Sick and chilly.

It’s been awhile since we’ve posted!

After Kruger, we were both absolutely exhausted, and Robyn had a bad case of the chills. We both got right back into the swing of things, teaching the art class, feeding the babies, etc. But neither of us were feeling well. By Saturday afternoon Robyn was wrapped up in a blanket on a couch and I wasn’t feeling much better!

On Sunday we took it easy before friends of ours came to pick us up and take us to Soweto in the late afternoon. We didn’t have much time there, but it was great to get a quick glimpse of Soweto.

We stopped quickly at Nelson Mandela’s house (where Winnie Mandela was put under house arrest and then evicted by the state while Nelson Mandela was on Robben Island) which has been turned into a museum. Unfortunately the museum was closed. The friends we were with said that up until about six months ago the gated museum wasn’t there and the house was basically open for the community. They told us that because SA is gearing up for FIFA 2010, everything is being cleaned up and commercialized.

Robyn and I are both steadily making our way through Nelson Mandela’s epic auto-biography “Long Walk to Freedom”, and it was incredible to see the places where the story takes place. It was incredible context in which to tour Soweto.

We then went to the Hector Peterson memorial. Peterson was the first young boy shot dead during the ‘76 Soweto Student Uprising when 20,000 students peacefully took to the streets on a march to protest the governments attempt to impose Afrikaans as the language of tutelage. The uprising turned into a bloody riot when the police opened fire without warning, and I was reading yesterday that it was more than a year before order was properly restored to Soweto.

After the Hector Peterson memorial, we went to eat at the world famous Wandie’s (http://www.wandies.co.za/). A restaurant famous for it’s distinctive ” Soweto African Soul Food”. It was delicious. It’s tradition that everyone who comes in signs or tapes a business card on the wall. There wasn’t much space left but we found a little corner and proceeded to scratch our names onto the wall with Robyn’s blue bic pen. (If only I’d had my sharpie on me!)

On Monday, both Robyn and the weather took a turn for the worse. The weather went from sunny and warm to overcast, raining and freezing cold. Robyn spent the day on the couch with chills, a sore throat, stomach pain and a cough.
In the afternoon, I mustered the energy to teach a voice lesson and go visit the babies. We’ve taken to calling them ” our beh-behs”, and it’s hard to go a day without cuddling and tickling them. By Tuesday, I’d joined Robyn on the couches. Neither of us moved, let alone left the house!

Thankfully, we’re both starting to feel better. This morning was the first time we actually got up and got dressed and left the house! We’re supposed to be shadowing a woman here while she visits a Sparrow ‘Grannies’ project in a nearby township this morning, so we’re just waiting in our chillly living room (yes we can see our breath when we breathe) for a call from her. The grannies project is an initiative to help out the grandmothers who have taken in their grandchildren after both of their parents have died, usually from AIDS. We don’t know much more than that but I’m sure we’ll have much to report.

We’re gearing up for our last few days here. Even with our extra week at Sparrow, our time here went by in the blink of an eye. It’s that funny simultaneous ” feels like we’ve been here for years” and ” like we just got here.”

Friday we are hopefully going to be helping with a day long food and blanket drop in one of the townships. Saturday, we take the teenage art class to two downtown galleries, the Johannesburg Art Gallery which has a broad range of works and the Standard Bank Gallery, a gallery that seeks to promote contemporary South African art. I am so excited for them to see both. It will be their first time in a gallery. Sunday we will hopefully hit up a market after church and then I’ll teach my last couple of voice lessons. And then Monday evening we will blubber in the nursery and the hospice for awhile as we say our goodbyes and then fly out.

We’re then headed to Europe to see some good friends before heading home at the end of June.

We can’t believe that six weeks of our adventure have already gone by!