week 2

It's Sunday morning, and we--some of us--just woke up with a note on the door from Tom about bringing food for brunch from Olympia Cafe down the street, which will definitely make for a great last day of an incredibly full week.

To begin, we already wrote about the blessing ceremony on Tuesday (definitely check out the artaidsart link on Patrick's post below), which overall was a more beautiful, enlightening, and 'successful'--in terms of starting to connect the community to the project and ourselves--experience than I think we even expected. The following day involved the enormously helpful 3-hour conversation with Carin Smutts, whose new double-height studio studio space on the top floor of her house (with a view of the ocean) happens to be about the size of our site, making it a great example of the kind of large, simple but beautiful space we could create in our own project. Following this talk with Thursday's "field trip" to the Migrant Worker Museum and community center (where Wired Women work) in Lwadle, Guga S'Thebe, and the Philani Nutrition Center and Weaving Studio in Khayelitsha, we definitely heightened our understanding of community centers and how artisans can interact with and use the centers. Finally, we again spent Friday with the women at the MonkeyBiz clinic in Cape Town, this time working with translators (our Xhosa still needs a little work, though I've totally mastered one of the clicks) to record the women's stories--of how their histories, their families, their hopes for South Africa, their legacies for future generations.

Every day I have been completely blown away by people here. The women and other members of the community have embraced us in so many ways, without many of the reservations we might have suspected them to have, and in speaking with mothers, wives, grandparents and other family members we repeatedly see simply a great strength, a perspective on life with realities, priorities, so different from our own but so much more grounded in basic connections to family and to place. People love their homes and the land in a way I think often runs less deep for Americans. Everywhere is an opportunity for meaningful conversations about life here, the state of the country and its future, spoken about very differently by our guide Loyiso or the owner of an art gallery on Church Street or a cab driver. All of this for me has begun to give greater gravity to our project and to our hopes of creating a proud but safe building full of opportunities for its users. I worry more about the disappointment if we are not able to physically accomplish much during our time here, but at the same time I am thrilled with the development of the design as we get more input from community and professionals, and I have no doubt that we have plenty of work to continue moving forward with as the construction realities of every aspect and detail of the building come better into focus.

Gearing up for another productive week...Gena arrived Friday night, so for four full days the entire group is here. We started yesterday with a meeting with the contractor who finished part of Blue on Blue for Tom (the first of three contractor meetings in the next few days), but after that...day off. Penguins on Boulder Beach! I wanted to go swimming with them, but rather than catch pneumonia we opted for a good lunch and a couple beers back in Kalk Bay instead. Which led to getting ready with a bottle of wine back at Blue on Blue...which led to the 31st floor of the ABSA building in Cape Town...which was a great night of chilling out and dancing above the city.