Greetings from Week 2!

Hello world. This week is getting steadily busier with classwork and things--the readings are getting more intense in terms of length as well. Thank God Quinton gave our class a few more days for our group presentations and papers.

I've noticed things lately in the metrorail--how all of the whites and coloureds take the first class area, and the blacks and coloureds take the third class area. There's not much different between the two, just seats that are a bit comfier, and more room, yet yesterday I was confused by which side of the platform was first class, and I found myself looking for where any white people or upperclass people might be standing--or schoolkids. School kids of all ethnicities tend to ride first class; I think their parents foot the bill because it's supposedly a little safer. When I'm riding by myself I ride first class, because it's less crowded and I'm so spacey that even if there was never a chance of anyone swiping anything off me in third class, the sheer amount of people might distract and fluster me and I'd end up leaving my backpack on the train or something. When I'm traveling with someone, I go for third, because it's cheaper. It's just interesting to see the dynamic that develops there, or when I go to buy a newspaper, and a black man is in front of me, and the coloured cashier automatically tries to wait on me first. The prejudices of Apartheid (white, then coloured, then black African) seem to be so ingrained into the system in some ways that people don't even notice it. It puts the whole concept of "privilege" into new terms and settings...not as something that is one race or ethnicity's "fault", but as something entrenched into the worldview that everyone needs to work together to repair. South African society's collective memory needs to be healed and lessons harnessed for future generations. The deal is, this is going to take a while, because the racial stratification has been in place for hundreds of years.

I'm still thinking about how these lessons relate to the US ethnic and racial issues. I do think that in the US there's some sort of strange emphasis on confrontation, conflict, and (on the opposite side of the spectrum) color-blindness. Some kind of balance of reconciliation needs to be reached--and I'm sure that the idea has been considered before. I'll have to do more research.

In other news, the weather is lovely here, I've managed to find white rice flour for quite a cheap price, and the massive mountains are still there. God is still good!