Miscellaneous Houses of Worship

Dear Rev. Dr. Barbara D. Rowe, BS, MBA, MDiv, DMin,
Here is a sampling of churches I saw in Mozambique. None of them are mainsteam Protestant churches. There are a lot of Papists. There are some Pentacostals (didn't get a picture though). There are a lot of Mosques. I didn't speak to anybody there about religion.

Catholic Church in Namaacha:

Catholic Church in Nampula:

Mosque on the coast of Nampula Province, near Ilha de Moçambique:

Church of Santo Antonio on Ilha de Moçambique:


500 years of Jesus:


There is also a beautiful little church, the Chapel of Nossa Senhora de Baluarte, the oldest European structure in the southern hemisphere, which will have its own post here shortly.

Scenes from the Lebombo

My Rowe aunts would feel right at home here - goats everywhere - baby goats, big mean old goats, all kinds of goats. We didn't ever see any goat dairy products though, only saw milk once, sold in little single-serving baggies... I guess they are mostly for meat? Don't tell the 'cousins'! (those would be my aunts' goats, in case anyone is wondering.) The goats eat well out here too, lots of grass and bushes and moldy old fruit and lounging in the shade. Wish I could say the same for the people! They are slaving away, carrying water to the goats and making charcoal to roast the goats. Also using tiny ball peen hammers to make pink rhyolite gravel road base (yes, by hand) for that nice tar road these goats are crossing.

Life in the Lebombo mostly in traditional rondavels - these are constructed of a stick frame which is sheathed either by tying bundles of reeds around it and plastering over with mud, or by jamming rocks into the frame and mudding over that. This one is under construction. When someone moves out, the house just melts down in the next rainy season to leave a donut-shaped mound of mud on the ground.

Lots of changes evident from the colonial days... Here's an old country manor house with a lovely stream in front of it, dammed to make a nice lilly pond. We came upon it while looking for outcrop in the low-lying weathered basalts. It's all overgrown with plants inside now. As Sila just suggested - maybe it hasn't been occupied by anyone because it's too big to roof without timbers? Or maybe it just has bad vibes.

The Lebombo is conspicuously empty of animals. Mozambique generally is quiet of animals - no mammals, few birds, lots of sub-bite sized lizards are left. People were very hungry during the civil wars. Finding owls in the quarries made me happy, even though I took a rather poor photograph.

One population who has found a home in rural Mozambique is the white farmers who have been ejected from Zimbabwe in the past several years. Mozambique invited them to stay - recognizing that a few white farmers could manage a lot of food production and jobs - and speed the recovery from the war years. A kind couple in the hills outside Namaacha are setting up a bit of a guest lodge on their land. This is an African wildcat who they rescued from a creek after a fire as a tiny kitten. He's now the king of the farm anyway. He's a bit bigger than an ordinary housecat - but like a coyote back home - when you see how he moves and looks at you, you don't mistake him for a housecat. Still a kitten though, when you tease him with a blade of grass.

The border post town of Namaacha (gateway to Swaziland) must have been a cool mountain refuge for the Portugese that built it -this is the high school - we stayed at a nice brand new and creepily empty conference hotel. It was a huge hotel with a big restaurant/bar and servers who commuted from Maputo for week-long shifts - English speaking - and we were the only guests for 3 nights. There is a big business in Mozambique just catering to UN, UNESCO, USAid, WWF.... you name it, they pay in US$.


Next post (by request!) : Houses of worship.

RIFTCLASTIC! And Rhyolite and Basalt - Lebombo

Ha, I will punish you non-geologist by talking about rocks before talking about people and animals. Why? Because that's my job. Santa Cruz has the "Poleta Punisher", the "Polish Punisher"... What can I be? Anyway....

Beautiful quarries like this one are carved out of the Lebombo Rhyolites, in particular the Seca Beds rhyolites. They are making road base and building stone out of solid volcanic rock. The basalts in the area are generally quite rotten and spongey and make good banana soil but bad building stone. In this area, holes are drilled by hand or by little generator powered drill, then blasted, then the rocks are broken down by hand and sorted with a dump truck and a grizzly. The quarries here are richer and the people poorer than in the north. Here's an inactive quarry in pink rhyolite

One mystery not yet solved by the mappers (from geophysical data) and geochemists (from ... geochemical data) is: where's the vent? Where did this rhyolite erupt and which direction did it flow? No volcanologists have spent any time out here sorting the mess between the ignimbrites, volcanic breccias, flows, glassy blocks, etc.... so as a structural geologist I did the only thing I know how to do, measured folds... [Diversion - SILVA COMPASSES SUCK they are not fit for any geological purpose aside from being CHEAP, IMPRECISE, WORTHLESS, in short, their only value is that you can give them to UNDERGRADUATES]... hoping the flow folds will plot up nicely and give us a flow direction?! Time will tell...

