Day 9 - September 7, 2006

Today we are having class at the Groote Schuur Hospital, which is where the Health Sciences/Medical School of UCT is located. We boarded the bus at 8am, which took us on a short drive to the hospital. We went to the Gender, Health and Justice Unit of UCT for a morning session. Dee Smythe, the acting director of the centre, along with several other scholars gave us a shocking report of the status of violence against women in South Africa. The country has the highest incidence of reported rape in the world, with estimates of over a quarter million raped each year. A majority of the rape is in connection with gangs in townships and other areas, often used as a retaliatory gesture. How horrific it is that the public has to internalize and live in constant fear and trauma!

After this introductory session, we had several activists from the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) come and talk about their work with the organization. TAC is the most successful HIV/AIDS organization in the country. They are currently asking for the Health Minister to be sacked and for ARVs (anti-retroviral drugs) to be provided in prisons. Then, we were joined by a forensic pathologist and a human rights lawyer to talk about law reform concerning sexual offences, specifically trying to shoot down a law that basically criminalizes people with HIV+ status.

After this intense and incredibly powerful morning session, we broke for lunch. A large group of us went to a nearby shopping center and had italian food at a sit-down restaurant. The food was decent, and I had a hot milo (like horlicks) drink too. At 1pm, we returned to the centre and boarded a bus with Dee Smythe that would take us to Ocean View. Ocean View is a coloured township, in the suburbs of Cape Town down the peninsula past Simonstown. Dee was an outsider, who as an expert on law reform, joined a steering committee to increase housing in the area.

Ocean View was one of the nicer townships I've seen, which isn't saying much. About a quarter of the residents are Muslim, with the rest being coloured Christians. Members of the steering committee greeted us in their multi-purpose hall, and then gave us a brief history of Ocean View. Most of the residents used to live in Simonstown, but the Group Area Act in apartheid times relocated all non-whites to the Ocean View area. Surprisingly, many of the steering committee members viewed their lives as being better during apartheid and that they faced reverse racism, as before they were not white-enough, and now they are not black-enough. Another issue was that when we mentioned that we saw the Premier yesterday, the committee members seemed to think that because the Premier was Muslim, he did not represent them. Apparently, there was a division between the coloured Muslim community and the coloured Christian community. We did not realize that even within certain racial groups, there were all these divisions.

Next, we divided into 3 groups, and the committee members gave us a tour of the township. Some areas were a lot nicer than others. One area called Mountain View was the worst, with small shacks and a communal bathroom. The whole area smelled like sewage. Other parts had individual bathrooms, but many of the homes were in disarray and crumbling. The steering committee was in talks with the mayor of Cape Town to rebuild many of the homes and to receive more land to build homes, as many families are on waiting lists to move into their own homes.

Ocean View was one of the safest townships, but they still had a major crime problem. The biggest adversary, however, was drugs, and parents were deeply concerned that their children were wasting away and resorting to crime because of drugs, namely tik (methamphetamines). Due to the vast unemployment in the area, it seemed like their children did not have a future, so finding jobs was a big worry. But another great part about seeing the township was visiting the children and noticing the innocence in their eyes, as they ran to give us hugs and walk with us through their homes. We took some pictures with them and the steering committee, and then we headed back to Rondebosch.

When we arrived, the vast differences between where we were staying and the townships struck us deeply. The caterer had already arrived before we got there, so dinner was almost ready for us whwn we returned. We had dinner and then had a lengthy reflection period, where we discussed all the intensity of the day's events. Then, people dispersed. Some watched Sex and the City, while others played on the internet before heading to bed.