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.