While peeling back layers of pumicy rhyolite and glassy rhyolite to get at a fold axis (and by "peeling" I mean "crushing with a sledge hammer to make a satisfying glass-tinkly sound") I uncovered a tiny bat which had been trapped between layers and dessicated. I include this here because it's not a living animal, more like a fossil or a mummy, therefore geological. Inset photo: closeup on bat. Outset photo: Jodie happy to have strange dead thing to add to her display case coffee table.

As an aside, there is this bubbly-like texture on what appear to be both top and bottom surfaces of some rhyolite beds - and sometimes lining cavities - looks like bubbles but they are actually solid glass, and seem to be internally flow banded coherently with external flowbanding. A weathering spheroidal texture? Maybe but some are stretched out, like spherical prisms (if there is such a shape?) Not sure what they are, Jodie will work it out with a volcanologist friend... Cool anyway, no?

This is the only good basalt outcrop we found, it's directly under a cap of hard rhyolite and will likely weather to banana dirt soon! (Geologically soon.) BUT CHECK OUT THE GORGEOUS COLUMNS! These are among the nicest ones I've ever seen. Question: why do they change orientation? Answer: the isotherms were curved during cooling. Question: Why did the isotherms curve? Answer: Ek weet nie. HA! That's AFrikaans for I don't know. I'm learning Afrikaans phrases from an Australian. Oh dear.


And finally, but not least, the volcaniclastic sediments. These are sediment that are interbedded with the volcanics, laid down by (in this case) a river running through and within the active volcanic field, so they are very chemically immature and almost identical to the volcanic rocks themselves, only by their sedimentary structures are they different than volcanic rock. Since they are sandstone-siltstone-conglomerate and the volcanics are demonstrably rift-related I am taking the liberty of calling them RIFTCLASTIC (which will always remind me of Randi, Marci, Ian... that crew... structure 06... but I digress!) although that term is usually used (in the USA where somethings are still better than here, such as EARTHQUAKES) to describe a fanglomerate (oooh smack!) deposited off the footwall, into the graben, or similar... a molase.... but I think these qualify. It was quite gratifying to note that the sequence resembles the Connecticut Valley sediments in the neighborhood of Smith College. Riftclastic indeed. Sadly, no fossils were discovered, body or trace. True afficianados will note a tiny structural feature (or set of features) in this photograph.... At least I hope so because Jodie and I climbed a 800' cliff in thorn trees and sticky piles of bug-attracting rotten fruit to confirm this lithology and acquire said photograph...

Miss My Dad

Wading through the grass out here, looking for outcrop - a bit off the road and all of a sudden you forget the road was there, no cars on it anyway - the wind has a snap to it and the air seems to be changing temperature quickly - for some reason I hear my dad's voice in my head saying,

"This is what the First Man saw, we are looking through his eyes now...",

and for a second I'm thinking, "Yah, Dad, that's awesome, this is amazing".

And Dad-in-my-head goes on, "... except not from the water, because he was an aquatic ape, see, and he would have parked his submarine under the pyramids over there that the aliens helped build out of solid gold..."

And Me-in-my-head goes, "Now wait a minute dad, there's no evidence for the aquatic ape theory, and besides, first evidence of man is farther north in the rift valleys, and wait a minute, MAN, anyway, you forget about LUCY obviously, you patriarchal schmuck...."

Overview of the Trip to Mozambique

Big country! Also a small country. A few comments about geography before I get to the travelogue. At the southern corner, Mozambique is bounded by Swaziland and the two are engulfed by South Africa. The famous Kruger Park lies along this triple-junction and there is an effort underway to grow it as a 3-nation wildlife preserve. Thus far the "South African" elephants have been wandering into much poorer Mozambique and getting poached - but we met an international conference of game veternarians with representation from USAiD and WWF and I think there is some money behind the problem - gladly, also to build skills economy in the surrounding region and prevent poaching by assisting with human health as well as animal health.

Sorry for posting a photo of 2 juxtaposed slightly differently scaled, differently aged geologic maps in Portugese, but what can I do. The power was out at the DNG. Lorenço Marques was the Portugese name for Maputo.


