Day 2: "This is everyone's fire"

So after the good times spent at Dubliner's on Monday night, we woke up to a very unforgiving Tuesday morning. We had class and learned about the Power of Living and heard from Logan Smiley, on of the guys behind Darius goes West, and he told us about his time spent with Darius, a brother of a close friend of his he worked with at Project Hope who is suffering from md, and Garrett told us after that presentation that we had an hour to pack our backs and eat lunch that we were going to be spending the night in a township with the family of a soup mother. My first thought was, you've got to be kidding me. But an hour later I was on the bus headed to a different Cape Town...A soup mother is a woman who cooks soup for the children of her street, or neighborhood in the township. I'm not going to lie, I was a little taken back- I never did anything like this before and if you know me you know that my idea of roughing it isn't really on the same level as everyone else's.

Driving into the township, my world was pretty much rattled. This is the poorest of poor, and the whole theme of the trip was "Living off a dollar a day" so that's exactly what we did, we were living off a dollar for that day. Our mom, Hetta, welcomed us with hugs and a smile on her face while she said "My beautiful American children, welcome home." Walking into the house, which had 3 rooms total was very small and hodge-podge. We played with the kids for about 3 hours, they never seem to get tired or get tired of riding on shoulders. My 2 newest friends, Waylan and Ramario kept telling me how much they loved having us here playing with them and how they were going to miss us tomorrow when we left- that's about enough to make you want to cry. Our group and the family talked for a while just about life and how different it is on the other side.

When bedtime rolled around, that was probably the most interesting part. Our bed was in the room with the bathroom- so we had some pretty steady traffic. When you have 8 people living in a house with 4 visitors, things can get a little hectic. Me and the group shared a Queen-sized bed, where we slept real close because it gets really, really cold at night. I didn't sleep much between the tight sleeping space, cold, hurricane happening outside, the dogfights and roosters... oh wait, and the cat "Black Cat" who decided to sleep with us last night, even though Sarah is allergic. So when it came time for us to leave this morning, I promised Waylan I would walk with him to school. When we walked out of our room this morning he was dressed, ready and waiting on the sofa for us to go. So we did, and when we got to the school, also where our bus was parked, he hugged us and said he couldn't wait to see us again.

We lose sight of the important stuff back at home- how family is everything and all we really need is love to get by. It definitely opened my eyes a little more. There was also a point where one of the other girls from our trip walked up to the fire my family had made and asked if her and one of the little girls could stand by the fire, and my mom said, "This isn't my fire, this is everyone's fire." Even though she wasn't sitting right up against it and it was a fire made by her husband, she didn't care. Never in a million years did I ever think I was going to do what I did last night, but I proud to say I survived. Rest assured that I don't think it is something I will frequent.

The pictures posted are the view from our room (1), the view from our hotel (2) and I will post pictures with our families and the township on Thursday when we get back from going to see them again. Give thanks and live ayoba!

Travel on,

Seth