long days and nights with the joburg boys

Sometimes its easier to throw your toys and walk against the tide. I had two of my Jozi boys surprise me and hit Slaapstad this weekend. Good to see them. Unfortunately their surprise tactics required that I pick them up at the airport at 23:00 Friday night. Hard to keep things quite if you gotta get the surprisee to get your sorry asseses at the airport midway through his Friday night.....

And it had been a long Friday starting with a team building afternoon that saw circles ran around my still faltering soccer skills. That venue was an old bowling club with bowls green converted to rough pitch and club house to tae kwondo gym. Bizarre. But fun. One skyward shot vaulted the razor fence between pitch and Greenpoint Virgin and very nearly bounced neatly into the open benz convertible cruising by. I'd have loved that.

Not to be out done four other CT venues played their part before we made the airport:

1. Dodgy Kloof bar for jobdowners with Becca sporting her new shoulder scar and Pete pointing out local characters, including John Cleese lookalikes and men with parrots. Hello Polly parrots.

2. Great family pizza restaurant for supper w extras from a Hugh Grant movie and Good Will Hunting; and James swearing excitedly at the call from
the airport two feet away from the 5 year old with her crayons and
paper and the death staring from her mom. Oops.

3. The flash cocktail bar where my shorts and slops where frowned upon in Nigerian.

4. Then Walmer Estate Estate to prep sleeping quarters. Got the notting hill extra to pump the air mattress while I sorted myself out.

Then airport and Joburgers.

Was so good to have those shared history's to banter about and introduce to my local mates. Fun all in all. Had two hours sleep before my soccer tournament in the sun in Athlone but fun. Except the bit where the Big Guy wanted to call his mom at 04:30. Don't ask. I think his mom was as surprised as we were. I've not seen a grown man throw toys like that. Ever.

The baking in Athlone went well and included a run out to Khayelitsha to show our big wigs around. Three months in and I know my way around quite nicely. Could stop and braai Nyama and scoff pap on the sidewalk. Nice to be feeling comfortable.

I'll give this town its summer days. Blazing sun and the darkest green on the mountain as you drive in from the flats. Umi broke through Kloofnek around 15:00 and then drifted to a parking spot half way up the mountain.

You can hear the laughter and humming energy from Clifton 4 from 200m back up the cliff, well before you can see it. Its also so good to have faces I know now, to bump into crowds. From the Hoff directing the 18 year olds to save lives, to the crowds of yuppies under shade. Nice to slowly have a crew building.

Wrapped up with a swim around sunset watching yachts bob from ocean level and I shower and a chat in the Clifton Surf club.

Very cool. The week before I'd lounged with leftest campest afr. crowds and loved it and met a cool jhb couple who'd gotten the cold shoulder at a wedding. Definitely not joburg but not mars either. I like it. And this banter is unlocking some work flow I hope....

guns, arms and heartache...

This morning I realised this blogs gone a wondering...it's supposed to be a about places and instead its about head spaces. On my coffee table here in Slaap Stad, I didn't have one in Joburg, lies a copy of the Design Indaba Mag. In it are 10 pages of Jozi worship. I loved it. I nearly cried. Perhaps I will share some with you.

At the same time I'm loving Sleep Town. It's the combined spinning of new work and new places that make it a little hard to settle but that's what I came here looking for. A space for thoughts and perspective, and those are here in spades too.

For my head there's the realization that even as the city and orgs like mine scramble to make things better we're losing the battle, nothing new. Only now I'm starting to get my head back around the bigger picture...

Here's a quote that's fitting: (It's from a paper by a CT resident about theories of change from a cool as hell community development resource centre)

“My eyes already touch the sunny hill,
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has its inner light, even from a distance.

and changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are;
a gesture waves us on, answering our own wave...
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.”
Rainer Maria Rilke

Dude.

There's heartache but its of the longing that I like. The kind that tugs you forward. Before I puke there's been development of another kind.
My.Fat.Ass.