Check out the purple/pink units along the western edge of the map - These are the Lebombo Volcanics. You can see that they continue both north and south into South Africa, where they have been studied. The Lebombo (or Lubombo) "Mountains" begin about 40km inland from Maputo. The highest ridge defines the borders between Mozambique-Swaziland. Geologists refer to this area as the Lebombo Monocline (means all the beds gently dip the same way) or the Lebombo Bimodal Volcanics - as the rocks here are either basalt or rhyolite. More on that later.

The second week was spent in the Nampula area - This Google Earth image shows the city of Nampula in the lower left (find the airstrip) and the outskirts to the east and north. Flat, flat land. 15-ft Ant Hills but Dad has never heard of this so he says there are not. And then there are... "inselbergs"... gneissic and granitic monoliths, looking like Half Dome (or Whole Dome), jutting every which way out of the landscape. Google Earth doesn't show them up so well, but there are many:


As you can see from the plane while descending into Nampula:


I'm getting carried away here so I'll quit - suffice to say that these provide tiny areas of perfect outcrop in an otherwise impermeable landscape - More on that later.

Sad News in Maputo

A terrible disaster in Maputo - it seems Mozambique has gotten kicked when down so many times this year. First the Zambezi floods, then Cyclones, now an armory explosion in the city has killed at least 72 people. My heart goes out to them! It's a beautiful country with everything in place to begin lifting out of poverty, if they can just get a break. Guardian Story.

Maputo, Moçambique!

Hey, I'm back! Moçambique was amazing. Note that it is still pronounced the same as "Mozambique" when spelled "Moçambique" -

I guess I'll start at the beginning - this post will be about the Capital City of Mozambique... we were there three times so the pictures are not all from the same day...

Jodie and I flew into Maputo on 5 March. Maputo is actually a huge, sprawling, humid, stinky city but none of my pictures reflect that somehow. The old part of the city though is quite nice with a lot of trees and broad open streets. We stay in the area around Eduardo Mondlane Blvd, which is near the beach front and has lots of embassies and consulates. The streets are in horrible shape - bomb damage from the civil war has not been repaired, and the city is on soft sand which is clearly creeping around and making its way up the cracks, further undermining the concrete. Rural highways are in great shape however.

So anyway, between the airport and the downtown is sort of high density market/suburb/informal settlement residential space - masonry houses are crowded together with lean-to shacks and there are a lot of people and an assortment of livestock. Things are for sale everywhere, including some beautiful hardwood furniture and doors which come from the central/northern coast, and this lovely muffler tree:



The following morning, we went to the Moçambique DNG. There was no electricity at the building so people were just sitting around in their desks, chatting on cell phones and sending SMS (aka text messages). Naturally it was obscenely hot and humid and we had to see people on the 10th floor, then 2nd, then 4th, then 2nd, then 10th, etc etc. We bought one of the maps we needed but couldn't get the other as they didn't have a hard copy and the power was out. Director Daudi was very nice and helpful and I had the feeling that his direction was very important to the future of the DNG as it evolves/matures. Mozambique is very mineral rich and it seems like a race to bring the level of professional expertise/control in the country to the point where it can hold its own against sophisticated mining conglomerates who are knocking from all directions. Many large new projects are underway - a new giant mineral sands mine is opening in the next few months - one of the world's richest mineral sands for Titanium.

The view down from said 10th floor shows some of the features of the city - very Portugese/European garden squares - This photo also shows the old fort from which the river mouth was defended in the earlier days of the colony - we didn't hire an English speaking guide here so unfortunately I can't tell you anything about it. No signage.

Somehow my city photos have managed to completely omit the grit - Here's another view from the DNG offices of a cathedral or something - there are angels and Marys and Bartolomeu Diaz ("discoverer" of the cape) and Luís Vaz de Camões (poet) statues, bronzes, marble, everywhere in the city - anyway, in the left foreground you can see a bombed-out shell of a fancy colonial structure - these are all over the city - some have been reoccupied, some few are under repairs - most are just slowly falling in on themselves...


On our next stop through Nampula, Jodie and I explored a bit more and waited for Lee-ann (Jodie's Honours Student from Stellenbosch) to fly in. We went down to the beach! Even though the recent spate of cyclones left the waters pretty muddy, it was quite beautiful:
I spent some time chatting with a kid who was from Johannesberg, visiting cousins - he told me, "America has a dirty coast and a clean coast. The dirty coast is New York. The clean coast is Las Vegas". Heh heh.

