of the soccer stadiums would be a good, short term, one-time infusion of money into the economy with out creating government programs that will have to be funded long into the future.

We had an absolutely great talk about Zimbabwe and what is going on in that country. If you have been following it, I have because I was coming to South Africa, we got some great insight into the history of the current conflict, an overview of the players involved, and an update on what is going in the present. If you haven’t been following, I probably can’t summarize well and it’s a little too late in the evening for me to try. Most everyone in the group found that to be the highlight of the day.

Our last speaker at IDASA talked to us about his program for civic leadership. South Africa and other emerging democracies have had trouble with leadership in civil society and out side the government. What tends to happen is that the people that were the leaders and organizers of the protests and opposition to the government tend to move into the government, once democracy takes hold. This leaves a void of leadership in community organizations, trade unions, churches, and many other places. They are working on a program to try to motivate members of society to become leaders in those groups.

After lunch, we headed out to the De Wildt Cheetah preserve. They have many different animals they take care of and breed in captivity for release into the wild. It was a great little tour through their place. We got to see cheetahs, wild dogs, hyenas, impala, ostrich, and ngala. It was a great little trip and it felt like a mini-safari.

Dinner was a traditional South African Boer meal. I thought I was going to have the bobotie, but settled for a springbok stew that was just wonderful. I had a taste of the bobotie and hope to get to order a meal of my own soon. It is a favorite in South Africa, so I’m sure I’ll have a chance again. When push came to shove, I did have to have the springbok stew and I wasn’t disappointed.

Tomorrow is a meeting with a city council and a trip to the Cradle of Mankind.

Springbok

Our first full day in South Africa was a nice introduction to the country. We all met in the lobby at 8 AM to head to breakfast. We had breakfast at this great little bakery, not all that different from something you might find in the States. It is located in one of the massive malls in South Africa. The malls here are huge and usually there are two or three right next to each other. They certainly are as big as any mall in a large American city and some are much larger.

We found an ATM and a grocery store and we stocked up on everything from water to SIM cards for cell phones. Then it was off to the Apartheid museum .

The museum is a great place to get a better feel for what apartheid was, how it came about and how it ended. It was great to have the book I mentioned in the earlier post to set the stage for the museum. I have to be honest and say I still can’t get my mind around apartheid. It seems surreal and, while I know it happened, I have trouble believing something so horrible could take place. It is something I have had to read about and go to a museum to even being to imagine what it must have been like. Words really do fail me when I try to describe how I’m ingesting the information about apartheid. I’m sure that baseline will be with me throughout the trip.

Another item I found interesting at the museum was the display on Johannesburg. It grew up as a mining town and I could see some similarities with Butte. They started mining Gold in Johannesburg in 1887 and nine years later the city was responsible for producing 27% of the worlds gold. This brought both black and white mine workers to the city in incredible numbers and the city grew extremely quickly. Mining is still big business in South Africa.

We took off for lunch at another mall in Soweto . Just driving to the mall you got a sense of the townships in and around Johannesburg. This was another one of these massive malls they have here. After lunch we drove around Soweto to have a closer look at the township. You could get an even better sense of the ghetto that existed before and how it is changing. I’ve a couple of people say that can’t believe how much the place has changed in just a few years. There were some very nice homes in Soweto and there were some not so great homes.

They are building a new soccer stadium in Soweto as part of their effort to host the 2010 FIFA World Soccer Championships . There are currently building 9 different stadiums throughout South Africa. A lot of people are worried they won’t be ready in time for the championship and are comparing it to the Athens Olympics. Which means it will be close, but they will pull it off and be ready. South Africa sees the coming World Cup similarly to how the Chinese see the Olympics. It is there chance to show off to the world how well their country is doing.

Dinner was a great restaurant in Mellville. It was on a great street with a number of restaurants and a nice walking district.

I ordered the Springbok. It is a South Africa animal that would be similar to an antelope. The meal was delicious. The springbok was slow roasted and I found it to be a nice cross between antelope and venison. A couple of others in the group ordered ostrich. I tried a bite and it was also very good. I’m looking forward to ordering ostrich at some point in the near future.

Tomorrow we visit a think tank and then on to the Cheetah preserve.

A Long Day

I wasn’t able to get on the computer yesterday or the day before because it was such a long day that all ran together. We had some good meetings in DC and got a nice base layer of information about South Africa. However, I couldn’t stop thinking that while this was great, I wasn’t going to have a real feel for the place till we arrived.

