Oakhaven Old Age Home

Yesterday was my first day of work at Oakhaven Old Age Home.  It is in a "colored township" of Cape Town which is essentially one of the areas of the city that you were allocated to under apartheid if you were not black, white or Indian.  I finally found out how it was decided whether you were colored or black.  A government official either decided simply by the color or your skin or they did some "tests" on you.  One such scientific test was to poke a pencil in your hair.  If it fell out, you were colored.  If it stuck, it meant your hair was coarse enough to belong to a black person and you were considered black.  Another way was to pinch a person.  If you were pinched you usually yelled out in your native tongue - if it was a tribal language you were considered black.

Anyway, although the old age home is in a colored township, now that apartheid is over, there are actually some black and white people there.  All of them seem very nice and were happy to see a new face.  I will be working with the occupational therapist, Lucy, helping her to implement programs for the old people.  Yesterday, I spent most of my time observing and talking to the old people.  There were some very interesting characters.  Lucy does an exercise class and then some type of activity each morning.  She told me I could do yoga with the residents instead of her exercise class so I did that today.  It was a different experience than I am used to because most of the people are less mobile.  One curious thing that happened is that one of the residents who typically yells out some type of words that no one understands once in a while, decided to do that constantly during my yoga class.  It was like he was competing for attention.  Pretty funny.  After the class was over he became completely quiet.  Anyways, next on the agenda was an energetic game of dice complete with sweets for the winners.

After work today, we went with the other volunteers to an open market and looked at African crafts and then a few of us went to a huge mall, looked around and had a steak dinner.  Lots of fun.