Student Bloggers

How many Americans can say that they have consumed a piece of sheep’s head at a township meat market? Not many. I, along with a group of American students, followed our tour guide through the plethora of meat merchant stalls. At first I was a bit freaked out about digesting the face of a sheep, locally known as “smiley.” I’m not going to lie; I could only eat it because the piece I ate did not resemble a face, a tongue, or an eyeball. The smiley tasted like the seasoning I used and felt rubbery. However, my tour guide from Gugulethu picked up the smiley and went to work on the head cavity. The old Angela could not have had this experience, but I knew it was time to overcome my American prejudices and live as South Africans do.

A little bit more information about my visit: on the days of March 12^th and March 13^th, I spent a significant amount of time in the township named Gugulethu. This township was established when black South Africans were forcibly removed from their homelands under the harsh apartheid regime in the 1960s. From what I observed and learned, these same individuals, who haven’t moved out, still inhabit the area in either tin shacks or more stable housing structures. The high concentration of abject poverty I saw in this one area was startling. There is nothing comparable to this in the states.

During my time in Gugulethu, our group visited an orphanage. Our tour guide told us that these children did not get many visitors and that our donations helped run the orphanage because the South African government does not provide adequate funding for each child. At the orphanage we had a chance to play with children of all ages. I wanted to interact with the children, but I couldn’t let myself. I spent most of my time in a trance, feeling vulnerable and somber, because of where we were and how these kids lived. A part of me knew that I didn’t have to play with the kids to feel close to them. These kids looked like they could have been my kin. Or maybe I had seen these kids on the streets of Detroit. But the type of poverty that these children lived in is unseen and unheard of in the United States to my knowledge. Thus my comparison isn’t justifiable.

In retrospect, visiting the orphanage had awakened the strongest emotions I have felt since I came here. I experienced waves of heartache. It is one thing to see the tin shacks while passing on the highway. It is another thing to walk through the lot of them to visit an orphanage. My trip to Gugulethu showed me how Cape Town is a small city with large economic gaps between race and socio-economic classes. The majority of white South Africans hold most of the economic wealth, while black Africans and coloureds are not so fortunate. Apartheid ended 22 years ago, but the economic disenfranchisement still reigns in Cape Town townships.