Saturday, May 6

Oh what a joy it was to go to bed last night for the first time since Monday night.  That seems a lifetime ago.  I awoke with a start this morning thinking that it was daylight and that I had slept in and missed my tour to Soweto.  The light was only the television that was left on when I fell asleep.  It was only 4:15 so I tried to go back to sleep but all I could think of was what camera equipment I was going to haul along.  Things would be so much simpler, not to mention lighter, if I only had one point and shoot camera!  This trip is SO photographically oriented and I have had so many difficulties of one sort or another that I am becoming paranoid with fears of camera (or mine) failure.  Nothing I can do about it of course.  Hopefully I will have some more interesting photos to add later today or early tomorrow.

Soweto

It is difficult to describe how I feel after this tour. 

It was, at the same time, very educational, depressing and thought provoking.  I need to read more and would have bought a few books if I had room to carry them.  To think that these things happened as recently as 1976 almost defies description until one realizes that similar things, minus the killing, are still happening to various degrees throughout Canada in regard to our Aboriginal People.  The similarities are so striking that the guide and I were able to speak the same language on virtually every topic.  The one other person, Charles, from Germany, was most often left out of the conversation and question and answer sessions.  Amazingly the guide, Hope, and I seemed also to share the same sense of humour and irony so we both had a very good time.  Because of my background I didn't feel nearly as ignorant, though I am of detail, as I expected to be.  The museum, where it portrays and preserves the 1976 protest, was so disturbing to me that I had to leave after seeing only half of it. 

The only criticism I have of the tour is that there weren't nearly enough photo opportunities to allow me to document a sense of Soweto.  We saw upper class areas, middle class areas and lower (poverty) areas but I got no photographs of any of them.  Soweto has a population of 3.5 million but is considered and treated as a suburb of Johannesburg with no local government powers of its own.  When I asked what the ratio of "blacks" to "whites" was Hope just laughed.  Virtually no "whites" live in Soweto...

On a much lighter note, the street market was fascinating and I would have purchased a number of things if I didn't have the ongoing luggage problem.  Hopefully I will find similar items after the safaris when I can get another suitcase.

After getting the photos loaded I went back to the shopping centre to see if I could resolve some of my camera problems and was amazed that I was able to solve the most important two of the three problems.  Please heaven may I now be good to go!

I asked Hope if the Lesedi Village was, as I expected, an entertainment presentation (as I saw in Australia) as opposed to an educational one.  He confirmed my thought.  It is apparently reasonably authentic but is designed to entertain as well as pass on a bit of culture.

Lesedi Village