We arrived safely in Johannesburg last night after a long day of travel. Thankfully we were traveling on Emerates airlines, national airline of the United Arab Emerates. As you can imagine, this means they can afford to spare no expense. We were flying on the latest in jumbojet fashion, the Boing 777. It was sweet. Each seat was equipped with a 10″ monitor and hundreds of movies to choose from, plus games and TV shows and video cameras displaying the view from the nose of the plane to keep an eye on how straigt a line the pilot could drive down the runway.

Tomorrow we leave for the rural area north of Johannesburg. It looks to be beautiful country in a completely different setting.

We haven’t had much internet access this week, and when we did we had very little time (or energy) to writeSo here is an update.We are at the Abu Dabi airport right now. We are exhausted and in desperately need of sleep. We have a 14.5 hour flight to JFK so we should be able to get some rest. The flight from Johannesburg to here was 7.5 hours. We are missing our boys and eager to get home and it seems as though time is uncooperative with our feelings. At JFK we have a 12 hour layover. Not funny. We are hoping to go into the city to meet up with some friends. Well then…where to start… We arrived in South Africa late Monday night. We spent Tuesday in a township where we filmed and had lunch with a young boy named Tumi and two of his friends. They live in a township called Phola Park. Because it is government-sanctioned, they have roads & utilities. The house was quite nice, a small 3-bedroom home. Tumi was excited to show us their new washing machine. This neighborhood stands in contrast to the “squatter camps” that you see as frequently as you see these official townships. The squatter camps are the tin shack shanty towns that you have probably seen in the media. Some of these communities stretch on for miles. (Show me more…)

In the South African township of Phola Park just outside Johannesburg, we met Tumi.