We chilled out with a pitcher of sangria...



Snapped this one from a moving car (Jodie continually making fun of me for doing that). I'm not sure what these are called, because they're not really what the women wear - Mozambiquan ladies wear wraps (as long skirts usually) made from brightly coloured fabric with HUGE printed motifs, sometimes also a border- supposedly they originated from bolts of fabric intended for table clothes for Portugese tables but the look took off and now it is certainly home grown, with large portraits of Samora Machel being a popular pattern. They're heavier than a sarong, more like quilting cotton, and they're called Ca' polana (as in, "house of Polana", Polana was a chief or something). Given that the ones in this photo bear the images of African animals I think they were made to appeal to tourists, as Mozambiquans (in my brief experience) show a strong preference for Coca Cola and Vodocom motifs.

Phew, finally out of the city. I'll post next about the rural Lebombo Mountains, and more about Samora Machel....

Mozambique!

I'm out of touch for a couple weeks - got my Malaria pills, no bad dreams yet. Check back after the 20th! Jerry Fredricks will be holding down the apartment here March 8-13 so ring him if you like 27 21 689 8996

-crowe

Sunrise/Sunset

Sun just set here - don't worry buddy I'll take the shuttle bus home.
Sila's up and probably working on the boat right now, if Dave Jablonski doesn't get hold of him today! I miss this very much, all the elements are in this photo. Cozy boat, cold Tecate, Netflix, good books, and oh yah, my darling Husband. I'm surprisingly unhomesick but I do need somebody to go around with. Went shopping today at a normal western shopping mall and went to the REI lookalike and got some lightweight pants with lots of pockets - no shorts in Mozambique.

When the sun rises on Sila:

The sun sets on me:

And vice versa.

Busy bee

Lots to do here my friends! Just realized I was neglecting the blog - thanks to Hilde who's actually reading it! Yay Hilde thanks & miss you. So I haven't had much new scenary this week but I did go see Inconvenient Truth with John R. and his wife Phil and they took me out for a lovely Italian dinner at the V&A waterfront. Nice weekend activity. Now I'm trying to write three (tiny) grant proposals for three different projects, get my 3rd year practicals (7 labs in 4 weeks!) organized enough to turn billets over to the techs for microstructure, and lay out my lecture schedule IN SPECIFICS before leaving for Mozambique on Monday, unless of course it continues to rain/flood in Mozambique and Jodie Miller decides to postpone the trip. She is fast, and funny, and Australian and I can't wait to work with her. She speaks bluntly and is always smiling.

Mozambique! Shaped like California but slightly larger than Texas. We are flying via J-berg to Maputo for 7 days to look at fluid flow in a bimodal rift volcanic sequence - that's all I know about that - then north to Nampula for 8 days to look at the Mozambique Belt - seems like that should be awesome. The Zambezi River is flooding again (as per today's Guardian.co.uk) and we may have trouble connecting to the north.

A warning to American travellers - I paid R700 for my 2-month tourist visa to Mozambique - "Reciprocity Policy". And a note to my mom - My health insurance is covering emergency care and they have your phone number.

Paradise Office

Ah, the sixth floor office. In spite of numerous warnings from all sides that it's going to turn into a sauna, I have all the windows open and I am loving it! Loving it up here. and the thighs of steel will be thanking me too. I hate the lift! It's creaky and humid in there.

These two pictures are both taken from the north wall of the office, from either side of the bank of file cabinets. The office is L-shaped and huge. It was the department chair's office for the old PreCambrian Geology department that was later absorbed. So it has a little secretary's office adjacent, with wacky old phones, which I will now refer to as my "bike's office".

I love the bookshelves. Love love love! Can't wait until my books get here. All those rocks belong to my predecessor, they are rad ductile stuff (most of them) which I will cut up and see if I can make thin sections and start working on the teaching collection! My thin-section-ductile-structure is a bit rusty after years in mothballs at UCSC.






Oh yah, and here's a link back to when I first discovered this office with this view!!

Guinea Fowl

On the way to work... Guinea Fowl... with babies!

Cape Hangklip Day

My colleague John has a great Honors student who is doing a project out at Cape Hangklip. On Saturday the three of us went out there to scope the field area and see if we could find some of the outcrops described by geologists who worked the area previously. Cape Hangklip is a beautiful peak east across False Bay from the Cape Peninsula. It is composed of the same Table Mountain Group rocks, but more deformed than on Table Mountain intself. On top of Table Mountain, relatively conformably overlying the Peninsula Sandstone which forms its ramparts, is the Pakhuis Tillite.


