Sorry friends,
It's been nearly two weeks since i last wrote something. Ive got a bunch of excuses that you probably don't care to hear but ill tell you anyways, because honestly I just like to whine. The internet at the office/house was down for the last two weeks. It was working ok, occasional hiccups but fast and consistent enough, and then wam! all of the sudden it stopped. It took us a while to believe it because it would come on for a few seconds every day but eventually we got mad enough to call the company. The guy showed up when we were out but luckily the realtor was there giving a tour and let him in. The only evidence of him being here is a bunch of electrical tape on one of the wires. They do this weird thing here where they splice the wire from an AC adapter into the internet wire from outside. What is being powered? I havent got the slightest.
But thats neither here nor there. I was talking about the reasons why Ive been a bad blogger. Besides not having internet, a hurdle I suppose I could have overcome, I have been exquisitely exhausted. I mean I passed out at like 8 the other night! Maybe its cause my coffee maker broke. Even though I didn't even have any coffee today I have lasted a good deal longer just because I know I have a working coffee maker in the other room.
So, as some of you may have picked on, the GRS house/office is on the auction block. Almost every day this week, when i pull up in the Jetta I'm met by a crowd white couples who have just finished or are just about to take a tour of my life and affix a price to my much loved home.
I dont think I ever told you about pedro the lizard. He was the former resident in the house. Used to spend most of his time in the bathroom. He wasn't but an inch long. Some people would say he didn't stand a chance. I always said he was good company during my lengthy baths. I have a guilty conscious though because It was me, his housemate, his protecter, his compadre, who took his life. One infamous night, while rinsing the soapy scum from the bathtub before bathing I clumsily turned the faucet on full blast and watched helplessly as my slimy little friend drifted down into the damp darkness. I still feel awful about the whole ordeal but nothings as bad as the bathtime confinement.
that was a bit of a tangent, sorry. So the other main reason I havent written is becuase Ive been dead tired. I thought i might be getting sick but i never really plunged in to the depths of real sickness. I havent been sick in quite a while. almost a year i reckon (knock knock knock). A coleague and new firnd if mine, Jessica just recovered from a pretty nasty stomach virus. Jess is a former GRS intern in Zambia who is back in Africa with a team of American Girls who are doing a cultural exchange girls' soccer promotion trip. These girls are doing a week long camp with a group of local teenage girls run by Grassroot Soccer this week. Jess is really cool and Im already sad she'll be leaving in a few days back to the states. Shes super sharp and funny even when shes not all there because of this bug.
These American girls who call themselves the DC Blast are mostly from in and around bethesda, maryland. THey are a pretty fun bunch and they have been great so far in the camp. THey have a blog called worlds united that you can get to on the washington post website. There are some cool pics and supposedly there is a recording of Titie, the GRS protege, telling her coaches story. Coach's story is about how HIV/AIDS has had an impact on the coach's life and how education has helped her deal with the tragedy of losing a loved on or seeing the stress on the community but youll see if you look up the blog. Titie is amazing. Im sure Ive said it before but she is one of the most positive, motivated and thoughtful people Ive ever met. Shes also a phenomenal soccer player. Her charisma and soccer skils have won her an opporunity to change her life in a BIG way. Tiffany Roberts, olympic gold metlaist, women's World Cup champion and head coach of the division 1 womens soccer program at Virginia Commonwealth university, is also traveling with the DC Blast Girls. After meeting Titie and seeing her on the soccer pitch she immediately offered her a full ride to VCU with a sports scholarship starting in the fall. Making this huge project happen has consumed most of my time in the last couple days. THe logistics of it are quite a challenge, especially because its so late. I wasn't at the camp at all today becuse I was the choffeur for tiffany, Jess and Titie as they tried to get together all the documentation and persuade Titie's family that it is the right choice. Forgive me lord for I have sinned. I have been an accomplice in the crime of Bran Drain. I think shell probably end up coming back after she gets her engineering degree but well see. a lot can happen in 3 years.
Tomorrow is the fourth of July. WOOOHOOO!! Weve got a plan for a braai (BBQ) for the american girls and the south africans. Weve been forced to have it in a shebeen or township bar because it gets dark and dangerous at nightfall around 5:30.
I hope it goes well and there arent tons of drunk old guys in the bar.
