cape town!

This will just be a quick note to let you all know we’ve made it to Cape Town – Mitchell’s Plain, to be more precise! We have settled in to the wonderful hospitality of Pastor Alfonso Schilder and his wife, Crystal. They have built an apartment attached to their home that they use as a guest house, and we will be staying here for the week. The Cathcarts (good friends from Seattle) arrived on Sunday, and it is so wonderful to be together with them here – much good reflection and dialogue and reconnecting!

Mitchell’s Plain is a large township – 1.5 million people – mostly coloured. It’s in the area know as Cape Flats, which is the region of Cape Town where the townships were created when the government moved black and coloured folk out of the areas of Cape Town deemed desirable (starting in the mid 1960s) . The scale of things here is much more vast than Port Elizabeth (whose entire population is 1.5 million), and the contrasts of rich and poor are more extreme.
We’ll add a few pictures here, and will try to get back to this and give more detail about things soon. There are many stories to tell, both from our adventures and also of the people and this place.