Centre of the Universe

South Africa is an interesting country, and if you think you know completely it – even as a local you would be severely mistaken.

Yesterday, despite having lived in SA my whole life, I had my first experience of visiting one of our infamous townships (Du Noon), and despite the fact, that I literally live 2km away from Du Noon, it is like an entirely different world than what I am used to.

South Africa is one of the countries in the world with the largest difference between standards of living between the rich and the poor, and that was very apparent to me yesterday.

You have a small rich elite, who all drive snazzy new 4×4’s, BMW’s and Mercs, who all live in big mansions. Then you have the struggling middle-class, who can barely afford to pay rent and keep food on the table (which we are firmly a part of), and then at the economic bottom, you have the working class which mostly live in townships and squatter camps in the most primitive of conditions imaginable. The sad thing is that the majority of our population lives this way, especially when you consider that unemployment sits around 30%, and that even if you do work, most working class jobs pay an absolute pittance in South Africa.

The reason why I had to go to into the township, was because one of Claudias former colleagues lives there, and since we are packing up our stuff in preparation to move to the Netherlands, we promised to give her a few bookcases, and had to go drop it off.

Once you enter the township, all resemblence to anything you know before just disappears. Building materials are anything people can get their hands on, roads are narrow, most people have no other transport otherthan their feet, and houses are tiny. The main street is bordered by little shops selling discount items. A few of the shops even use old shipping containers as their building.

In Du Noon, a house tends to be a little bit of a misnomer. To gve an example, Letitia (to whom I was giving the bookcases) had one of the bigger houses in her street. It was built out cement bricks, unlike most of her neighbours whose houses were made out of corrugated iron.

Her house consists of only one room, with two beds in it, the cooking area, and a tiny walled off section for the toilet. That is all of it. And here I complain about my tiny house with two bedrooms a lounge and kitchen, and her entire house is smaller than my garage.

Letitia’s house was impeccably neat though, and she was proud to show off her house to me – as she ought to be. She has done well with what she has.

Despite the fact that most people who do not live in the townships and squatter camps fear them greatly, since most of the criminal element tend to originate from them, my experience yesterday showed that most of the inhabitants are decent respectable and most of all friendly people who are just trying to make it through life. I did not feel threatened once while I was in there, despite the fact that I was not quite comfortable in these unfamiliar surroundings.

I know I struggle immensely to make ends meet every month, and I earn ten times what these people earn – sometimes even more.

South Africa might be pretending to be a first world country, but until these poor people get lifted out of poverty, we will be firmly stuck in the third world. From first hand observations, I certainly think it is time that South Africa’s politians take out those silver spoons out of their mouths and start doing something to alleviate the suffering of their people.

The pictures are kindly provided by www.capetown.dj

It is now safe to do this, since I have informed the company I work for already, so the latest news flash is that mysef, Claudia and Cole are going to be emigrating from South Africa to the Netherlands in a few months time.

Currently our planned departure date is set at the end of April, largely to give us enough time to get all our passports sorted out before we go.

So, now I am sure the first question you may be wanting to ask is, “Why would a South African want to go live in the Netherlands?”

Well, the reasons are many, but one very powerful driver of our move, is that I have dual Belgian/South African citizenship, and Claudia (and by implication, Cole) has dual Swiss/South African citizenship, so making a move to Europe is very easy for us. Since Switzerland has very close ties to the EU, and me beign an EU citizen, there is no issue at all for us to move over. Very little paperwork to worry about.

This still does not answer fully why we chose the Netherlands though, since most South Africans heading off for Europe tend to centre around the UK. Well, firstly, my mother and brother already stay in Haarlem (near Amsterdam if you are wondering where that is), which gives us a free couch to sleep on until we get settled.

The Dutch are also very easy going, and many of them speak pretty good English to boot, and for an English speaker, I have the greatest probability of success there, outside of the UK.

And in addition to that, Dutch would be one of the easiest European languages for me to learn, as in South Africa, Afrikaans is one of the major languages, which I did 7 years worth of at school. Afrikaans is a closely related language to Dutch, and originated in the early Dutch settlers in South Africa. The pronunciation and spelling are slightly different, and there are a few minor differences in vocabulary, but the two languages are very close to each other, to the point where, based solely on my fluency in Afrikaans, I am able to understand most written Dutch, and spoken Dutch when spoken slowly and clearly.

As to the reasons we are leaving South Africa, well, my entire goal is to provide the best life that I can to my family, and that is becoming increasingly difficult in South Africa. If I start naming reasons, I will start to look like one of the many whingers we have in South Africa. Don’t get me wrong, I have always loved South Africa as a country, but the problems we have here are starting to become too much for me, and it is now time to seek a better life.

There will be many things I am going to miss, but what I am looking forward to is decent public transport, and fast cheap internet, over everything else.
As the move comes together I will blog more about the experience of uprooting ourselves and planting ourselves in a foreign land.

A few days ago, I saw an article which said that the German soccer team were advised by their security firm that when they came to South Africa next year for the Soccer World Cup, they should wear bullet-proof vests when they venture out of their hotel rooms.

The reason for this is that South Africa has one of the highest murder rates in the world, and they just trying to be careful. It is overreacting a slight bit, but does give a very interesting view as to how South Africa is viewed on the world stage.

Crime exists everywhere in the world, but South Africa has one of the highest rates of crime. Now, how exactly do South Africans handle this war zone we live in? We just simply carry on with life.

