A day in the life of Nyanga

My first few commutes (15-30 minutes depending on which route I chose to take) to Nyanga township I was somewhat shocked and awed and also warned and then cautioned some more. It's amazing to me how quickly we adapt to our new environments and then it's all quite normalized (for better or worse). At any rate on most days I quite enjoy my commute to and from the township, and I never cease to be amazed at what I see, loving taking it all in. I've started writing down/listing the amazing and compelling sights and plights of the folks, happenings and animals I pass or interact with on the 3 day a week drive and work in Nyanga and Guguletu. Just to paint a visual for those of you at home or elsewhere in the world:

There's the guys driving old and rickety wooden horse drawn carts. The backs filled with people or garbage, sometimes scrap metal to sell at the scrap metal shops. And then there's the folks (usually 2 to a cart) hastily pushing shopping carts filled to the brim also with scrap metal to sell for a handful of Rand (SA currency). There's the numerous mother's carrying their babies on their backs with towels or thick warm wooly blankets tied tight around their little ones and knotted at the waist, so many goats roaming free and eating huge piles of garbage, horses tied to telephone poles as is clean laundry as there aren't many "yards" per se, many stray dogs, ribs poking out and resembling that of the familiar Mexican beach dog and pigs in pens outside of homes. Men sitting, laying and crouching in trees (often I see the same ones in the same trees on both my drive to and from work). Boys soon to become young men sat huddled today outside their circular black plastic circumcision tent/huts alongside the road (I was wondering how long they have already been there, word is they must stay a month before getting circumcised, leaving their boyhood behind, and becoming men). Construction workers doing some major road work with simple tools (shovels and pick axes for example) as opposed to machines. Men selling whole Snoek (fish) and ladies on the corner selling slaughtered sheep's head or a whole lot of live chickens strung up from their feet, folks selling mounds of nartjies (tangerines) and other fresh produce out the back of a backie (pickup truck) or on the side of the road, my favorite is the one single guy with this cool metal contraption that resembles a Christmas tree that holds mufflers of numerous shapes and sizes. Last week it was full, this week he only had two on there.

The center of Nyanga is colorful and chaotic with it's busy taxi rank, folks running red lights and not obeying any "rules of the road," braai after braii of a whole lot of smoking meat (barbeque, the contraption often made with half a sawed metal oil drum, using wood for flame). Smells of juicy mutton and wood smoke waft through the streets. Turning the corner it's the "shopping district," a long row of shipping containers lining the street all the way to the freeway entrance with just about any and every business imaginable: barber, dentist, corner shop, cafe, mechanic, and so on, all operating out of single metal shipping containers, just as our art therapy space does at the school in Nyanga. At the entrance to the freeway I often see kids happily playing a game of soccer or half naked little ones playing in a drizzle of water just outside the fences that enclose the small make-shift wall to wall shacks (constructed of tin, wood, cardboard, plastic. . . you name it: any material that is available) that make up much of the townships. It's a wild existence and a whole other world, one in which I feel fortunate to be contributing to and working in.