Braai and Orientation

Before this blog, I thought I should share some of my favorite food discoveries this summer:

1) Oatmeal, with yogurt and granola (sooo good) plus fresh or dried fruit

2) Avocado with salt on toast

3) Digestives- I had these in Australia, they are biscuit-cookie things which taste delicious and aren't too sweet

4) Curry and Pasta- two of my least favorite foods usually, but when cooked by my flatmate Akeel, from Malawi, with Indian spices, tomatoes, chicken, garlic, onions.... sooo good

5) Halloumi- fried cheese, sounds disgusting, but is actually really good on salads, for an appetizer or in lentils

This past weekend was my flatmate Rose's last in Pretoria. She has been here for a year now and plans to return in January after finishing her final semester of college. For her goodbye we hosted our first braai at the flat complete with potato salad, pasta salad, greek salad and teriyaki chicken. We were going to attempt to make pap, but decided we would probably butcher it to the point her host family would not enjoy it. Her host family, who she lived with while studying here in high school, traveled up from the southern suburbs of Johannesburg. There was a little boy, Caclio, who was so mischievious. He went to the bathroom on the porch and ran around eating everything in sight then rubbing his chocolately hands on the walls, but he was adorable! We made a bonfire and enjoyed a warm evening on the balcony. Her host family (mother, 2 sisters and cousin) were extremely talkative and funny. We danced to South African gospel music and heard stories from Rose's high school days.

Yesterday was orientation, in week 8 of my intership. Idasa didn't run an orientation last month because of Reflection Week. The 4 hour orientation was led mostly by Yvette, the Executive Director's assistant who discussed the fascinating history of Idasa. Yvette has been involved with Idasa since her student days when she described the amazing responsiblity placed on students' shoulders to do the legwork leading up to the transition. Idasa was founded when Alex Boraine and Frederik van Zyl Slabbert , broke away from the Nationalist Party in which Yvette described them as "cultivated" to take the presidency as good, Afrikaner boys. In its early days, Idasa hosted now famous meetings between banned political organizations and prominent white South Africans (from politics, business, law etc.) to facilitate discussion about a transition. The most famous of these meetings took place in Dakar, Senegal and broke ground between famous ANC exiled leaders and prominent Afrikaners. Yvette described running around the country like mad during the 80s and early 90s training people about democracy and trying to instill a more democratic culture in the country. Idasa's work was extremely controversial and at one point Ivor Jenkins' (current director of the Idasa office where I work) home was shot at requiring him to go into exile in the United States where he spent a year working with the Kettering Foundation. I would have loved to hear more stories about Idasa's early history, but we had to move on to Idasa's policies and procedures and IT.