South Africa is a complicated country…

The sky is clear. The land is beautiful. The ocean is immense. Standing at the window looking out at this land feels a little magical…. And then you go down to breakfast and the white woman serving eggs at the hotel gives off more attitude the local cashier at the west end church’s chicken (think school daze). I am finding myself intensely aware of race and the function it plays – most prominently from a distance. I am also clearly aware that the people we interact with (for the most part) view us primarily as American and therefore somehow different and separate from the complicated racial dynamics.

Today was a series of little frustrations, which boil down to one clear fact - South Africa is a complicated country. It is a second world country with the info structure necessary to become an efficient powerful free trade center in the world, but lacks the foresight to make it happen. There were so many times I felt like hitting my head against the wall because there was no common problem solving skills applied to simple situations. For example, we drove for 15 minutes in a van with the interior lights on because a door was open. Before the van left the airport we said, “a door is open, it’s probably the truck with the luggage.” We left the airport and a few minutes into the trip one of the ladies offered to turn off the light. They spent the next five minutes looking for a light switch that did not exist, all the while Marcus and I are saying aloud, “The lights are on because a door is open. There is a light on the dashboard that indicates the door is open. It is probably the trunk door.” Five minutes later we pull over and Wilson, the driver, moves a piece of luggage to the front seat, closes the trunk door, and the lights go off.

There are customary stumbling blocks of being in a foreign place where you are unfamiliar with the many primary languages… for instance in the mall when I tried to make a purchase using my credit card and couldn’t quite capture initially the cashier’s question “straight or budget?” Marcus and I looked at each other twice and then both said, “credit.” There is also a cultural difference in the concept of “far” and “cold.”

“You don’t want to go there, it is very very far.”

“How far?”

“Oh maybe like 10, 15 minutes.”

Or

“It is freezing here today… days like this you just want to stay home.”

It is 51 degrees today. It is the dead of winter in South Africa, shortly after the monsoon season and everything is lush and green. It IS in fact chilly; I’ve worn a jacket all day.

The minor frustrations fall in the inconvenience of spoiled American modern conveniences. Perhaps it would be different if I were in a country that didn’t have the internet readily accessibly or a town with very few cabs, I would not find myself so frustrated. Port Elizabeth is a touristy city {once heavily industrial} that boasts (at least in the white sections of town we visited today) of top-notch restaurants, 5 star hotels, beautiful beaches, four mega malls, and hundreds of tours. We, along with ten other people, were at the taxi rank at the airport last night for almost hour waiting for a cab. Three different cab drivers called in for additional cabs to come to the airport, but none of showed for more than half an hour. While waiting we met Mike, an airline pilot, who was extremely kind and helped us find both a cab and a hotel closer to the city centre so we could maneuver Port Elizabeth more efficiently. He had his taxi driver lead our driver to the hotel, then stayed to make sure we were settled. I know he was at least as exhausted as we were after flying all night, but he stayed anyway and passed on his info in case we needed anything else in the city before he had to fly out again.

This morning we waited an hour for a taxi, after the concierge at the hotel called the cab service and assured us it would only be a few minutes. This time our driver, Adel, was at least pleasantly aware we had been waiting. We spent the rest of our day with Adel, calling him when we needed transport around the city, listening to him give the history of Port Elizabeth. Adel was very open about his experiences in South Africa, pre & post apartheid as the father of five. He once worked in the mining industry, but left because of the dangers due to a lack of regulations and standards. An American company he worked for began mining in South Africa in the early eighties and introduced for the first time the type of federal standards we have in the USA. Unfortunately the company ultimately divested from South Africa, Adel believes that if the company had stayed the course in South Africa the rest of the industry would have been forced to follow suit. Looking at the timeline, the company probably divested in the late eighties / early nineties, which fits the political pressures major companies were facing in the USA to financially divest in protest of apartheid.

As we drove down the coast of Port Elizabeth, Adel described the now resort filled section of town, as a once black owned township. “Once the white man came and saw it they moved all of the colored people to the end of town and built these. Now with our new government they are trying to give some of the land back to the original owners – but most of them have died off. They do not give it to the families… it is hard.”

Adel described Africa in terms of American television. “Johannesburg… is like New York from what I see on TV. Oh! Cape Town is like LA from what I can tell on American television and P.E. well I don’t know how to compare that… no show I know is like P.E.”

We were trying to catch the evening bus to Cape Town, but were lugging around all of our bags and wouldn’t be allowed to take them on the bus. We decided to drop our bags at our room in Grahamstown, where the South African National Arts Festival is being held, and then catch the 7:45 greyhound to Port Elizabeth. After securing an extra night at the Milner house in Grahamstown we called the festival to book transportation. Now Grahamstown is a little less than 100 miles from P.E. on well-developed roads. The festival transport staff told us to head to the airport and look for the drivers with NAF signs, tell them to bring us to Grahamstown, and we will fill the paperwork out when we got to the college. Adel takes us to the hotel to grab our bags and away we go.

Before we hopped out of Adel’s cab for the last time, he said, “you haven’t seen the colored section of town. I will take you there when you come back. If I traveled to different places I would want to see how the poorest and the richest lived.”

Inshallah, we will have the opportunity to meet back with Adel before we leave the eastern cape, because that cab ride to the black townships is one I need to take.