I went on to Cape Town and met up with Dana Myers, who’s due to take over as Director for South Africa when he’s released by the American International School on 15 June.

Dana has a complex family history. He’s in his late twenties and has an interesting history, including working as a schoolteacher on the edge of a volcano in Hawaii – apparently, you had to be careful when you breathed in case you swallowed a bit of floating lava – amazing! Then he did his Masters at a university in Montana and joined one of our programmes. He’s ideal for the Cape Town job because he loves the city and also knows all about the background and expectations of Western volunteers (particularly, I suppose, if they happen to come from the edge of a volcano in Hawaii or from Montana).

Dana says that Cape Town is the most complete city he’s ever known (although, when you think that his experiences may be limited to Honolulu and Montana, this may not be saying much). But I can see what he means. Cape Town is a big cultural centre and is visually amazing with Table Mountain behind and a general feeling that the city is built on a series of narrow strips between a wild mountain range and the South Atlantic. For years and years, I was an anti-apartheid campaigner so it was great to see a complete racial mix in all the hotels, shopping malls, restaurants and so on – but depressing to see the dreary monoculture of the townships thirteen years after apartheid had been swept away. I am inclined to think that the Mbeki government has probably got the balance of positive discrimination about right, but it must be very tough for those who expected more and who are still living in poverty.

I did the usual placement tour and there are some really good ones. The Salesian School takes in street-children and is totally brilliant – “Salesian” as in monks from France and not “Silesian” as in coalmines in Poland. The print-journalism placement is at Cape Town’s own Big Issue – the editor is very energetic and he’s keen to have volunteers to do real broad-ranging and tough journalism in a new-look fast-expanding magazine.

The original inhabitants of Cape Town were bushmen. They’ve been battered over the centuries by the Portuguese, the Zulus, the Boers, and the British and they’ve retreated to the Kalahari. If you climb Table Mountain or go to the Cape of Good Hope, just look around and imagine what it would have been like if they had just been left alone…

Dr. Peter Slowe

By Dr. Peter Slowe, Founder and Director of Projects Abroad

I just got back from South Africa where we are starting a lot of new projects.

The first place I visited was in the far north where we have leased a stretch of land on the Botswana border. I travelled up with the guy who’s going to be running the programme, Gerrit Prinsloo – Gerrit (pronounced “Kherrit”) is an interesting character, originally Afrikaner but now English-speaking but with such a strong accent that I spent a lot of time saying “pardon?” or “what?” – he’s a fully-qualified ranger and knows every plant, insect, bird and animal, so he’s a good companion and exceedingly enthusiastic.

The reserve itself, called Legodimo (pronounced “Lekho-deemo”) has plenty of wildlife, particularly when you get near to the Limpopo river – Rudyard Kipling’s “Great, grey, greasy Limpopo”. There are zebras and elephants which apparently you mustn’t get too near or they get very nervous – I startled Gerrit by jumping out of his jeep and going towards one to photograph it. In fact, one thing that struck me about wildlife in the bush (technically this is “bush-veld”) was that most of the animals are nervous wrecks because there’s always something around who wants to make a meal of them. The particular elephant I approached had a baby, which was bigger than me anyway, so it lifted up its trunk and waggled its oversize ears – these are apparently preliminary to a ten-ton charge at 40 mph, so I got back in the jeep. One of the most spectacular sights was a pair of fish eagles sitting on a dead tree in perfect sunlight – enormous and very impressive. An eagle owl ate a guinea fowl and a crocodile was just surfacing in the water. There were also masses of Marabou Storks, rare kingfishers and hornbills and a magnificent Goliath Heron.

More photos and information about accomodation and barbecues after the jump

The accommodation is a bit rough at the moment but we’re going to paint it, put in new beds and add a few cheerful decorations to make it homely. Once they’ve been tarted up, the facilities will be really good – and include a swimming pool which is occasionally shared with elephants and ostriches (which are really dumb).

Gerrit is a specialist in camp-fires. He is a great believer in the South African barbecue or “brai”. Personally, I’m not all that keen on strange South African sausages and tough raw Biltong, a kind of salty meat snack, but apparently they’re popular with many people. He assures me he can cope with vegetarians, although I guess the vegetables are all barbecued too.

Later on, I went down to Cape Town – fantastic new projects of which more will come.