Spring time in JBurg

Spring flower named "Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow"


Local resident at the guesthouse

I loved the name of that flower! It's called that because it changes color in its life cycle - it starts out as white then the color deepens as it blooms, so cool! And the frangrance is incredible, you smell it before you see it. It's spring here so the flowers are in full bloom. The resident bird is one of the loud ones. Every morning between 5:30 to 6 I get woken up to a profusion of bird sounds. Reminds me of when we were in costa rica.

The week is becoming more intense and we have a lot of work ahead of us. In between I am learning so much about this country. There are 11 national languages here! Almost everyone knows english because it's taught in school (good for me!). One colleague knows 9! How is that possible?! I get my french and spanish mixed up a lot so I can't imagine speaking 9!
Even thought apartheid law are no longer in place here its influence is still evident. The population consist of whites (european descent), blacks (africans) and colored (mixed races like indian or asian. Currently about 80% are blacks, 10% are whites and the rest are colored. Given that you can still see that the lower level jobs including labor are done by blacks and the administrative jobs are whites. It feels like I'm back in the US during the 1950's! When we eat lunch in the cantine Federico and I noticed that the groups are clearly segregated. It does not matter if the person is black and works in the office, he is sitting with the black people. We have yet to see a mixed table. Now I'm thinking if they think it's strange that I'm sitting with white people because I'm considered a colored person! We are dying to ask these questions but figured we will wait to know our colleagues a little better. Before coming here I read that apartheid topics are very sensitive and to not bring it up in conversation!
When I read the history of apartheid in this country it's amazing to realize how such a small percentage of the population could have gotten away with such a degree of injustice. These apartheid laws were established to clearly give white people preferential treatments in every part of life, the statistics are crazy.http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~cale/cs201/apartheid.hist.html This topic has mostly been on the edge of my consciousness but now I have an opportunity while here to see and hear about it first hand. I now know it's very different from racial discrimnation as I knew it at home. It's much more harsh and unjust.