Random Update
Posted By Sika on August 9, 2007
Today is Women’s Day in South Africa. It’s a federal holiday and everything. To quote my mama, it commemorates a march by the Federation of South African Women in 1956 against extension of the pass laws. Their chant then and throughout the anti-apartheid movement was Wathint’abafazi, wathint’imbokodo (“you have struck the women, you have struck a rock”)
When we first got here, mom dared me to touch one of the electrical fences. She actually double-dog dared me (isn’t she so grown-up?) and then called me a chicken when I refused. I tried to double dog dare her back, but she said that since I didn’t touch the fence, I couldn’t dare her back.
Yesterday, we went to the Austin Roberts Bird Sanctuary. In the process of walking around the block(s) to find the gate to the bird hide (which we passed twice, btw, before we found it) we encountered the French Embassy, which mama expected to be more stylish because it’s y’know, French. It did look an awful lot like an office park. An empty office park. Kinda like the American Embassy, only smaller, which is good because one sort of expects the American Embassy to be an ugly behemoth, but the French should know better.
After the bird sanctuary we walked over to the mall (where I did not lose my phone again) because there’s a film festival put on by the Mexican Embassy. Yay! Free movies! We saw a short documentary called Family Portrait which is about a family on which Gordon Parks did a photo spread in Life Magazine in the 60s. Even though it was in English, everybody but the director and the subjects were Mexican. The feature film was Al Otro Lado which was a very sweet and a little depressing movie about 3 kids, one in Mexico, one in Cuba, and one in Morocco, whose fathers had gone off to seek better fortunes “on the other side,” in the case of the Mexican and Cuban fathers, America, and in the case of the Moroccan father, Spain. It all boils down to these kids being desperate for their fathers’ presence in their lives and willing to try just about anything to get them back. It’s a little choppy, but good.
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