Johannesburg Sports
We were advised at any number of Johannesburg boutique hotels that the car is king and that it will be difficult if not impossible to find a cab in this laid out city and, furthermore, the people are very punctual. I don’t why that last bit was thrown in but it is good to know and Inoddled appreciatively at the man. But we were hungry and thirsty and asked where we could get a pint and a little lunch or a lot of lunch. He gave us directions that seemedpunctuated in a kind of waggling sign language that seemed incomprehensible in the lobby, but Toni and I found out were spot on once we were outside and in the South African day of blue skies and light clouds.
We popped into the pub and ordered pints and overheard gentlemen boasting about the upcoming World Cup that South Africa will host which is all anyone there wanted to talk about, if it wasn’t talk about rugby or, gulp, cricket, of which I know less than anything about and after much study of the video monitors in the wood lined pub with its brass rails and thick glass I couldn’t decipher. One fellow who seemed to have a bowler hat on the rail beneath him and an umbrella that looked like it could have been present during the Blitz of London. I tried to tell them how in some ways the game looked like American football, a purer and less regimented form of the tackling artful game weAmericans know and love, well some of us anyway, and they wouldn’t have it. “Tut tut, old fellow!” the guy with the bowler hat said between intakes of his dark ale. “You won’t see thatabominable sport here!” and I must profess I kind of got into the rugby game on the tube. Now if they would only do the wave.
06.15.09Builder women outside Johannesburg
One recent morning in the township approximately 125 kilometers southwest of Johannesburg , strong hand and strong back women were stretching and arching their backs. More than a dozen women busy building a nation; one sidewalk block at a time. No one was complaining, even as they shoveled heavy mounds of wet cement or pushed a heavy brick laden wheelbarrow. Emerging from their labor were walls, floors and simple roof lines.
At the edge of Kgotsong , as vast empty wilderness, an ever-growing township of well over 72,000 people, these women are solving one of South Africa’s biggest issues: a housing shortage of tremendous proportion, leaving 7 million of the country homeless. We were fortunate enough to be staying at one of the many Hotels Johannesburg has to offer, but these women were staying in crumbling corrugated metal shanty’s while building with their own hands, 28 houses with materials they themselves salvaged or purchased by pooling scant resources.
Working with a technical adviser, five women can build a three bedroom house in five days. For generations, millions of the poor, black South Africans had no choice but to squeeze entire families into the crude corrugated shanti’s, which did not provide much shelter from the rains and winds that will suddenly whip by and tear apart or blow off roofs. Some shack dwellers will visibly shake if you mention the word fire.
So, twice a week, these builder women gather on a dusty plot and do a Kgotsongs version of a barn-raising. They pool their resources, each woman contributing a rand per day. The money is usually earned by fund-raising parties, working as a domestic many many miles away or sell fruit to passers-by. The Government has long understood that for the poor in South Africa, mostly the black, buying a decent home has been a great and difficult dream. But a dream these builder women are bringing into fruition.
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