Johannesburg: (At Mandela's) Home Alone

I'm here! The flights were actually pretty uneventful;
just long. I'm in Joburg until Wednesday for part of
orientation, then all of the Northwestern interns fly
to Cape Town. The 8 who are working in Johannesburg
will fly back here on Sunday and we all start work
next Monday (April 2). There will be five of us in Cape Town.

Today we spent the day touring Joburg with a tour guide
named Elvis. We saw Soweto, the southwestern township
that was crucial to the liberation struggle back in the late 1980s
and early 1990s.

We also visited Nelson Mandela's old house, which is now
a museum. He moved into it in 1946 with his first wife,
Evelyn, and lived there with his second wife Winnie
until he was arrested in the 1960s for leading the
struggle against apartheid. Members of the Mandela
family lived there for a total of 40 years.

This is a great piece of history, but this part of
the tour led to one of the more dangerous situations I've
been in. After the tour was mostly done, I went to the
bathroom. When I came out, everyone was gone. I left the
premises to see if they were out front or waiting in the
van, and they were not. I fought with the staff to let
me back into the Mandela house to make sure they weren't
on the back patio or something--I got in after a few
minutes, and I came to the conclusion that I had
definitely been left behind. I had no idea where they
had gone, since Elvis pretty much brought us where he
thought we should go without an itinerary.

This may seem bad enough on its own, but it gets worse.
Paula Fray, our main keeper, had not yet given us our
phones (she probably thought that no one could get into
trouble in the first 24 hours, but I guess she didn't
realize that I was on the trip). I was stuck in a
foreign country, alone, with no phone or money. Even if
I had had money, I'm still not all that clear on how
SA's public transportation works. So I was like, "FUCK."

I told the man who had let me back into the house that
my people were gone, and he proposed we go up the street
to see if they were at another museum close by. I
figured I had two options: one, wait at the house until
my fellow students realized I was missing, or two, see
if I could find them. Well, technically three options, the third being get kidnapped and never leave South Africa.

I decided to go up to the other
museum and see if they were there. We went, and the
people at the desk told us they hadn't come in. The
guy from the Mandela house wanted to check around back
to see if the van was parked there, but I refused and
told him I was going back to the Mandela house to wait.
He walked me back and reassured me that we would find
them (I'm pretty sure he was a well-intentioned guy who
actually intended to help me find the others). When we
had almost reached the house, Rocean, one of the other
interns, darted out of a van parked across the street
and flagged me down (all vans are white and look pretty
similar). Abby, who's going to be working with me at the
Cape Times, also came out and they asked me where I'd
gone.

"Where did YOU go?! You guys left me!"

We climbed back into the van and I told the other
interns what happened. They were appalled and sorry
about leaving me. They had walked up to another place
for a few minutes and hadn't realized that I wasn't
with them until they had come back and gotten in the
van.

"We had a collective heart attack," Zach told me at
dinner. "And you seemed pretty mad when we found you,
but you were pretty composed. A lot of people would have
been in hysterics."

After that incident, we went to the Apartheid Museum, which was
quite well organized and put together. I'll talk more about
apartheid later--I'm pretty tired. But it's still very
important for a lot of reasons, and I'll definitely get to it.

Finally, we went to dinner at Paula Fray's house.It was
really delicious--I had traditional South African
sausage, which is made up of lamb, beef, and pork. We
met Paula's husband, sons, and dogs (one of them is
named Batman, and that dog has mad skills). We got our
phones and headed back to the guest house we're in.

So all in all, a crazy day. I've already gotten into
trouble and it only took 18 hours. I continue to break
my own records.