On Tuesday evening, I went to the "A.R.T. Gallery" in Kalk Bay for the opening of a small photographic exhibition by Sean on his mad cycle trip from Kenya to Mozambique. While it was a small exhibition (featuring only a small subset of his photos), the quality was remarkable none the less, which was not really surprising, considering Sean is quite an accomplished photographer.
On the way back from Kalk Bay, I met a salesman at the station. The train was late and the few passengers got talking to pass the time. Turns out, that the salesman can speak at least six of the eleven South African languages fluently and also knows atleast 3 other foreign languages. The fact that he had a fluent conversation with four different people with four different languages (English, Afrikaans, Xhosa, Sesotho) did lend some credibility to his claims. Turns out, that while selling sweets and biscuits on the train is his job, he spends a lot of time teaching, without pay, languages esp Xhosa and Afrikaans at different primary schools. He is trying to get a proper teaching qualification so that he can actually make a proper job out of it and his ambition is to master every official language in South Africa.
It is a bold ambition, but it was amazing to meet someone who, despite his own difficulties (after all selling sweets cannot be that much of a decent living) has so much to give to others. In hindisght, I realise that I should have tried to at least get his name ...
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