Arriving in the Rainbow Nation or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace Lost Luggage

Greetings from Johannesburg! This is the first entry in the PBPL 85 class's travel blog about our research mission (maybe mixed with a bit of vacation) to South Africa. You'll hear from a different one of us each day about our adventures. Today, Nov. 30, your humble correspondent is Kyle Mullins '22, one of the group memo editors and a history major from St. Petersburg, FL. 

Of course, "today" truly started at 4:30 a.m. on Nov. 29, when thirteen students and one steadfast professor — all having arrived the night before from across North America — gathered bleary-eyed in the Boston Embassy Suites lobby, ready to begin our transatlantic journey. The subsequent six-hour flight from Boston to London was smooth and uneventful. It did, however, contain our first impromptu interview: A South African professional rock climber barely younger than us, also en route to Johannesburg, proved a chatty flight companion and gave me and Kate Yuan '23 safety tips and her thoughts about education in South Africa. 

The 11-hour overnight flight to Johannesburg was … longer. Activities on the double-decker Airbus A380-800 ranged widely, from Thomas Brown '23's reading of Dracula to Claire Betzer '23's crosswords. My personal activities consisted of the following:

1. Binging a Netflix animated series called Inside Job, the premise of which is that every wild conspiracy theory is real and managed by a single dysfunctional corporation (wacky office politics hijinks ensue).
2. Contemplating newfound questions about the JFK assassination as I desperately attempted to fall asleep.
3. Looking with enormous envy at my peers who were actually able to sleep. 

On the bright side, thanks to some idiosyncrasies of the passengers around us — who seemed unable to stand touching cheap fabric and sought to get it as far away from them as possible — student assistant Jason Norris '24 and I somehow managed to accidentally accumulate an entire seat's worth of British Airways pillows and blankets in the empty space between us. 

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You could say it was a cushy flight!

Upon arrival in South Africa, we discovered that a whopping 12 out of 14 of us were able to retrieve our luggage! Josh Freitag and I were not so lucky, however: British Airways left our bags in Boston in what I can only assume is either revenge for Team USA's tie against England in the World Cup or extremely belated retribution for the Boston Tea Party. Please send prayers and toothpaste.

After meeting our jolly guide Alistair, exchanging currency, and arriving at the swanky DaVinci Hotel, we hit the ground running. Chief Africa correspondent for The Economist magazine John McDermott met with us to offer some tips regarding what topics we should focus on in our conversations with others, including what we could ask government officials if we wanted to be "cheeky." He also offered guiding thoughts that will help organize our memo. 

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Observant viewers will note that I am still wearing my plane outfit, as the rest of my clothes were on the wrong continent.

Undeterred by our escalating exhaustion, the group then dined with lawyer Tanya Cohen and businessman and former foreign service officer Daniel Ngwepe, who have over the years worked in a variety of roles across the public and private sectors in South Africa. Both noted the issue of a lack of trust between the government and the private sector, worrying that ideology among government officials could block businesses from forming a critical part of racial reconciliation in the country. 

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Some phenomenal conversations over equally phenomenal Greek food.

Thus begins a packed two weeks. At the end of lots of travel, the whole group was ready to rest up. Day 2 will include more interviews, a visit to a nonprofit that promotes public health via soccer, and — hopefully — the return of Josh's and my missing luggage. 

Read December 1st Blog Post