Sunday, August 29, 2010

Protests and Football Games!

The public sector is still on strike here in South Africa. Millions of workers have spent the past two weeks out of work as an attempt to pressure the government to give them an 8.6% pay increase and a higher housing stipend as well. If an agreement is not reached soon it is rumored that the police will go on strike and some private unions are threatening to strike out of support for the public sector. It would be absolutely crazy if that were to happen! Since the primary school has been out of session, I've been spending my days at the Bookery which is part of an NGO called Equal Education. The organization is currently trying to supply more public schools with libraries since only 7% of all South African schools have a functioning library. The Bookery is pretty much a holding place for books that have been donated before sending them to schools. I've been sorting, organizing, labeling, and covering the books - not too exciting but it definitely beats sitting around all day!

The Bookery is right down the street from the parliament building in Cape Town and on
Thursday hundreds of public workers marched outside of parliament as part of the strike. My friend Noah and I were running an errand nearby and walked right through the crowd - it was really neat to see! An African protest is unlike anything you would see in America, without the signs they were holding it may be hard to tell they were even protesting - everyone was singing and dancing! It was a pretty cool sight!



Friday night we got tickets for the Cape Town Ajax football (soccer) match. They're one of the
teams in the Premier Soccer League, South Africa's national league and they played in Green Point Stadium which hosted some of the World Cup games. It is such a beautiful stadium, I had a blast! The vuvuzelas are even more obnoxious in person, but I could only imagine how great the atmosphere would have been in that stadium during a World Cup match - just amazing!

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