Crime is the number one topic we South African love to complain about (justifiably so), yet life goes on. We may live behind electric fencing and burglar bars, but very few fear walking down the road. We know that there are risks, and we try to minimise them as much as possible – you could say that South Africans are a heck of a lot more street-wise than our overseas counterparts. We don’t show off flashy items such as cellphones or expensive jewelery in risky places, and are always aware of our surroundings.

But has it reached a point where we need bullet-proof vests? I think not. We may be street-wise but we certainly are not petrified of getting gunned down.

I will say I understand the German security firm’s stance, and I certainly think that South African crime is out of control, but I still feel safe enough to walk down the street leaving the body armour to the security guards who patrol our streets.

I spent yesterday watching the rather nail-biting match between south Africa and England. Both teams played really well, and the total of 323 runs which south Africa were chasing was a huge score. Even though south Africa came up 22 runs short, it was a very good effort.

Of everyone though, I was most impressed with Graeme Smith’s performance. He got 141 runs and stayed in the match for almost the entire innings.

I did lose a little bit of respect for the English side though. Towards the end of Graeme Smith’s innings, he started cramping badly. From what I saw on TV, it looked like it was painful for him to walk, let alone run.

When Smith asked for a runner, to run for him (which he was fully entitled to do), the English captain, Andrew Strauss, refused to allow it, saying that runners should not be allowed for cramping.

Understandably, Smith, and the rest of the team were not particularly happy about this, as there is a fair bit of historical precedent where runners were allowed for this very reason.

It looks to me as though Strauss was wanting to make sure that South Africa was in the least favourable position to win the game, although, by that stage the chances of us winning was remote whether Smith got a runner or not, so seriously, would it really have been so terrible for Struass to allow the runner? I certainly don’t think so, and it left a little bit of a bad taste in my mouth. It came across as rather unsportsmanlike, which cricket is normally known for its high levels of sportsmanship.

And to the Proteas, I know we lost, but I am proud of you guys anyway.

Today, on news24, I saw the reply from Telkom about the pigeon race to copy 4GB of data from Howick to Hillcrest (read my post about it here).

Telkom are claiming that they cannot be blamed for the slow internet connection, as they say that The Unlimited have not followed their recommendations and that if they had a problem they should have contacted the Telkom call centre to sort them out.

Now, anyone in South Africa who has had to deal with the Telkom call centre will know that that is an exercise in futility. Telkom are so well known for non-delivery of services. Just think of sites such as www.hellkom.co.za, or the amount of complaints on www.mybroadband.co.za.

Telkom have a stranglehold on communications in South Africa, and as with all monopolies, they don’t really have much reason to improve service if there is nowhere else to go. New infrastructure like the new Seacom cable might change things like that in the future, but for now, there is not much we can do.

Having studied astronomy for a number of years at university, this is a subject that is very close to my heart, and South Africa is in a good spot right now. We have a good climate for astronomy, one of the world’s largest ground-based optical telescopes (SALT out in Sutherland), a magnetic observatory in Hermanus, and several other smaller observatories.

That all is old news though. More exciting things are still to come. South Africa are bidding to build what will be the largest radio telescope array in the world, and our only competition are the Australians.

This radio telescope, called the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), will be made up of 3000 radio dishes, each of which is 3 stories high. Think of something similar to the Very Large Array (VLA) out in New Mexico that featured in the movie Contact. Except the VLA comprises only 27 dishes. Now, granted, each dish in the SKA will be smaller than the ones in the VLA, with 3000 of them working together, nothing before it will compare.

The name of the telescope comes not from the size of the area on which the telescopes will be built, but rather, the combined surface area of the dishes, which will be spread out over an enormous area. If we get the bid, most of the dishes will be built in the Northern Cape, with 7 other neighbouring countries also having a few dishes, since the full scale will be 3000km across.

The reason for this is that when you use several radio telescopes far apart from each other, you can get much better resolution than having one big giant dish. I won’t go into the technical details of how this works since I would probably lose 99% of my readers doing that. Suffice to say, what we are essentially creating here is a huge radio telescope 3000km across that is made up of 3000 individual bits, all connected by fiber optics.

And what would be the price tag for this project? Only a paltry two billion euros. It sounds a lot, but when you compare to what you are trying to do, it doesn’t sound like much.

I think South Africans need to come forward and be proud that we are being considered. Come on show your support.

Winston the Pigeon is the champion in a most unusual race.

A company in KwaZulu-Natal, The Unlimited, decided that they were a little sick and tired of the unreliable internet connectivity they were getting from Telkom. They have to regularly send 4GB of data from their Howick office, near Pietermaritzburg to their head office in Hillcrest, Durban – a distance of 80km.

Someone had a bright idea that it would probably be faster to send the data between the office using a carrier pigeon than using their broadband connection, and thus was born Pigeon Race 2009.

Today, at 10:00 or so the race began, and Winston, the carrier pigeon did not disappoint. the download is still underway at the time of writing, while Winston has landed already, and the data has already been copied off the memory disk they attached to its leg. A recent test by the company showed it took over 2 days to transfer the 4GB over broadband. Winstons trip took 2 hours 6 minutes.

There is some talk that the company might employ more carrier pigeons after the success of this little experiment.

Many people who were trying to watch the live internet feeds struggled due to inadequate internet bandwidth. I love the irony.

This just goes to prove that Telkom IS as bad as they are made out to be….I just hope this contest spurs on our local communications companies to pull up their socks and offer us a real service.