Home Stay

Okay so to make up for the fact that I haven't blogged in a million years, here's a SECOND post in one day. Amazing, right?! Anyway, I just got back today from a home stay. We were given the opportunity to spend a weekend living with a family in a township. We were at Oceanview township, a coloured township (remember, not considered derogatory over here). They all speak Africaans for their first language, but are very good at English so communication was no problem.

Oceanview is one of the nicer townships, not like the shacks made out of metal and plastic that are all over Cape Town. With that said, it's still a township so it wasn't exactly luxurious, but I had an incredible weekend. I stayed with a wonderful family with another girl that I didn't know from CIEE. My family was really big! My mom Crystal, and her husband Cedric had three of their own children: Carl (20), Brandon (16), and Bridget (12). They also had an adopted son, Jason (3), who's mother was murdered in the last couple of months. The stories they were telling me about that were incredibly heartbreaking, apparently the night after her funeral Jason said he saw his mom and asked Crystal if they all three could just lie down together. It was really touching. Carl (20) had a 1 year old child, Alex, and because his mother couldn't take care of him, he pretty much lived with us too. So in summary: Crystal and Cedric, Carl, Brandon, Bridget, Jason, and Alex all lived in the house with us. Here are some fun pictures of them all:

This is Crystal preparing for our Braii:

And here is a picture of me playing with Alex:

Here's another picture of Alex (he's too cute, I can't help myself):

Here's a picture of Cedric (my dad):

This is Bridget:

Here's Jason:

I have pictures of the older boys, but I think you get the idea. When we first arrived on Friday we had this huge dinner and performance again. Unfortunately, it was Yom Kippur and there are NO jews in all of Oceanview and I was the only one fasting. It was probably the hardest yet, everyone was eating so much food all around me. We woke up on Saturday (at 8am... cause of Alex) and went to go walk around the township. We stopped in to a lot of houses because all of my family's extended family lives there, which is actually quite nice. They couldn't understand that I had family living in New York but I lived in Los Angeles. Here are some pictures of the township itself:

We said hello to a million different friends/family and then went to Crystal's sister's home. She is the mother of five, Phoebe (8), Tazewell (5), Keenan (2), and 1 month old twins Joy and Jesse. We spent the whole day with the kids, mostly holding the two beautiful baby girls. They were premature so they are TINY. Here are some pictures of the two little girls (pictures of the other kids will come later):

After satiating some of our (my) baby-craziness, we went over to the basketball game. It was between the townships basketball team and some of the CIEE guys. We got totally creamed. Either way, it was a beautiful day so I took some pictures of the game.

After the Basketball game we went back home for a bit and then went over to the house with the twins for a Braii. I couldn't WAIT to break my fast, and my "mom" was very accommodating and made me a huge snack because we didn't eat until 9. Anyway, the braii was basically like a huge party. There were probably 30 or so people in the house (which isn't very big), which includes about 10 kids. My friend Lauren was there with me (she was staying with the other family) and we played with the kids for a long time. Here are pictures of Tazewell, Phoebe, Keenan, and lots of other kids who I forget their names.

A bunch of the boys then decided to teach all of the family how to play beer pong which was hilarious. I ended up playing with my "mom" as my partner and we won! They all thought it was the most fun/funniest game ever. Here's a picture of them all playing.

The most interesting thing I found was the relationship of the adults to the children. There wasn't really any taboo on what you do/say around children the way that they are in America which was interesting. As you can see, beer pong in front of the kids was no problem, they actually had a fun time chasing around all the ping pong balls. And in terms of bed times, there really isn't one. Whenever the kids were tired they just sort of fell asleep wherever. Here's a picture of Keenan passed out on the bed, despite the fact that everyone was screaming all around him and music was blasting.

After a long night we went to bed, and today my "mom" prepared us a huge feast. Here's a picture of her and all the food she cooked. Apparently this is normal for their Sunday's.

Okay, here's a picture of the whole family to end with. Hope everything is good back in good ole America. Miss you all.

Love,

Julia