We headed out to Dulles Airport in the early afternoon. We were well early for the flight, but we needed to eat lunch and one of the members of our delegation was flying out on an earlier flight. It was a good chance for the group to spend some more time getting to know each other.

The flight to Amsterdam left about 5:30 PM and we chased the sun around the Earth to the Netherlands. It did get dark for a few hours on the plane, but the sun we peaking up before you knew it. We arrived in Amsterdam at 7:30 AM the next day. In actual Billings time that was around 11:30 PM, my usual bed time. We had some breakfast in a nice Irish Pub in the airport and then waited to board the flight to Johannesburg. There were lots of people going to Jo-burg and, for some unknown reason, we had to go through a separate security line.

I’ve had a good book to read while I was on the plane. It is “Kaffir” and it is a memoir of a gentleman that grew up under apartheid. It is hard to believe how bad the conditions were during that time and the book was a great primer on the visit we would later make to the museum on apartheid.

Let me just say that before I got on the plane to Jo-burg, my butt was pretty numb. I’m pretty sure I left my butt somewhere over Africa, because I could not feel it when I got off the plane. I was planning on not sleeping so that I would go to sleep when we finally arrived. But I was doing the head bobs of sleep and couldn’t stop myself from going to sleep on the plane. It turned out to be the best thing. I was still tired when we got here, had a good nights sleep and I haven’t felt any ill effects of jet lag.

I probably slept the first half of the flight. I did get a chance to get up and walk around when we were flying over the Sahara Desert. It was really great to look out and view the desert from up high. Since we were headed to the South Hemisphere and winter, it did get dark pretty early on the flight. I think it was dark by 6 PM. When we did land, so did the Air France flight and it took forever to get through passport control. One of our delegates didn’t have a bag arrive, so it took quite some time to get out of the airport.

We arrived at a great hotel and it took quite a while to check in. Most everything we do takes quite a while, but that is just group dynamics.

Unfortunately, I haven’t had a chance to get on the Internet until now. I’m hoping that now that we are here, I will have much better access to the Internet. Sunday was spent at the Apartheid Museum and touring parts of Soweto. I will update that shortly.

The First Day

Things got off to a very early start this morning as I left for the airport about 5 AM. Things went pretty smooth on the flight to Minneapolis. When I got there, my flight to DC was delayed 30 minutes and then we had to sit on the runway for another 30 minutes as it was raining in Minneapolis and things were backed up a little bit. All in all, for a Northwest flight, it went pretty well. I'm not a huge fan of Northwest Airlines. They do OK, but I would rather fly other airlines if I had a chance. This time around however, the Northwest flight is the one that worked best for me to get to DC.

I jumped on the METRO after picking up my bag and took it from the airport to the Farragut West stop. There were two guys sitting by me that had hats that pertained to Montana. One guy had his University of Montana hat on and another had a Ted's Montana Grill hat. I'm guessing most of you know the University of Montana, but for those of you that don't now, Ted's Montana Grill was stated by Ted Turner as a way for him to serve the buffalo that he raises in Montana and elsewhere. You can check out more on Ted's Montana Grill by clicking on that link.

One interesting tidbit about Ted is that through Turner Enterprises, he owns 15 ranches in Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and South Dakota. Totaling 1,910,000 acres (7,700 km²), his US land-holdings make Turner the largest individual landowner in North America.

I thought it was a neat little coincidence that there were two people sporting hats with Montana references on my METRO ride. It's a smaller world than you think.

Most to the METRO ride is underground, so you don't get to see much of the surrounding area. But I think the METRO is a great way to get around out here, and always use it when I'm in DC. When we did go past the stop at Arlington Cemetery you did see the typical summer DC tourists. There are tired, hot, and sweaty from the DC summer. Having lived here for the summer, it is a scene I remember well. It was not overwhelmingly hot in DC (about 90, pretty close to back home), but is always that humidity that gets folks like me from the arid west. And you can definitely see it on the tourists.

One thing I'm quite happy about is that it will be winter in South Africa. The forecast is for 50 to 65 degrees when I'm there and that suits me just fine.

Once I reached my final destination, I somehow managed to come out of the METRO in the wrong place, even though I took extra time to make sure I didn't. It was only a block extra to the hotel, and I have a nice little room here at Club Quarters. It is just south of Farragut Square, a nice little park with a statue of Admiral David Farragut.

Check in at the hotel was done by using an electronic kiosk. I like using stuff like that, but it was the first time I had check into a hotel using just a machine. We had our little welcome packet waiting and I ironed my clothes for tomorrow. I don't have the best view in the world, just the construction of the building next to me. Before you know it, it was time for dinner.

