South Africa Update
I’m two days through the trip and things here are in full swing. I spent yesterday briefing staff here at the USAID Mission and, with the help of a couple key people, taking stock of what needs to be accomplished during the rest of my time here. It’s a good list, but reasonable and all should be accomplished by the time I leave next Monday.
It turns out that someone I worked with in Cairo is now on staff here in Pretoria. Yesterday evening, I accepted an invited to dinner with her family. It was one of the most unusual “developing country†experiences I have had; not for its strangeness, but for its total normalcy.
The occasion for dinner was the 8th birthday of her daughter, and she was invited to pick the restaurant we’d go to. Thankfully, she didn’t subject us all to the fine Scottish cuisine of MacDonald’s. Instead we went to Mugg and Bean, a South African chain, located in one of the nicer malls in Pretoria. Re-read that sentence, and remember that I’m in a developing country. I know I totally forgot where I was for the couple hours we were sitting there and I was enjoying all the comforts of home! One of the most telling sites I saw in the mall was a pet store – such a thing wouldn’t exist in many countries I’ve visited where people can’t feed their families, much less afford to have pets, much less afford to buy the cat(s) a big scratching post/condo.
It is well acknowledged that there are parts of South Africa that are very developed and are much more European than African. The economic centers of Johannesburg, Pretoria, Cape Town and Durban sound like they rival any first-world cities. I’m told that if you get out into the provinces, though, the magnitude of the disparity is striking. That’s where the development comes in.
My meetings today were with a number of project teams; I was able to meet with and brief Chiefs of Party in the morning, and then spent the second half of the morning and the afternoon training members of their staff. All went well, and as usual I’m bushed.
I had the opportunity at lunch to sit and speak with a couple of USAID staff whom I have come to know in the short time I’m here. We talked about a lot of things (of course), and eventually the conversation got around to the changes here in the last decade. It has only been about 10 years since the end of apartheid, but in that time it sounds like a great mental shift has already been made and the society is becoming more and more multi-cultural. This has been somewhat of a melting pot for a long time, with Oriental, African and European influences. According to one of my friends, though, the change in attitude from one generation to the next (parents to kids) is going a long way to erasing some, but admittedly not all, color boundaries. Paradise this isn’t, in most of the urban areas black & white couples are accepted, and many office colleagues have become blind to the color of their coworkers. Would that we were so in the U.S.
So I think I’m going to try to go to Cape Town for the weekend. Several people have told me that the flights are inexpensive, the city is gorgeous, and that I’ve got to go! I’d best start exploring options tonight and tomorrow, because the week is already half done.