South African Sojourner: Lotus Park Revisited

This Wednesday I headed back to Lotus Park, the informal settlement we went to last week, to help with enumerating dwellings. SUN Development and the City of Cape Town are working to number all the houses in Lotus so they can set up a mail system and map the settlement. I spent all day photographing numbers that we painted onto houses and the houses themselves. The system was a little hard to follow; some houses already had numbers, some had numbers but needed new ones, and some houses were completely unmarked. Going around Lotus for 8 hours was certainly eye opening. Some of the houses are completely hidden and we had to squeeze between buildings to access them. Many people were wondering what we were doing and some of the other enumerates spent the whole time explaining what we were doing. 95 percent of the day, I didn't hear any English, just Xhosa. It was an exhausting day but quite an interesting experience.

On Saturday, I was back in Lotus again for a photo shoot for Dead End Production (DEP) Family, a collection of rap artists Claire S is working with. Claire had invited Erin to take photos of all the groups for the website she is developing. Charlie, Bridget and I tagged along to assist with interviewing, carrying equipment and safety. It was so much fun to see the groups in their element, they were all dressed and ready for their photos and knew exactly how to posed without direction. We hurried through the photos because the artists were very concerned with us being in Lotus too late. Below is a photo of all of us (minus Erin the photographer) together at the end of the day. I also got a CD filled with DEP videos and music!