The group boarded the bus for a nice, quiet dinner/get-to-know-you evening at a restaurant that was otherwise closed. We ate up stairs, family style. The food was wonderful, good Italian with pasta, eggplant, and flank steak. We had one guest from South Africa, so the conversation was quite good between meeting people and hearing from her about South Africa.

After dinner we came back to the hotel. I needed to take a walk an since we are only a few block for the White House I decided I would take a jaunt around the west end of the National Mall. I always loving going down there to look at the monuments and walk among the memorials. My pictures of the evenings are here.

Made it back to the hotel around 11 PM DC time and 8 PM Billings time. I should be going to sleep cause we have an early start tomorrow. We are visiting the ACYPL headquarters for an orientation, the Department of State and their South Africa Desk, and the Embassy of South Africa. Should be lots of fun. Then we get on a plane for Amsterdam. With a packed day, I probably wont be able to write until very late tomorrow evening. Or early in Amsterdam as it where.

Conference Call

Today in the afternoon we had a conference call with the group to speak with a gentleman who was on the last ACYPL delegation to South Africa. It was a good information session about what to expect, how to pack, what to look for, and other tidbits of information about the trip.

The ACYPL is still waiting on a hard and fast itinerary, but I do know that we will be going to Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durbin, and Cape Town.

I do know that I’m going with 5 other people and a trip coordinator. The group includes a member of the Mississippi House of Representatives, a city councilman from Columbus, OH, a city council woman from, New York City, a county commission member from Washtenaw, MI, and a member of the Texas Commission on the Arts.

A Little Light Reading

In one of the discussions I had about going to South Africa a gentleman mentioned that I should read “The Covenant” by James Michener. I love a good book and was curious about this particular one. I checked online to see if the Parmly Billings Library had a copy, and sure enough, there was a copy I could check out. So I headed down to the library to check out the book.

I found it on the shelf and was a bit surprised at the size. It is a couple of inches thick and comes in just under 880 pages. I should have known as much considering that Michener was the author, but I didn’t put two and two together until I saw the book on the shelf. At that point, I decided I would get through as much of the book as possible before I left. I briefly considered bringing the book with me on the plane, but I decided I didn’t want to have to carry the book with me on the trip. Much better to take a few small paperbacks.

Since I have started reading the book, I have really enjoyed it. It is a novelized account of the history of South Africa. It is my kind of history book, mixing a good story with the history of the place. It really puts a human face on the history, but does a great job of covering how South Africa became a country. I’m only about half way through and I won’t make it through the whole book before I leave. However, I think it will be fun to come back to the book after spending time in the country.

Here is the link to the book on Amazon

Here is the link to the book in Wikipedia

Welcome

For those of you that didn't follow my blog when I visited Europe last summer I wanted to add a quick note about what I'm trying to accomplish.

While I'm away, I try to post each day about what is happening on my trip. So there are a few posts on the blog now, and they will continue to grow as the trip continues. Some days, there isn't anything new due to my inability to get to a computer, but I do my best.

There may not be much at the moment, but each day the blog will grow a little. And I think i will be able to have some pictures from this trip.

For a good flavor of what to expect, click on the link on the right for my European Blog.

European Fellows

As many of you know, I traveled to Europe last summer as part of the Marshall Memorial Fellowship. I was very honored to be a part of that trip and had a wonderful cultural experience. So when I got a call this spring to host a group of fellows coming from Europe to America, I jumped at the chance to host them.

Their stay in Billings is the part of their trip that exposes them to rural America. It is called the “Farm Stay” and they are supposed to spend a couple of days on a farm in rural America. However, they will be visiting over the 4^th of July and I didn’t think staying on the farm would be all that interesting over the 4^th. Most of the farmers/ranchers I know come into town to celebrate the 4^th, so why send a group out when they would just be coming back to town.

Instead I have been working to get them a place to stay in Red Lodge over the 4^th. Red Lodge is the quintessential small town America 4^th of July celebration. It has a rodeo, parade, and the town gets all dolled up for the celebration. I think it will be a fine slice of Americana.

I have several other ideas planned for their stay. I hope it works out OK. This is my first try at hosting a group, so we’ll see how it goes. I’m sure there will be a few bugs, but nothing we can’t get through.

Update: The trip through Montana with the European Fellows went quite well. We had a great time and they seemed to really enjoy Montana.

Here is a link to the Billings Gazette Story about the Fellows

Here is the link to their itinerary while in Billings