Bipolar Cape Town (Fri 06/12)

Today was back in the office for me. It’s ok, I wasn’t that disappointed. As exciting as yesterday was, I was exhausted after running around Cape Town from 8:30-2:30. I spent the day rewriting an article about girls getting abducted and being forced into marriages with men 50+years older than them who also tend to HIV. (Article is here http://www.tac.org.za/community/node/2611) I learned a lot from the article. At first I wasn’t too excited about the fact that I would be doing a lot of editing during my internship, but I’m quickly discovering that reading up on things that TAC has done or researched is the best way for me to learn things. Reading=Learning, since when? Joke.

So I finally had it…my first really unsettling experience on the streets of Cape Town. This afternoon on my way back from meeting Lauren and Ryan for lunch at a cute little café, some sketchy guy hissed at me from across the road as I was crossing it. After living in Cairo, guys making comments doesn’t bother me at all. In fact, I don’t even really notice it most of the time. But this guy was being really obnoxious and caught up to walk with me. He kept trying to talk to me, and while I know the best decision to make at that point is to completely ignore the guy, it is quite difficult as he’s in my face asking me questions and following me. We won’t go into what he was saying to me, but let’s just say they weren’t dinner table comments. He followed me back to the office which makes me a little nervous now that he knows where I work, but whatever. He probably has found some other random girl to stalk in the streets anyway. I did ask Rose and Danielle to meet me at the office to walk home though, just in case.

The second bad experience came later in the evening when the group went out to celebrate our first week in Cape Town. Unfortunately, I am pretty sure that we picked the most ghetto bar on the already sketchy Long Street to go to. We were all having a great time, but keep in mind that when we go out it’s usually 7 girls plus 2 boys (Anthony and Julian from the B&B who is volunteering there for year rather than going into the German army). Not the best protection ratio. After we’d been at the bar for a little while, this guy (as usually happens to a group of girls) came up and started to be gross with everyone. Anthony and Julian both attempted to step in (especially Anthony), but the man, who happened to be black, blew the whole thing WAY out of proportion and turned the whole ordeal into a black vs. white issue. He was going crazy, literally. As in Naomi and I both think he was bipolar seeing as how he later came up and apologized to Anthony. Normally, I wouldn’t think twice about some guy getting pissed about a guy getting in his way to a group of females. But again, because of all the hype around muggings and violence, I couldn’t help but be a little worried about this guy taking things to a different, more violent level. Fortunately, nothing happened and we left soon after. Everyone except Naomi, Ryan, Anthony, Julian, and I went back, but we decided to stay out. Julian took us to this reggae-ish club called Zula where we had a much more relaxed time dancing like fools. Naomi and I started people dancing on the stage, as in we both went up there and then 15 guys followed us up there. Nice J

Ukuthula,

Lynn