Back to basic

Hello everyone!

Here an update of our great adventure in South-Africa! We are writing to you from our small living room in the orphanage in the second largest township, Khayelitsha. We are still recovering from our culture shock, but first let’s go back to last Saturday. We started this day pretty early to go on route. Our tour guide, named Thandu, showed us all the beautiful highlights along the Cape Point Route. Among this route were highlights like Chapman’s Peak, Cape of Good Hope and last but not least the penguin reserve. The evening turned out into a really spontaneous visit to the soccer game Ajax Cape Town against Supersport United with

 our roomies. Unfortunately we are not sure what the score was, because we missed the first ten minutes. Due to this spontaneous action we had no time to eat, so we ordered pizza which resulted in the six biggest pizzas we have ever seen.

Sunday was the day that we visited a township for the first time. The name of the township in Hout Bay was Imizamo Yethu. During the tour we stopped by some local entrepreneurs who are trying to make a difference for their community. This was really impressive. In the afternoon we went to a local food market at the harbour of Hout Bay, where we did some surveys for our research. The weather this day was really good so we decided to take this chance to visit the Table 

Mountain. The view of this new world wonder was amazing. It made you feel very small. After this we went to the Waterfront for dinner with group C.

For the first time these days we could wake up a little bit later than normal. O

ur guide Johnny picked us up and we drove to our next stay: Khayelitsha.  We started with a tour from our guide Loyizo. He is one of the founders of Khayelitsha Travel. During this tour we visited the highlights of this place with stories which inspired us from two man who set up good established companies. The first guy wanted to make a change in the way people deal with food. He developed a kind of bread which is made of spinach. With this special recipe he is also making muffins and pizza. The other man once had a dream and made a job out of it. He makes flowers out of cans and sells them widespread. These are great examples of how to change your life with small things. We were touched by this stories and we want people to know what beautiful things are happening in this township. Another great project is the orphanage where we are staying for eight nights in total. When we first arrived here, we were a little bit in shock about their living conditions: no warm water, cockroaches and poor hygienic circumstances. We went to bed a little bit flabbergasted, but the next day we foun

d a way to deal with this and appreciate our standards even more.

Yesterday we experienced for the first time culture differences in the way of communication. Our plan was to spent the day in Khayelitsha, but Loyizo thought something different (African way of life in practise). So we needed to switch our plan and go to Cape Town instead. Besides this, it was a productive day which led to an interview and some surveys. When we came back, the children, living in the orphanage, did really take care of us. Every day they are making us breakfast and cook us dinner. We found out that we were the lucky ones with working toilets and a heater to make warm water. So after dinner we were already used to live the back to basic life and we did our laundry  in a washtub.  

And last but not least we had to shave our legs in here as well,
which was a funny thing to see. 

Today was a really heavy day. This morning we wouldn’t have thought this day ended at the place where we are now. In these three days more and more students became sick. This was for our teacher the limit and she made some phone calls to the 

organisation of the trip. Despite this we were able to do research in Cape Town. We were very proud with the outcome, namely 100 completed surveys. On the ride back to the orphanage we heard that we would spend the remaining nights elsewhere. This made us feel happy and sad at the same time because of all the effort the people did for us. For this reason we made a package for their fundraising and a donation to fix their car. We had the feeling that we had to do something in return. We never packed our stuff so quickly and left to go to our new accommodation in Cape Town.

Hope you enjoyed our new stories and we keep you posted!