Midterm Week

Molweni,

It has been an over week since my last post. Since then we had gone to see President Zuma speak at Parliament. We sat in on a session at Parliament where representatives were able to ask the president questions. It was interesting to see how the session was run, but nothing was really got accomplished. Typical bureaucrat stuff. Following the session at Parliament, we went to a book launch party for Manuel Castells. The Social Sciences Citation Index, ranks Manuel Castells as the world’s fifth most-cited social sciences scholar, and the foremost-cited communications scholar. Many people compare him to being as important as Karl Marx. Angela, one of the women who runs the program is close friends, so we had the opportunity to talk to him. His speech was amazing and it was cool to talk to him.

The next day I was at Equal Education all day. We had our second march for school libraries, this time it was in Khayelitsha. It was a great success and we had tons of people in attendance. There were probably about 500 people marching. Which is small compared to what the march on the 22nd of September. At the end of march we went to a town hall where we had lectures talk about the importance of libraries and why we need them. So the night was overall successful. Friday there was not much happening and we stayed around the house. On Saturday we went down to Long Street and hung out around there. Before we went to Long Street we gave Ronel her birthday present, which was a cake and Eva's friend came in from home on Saturday and we all met him on Sunday. On Sunday we celebrated Ronel's birthday by going to Mzoli's. We had meat and listened to music for a couple hours. It was pretty fun, but it was an experience trying to order and pick up the meat on our own. You have to pay for the meat by the weight and you have have to give the cooks a little extra if you want your food ready in less than 2 hours.

On Monday I spent the majority of the day packing up stuff for the move at Equal Education. We finally moved out of our very small office. The office that we used to be in was extremely small was about 30ft by 8ft and we have about 12 people working in there. It was so crowded, but now we moved into a larger set of offices. We now have about 4 offices spread out through an apartment complex. The offices are nice, but we do not have internet or telephone lines hooked up yet. In the long run it will be advantageous, but at the moment it is a bit of a pain.

Tuesday at Equal Education we ran a bunch of errands had a Youth Meeting where we showed the Dangerous Minds to the "Equalizers" (youth group members). I didn't get to stay though because I had to make it back for class. Unfortunately class was canceled, but this gave me time to prepare for my exam in my Social Research Methods. Wednesday was especially interesting because this was supposed to be the day of the march. The press still wanted us to do something on that day becausee it was the 33rd anniversary of the march in Cape Town by Coloured students in solidarity with those in Black students in the Soweto Uprising. As a result the whole office went to Cape Town and petitioned and handed out fliers for the campaign. It was a success considering that we handed out all of our fliers and filled up all of the petitions. We had a group of our Equalizers in attendance and Die Burger (an Afrikaans newspaper) took pictures and interviewed some of the staff.

Thursday I went into the office for only a short time, because without the internet there was not much I could do. My two bosses were also not in that day so I went home early. That night we went to the ballet to see Giselle. It was well done and I actually understood a fair amount of what was going on, but ballets aren't really my thing. I came back and worked on my Social Research Methods paper that was do on Friday. I stayed up with Alice, Emily, and Brianna until about 2AM working on the paper, but we all could have finished much earlier. There were some distractions when we all tried to learn how to do the worm.

I got done with it and was able to relax on Friday before we took off for Spring Break. The week was pretty hectic, but we got everything done. I was ready for a much needed break.

Sharp-Sharp. (cool, alright, goodbye in South African slang)

Pat