A Quiet Night
Friday, July 21 |
| Tonight (Friday) Spatz and his wife are staying at an elegant hotel in Capetown which offered him the night as a present. They are also having dinner at the Five Flies, a South African spin-off of the original Amsterdam restaurant. I had a delightful dinner with daughter Nora, her husband Erhardt, and their almost year-old son Rudy. Now I am back on the farm, watching South African television and enjoying the quiet company of five cats (latest count) and three dogs. I am not alone -- son Victor lives in a house next door and other employees live in various buildings around the compound. And I am secure. There is an electronic gate which closes at 6:00 (operable with a beeper after that) and a security guard who monitors the valley, dropping by several times during the night. |
| My plans for the rest of the visit are developing. I have been offered a small apartment in Capetown next week which will give me a chance to explore on my own when Spatz and Vera leave for a marketing tour of the "Eastern Cape," -- the area around Durban. I hope to go to the school in Guguletu later next week or the following, and then on August 4th, I will rejoin Nora and Erhardt and fly from Capetown to Hudspruit on the edge of Kruger National Park. They have invited me to join them for a quick tour of the park (daughter Maria, sister to Nora will be joining us) and then we will join both Spatz and Vera and Erhardt's parents at a timeshare just outside the park. I am looking forward to the whole adventure. |
| Erhardt has two brothers. One is currently working for the UN in Kosovo, helping those who were stripped of their papers to reestablish their identities. his other brother, Gustav, works for one of the local English papers, the Cape Times, and wants to write a story about my project at the township school. We'll have to see how that works out next week. On Monday I will visit a school in Stellenbosch -- it is the school that Nora and Maria attended, and has many of the traditions of an English private school, but is in fact state run. |
| This morning Vera and a friend took me to see a small entrepeneurial factory in an area known as the Strand. The woman who runs it started out in the catering business and has published several cookbooks. Now she has a business which packages and markets a collection of spices, a selection of jarred condiments (like chutneys) and a new line of microwavable individual meals. The cuisine is called Cape Malay, but the emphasis, Cass insists, is on African cuisine, which evolved from the interaction of the Dutch, Begali, Malay and African peoples of the cape. |
| The building we saw was remarkably large with three massive freezers. The largest was at least 300 square feet. The building used to be a meat packing plant. While the operation was very modern in terms of the technology and the cleanliness, both Vera and I were discouraged by the slow pace of the work being done by hand (specifically wrapping Spring Rolls). Based on what we saw, we thought the business would have a difficult time making a profit, or if it made a profit, paying the workers a decent wage, the productivity level was just not high enough. Of course, I couldn't help comparing it with what I have seen in Malaysia and China -- a totally different work ethic. |
| Back on the farm we had a delightful day with Rudi who is just learning to walk (ten full steps today) but who has discovered that he can walk endlessly holding on to a little wooden wagon which he pushes all around the yard, chasing after the roosters who, at least at this point, are no match for him even with the wagon. He particularly delights in announcing his whereabouts by making vrmmm vrmmmm sounds. It is amazing to think how is just one day his world of independencehas widened from the indoor floors to include the entire barnyard. |