Last time I was there a bouncer had to remove one guy who kept on trying to hug Kourtney and I. Our partners, ubuntu, have taken it upon themselves to arrange the venue and the food so i dont know if we have the whole bar or what. We're gonna have smileys, boiled sheep's heads, hot dogs, hamburgers, and a American/South African flag cake, and sparklers too, I hope.

cape town by foot

I walked and ran the streets of cape town all day long, dusk till dawn. I didn't sleeep so well so when I woke up for the 5th time at 7:30 I justs threw on some shorts and hit the streets. Went by the company gardens (Dutch East Indies Company, that is) and through the narrow side streets, crowded with uniformed teenagers and up the slope towards table mountain. I didnt really have any direction until I saw a sign for Vredehoek, the neighborhood where Alan Drabkin grew up. He described to me in detail where his house was the week before I left but i didn't bring the scrap of paper where I jogged down the names. I decided to just explore until I found something that sounded famailiar and with some luck I ended up in front of his old house. Its a very nice neighborhood, tons of flowers to soften the brutal walls which characterize all white neighborhoods in this country. I cant think of the name of the flowers but they are the same ones I saw and loved in Israel. I took few petals back from one of the brilliant bushes in the weitzmann institute campus so I took a few petals from one of these bushes as well. Its not a bad tradition, I think; collecting petals from a certain type of flower (Its killing me that i cant think of the name!!) around the world.
This fella next to me( he owns the hostel) is saying its a protea and that it is exclusive to the western cape, meaning it couldn't possibly be the same type as those I saw in Israel and elsewhere but Im not sure I believe him. Nope, not the same flower. NOw I found a picture of them and hes calling it borgenvilia. Either way, I like em and I collect petals where ever I go.
SO I wanna go out and dance but my peoples are passed out upstairs. There are others in the hostel but they're way ahead of me if you know what I mean. Apparently they had been playing beirut all night. Yes, beirut has spread like the plague and has supplanted much better drinking games all of the world. Its worse than starbucks. THank god I havent seen any here hold on Im gonna knock on some wood. cape town, long street in particular hasnt been overrun by chain stores.
By the end of this weekend Im gonna be basically broke and will be forced to live like a pauper for the rest of the summer. Luckily I dont need to pay for much besides food and Ive got tons and tons of multivitamins (thanks ma) so I can basically eat bread with olive oil and be fine. Oranges are in season here and they are cheaper than dirt cheap. Were talking juicy delicious seedless oranges here. 5 Rand (~80 cents) for 25 of them. 25 big oranges!! Everything else is comparable in price to american supermarkets. oranges , bread, olive oil and multivitamins...sounds delicious!
Its hard not to spend money in a town like Cape Town because everything is cheap by American standards. I had a guy say to me at the market today, "Ill give you good price, just give me anything." Shocked at the bargaining strategy I asked him how much time he spent of the object in question and he says 2 weeks. I could have given him 30 rand for something thast took him 2 weeks to make! thats desperation! OK to be fair, he probably didn't spend two weeks carving the damn thing - the stone is quite soft - but even if he spent a quarter that amount of time, 30 Rand aint much. I ended up buyin a similar thing from another vendor for 20 more but it was worth it.
Im gonna take a tour of Robben Island, where Mandela was imprisoned, and climb table mountain tomorrow and Ive got a ton of partying to do before then, so I suppose I had better be takin off.
THanks to everyone who is still with me.
sharp, sharp

So with all my fee time Kourt and I decided to skip out to Cape Twn for the ling, long weekend. Hopefullyt he strike doesn't end tomorrow. Its been a lot of fun so for. I watched the Sundowns, the South African championns play Barcelona in a first ever type match. Some good fans in the place. Wee staying on Long street which apparenty is the place to be in Cape Town. Its like Nebury, Lansdowne, and all of the corrercial district compounded into one 1 kilo street. Ive got to wrap up this post short b/c they ae shutting down the comp. pictures to follow.
