Bloemfontein

The following blog post was written on the evening of the 10th July. Due to technological restrictions it was posted at a later date.

Today we left Lesotho and made our way back to South Africa for the weekend. We are in Bloemfontein, which is about two hours from Lesotho—but it seems like another world.

After being in Lesotho for a week and a half, the buildings in Bloem seems very tall and fancy. The air smells different (and feels different in your lungs, lower altitude). We do not stand out as much due to our race as we did in Lesotho but, it is strange to have people assume that I speak Afrikaans simply because I am white. (Especially when I find Afrikaans to be as big of a mystery as Sesotho.) In addition, Bloem seems to be more segregated than the area we stayed in Jo’burg.

Today we had 5 different speakers in a row. Some of them were really good speaker and were very interesting…I took about a zillion pages of notes, but I am not going to bore you with the details. One interesting component was about language in school. Apparently, after 3rd grade in South Africa schools/testing only occurs in either English or Afrikaans-regardless of the home language of the child and regardless of the fact there are 11 official languages of the country. This has led to the continuation of segregated schools, as the majority of students in the Townships areas go to English schools and the majority of white students go to Afrikaans schools. This segregation continues to exist at the University of the Free State (where we were unable to buy t-shirts because the shop was closed for winter break) because college students continue to take classes in one of the two languages. We did not realize that the segregation would continue to exist so heavily in parts of South Africa, although now it seems to be largely economically based, the lack of fully integrated schools cannot be helping to break down the walls that exist.