Thank goodness I've recovered from the case I picked up on my return to Glendale from Cape Town, South Africa. It was only a nine-day trip (four days traveling) on family business, but it's surprising how distance -- a little or a lot -- renews one's perspective on so many things we take for granted in our rush to make it through the day.

It's great to be home!

Cape Town, a picturesque city of about 2 million on the southern tip of Africa, is in many ways comparable to Glendale (although some would regard it as far luckier because it's not surrounded by Los Angeles). I spent my first 23 years in what is fast becoming a tourist Mecca at the foot of Table Mountain, immigrating to San Diego in 1975.

Even after 21 years (12 as a U.S. citizen), as an immigrant I fully empathize with Glendale's large immigrant population. I perceive issues like Proposition 187 as about us -- not about the impersonal, abstract concept of "immigrants" perceived by so many native-born Americans.

On this trip to South Africa, however, it was fascinating to see how (and how much) its people and their homeland have changed in the three years since I was there last. During the 50 years of apartheid, central Cape Town was sparsely populated, mostly by affluent whites. In one of its more horrific actions, the government had uprooted thousands of so called “coloreds” (persons of mixed race) who had lived for centuries adjacent to downtown in a community known as District 6.

They we forced to move to townships 25 miles away on the wind-swept Cape Flats, where today thousands still live in squalid conditions. Hoping to entice whites to move in, the government demolished all the buildings in District 6, but the land has remained barren -- like a scar on the city's heart.

Today, the center of the city is vibrant and thriving, the streets glowing with people of almost every color and race on the planet. A bustling underground shopping mall gives one a good sense of how the country's economy is rebounding after years of apartheid-induced decline. 

The big new attraction in Cape Town is the Waterfront. Developers bought the small, old harbor (a new, larger one was built in the 1950s), renovated the wharf buildings and turned the entire area into an entertainment and shopping plaza which, when it becomes as internationally famous, will rival San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf.

The Waterfront has become such a hit since opening three years ago, construction is already underway on an expansion that will double its size. While we don’t have a harbor or waterfront here, redevelopment officials in Glendale are pursuing similar strategies to enliven downtown, recognizing as city planners worldwide are doing that a healthy city center is vital for any community to thrive.

In the Cape Town suburbs, the landscape is changing at a breakneck speed. Under a Reconstruction and Development plan sirnilar to the Marshall Plan the United States used in Europe after World War ll, the South African government is pledging to build thousands of homes for its constituents and bring them into the 21st century with indoor plumbing and electricity.

On the edges of Cape Town, new communities are popping up every day. Some replace vast (and growing) squatter camps, where the homeless built tin and cardboard shacks in the days following the collapse of the apartheid regime.

To provide adequate housing for some 40 million people is a monumental undertaking, but in two years an impressive start has been made. Glendale officials could learn a lot about how to deal with our homeless population from the humane, expeditious way the South Africans are doing it.

There was much other evidence of dramatic change. Not all of it is positive. The numbing 40 percent unemployment and crushing poverty of a huge majority has resulted in an explosion of crime that has far outstripped the resources of the police. Lawlessness is commonplace, as I discovered on the freeway from the airport to the city -- at the speed limit of about 70 mph, other drivers were flying past me; they must have been doing about 100 mph. Although I felt more comfortable in and excited about Cape Town than at any time since I emigrated, I was in a hurry to get home.

There's no feeling quite like the surge I get when flying over the San Fernando Valley towards LAX after an 11-hour flight from abroad. And, arriving back in Glendale -- with its clean brick sidewalks, outdoor cafes, bustling businesses, freedom from crime. . . and, yes, the traffic, smog, graffiti and pesky pigeons -- only one thought comes to mind: There's no place like home.

WARREN SWIL is editor of the Community Forum.