I've been lugging it to the rough gym in our office block. Yesterday's 90 minute storm looked like this:

1. Wedged into the little change room between Wesley Snipes, senior and junior, I lace up. Looking hard.

2. I punish the cross trainer thing its setting on stupid high for twenty minutes sweating like Sly in the forest while trying to casually watch Super Sport three. Sports fishing in Limpopo some place. Three huge over weight men, one skinny presenter/poplap and a dam of terrified fish. Not entertaining.

3. Crawl across to the treadmill. Casually key in my weight. 90. The
program. Random Pain. The speed. Blade Runner. And hit it for 20
minutes. The first 10 minutes of incline shifting and mat pounding flew
by cause I was trying to outrun the girl next to me. Turns out she was
a guy.

4. Free weights. There's me in my Rwandan soccer shirt nestled between the four biggest francophone Africans on the PLANET. I powered, strained, swore through exercises with dumbbells that made them chuckle while they threw around weights heavier than me. See 3. Messy.

2 more months of this and I'll be Jean Claude Van Stupid. But younger. And lank more witty and intellectual like...

one skewed world

Turns out beer in hand I've trapped all sorts of unsuspecting party goers into stunned submission with too intense convo's about our twisted little world. Just this week victims, though they loved it, included a British engineer doing a masters in power Eskom style, a Zimbo theatre type in the country for a week, a retail mogul turned fashionista and the teller at ABSA, poor bastard.....

Parties are the BEST freaken place to design grand world take overs...we all bitch like hell at them, spew forth grand points of view, berate politicians. Perhaps what
our little democracy needs is a giant cocktail party, long islands on tap. We could all talk, debate, argue and discuss and then scattered around could be flip charts, little video cameras and tape recorders to capture it all.

My party fodder of choice at the moment sprouts forth from an awesome little South African economics book called 'It doesn't have to be like this'. The auntie who wrote it is since departed but, damn, her economics have CHANGED MY WORLD! Margaret Legum, look her up four five six, she's rock and roll.

For so long we've all known that the world's a mess. Somehow its totally normal that the same place that makes billionaires leaves thousands hungry. And I'm not talking communism, I like capitalism. I like being able to sit in flash bars, wear good jeans and play with my 2gig, 5 meg camera phone...well, before it got liberated...

But I'm talking about a few little known facts that are so damn simple but just never occurred to me. Where do the millions come from for example. Most of them come from thin air, made up in debt trades and speculation. Millions of Dollars shunted around the world hardly ever buying anything real, never really creating jobs, so handfuls of people can be millionaires. I will explain more later but this is just a taster.

Fact 1:
Banks create money. Not the government. Less then 20% of the money in our country is made by the gov, actually printed. The rest is electronic and created by banks.

A bank only has to actually have 25% of what it lends in real cash. So for example I put R 5000 cash into my ABSA credit card the other day. ABSA got R 5000 more to invest and play with for absolutely free. When they approved my credit card with R 5000, they didn't go and lend me money they had. They just took a risk, they created my R 5000 out of thin air, and one month later I replace the void with real money, for Jam.
Think about it. Millions of Rands EVERY month that the bank just get for free to play with, to pour into capital markets and 'make' more money out of.

In super simple terms that's what's causing the crisis at the moment...banks 'created' money out of nothing and now as people panic and run on their investments the money just isn't there. The banks fold. And to keep the system stable governments have to bail them out. Wait till you hear where all the US' trillions actually come from, you'll be terrified. Most of it comes from poor countries, reall hard cash sucked up by banks and trade agreements and agribusiness, skimming off every country in the world to feed the debt monster that is the US.

I have more to say but just so you know. This is the stuff that's filling my little head.

Of mountains, Mbeki's and cell phones....

True signs of impending doom are failed cell phone connections on the top of table mountain.

I lugged myself up plaateklip gorge with a 3 ton hang over and 3 year old child on my back to summit grand table mountain around midday on Saturday. It was beautiful with the little chatterbox, daughter of a mate, entertaining fellow climbers all the way up.

