A Contrast Deeper than Black and White...

Freshly off not only a physically but rather more of an emotionally exhausting week in Gugulethu, Aaron had the brilliant idea to pull on our heart strings by scheduling a wine tour excursion this past Saturday. So we woke up early once again to catch our tour shuttle at the Mowbray Police Station (who are called the flying police, for some reason - by the way...) We boarded a bus equipped with individual garbage bags, a cool bottle of water, and multiple brochures from the vineyards we'll be visiting. At the same time, the students from the 1st grade class I visited are probably wondering what or if they will have a meal for the day. The hundreds of thousands of people living in the shacks in Gugs are probably curled up in tattered blankets, walking to get fresh water, or possibly caring for a younger sibling who may have HIV, TB, or another malady which cannot be treated without a long walk to a free clinic. Although - the fact that HIV is so heavily stigmatized in South Africa that the free ARVs (anti-retrovirals) which are made available to anyone who needs them won't be saught for until it's too late. Nine year old dead.

The contrast I realize as I sit in a heated bus on my way to taste-test wine. I'm going to learn how to tell the difference between an imature red wine versus a 4 year old South African blend. Perhaps this past week did effect me...

Just outside of Cape Town on the N2 we drove by Kayalitsha, the third biggest slum in South Africa, where about a million people live primarily in tin shacks. The township kept revealing rows upon rows of dilapidated dwellings as we drove by in our fricken tour bus, snapping pictures along the way. Our instructor said he heard that somewhere around 25% of the population is infected with HIV. Around 250,000 people in one township who don't seek out free ARVs.

Soon after, we arrived at the first winery. The winery was fairly new (established in 1994 by a rich Afrikaaner family) and we were the first group the guide has given a tour and a taste-testing to - how lucky are we, right....? My sister is a wino so I bought a couple bottles for her because I missed her birthday. Sorry K. I learned that wine is ridiculously cheap on a vineyard.

After talking to Aaron a bit about the day, I realized there was a method behind his madness by scheduling something as posh as the day's refinement. How would we feel driving by one of the biggest slums in South Africa - in the world, actually. Would we feel regret and guilt by spending a couple bucks on bottles of wine that are supposedly award winning, when the same amount of money could help feed a family in Kayalitsha? The contrast today between the physical and the emotional went deeper than the contrast which we've seen throughout the past weeks of black and white. This was no longer a black and white issue to me. It became an issue of the have's and the have not's. Do we feel any regret throwing away the end pieces of bread, turning our heads away from a homeless family outside the shoprite, or spending time refining our palates with different variations of South African wine?

I also realized how quixotic it is to think that feeling regret or remorse, acting on it, and remedying the problem is actually possible with my abilities - with your abilities. Fifteen years from now: will we notice the mile long slum along the South African countryside or will there be a slum to notice? Will we just notice it physically, will we notice it emotionally as well or will it simply go unregistered and remain under our radars...?