Back to Prison

I paid a second visit to the Johannesburg Correctional Center today...this time the team had to perform outside on the edge of the soccer field, and the audience members kept interrupting the play with urgent questions like, "what's the risk for HIV with anal sex?" The actors politely asked them to hold questions until the end. Next week I have a chance to see them perform at a school, which will be very different. After the play, I accompanied two actor/educators who held a session with a group of inmates who they have trained as HIV/AIDS peer educators. We did some image theater together in a bare, musty smelling cement room with a few old pieces of weightlifting equipment and a sad ping pong table in the corner. Nonetheless, everyone participated and afterwards a few men told me how they are forming a theater group inside to create their own plays, and want to continue working when they are released. Everyone keeps asking me if I'm scared to be at the prison, but I'm still not...the facilities are much more run down than SF County, that's for sure, but otherwise, it's the same game.

I have now taken the minibus taxi home a number of times now and can honestly say that I could probably figure it out on my own, although it's much better to go with my chaperone, Tsepho. I am always the only white person in the taxi, with a strange accent no less, so it causes some curious sideways glances. But I've figured out when I need to get out, when I need to announce that I need to get out..."after robots". The strangest South African lingo thus far--they call traffic lights robots. Makes no sense.