Melia and I stayed up all night flying over Africa.  She couldn’t settle down and wanted someone to keep her company as Micah and Heidi slept a little.  The rain poured down as the plane landed, the water streaming in beads across the windows under a gray sky.  At first (before we saw the fancier neighborhoods), Capetown looks like a living, breathing edition of Skateboard Magazine.  Surfer magazine has beautiful pictures of green tropical oceans and lush distant islands.  Skateboard Magazine has pictures of the concrete spillways and graffiti-covered, paved-over elementary school grounds.  Everything here seems modern and rundown.  This is a world of worn out mossy/moldering steel-reinforced concrete.  You half expect to see the rebar poking out like a starving man’s bones.  Near our hotel are several never-completed raised freeway structures, huge roads into thin air.  One day long ago the work crews simply stopped and left ramps in the sky forty feet above the ground.

    I forgot how often one sees single men walking along the freeway in Africa.  I always wonder what their stories are.  We asked two bystanders for directions to the hotel.  They seemed like miracles to me – speaking English and their African language to the driver.  Their worn faces and friendliness struck me deeply.

    We went through customs and immigration.  We waited for a long time at the Dollar car rental booth.  When our turn finally came, they didn’t have a car.  Chatting and waiting, waiting and chatting we all mutually resolved to have someone at the desk drive us to the hotel.  His car was too small, so they eventually got another one.  Heidi knew were to go, but the driver didn’t.  We had an extra hour driving along and under Cape Town’s freeways.  Although they enthusiastically promised to bring a care right over to the hotel it never materialized.  A little bit of a déjà vu experience in Africa.

    We quickly dropped off our bags and went to St. George’s Anglican Cathedral and saw portions of an AIDS quilt with a pink triangle on the wall.  Another section of the church had a plaque memorializing those who lost their lives in the Boer War.  In November the South African parliament resoundingly voted to became the sixth nation in the world and the first in Africa to legalize same sex unions.  I guess the Anglican church here has been supportive of American Episcopalians.  If communion means literally sharing the Eucharist, I suppose I have been more in communion with South African Anglicans than any other African Anglicans.  There is a priest in the Bay Area who escaped political repression in Kenya and one of our candidates for bishop was a white South African…