The night before I'd been skilfully relieved of my cell phone and wallet mid photo pose and now was trying unsuccesfully to talk to my dad about the beauty of this god awful city viewed from a distance. He was having none of it, talking instead only about impending political doom and how the very fact that our phones kept losing themselves was proof of fools running things. Interesting it was.

Now from those humble attempts at an entertaining weekend I'm back in the office trying to summon a plan to develop the most kick as soccer for development centre ever...fun. Now I'm off to play soccer while my ugly mug banters with Lucas and the furry mascot on the box. Interesting times these.

Testing my bloggability...

beaches as big as rugby fields...

slaapstad's good and evil

I'm filled with snot. Again. What is it about this town? I think every disease infested snot inducing bug gets dragged through Cape Town. Something to do with ocean currents and the lack of ozone....

I've just spent two weeks risking life an limb with malaria and yellow fever and god knows what else and not a scratch. Home for two days and I'm leaking on my mouse pad and sneezing traffic. Fuck. Sorry mom. But its an expresive release of some sort.

On the better side dinner partied it up last night on an 8th floor penthouse a work colleague put to good use to say farewell to another work mate. Poor bastard's heading back to the states for 5 years of med school in his bid to save the world. All these Amercans come to save us. Quite encouraging actually.

I also recommitted myself to reducing the boep. Good news is from my place I can get to a beuatiful mountain path and now its actually still light past three in the afternoon so I can hit it after work. Bad news is its three k's straight freaken up to get onto the path and then the path itself is another 3 k's up. Damn. I must look like I'm running through treacle, though coming down I get to stretch my legs and look a little more athletic in case anyone is actually paying attention to my panting ass...

Bizarely I also tore past a 'bergie making a fire on Tuesday eve and stopped for a chat. Guess where he's from? Tanzania. No kidding. Back to work then.

Bullets from East Africa

Good blogging likes bullets, like good bad news african news stories....here are my Tanzanian Top Ten in no particular order of time or importance:

1. Diving off the pier at high tide with local kids in Stone Town.
2. Getting stung to pieces by jellies while playing 'chicken' with more local kids too far out to sea.
3. Sunset ferry crossing in Dar with 25 cars, 300 people, 14 chickens and 5 life jackets.
4. Oceans of Baobabs.
5. Poms living 'in village'. Now that's a gap year.
6. Ugali (pap), Safi (lekker), Mambo (howzit), poa (sharp), asante (thank you).
7. Zanzibari locals excited to meet a South African filled with stories of their eviction from the 'Europe of Africa'. One guy told me proudly of his happy days in ‘Woodstocki’ and ‘Hullbra’
8. Robert and Sam, my Dar peers and proud as hell of their city and people
9. White beaches broader than rugby pitches
10. And this quote from an ancient Swahili inscription of a drum reserved for leaders as an insignia of power:

"Your action is a reflection of your leadership. So call all the people together, including those who behave differently, for the wise gathers all and satisfies them"

A whole other mountain....

Hasty Tasty. Its a little Indian style fastfood place much like the roti shops in the Oriental Plaza in Joburg except this ones tucked under a coke sign at the edge of a strip of concrete shops along the main road in Iringa, Tanzania. The town's bizzare straddling an impressive mountain range bang in the middle of Tanzania. Founded by German missionaries 100 years ago its a cool mountain top town with great personality.

Tonight sitting in Hasty Tasty we were joined by a texan missionary family that's lived in Tanzania for ten years...across from us, and the place only had four tables, sat a german missionary family, 3 white blonde little girls and their folks...been here for 17 years....I've never met a misionary before today.

The road up to Iringa snakes through some of the most beautiful little valleys I've seen before. Strips of it felt just like the lowveld and so felt like home, others where oceans of Boababs. It felt like a world inverted, like being underground and if you flipped the world over the trees stood tall as red woods. I've also never seen bush as 'alive' as those boababs, each its own shape. 'Like odd interpretive dancers', said the american I'm working with.

