Finding my way to work

Earlier last Tuesday I went with Jon to meet with the director of my internship site. It was a low key meeting, we just talked about hours and stuff like that. Monday through Friday 9-5 (African time—which means a little after 9 to somewhere around 4:30) I’m here at the Mamelani office in the Wesley Training College.

Finding my way to and from work was a little stressful the first couple of days. When Jon drove me to the site for our meeting he realized that it was close enough that I could walk. Just take a left at the robot (what they call traffic lights here) and keep walking. Seemed easy enough. On Wednesday for my first day of work, Andrew came and picked me up at 9 am to help me with public transport. We got on a train went one stop down to Salt River then walked around for like 20 minutes or more trying to find the place. Nobody knew where Durham Street was and all I knew was that it was a yellow building. Finally when we found it Andrew was like, “oh this is close, Jon should have given me better directions and said we could just walk here.”

When I got off at 5 and was walking out, the security guard at the building (mr.forgess) asked if I knew how to get home and I said kind of, to which he gave me the same “turn left at the robot” directions. At the first robot I went to turn left and saw that it just led down some tiny little street that looked like a dead end so I went up to the second robot and didn’t know where to go. Instead I just decided to follow a big group of people to see where they were going. The area that my work is in—Salt River—is a little sketchy, so everyone just said to walk around like you know where you are going. I was absolutely lost but I was marching around like I knew exactly where I was headed. The group I was following ended up leading me back to the train station and from there I figured I knew how to get home. That was until I saw like 6 train lines and had no idea which one went back to Observatory. After a quick call to Jon and finding a security guard to ask I found my train.

There are regular train tickets and metro plus tickets. The regular tickets are more like cattle cars where people are packed in and the metro plus tickets are generally a little safer and roomier. I had bought a metro plus ticket but of course made my way onto a regular cart in the middle of rush hour. I was packed into this smelly, sweaty cart hugging my purse really glad that it was 100 degrees out that day and that I had no idea what I was doing. Made it off finally though safe and in one piece.

The next day at work mr.forgess asked how my walk went and when I told him I ended up just riding the train he drew me a map. Since then, it has been a nice little 20 minute walk to and from work every day. It’s a good way to start and finish my work day. No more aimlessly wandering the dodgy streets. No more being shoved into sweaty cattle cars.