Day 7

Day 7 Johannesburg, South Africa

This morning we went to the Slyakhana Food Garden Premaculture Project.  This is an inner city park whose mission is to "establish a model urban agriculture initiative that showcases a food garden system for food production, education, research and empowerment of the community, particularly women through training, employment, and income-generating opportunities."  It's a big garden area reclaimed form a dumpsite.  It's in a lovely large park setting.  We toured the garden beds and saw the winter crops.  The boys helped shovel and haul wood chip mulch and the girls cleaned lettuce and pounded dried spinach into fine powder and learned to make spinach salts.  We tasted a wonderful homegrown tea that contained fennel, rosemary and a local wort herb.  We learned about all the medicinal properties of food, especially those mentioned in the book " Back to Eden" by  J. Kloss

 

We headed to lunch at a lovely Italian restaurant in the Nelson Mandela Center.  Afterwards we had a brief time to shop.  This trip has focused more on education and immersion into the culture and this was really one of the only brief times allowed for shopping.  Many stores and so little time!

 

After a brief visit to the hotel to clean off the dirt from the garden, we headed out to Lesedi Cultural Village (see earlier Blog for the website address).  What an adventure!  We visited 4 different indigenous villages, learned a little about each tribe and then were treated to a wonderful performance by the residents.  The pictures will be posted when we return as there are just too many wonderful ones and not enough Internet time to show them all!  After a traditional dinner at the village, we got to do our last bit of shopping at the village craft market.  What wonderful treasures we all found – including a few vuvuzelas (not exactly of the same tribes, but definitely very cultural here).

 

Tomorrow we leave for an 8 hr drive to the bush country.  We will be staying to the outré Kruger National Park, near Zimbabwe and Mozambique.  We have been told we will see all of the big five, and be able to get up close and personal with the lion-breeding program.  The students will be in large tented dorms, with (cold) showers below.  The warm campfires should keep us cozy.  We will hear the animal's roars, and see the Southern Cross in the sky.  We won't have Internet so this will be the last of the postings until we return to civilization.  It might be our last night for long showers too! J

 

Pictures will be posted as soon as we return.  Dillon did take off his glasses today!  And Alex managed to smile without closing his eyes!  Ian was standing watching one of the tribal demonstrations tonight, when an itty-bitty Zulu decided it was totally fun to walk through Ian's legs while singing a Zulu song.  It was so funny to see his surprised face – wish I had the camera ready.  All our students are doing fine, and all have remarked about the abundance of really tasty food – I think collectively we've all gained lots of weight!

 

Thanks to all our wonderful families for allowing us the privilege to experience this amazing country.  We can't wait to show off all our pictures and tell our stories!  AYOBA!

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