Africa

[Andy Rabagliati <andyr@wizzy.com>]

Folks,

  Philosophising at my 'local' on Friday, (really, the British
  culture does the 'pub' scene so much better than America, even
  if it is a struggle to find beer worth drinking here), I have
  to relate the substance of our discussion. Probably nothing
  you didn't know already ..
  
  The proposal was that a 'disease' of Western culture is that
  of loneliness - a fallout of our working culture and small
  families is that lots of people end up living alone. There have
  been efforts to address it, by setting up small communities to
  treat each other as family.
  
  One major thing that Africa still has in the rural areas, and
  I also noticed in the colored township areas, is the notion of
  large extended family. This is a support structure, where if
  one person is in hardship, or taking exams, or whatever, everyone
  feels for them. Last year I found that black houses / huts all
  had Grandmothers - the matriarch that made the house what it was.
  
  It is a notion that Africa has that is lost in many western cultures.
  
  I join a theatre group to get that group belonging, and treasure
  my theatre friends because of that.
  
  I went hiking this weekend (in the rain ..) with a few folks from
  work - from Constantia Nek up the back of Table Mountain. There are
  a lot of hiking trails in this vicinity, and they are well used.
  After a 2 hour climb through the woods, it flattened out into
  a flowered heath-like landscape that was very pretty - it being
  late spring here now.
  
  Vodacom, with much fanfare, launched their Internet Service Provider
  business last week - yebo.co.za, which we put together, and,
  annoyingly, still run. All the good Unix system Operators move
  to America and more lucrative job prospects...
  
  We also launched a Web newspaper, http://www.persfin.co.za/ -
  which is a bi-weekly paper edition in Cape Town.
  
  Weather is great - wish you could be here.
  
Cheers,   Andy!

--
subscription:- Subject "subscribe user@domain.com" to za-request@wizzy.com
     Archive:- http://www.wizzy.com/andyr/rsa/
Andy Rabagliati  .  andyr@wizzy.com  .  http://www.wizzy.com/andyr/