cheers

I haven't been all that busy this week because of the strikes which have been going on now for two weeks. Nurses, teachers and other public service workers have demanded a 12% increase in pay and the government has been stubborn. The strike has made everything go haywire; hospitals are staffed by the military and children wander the streets all day. Schools normally would be in session here because it wintertime. I suppose the summer break comes in january and february. Most of the work Grassroot Soccer does at the moment is through the schools in the townships so the strike has thrown off our schedule significantly. Were under pressure to hold graduations before the end of the second quarter on June 30th but Im not sure we'll be able to do it. We gather data at graduations including post-quiz data and number of graduates and attendees which we include in quarterly reports. These document and monitor the effectiveness of the programs and are important for getting donations. My boss and one of the founders of GRS, Kirk Friedrich, is on a plane back from Germany at this moment after meeting with FIFA and streetfootballworld, an umbrella organization that brings together organizations from around the world that use soccer as a social development tool. FIFA and streetfootballworld put on a tournament every four years in conjunction with the world cup for teams that represent different organisations from different areas and GRS, as one of the key members of the streetfootballworld network in Africa, is hoping to host this tournament in 2010. Im not sure I I already mentioned it but we are planning on building a compound in one of the townships, across the street from the Ubuntu Education Fund Headquarters, that will include a turf soccer pitch and a clubhouse. Once I get the green light, hopefully tomorrow morning at my meeting with Kirk, one of my jobs is to set this plan in motion. I would look for architects to make sketches and draw up a proposal to the municipality asking that the land, currently a dirt lot where kids play and people dump their garbage, be donated.
Its all very exciting.
Besides work, Ive been listening to a lot of Oliver Mtukudzi and Tupac (only god can judge me now) and reading the Brothers K. Im just at the beginnning now but so far it has made me laugh out loud more than any book I can remember.
I went out last night with Kourt to the waterfront, an area of PE with restaurants and dance bars, kind of near Barney's. One place, Tapas al Sol, had a good crowd and groovy music, at least for a while. At 1 am it changed from house remixed hip hop and 90s pop to american 70s classic rock, the kind of stuff you only want to hear when you are wasted. I wasn't so after making pretty valiant effort I was driven from the dancefloor by the lack of thumping base. THe place was pretty good. It had a truly mixed, though not at all representative, crowd, a rare thing in this very segregated town. Indians, who make up about 1% of the city's population probably made up a quarter of the crowd and their were very few black africans, mostly colored. Colored is the word for black/white mixed here and it took a while to get used to.
Took a nice run today in the park adjacent to the neighborhood where I stay. My neighborhood, in which every house has a 2 meter wall with spikes or electric fence on top and attack dogs behind the gate, sits on the edge of a significant cliff which constitutes one side of a beautiful canyon. The little river at the bottom cuts through the hilly landscape from a lake 40 K away right through downtown PE. It is flanked on either side and buffered from the city by dense lush park. There are beautiful flowers and groundhogs that live there and it is great for long runs. PEs got tons of park and is a great city to run in, before dark at least. I plan on taking quite a few so long as my feet cooperate.
SO long. Im gonna go call my father and wish him a happy father's day.

African Beeah

The most interesting experience so far has without a doubt been drinking african beeah and communing with the ancestors. What they call african beeah here is like no beer you have ever . Its not brown, it hasnt got any bubbles, its not even made with hops. I dont know what did go into it so all I can do for you is describe how it looked and tasted. It was in a 20 liter bucket before they divided into separate portions for the mothers and the fathers who then portion off some for the unmaried women and men. The stuff looked a little like a malted vanilla bean milkshake. It was a uneasy milky grey-purple off-white color with black speckles that could have been small seeds or bits of charcoal. I didn't really have time to make a careful inspection partially because I didn't want to be seen as suspicious and also, I must admit, because I just didn't want to know. It had an initial bite reminiscent of citrus. right after that came a sweet wheaty kind of wholesome taste and finally an aftertaste of burnt something-or-other. Im really curious to find out what was in it but Ive got a feeling its a secret reserved for the family elders. Apparently it is an ancient Bantu tradition that dates back to way before the US was even a sparkle in George Washington's eye. This was the first time anyone can remeber an "umlungu" (white person) being there, much less three, and everyone seemed a little excited about it.
The whole time in the back of my mind i was feeling a little like an intruder. I was half expecting one uncle or cousin to get half-cocked and cut me nasty glances but it never happened. All I got was kind words and smiles when words werent an option, repeatedly assuring me that I was welcome. The mothers were especially amused by having us in their midst though it seemed virtually none of them spoke a word of english. THey all wanted pictures with me and made me promise to print them and give them copies. They all found it especially amusing when I offered to help distribute the food. I was probably stepping all over time-honored gender roles but they got a good laugh out of a white man serving them. One sister dumped her gigantic one month old to Kourtney and he stayed with her the whole time.
