Durban

Just back from a surprise trip across the country, to Durban. Newsday, my former employer, gave me a call and asked me to go as part of a team of people helping cover the international reaction to the selecting of the next pope.

I was actually Newsday’s backup--they tried and failed to get someone into Nigeria, which has more Catholics and a cardinal who was considered to have a better shot at being named pope than the cardinal from Durban.

The work was very interesting, and I spent a good amount of time at the city’s cathedral, talking to more regular people in three days than I think I had in the entire rest of the time we’ve been here. And Sunday, Katie and I ended up eating lunch with one of the parish priests in the rectory, and having a long talk that covered a lot of ground, from the history of South Africa to the role of the Catholic church in battling apartheid. We took some of what the priest said with a grain of salt, but nonetheless had a very worthwhile time. And managed to attend three masses, one of them in Zulu. About nine percent of people in South Africa are Catholic.

In the end, the second story I was supposed to do got shelved when they named Ratzinger as the head pope dude on Tuesday night. Then it became a mad scramble to get some sort of reaction to the news, and the same priest came through in a big way.

It happened like this: When I showed up at the cathedral hoping to find regular parishioners to get their reactions to the announcement, the church was closed up tight. This is what happens in Cape Town at night, as well. The downtown becomes largely deserted, as the rich people lock themselves away behind the walls of their homes, and the rest of the folks go back to the settlements and townships that they’ve always lived in. Even though apartheid has been dead for over a decade, the poor people mostly do not live in the city center. In Durban, no one does, as far as I can tell.

So the cathedral was locked up tight, but I managed to get in to see the priest. He pulled out his country-wide directory of all the bishops and church leaders, called them all up, introduced me to them, and handed off the phone. An hour of this amounted to about three lines in a worldwide reaction story that ran the next day.

Still, it was a worthwhile trip. The city is very dynamic, and has a completely different feel from Cape Town. There is a large Indian population in Durban, and the Indian food was fantastic. Katie and I ate it every night that we could--every night I wasn’t working past closing time for the Indian restaurants.

And, we saw a baboon on the roof of our B&B. Our host said baboons can hamstring a dog in a few seconds flat. I wished they’d taken care of the little yippy dogs that were underfoot all the time, but, alas, that was not to be.

Just a few pictures from the cathedral in Durban here.