Leroy Glam

The Sylvie Lining “I was very curious about coming to Cape Town,” says Sylvie Amagna Assara, YMCA Cape Town’s 2018 intern from Cameroon, in her usual, earnest fashion. “But the trip was very long,” she allows. “I spent a whole night at the airport in Nairobi. “ Sylvie – ever inquisitive, and buoyant, at heart – is from Yaounde in Cameroon, where she passed a “very comfortable” childhood as one of nine children to two loving parents. Human life, though, can be jarring. Sylvie’s idyllic family weathered a body blow when the company her father worked for sacked him after [...]

Bella of the Ball On any given Tuesday morning, seemingly random people breeze into the Resource Centre at YMCA Cape Town. But there’s nothing arbitrary about them or their trips to the Y. They hail from drug rehabs or shelters and sometimes struggle to get there by 10:30. They do it themselves, but they also do it for Bella. Crystabella Odonkor (Bella to everyone, really) runs the basic computer literacy course at YMCA CT, where folks who’ve often never touched computers before go to her for direction. “Sometimes people will walk in and they can be quite [...]