Donna and John and myself spent Saturday hiking around Cape Hangklip with the goal of finding the similar strata as are exposed on Table Mountain, and chasing down an old mystery John found in the literature about their true origins. Here are Donna and John entering the park where we started our hike.


We had a long slow hike up the pass (east to west in the Cape Hangklip google earth image above) and crossed a lot of quartz-cemented breccias. By the top of the pass we still hadn't uncovered our quarry so we did a little bush wacking looking for it. We had a report from (other) John and Roy that was easy to find, just past the waterfall. So we went way off trail following the sound of this waterfall. Donna didn't say but I think she has some climbing experience.

The creeks run red here due to the pH affect from the tannins and other organic acids from the rich fynbos soils. These then acidic creeks run over Fe-Mn cemented breccias in the Peninsula formation - I don't know about their origin just yet - but their timing might help shed light on the Pen. Fm. history. My other colleague "John" [Andy! More "Johns" than Women!] has a student looking at the geochemistry of these cements on Table Mountain. I'm hoping to get up there to do some field work with him in Skeleton Gorge as soon as possible. Here is the Fe-Mn breccias weathered out along the slope:

Donna and I looking down this CRAZY CLIFF to Betty's Bay. Her family has a place out there so she can get in a lot of hours on this mountain in relative comfort. Here we're seated on the precipice at the head of the gorge, on what appears to be a crushed damage zone with most fractures running actually perpendicular to the gorge axis, and roughly vertically dipping. Cementation of this damage zone might be responsible for creating this nick point. There's a big waterfall below.

While climbing around and down one side of that gorge, we could see across to the other. See how there are nice concentric anticlines with crush zones where the synclines should be? Rad! Is that evidence of ramp thrust propogation? [Note to students: if you are snooping on my blog, you better be able to answer this question. Rick will help you.]

Now, in my previous life in North America I think we were rather strict about using the word "tillite" in that "tills" are sediments deposited directly by ice. Sedimentary rocks which suggest that ice was around but which are deposited in water or other means, we wouldn't have called a till (when lithified, "tillite"). If till is reworked and deposited by a river, it would contain glacially formed clasts, but it would have more sorting and sed structures of a river or delta, this is called a sandur. I already took note at Laingsburg that the Dwyka Tillites (these are amoung the famous deposits which link South Africa to other parts of Gondwana) some of which are really glaciomarine basinal sediments with dropstones. Are there any ice people out there who would care to get me off my high horse about the word "till"? CAn I bring myself to accept this flippant usage of a geological term? Anyway I dgress. Here is a faceted quartz pebble in the Cape Hangklip Member. These pebbles are the strongest line of evidence for ice processes in this section.

The Peninsula Fm. is a thick sequence of very very clean quartz sands, medium to coarse grained, with massive bedding and abundant crossbedding ( trough, herringbone, etc...) with common pebble beds and lenses with the pebbles nearly 100% vein quartz and chert. Sorting is near perfect. Now low greenschist-facies metamorphosed with abundant quartz cements, all non-quartz material is strongly aligned fibrous sericite in interstices, fibers are bedding-parallel. OK, simple mineralogy, simple microstructre, everything is explicable so far. Two models exist for its deposition: braided fluvial (maybe sandur?) and shallow marine. At Cape Hangklip there is a diamictite of fine quartz silt matrix with random assortment of quartz pebbles, basically no bedding. It is a lens a few km long within the upper portion of the Peninsula Fm. So the main question of Donna's thesis will be to determine the origin of this "Cape Hangklip Member", interpret its sedimentary origins, and compare it to the Pakhuis Tillite from Table Mountain. It is so similar in fact that there is a question of whether the CHM is just a repetition of the Pakuis/Peninsula contact by faulting. Here's the diamictite at Cape Hangklip:


I won't go into detail about the controversy because that's Donna's job! Suffice it to say that so far I have the opposite opinion to my colleague and I think that's best for Donna because she can make up her own mind without two advisors pushing her in the same direction. Finally, here is a blurry picture of a beautiful pair of orange-breasted sunbirds in the garden birdbath:

Khuluma Workshop

I've spent two of three days at the Khuluma Workshop - it's a sort of voluntary challenge day for any staff of UCT that wish to attend. I've been to plenty of diversity workshops and leadership camps and what have you before, and although there are some elements of this experience that recall those, Khuluma has been quite different. In our class of 16, I think we have 2 white men, 3 white women, 3 Black women, 1 Black man, 2 Coloured men, 5 Coloured women. They are from various staff offices and schools. The facilitators are a Black woman from Soweto and a white woman raised in Kenya and Uganda by British parents. They are both very very good. Embodiment of gentleness. Embodiment of authority.