I only got a partial translation of the speeches made by the grandfathers but the gyst of them was that they were celebrating the closeness of their family and of their community; indeed two representative members of the community were invited to the ceremony. They talked of the youth nowadays not respecting traditions and drinking their beer elsewhere, down the street in the pubs and so on (njalo-njalo in Xhosa). They also talked about how our presence was telling of how things are changing for the better. THere were other things that I missed or dont remember and all the while they addressed their speeches to the ancestors.
One grandfather, who I had met the day before when Siya was giving a tour of the different townships, was a real character. He was probably about 65, bald and barrelchested with a potbelly and a booming voice that reminded me of Jabba the Hut. He stretched out certain vowel syllabes and had a enourmous smile on all the time. He also didn't have any of the beeah and instead drank coca cola from his own 1 litre bottle. He was particularly overjoyed by my rudimentary Xhosa vocabulary and botched pronunciations. Xhosa pronunciations are a whole different story. It puts your tounge to work!
So I just realized that I haven't explained to you why I was here in the first place. Siya, my right hand man, has been working with GRS now for 4 months or so. He is an amazing character and I think I already said this but I was and am very glad that he is on my side. Hes got a lot of knowledge of the area and of the curiculum that I could not have done without. He has been around the same amount of time as everyone else but the difference in level of mastery of the curriculum between him and the vast majority of the other coaches is emormous. Titie is also well ahead of the pack and my bosses always comment on how she has potential to be a GRS country manager. She's not as remarkable a stage presence as Siya but she is more thoughtful and independant in many ways. Siys strengths, his charisma and hi uncanny ability to command attention and lead large groups are also his weaknesses. He has a tendancy to steal the show at the slightest hint of a loss of energy or direction. Im going on a complete tangent. Ill finish the story and ten talk about my difficulties playing to the coaches strengths.
Siya introduced me to his mother during the townships tour and she invited us over for the beer the next day. Siyas family is probably an exception in many ways and I don't believe that their unbridled hospitality is shared by everyone but It was a fun experience.
In the picture above, I was holding a tray of food getting ready to go distribute it when a sister unexpectadly took a spoonful of cabbage and stuffed it in my mouth. She held it there for about 10 seconds while Siya figured out how to use my camera so, as you can imagine everybody was just kind of staning around laughing at how rediculous we looked. fun times.

There is so much to tell that is already happened. I hate playing catch-up but some of has been really amazing and I feel I can skip it.
Im the sole driver of the company car, a pretty nice VW jetta that we loving refer to as baby blue. Its just like a jetta in the states except the steering wheel is on the wrong, the right side. Drivng here was somethig I had to get used to really quick. At first ths thought keeps jumping into your mind screaming "what are you doing! Youre on the wrong side of the road and were gonna die!!" wide rights and tight lefts, and no left on red. I managed to adapt pretty quickly but my manual technique is a bit rusty after a semester of not driving one at all. I started teaching the other intern how to drive today because sometimes you just want to be driven places. It will also help a lot when she can drive so that we dont have to do everything together all the time. Honestly I really dont like driving all that much anyways.
Some of you may have noticed a hairy faced Simon Eisenburg inthe photo in the last post. Thats right he came out to visit me for a few days and we pretty much had a blast. He came to two Grassroot Soccer events and he said he had fun. He got a pretty good sense of the stuff Ill be doing out here for the next few months. Besides that we explored Port Elizabeth nightlife, which seems pretty bland. We checked out the Boardwalk, which basically has nothing to do with a board walk. Its not actually on the beach. Its a couple hundred meters back and its like a fun park of some sort. An adult disneyland complete with a casino, a handful of fastfood places, a couple bars and the kind of tourist shops that you might see in an airport or the Africa section of an american fun park. Inside the boardwalk you really could and might as well be in the united states or any other country for that matter. I mean its nice but I dont think Ill be going back.
That night was kind of a disaster from the start. First we went this bar called the the slurping owl or the chirping owl or something. Everyone was an Afrikaner and virtually everyone was over 50. Just imagine a little pub full of large people dancing to an unremarkable band with an electronic drum set. We drank our beers and fled quickly. The only girl under 30 was a waitress and she was too busy to give me decent direcions to a younger spot, but I think she was interested.