The road also ran through a nature reserve, got hooted at by trucks while we tried to see an elephant cow and her calf on the road side. Wonderful. Wonderful. And great people doing great things. 'Safi'...'Lekker'....

the space between...

The space between the tower and the mountain...between this post and the last one...its also the title of Dave Matthews song. Of course it is.

Haven't written since the attacks because as it spread to Cape Town I got a little twisted by it, it made my stuff too melodramatic. It sucked.

But I'm back! First up was the getting down. The drive is testimony to South African ingenuity because it is a planet on it’s on this own this place. I’ve not been here long but I’ll tell you that much. The N1 South to Cape Town may just as well be a highway to the moon. Stuff NASA, it SAMRA that impresses me. Heaven alone knows how they got the highway in here, or the voortrekkers got those ossewaens out.

It cost me about 2k to switch universes. That’s 3 tanks of petrol, 1 Nando’s pita, 1 wimpy burger (at 2am), and 17 packets of enerjellies. I LOVE enerjellies. I was meant to sleep in Kimberly but I couldn’t even find the big hole let alone a decent place to sleep so I kept driving.

I slept trucker style under the dark, star pierced karoo sky for two hours instead of forking out for a farm bed and tiger oats…sorry mom.

The beauty of that decision was a badly creaked neck, a spectacular sunrise in the hex river valley and a traffic jam at ratanga junction at 8 in the morning.

I drove into town, smelling bad and looking worse, found my new housemate who I’d first found on the internet, picked up my keys and arrived home. “Hello Cape Town” I said from my new little deck with a harbour view one way and a mountain view the other.

I’ve been out on that deck a few times since. Gotten very wet all but once, and in summer I’m putting in a monster plastic pool and getting wet properly. Yay! Joburg’s still home but so far CT will do pig, it’ll do. More to come. (I'll spare you the gory details of three hours of RSG in the northern cape...except to say that Radio Plays rock, and they reminded me of my ouma.)

Storms under the tower: Your Gold or your Blood

We're always under storm clouds in this city of gold, sometimes thunderous and beautiful and often murderous and frightful. I was given some advice to write shorter blogs more often and this was meant to be it. An angry outburst with a weak punch landing here like thunder shakes my flat windows but changes little.

I'm sick to my stomach, and angry. A cheap easy emotion. Mobs of people swept across streets and terrified, and hurt and murdered this weekend. Angry mobs. Some in the name of national 'rights' and others through pure criminal hate. I watched about six people die in slow motion last night in 'Mr Brooks', a serial killer flick. I flinched and felt ill with each death and the pleasure the murderers took. Sick. This morning I walked past newspaper vendors and tried desperately not to see the front page image of a man on his knees, burnt alive, still alive, being extinguished by a policeman. Sick.

They say we are almost all capable of it, of cruelty and murder. The right moment in blind anger, more scarily only three days of the right environment and even in cool calculated ways we could kill. Or standby and let someone kill. According to the US psychology professor that charged the US Army with complicity in the cases against soldiers that tortured Iraqi prisoners, less than 10% of us would stand up to it, would behave the way we like to believe.

So where's that environment coming from? We are all complicit, our world is skewed to create it. Of 18 million children in SA 11 million live in homes that earn less then 2500 rand a month. Stephen Pinker, another psychologist, shows that levels of violence in a society are more strongly linked to levels of inequality than to levels of poverty. Our happiness is linked to what we believe we should have, not what we do have. Those mobs killing foreigners are angry, those criminals killing old woman in their houses are angry. They believe that they do not have because the foreigners do, because the old lady did and they hate enough to kill. There are millions living in a world of nothing with a permanent window to a world of plenty and few doors to get there.

What we saw this weekend, and the murders we see every weekend, make me angry, and sick. But not blind. We, South Africa, the world, are building these environments. I cannot forgive those that murder, it is still a choice, but we must all find a way to stop creating breeding grounds for them, and for the mobs. I can't forgive us either. It is hard, we are all angry. We must work to fix it...or it will murder us too.