First of all - when the question is asked, "Relate a story of a time when you experienced discrimination":

A Coloured man related the forced relocation of his family from a neighborhood which was reclassified as "white".
A Muslim Coloured woman related being ejected from "white" beaches by the police and threatened with arrest.
A Coloured woman related the story of her green-eyed Coloured boyfriend who was able to "pass" or "go for white" and purchase a house in a white area. This necessitated getting the signed permission of everyone in that neighborhood for him to move in.

And that was just from my small group.

And when the question is asked, "Relate a story of a time when you discriminated against someone":
Initially, I was the only person in my group who had a story. I don't think there's been enough time and dialog going on for lots of people to think about that way. The history is so one-sided.

Today (the second day) we talked more about the history. I had read about some of the laws and some of the resistance in Nelson Mandela's autobiography, The Long Walk to Freedom but there were far more laws than I knew of, the system was more insidious than Mandela's book expresses. I assume this is due to Mandela's famous spirit of forgiveness and effort toward Reconcilation. It is amazing to hear first hand what it was like. And it's not like going once a year to meet the 1906 Earthquake survivors at a special ceremony, it's not history. Everyone you see on the street who is older than about 10 has memories (scars) of life under aparteid. This includes the whites too - whether actively involved in "The Struggle" or not. What was terrifying for me to realize is how the first 20 years or so of aparteid were basically barely different than the segregation laws in the US. Where the ZA National Party made laws after that - many of them were identical to the unwritten laws that governed the life of American blacks prior to the Civil Rights Movement. I went into the workshop planning to be an observer and feeling somewhat naive. But what I heard started to sound uncomfortably familiar.

We were divided into white and non-white groups today - the term "Black" here is used both for genetic Africans and as a general term for "People of Color" - I didn't realize before that this is how UCT achieves its "50% Black" statistic - but that's another story.

To be sent into another room with the other white people was a horrible shock. After spending 1.5 days really digging into the experiences of my new friends and really being touched by their stories - to be sent out felt like redrawing the lines in the sand. The other person who was really troubled and had difficulty leaving the room was a white man in his mid-50s - like other white males he was conscripted into the South African Defence Force at 18 and sent to the Border wars - he lashed out against the commanders for what he was being asked to do and was imprisoned by the government.

As the white group we made a list of how the legacy of aparteid had hurt white South Africans and the country as a whole. Many items on our list will sound familiar to Americans as well -
-the "Pale Male" syndrome where white males feel rage over being disenfranchised, but a survey of the positions of power still shows extensive control of economy and media by white males.
-fear of non-whites as bringing crime, incursion into neighborhoods, "property values"... living in fear
-white families separating as white people left ZA (thinking of white South Africans I've met in US... all arrived circa 1995)
-Hard to form new alliances of real trust - now racism has gone "underground"
-whites afraid to give anybody feedback/criticism at work - overplaying of the "race card"

We are not so different after all! I could have made 75% of the list about America.

What WAS different - is the reaction of the Black/Coloured group to our list - many people were genuinely surprised, and even terribly sad and hurt - to see the extent of the fear among whites -
I think the communication has been so ABSENT between communities that many people never thought about the motivations behind white racism and resistance to change. Nobody tried to justify those things of course - but I think for some people present it put a human face on the "white menace". One Coloured woman came to tears to see that Transformation was coming at so great a cost for some people, as a white woman related that her sons had left the country in 1995 and made homes in Europe - never to return.

Tune in tomorrow after the session on WHAT WE CAN DO AT WORK

Househunting (sucks)

I was smitten with this little cottage with a big back yard and a tomato plant in the front with bunches of tomatoes on it!



I loved it when I got inside, with "Oregon pine' plank floors and tall masonry/whitewashed walls and ceilings. It felt like it would be so cool in the summer.



Then I found the kitchen. Where's the sink? Oh it's in a shed tacked onto the back door of the house. No plumbing in the kitchen. The bathroom was back there too. No shower. Unfinished plywood. Back to the drawing board.





Devil's Peak at night: