First Week

After moving in we had more orientations. I went on two separate tours that gave me a taste of what I had seen while driving to the hotel after getting off my plane. There are two worlds in Cape Town, one you see in brochures for five star vacations and one you see in brochures for international service projects. They coexist here, and are often only separated by a road.
In one of my first emails home I wrote:
Just a brief snapshot: We're driving on our shuttle bus from the airport in Cape Town to our hotel and we're on a four lane high way (we're on the left side of the road because it's all backwards here)...to our right we can see a nice suburb of Cape Town with nice little back yards...on the left are what can only be called "piles" of shacks. It looks like people just made squares of out tin and put them right up against each other. Row after row of disorganized row of shacks of all different colors of metal. It's insane. And it's oh so normal. I kept thinking, this doesn't make sense. How does this happen this way. It's literally separated by the highway. Nothing else. We'll learn much more about it tomorrow but that's what I can gather so far.
We first took what was called the “Peninsula Tour,” where we took a nice coach bus around the city and up the coast to places like the Cape of Good Hope. Along the way our tour guide had extensive real estate knowledge and was able to tell us the prices of all the homes. They went for several million each. They are owned by white South Africans.
The next day I went on a tour for a charity organization that took me through some townships. People there are using plastic bags for roves and selling old clothes off of tarps in the street. These are black South Africans. The “coloured” or lighter skinned South Africans live in smaller settlements, either in the city or outside it. The gap was/is so vast I can’t even wrap my head around it. My accommodations here in Cape Town lie in the middle, and there is an assumption that I carry around that much more because I am an American.