The next night we checked out the bar thats in all the tourist books. It is an English pub
called Barney's aand its supposed to be a great place. It had great potential. THere were people of all ages and skin colors but, alas, the same band from the night before at the chirping owl was playing. They did sound a little better tonight because the crowd was a little more energetic but they weren't good enough to get me off my bar stool. I was content with watching these two women just tear up the dance floor. One was a mixed woman who appeared to have an old white sugardaddy that she would drag around the floor everyonce in a whil. The other was a striking tall skin-and-bones indian girl. In all seriousness I think they may have been the two best dancers Ive ever seen. They could go on spinning eachother round for 5 minute stretches without breaking, and I didn't get the sense that they had ever even met before.
Hopefully next time there will be a different band.
thats all for now. I still havent talked about my most interesting cultural experience so far, where the picture in the first post is from.
thanks for tuning in.

Molo friends and family.
I wanted to make this blog so I could keep everyone caught up with what I'm doing this summer in Port Elizabeth, South Africa without having to write a million emails. This way I can just record what I do and what happens to me and then talk about it further with anyone who is interested. It's my first blog so we'll see how it goes.
So I arrived last sunday at eight pm local time (we're six hours ahead here) after an epic 50 hours of travel. My voyage began on the familiar chinatown from Boston to NYC. As we inched through Brooklyn I realized we were getting further and further from my eventual destination, the studio of my old friends and alternate parents, Lucy Fradkin and Arthur Simms. I got a funny idea and told the girl sitting next to me, who was clearly from Brooklyn "I wonder if he'll let us out here". On an other bus line it would never have worked but the Fung Wah, for all its safety and sanitary shortcomings, has great drivers who are down for whatever. So I cut about an hour off my trip and dropped my enormous duffle bag of in their studio while I took care of some business in Manhattan. Actually I was passing in the last essay from the semester that had ended a week before but thats another story.
So Lucy and Arthur dropped me at JFK at 5:30 and I boarded the plane that would carry me across the Atlantic to Paris. I had a whole row to myself, which was nice. After 6 boring hours in the Paris Airport spent reading and walking from overpriced tourist shop to rip-off boutique, I finally settlesd on a way to spend some of the Euros that Lucy had given me as a going away present. She said "you'll feel cool because you won't have to convert your money to get anything in Paris". She was right. I felt pretty cool flipping through my three types of currency, Dollars, Euros and South African Rand to pay for some truffles. My boss at Rockefeller had given me 20 Rand, about 3 dollars, as a farewell gift.
The flight was long and sleepless. Everyone else, it seemed was on France time and had no trouble falling asleep for the entire ride. For me however it was mid-afternnoon. The movies were pretty terrible but interesting as my last exposure to american culture. I watched Shooter with Mark Wahlburg and half of Music and Lyrics before I shut it off. I'm generally not picky when It comes to movies. In fact, the worse a movie is, the more I must see it through to the end. In this case though I simply couldnt stand an aging Hugh Grant opposite the cliche quirky...whatever.
I had way too many hours in the Jo'burg airport that I used them to start to learn Xhosa words that I thought might come in handy. The waitress in the cafe found it really amusing that this Stetson-wearing american was trying to learn her language. My pitiful first tries at pronouncing the click syllables k, x, and q got some laughs from her and some strange looks from the family sitting at the next table. That's been something that I have noticed consistantly since I arrived. Most Xhosas really appreciate when a white makes an effort to learn about their culture and language because so few white South africans ever do. Most of them seemingly live in a completely different universe that virtually never comes in contact with blacks outside shopping malls and petrol stations. Since arriving I have seen a grand total of 1 white fluent in Xhosa and he was a police officer.
The last leg of my journey, an hour and a half from Jo'burg to Port Elizabeth passed uneventfully as I finished my book, George Orwell's 1984, and I reached my final destination, the Friendly city, Port Elizabeth in the Nelson Mandela District on the beatiful Algoa Bay.
At that point I didn't know what I would be doing ant more than any of you know. All I knew was that they told me to be ready to take on a lot of responsibility very quickly. It turns out that within three days of me arriving, the two guys who had built the program up from scratch over the last six months would be gone leaving me in charge of training the other intern and running the entire Grassroot soccer program in PE. THere is another guy, Kirk Friedrich, who lives in the area and is a resource to me. He deals mainly with the high profile partners like FIFA and travels a lot. He was one of the original founders of Grassroot Soccer back in 2002. He lives 60 kilometers away in Jeffrey's Bay, a world famous surf town to the west of PE. He has the surfer mentality but also seems to work very hard. Overall, he has a realy admirable attitude towards life and possesses the ability to turn off work stress as soon as he shuts his laptop.
I have to get to bed. More to come. and thanks for tuning in.