We arrived in Cape Town!

Internet has been sketchy and none have my posts have worked, but we are inSouth Africa!
This is out breakfast, view in Somerset West.

South Africa or Bust!

It's almost four a.m. and what am  I doing up? I'm leaving for South Africa!  Our flight at 3:10  p.m. which means in twelve hours, we will in the air heading for Amsterdam, and then to Cape Town!  (Maybe I need a few more exclamation points there).
In case you're interested: the flight from Minneapolis to Amsterdam is eight hours. After a three-hour layover in Amsterdam, our flight to Cape Town is twelve more hours.

I've received quite a few messages in the last twenty-four hours from excited students. After all this time, all this reading, all this discussion...we are FINALLY GOING! 

All the prep time, all the hours Scott Fee and I sat together at the Coffee Hag or Wine Cafe, hammering out details, transportation, lodging, budget, proposals, plans, writing emails, answering the phone, getting paperwork done....it all comes down to today. We are truly going to South Africa.

A year ago in the spring, I was at Joe Tougas's 50th birthday party when Scott (Construction Management, MSU,M, who has traveled to South Africa about ten times) asked me if I would ever consider taking SCC students to South Africa. Four days later, we were in my dean's office, sketching out possibilities and asking permission to pursue this interdisciplinary trip. Chris Black-Hughes from MSU,M Social Work program joined in, and we are doing this collaboratively.

I've wanted to see South Africa since I read The Power of One  nearly twenty years ago.

There have been so many added responsibilities and a few surprises this week, that my grading did NOT get done on time. I'm done now, though. I just have to enter grades. Good grief. Finally. Then I'm headed to bed for a few hours. We'll take some photos at the airport. In nine hours!

Blogging about South Africa

I'm planning to blog our trip from this site...so stay tuned for pictures and updates on our trip to South Africa.

Big George Hincapie and South Africa to boot

Two weeks from TODAY we leave for South Africa. My stomach does funny things when I say that out loud. I am so excited. I'm not scared; it just makes me a little nervous to be responsible for a dozen people in a country I've never visited before.

After all we've studied this semester, I think we all feel it: we are just ready to BE THERE.

In the meantime, there are finals to write and grade, a few feet-high stacks of papers to grade, and I'd like to sqeeze in a bike ride here and there to stay sane.

Speaking of biking, my friend Danielle Mitchell is a sports medicine physician in Chattanooga, Tennessee (how many double letters can you get in one place? This even beats the Mississippi). The area is hosting a big pro bike race, and guess who showed up? My idol and yeah, okay, if I have a crush on a celebrity, it's on George Hincapie. So look what Danielle got for me.

Required Reading for Singletrack High: Chasing AllieCat

http://www.tennesseemtb.org/singletrack-high-premiere/

So....I'm hoping if we want kids to RIDE--which we DO--maybe we want kids to READ as well. Wouldn't everybody in this documentary love to read about mountain biking kids as well?

Chasing AllieCat!
http://www.fluxnow.com/product.php?ean=9780738721309
and
http://www.amazon.com/Chasing-AllieCat-Rebecca-Fjelland-Davis/dp/0738721301

In My Country

I previewed the Movie In My Country last night with Tom. I'll be showing it in class on Tuesday. I am now carrying the story around like guilt--like the pain of awareness.

It's well-done. It's powerful. It's based on the book (which I'm embarrassed that I haven't read yet, but it's top on my pile to read), Country of My Skull.

I'm happy about the movie selections we've watched in my Culture and History of South Africa class. The most powerful ones have blown us out of the water.

The three most powerful are:

Dry White Season
Cry Freedom
and now
In My Country

The first two show apartheid in all its reality. BOTH were released while apartheid was still the law. Cry Freedom is about Steve Biko.  
In My Country shows the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings and aftermath.
Juliette Binoche is spectacular (I have never seen her in anything that I didn't love. I think she's brilliant. First memory of her: Unbearable Lightness of Being), and Samuel L. Jackson is always powerful. Always.

If you haven't seen them, and you are the least bit interested, watch them.
Other movies we've watched, which are also powerful include
Invictus
and
Tsotsi
Both of these are also set in post-apartheid South Africa, the one concentrating on Nelson Mandela and his relationship with the South African rugby team The Springboks.
Tsotsi shows what poverty can do in the townships that endure as a legacy of apartheid. I should have put both of those in the most powerful category, too.

Still to watch are
Cry, the Beloved Country (James Earl Jones, Richard Harris...can't go wrong with that, unless we should have watched it earlier)
District 9 
(Did you know that it's based on District 6 in Cape Town?)
and
 Disgrace (Based on the book we're watching now, starring John Malkovich).

We're also acting out/conveying/telling South African Folk Tales, taken from the book Nelson Mandela's Favorite African Folk Tales.

Our reading list included:
The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay
Africans and Americans by Joseph Mbele
Kaffir Boy by Mark Mathabane
and
Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee

Other books I still need to read are
Country of My Skull (The Movie In My Country  is based on this book; I might substitute it for Disgrace  if I get to teach this class again)
BIKO 
Cry, My Beloved Country

And many, many more. But these are at the top of my list.

Why South Africa? Why does this country matter in our study of Humanities?

Bill Clinton summed it up well. He said this after Mandela's marriage at age 80, and on the occasion of Mandela's retirement from the South African Presidency:

"In every gnarly, knotted, distorted situation in the world where people are kept from becoming the best they can be, there is an apartheid of the heart. And if we really honor this stunning sacrifice of twenty-seven year, if we really rejoice in the infinite justice of seeing this man happily married in the autumn of his life, if we really are seeking some driven wisdom from the poser of his example, it will be to do whatever we can, however we can, wherever we can, to take the apartheid out of our own and others' hearts."