On the ground in PMB

One of my motivations for serving with YAGM was to put faces to the statistics of extreme poverty and disease. It is one thing to listen to figures rattled off from a PowerPoint presentation and quite another to be shown around a township. I wanted to experience “the real thing.” I’m currently living in the province with highest infection rate in the country with the highest overall infection rate of HIV/AIDS in the world. At a 40% prevalence, KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) is one of the centers of the pandemic. It doesn’t get more real than this.

Pietermartizburg (PMB), or Martizburg for short, is the provincial capital of KZN. It is a city of stark contrasts. Like many other cities in South Africa it is possible to travel between areas with every developed world amenity imaginable to the desperate poverty of the developing world within minutes. You can find a shopping mall within kilometers of a township. I travel between these worlds on a daily basis.

I live in a neighborhood about a ten-minute khombi (taxi) ride from the city center. It’s a quiet area with spacious houses and well-kept gardens. Yesterday morning I enjoyed watching a troop of monkeys scamper across the road as I waited for a khombi. Before 1994 (the end of apartheid), by law my host family would not have been allowed to live in this neighborhood, as blacks in a formerly white section of the city. (During apartheid cities were racially divided into black, colored, Indian, and white areas. Its legacy is still clearly visible in the geography of the city.)

Each morning I travel to the city center or to the townships, depending on which placement site I’m working at that day. The khombi system is like the MBTA in Boston in the respect that it appears to have no set schedules. But with a lot patience (mostly with myself) and a little bravery I’ve been learning to navigate my way around the city using public transportation. Like any system, it’s much easier to negotiate once one has a better sense of how it operates.

I’ve been officially working for two weeks now, though the majority of my first week was spent in a training workshop on HIV/AIDS and the church. I wasn’t able to go to work on last Friday, because of the Jacob Zuma court proceedings that made the little city of PMB famous for a day. (There was no public transportation, as the khombis were not running their regular routes but ferrying Zuma supporters to the political rally taking place downtown.) To that end it is a very interesting time to be a student of South African politics. For the first time the president of the country, Thabo Mbeki, is not also the president of the ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC). Jacob Zuma is the current president of the ANC.

My sites are with a Christian non-governmental organization (NGO) called the Pietermatizburg Agency for Christian Social Awareness (PACSA) and a crèche (preschool) attached to an Evangelical Lutheran Church in South Africa (ELCSA) congregation. (Are you following the alphabet soup?) I’m discovering that as an American I have a strong need to “do” and to do it right now. I’m seriously resisting the urge to shout, “I’m here!” It’s taken a lot of patience to realize that neither SA or even PMB revolve around the orientation processes at my placements. I’m jumping, as a guest, into systems that were set in motion long before I arrived and will continue long after I’m gone. These first few weeks I’ve been trying to find the places where I will serve most effectively within those systems. Like any system, it’s much easier to negotiate once one has a better sense of how it operates, as difficult as that may be for an impatient American like me.