Today is my birthday. I am celebrating with pecan nut bread and peppered cheddar, something I couldn't imagine back in the great Zam.
I'm in Pretoria (Centurion to be exact), South Africa today up to Thursday for a meeting with the CA Regional Working Group, or CARWG "Car-Wig". CARWG is more or less a the vehicle by which country programs in Eastern and Southern Africa get together and "share" CA experiences. The quotations (or as they're known down here, inverted commas) come from the difficulty we have sharing experiences across such a vast area. To whit ... the country's represented at this plenary (Zambia, Mozambique, Tanzania, Madagascar, Zimbabwe, Botswana, South Africa, Namibia, and Malawi) are for the most part the size of 8.5 times the state of Texas.
Fly across Texas sometime (or drive, though that is a heart-rending). Consider how different East Texas is from West Texas, then multiply that by 8.5 ... you'll get the picture.
Anyway, I won't comment on that. The area is mind-blowing (as is every trip I've made to RSA); you can't imagine the development. Indicative of this is the rare ability I exhibited of dozing off in the back of the car taking us from the airport to the Protea ... the roads are that smooth. RSA (at least these parts) resembles something like the Beltway region around D.C., albeit with far more wall fences, electrified or razor wire, and with an apparent plethora of security guards. And the "cold" (again with the inverted quotes) puts ours to shame.
Not much else to mention. Strange society relative to north of the Limpopo; seeing whites in "common" jobs (cleaning up, busing tables, etc.) is odd. Not in the mean way; just something you forget in Zambia. The tourist literature is something off the planet as well, reflecting the duality of history hear. The hotel website refers to the Voertrekker Monument as either "an historical landmark" or "a grim reminder of the apartheid era". It also refers to the monument as being just outside of Pretoria, with the alternate name of Tshwane appearing in parentheses. This doubling of history lingers, reminding me (though to a lesser extent) of the names of Civil War battlefields differing between the Blue (rivers) and Grey (towns). Antietam / Sharpsburg; Bull Run / Manassas; Stone's River / Murfreesboro; etc.
