0 Promotion to official party planner

Even though I still can’t really believe it, it’s almost Easter time, the weather is slowly changing to autumn and school holidays are beginning. For Stella, Louisa, Magnus and me that means that it’s time to travel again. Tomorrow we are starting to escape the momentarily rainy Joburg weather making our way to the north – but first some words to my work of the last days.

In the mornings Stella and me are still doing our normal work for Cotlands which means for the moment a lot of office work: no matter if it’s data capturing for incoming donations or sorting files we are slowly but surely becoming experts! But this week we also had some more interesting work to do. Cotlands is just launching a new “donate your birthday” campaign and we could help to set up a small advertising event. The campaign allows people in an easy online way on the Cotlands homepage to give their birthday over to the good cause and instead of birthday wishes they ask their friends for a certain donation for Cotlands. That’s why the theme for our advertising event was a children’s birthday party. We could help buying all the decoration, decorate the room with all the Cotlands-orange stuff and in the end we could take place in the “children’s party”. Invited were some press people, South African celebrities that are supporting Cotlands, some donors and staff members of course. “Donate your birthday” is going online on first of April, so hopefully it’s going to be a success!

But now to our travel plans… After already having seen many nice places in South Africa we are going to leave the country for the first time of our stay and go a little bit farer to the north to Botswana and Namibia. There are many stops on our schedule like the Okavango Delta, the Makgadikgadi  Pans, the Namib Desert, the Skeleton Coast and maybe one of the highlights: A short trip to the Victoria Falls at the boarders of Zimbabwe and Zambia. We are leaving tomorrow morning at six in the morning and come back in three weeks’ time. I hope that I will be able to upload some pictures in the meantime otherwise I will report back with a detailed travel review at the end of April!

0 Sweet 16 or Justin Bieber & the devil

This weekend was the first time that we saw a little bit more of Soweto. We already went there two times before to fetch Louisa, another volunteer that lives in Meadowlands, an eastern district, and yet had to realize that Soweto is quite different than expected. I have to admit that in my imagination Soweto always was a huge and disordered accumulation of shacks without a real infrastructure. I expected many people to live without running water or electricity, but all of these pictures were forgotten when we actually went to Soweto. Now I can assure you that most people are living in stone houses that are bigger than imagined, have access to electricity and water and the infrastructure is also very acceptable as there are shops and malls like everywhere else. I don’t really know how I came to that wrong picture I had of Soweto but maybe it’s the expression township that arouse those associations in my mind.

However when we wanted to fetch our friend this weekend we were directly invited to her cousins 16^th birthday party. Alongside the 21^st the 16^th birthday seems to be the biggest in the entire of the Tswana, a Bantu speaking Southern African people that our friend’s guest family belongs to. On Saturday we could already watch the preparations for the big party that should take place the next day. Two sheep should be slaughtered for it and there was a big ceremony all around it. Two traditional healers, who are called Sangomas, were present and performed rituals with the animals and the birthday girl. It‘s quite difficult to explain because we didn’t really understand what they were doing but see yourself:

The next day we went to the real birthday party. The whole family was there - and in South Africa that means at least about 40 people – a big and colourful tent was built up in the court, everyone was dressed very nicely and a delicious buffet was prepared. Of course the highlight was the freshly slaughtered sheep! But also the other food such as traditional chakalaka, boerewors and different salads tasted very good.

We also had to take a lot of pictures that day but Louisa had already told us about that predilection. In Soweto you normally don’t see any white persons - except some albinos maybe. That’s why everyone in the streets without exception greets you and often wants to talk to you or just touch you – and if it’s possible also take a photo to use it as the new whatsapp profile picture.

All in all we spent a very nice day in Soweto and it was very nice to experience some family life and get to know more of the Tswana culture because that’s something that we don’t really have since we are living in our project and not a family.

At Cotlands we have to work a lot with toys for the moment. There is a lot of stuff that has to be finished soon so we unfortunately don’t have a lot of time to work with the children for the moment and do a lot of less exciting work. But that will hopefully change again as soon as everything is done! At least today I had a very funny conversation during the little time that we worked with the children. I was helping some 3^rd grade girls with their homework when one of them suddenly wanted to talk about God and Satan. At first she just philosophized about them in general, but then she came to the really interesting point: celebrities and Satan! I don’t know how it came to her but she was convinced that Justin Bieber is praising the devil. When he was younger he wasn’t, but now he is and Hannah Montana is obsessed by Satan too.

It’s never too late to learn!