Cape Town Crib Notes

Cape Town is contributing to major sleep deprivation of the best kind this week! Not wanting to miss a thing I'm limiting myself to 5 hours a night. How else do I cover South Africa, a country twice the size of Texas? Monday: Robben Island Tour, Tuesday: Cape of Good Hope Tour, Wednesday: Amy Biehl Foundation Tour, Thursday: Shark Diving Tour, Friday: Operation Hunger and Music Tour, and still 2 days left. A tiring adventure for the senses. Everything from Aparteid, Nelson Mandela, squatter camps and the disenfranchised black townships to dining at opulent 5-star restaurants and sightseeing wealthy beach front property. Cape Town has either extreme rich or extreme poor, there's no in-between. The problem is my ethnocentric view of the world is having a hard time adjusting to this economic scale. I want to help but I can't. Years of living in a wasteland of filth, garbage and unsanitary conditions cannot be solved with a coloring book and a box of crayons. Toy gifts are expected from us but education is what's really needed so I found a way of distributed condoms to the men, hand sanitizer for the women and new shoes for the barefoot children. Will this change their value system? Will a new pair of shoes even be worn? Will women use the sanitizer before handling food? It'll take days to process the impact this country is having on me. For now the ship is docked alongside BMW dealerships, art houses, cinemas and shops galore. Tonight it's a fusion of five of South Africa's best acoustic fretboard virtuoses. Pan-African music at it's finest!