Where are the townships?

The townships in South Africa are a legacy of apartheid and ultimately of colonialism. As a black, legally, one could not live anywhere else in a city before 1994 when South Africa became a democratic country. Originally built with the intention of being temporary homes for migrant workers, townships sprang up on the outskirts of cities throughout SA. They still have a makeshift, hurried feel to them, although people have lived there for generations: half-built houses and little, if any, infrastructure. Access to basic services like health care, water, electricity, and sanitation are limited, if available at all.

In the past few weeks I’ve begun to reflect on the townships in a different way. It would be insensitive to think of the townships as a metaphor, perhaps even crass to compare to something else the way people live and die in poverty. But I’ve started asking, where are the “townships” in my own life? Where are the “townships” in Boston where I spent four years at university? Where are the places that some can pretend don’t exist, because they would never choose to go there voluntarily? The Fens? Dorchester? South Boston?

The only time I went to Dorchester in four years of living in Boston was when I served jury duty. It wasn’t easy to get there. I took two unfamiliar bus routes. On the second bus I felt for the first time what it was like to be a minority. During that rather long ride two Teach for America volunteers in bright red jackets boarded and exited the bus before I reached the courthouse. Like I often do now, they stuck out like sore thumbs as white volunteers in a predominantly African-American neighborhood. Although the extreme and pervasive nature of poverty in Africa does not compare to the poverty in US, I spent four years in denial that poverty existed at all. I even attended a church that housed a homeless shelter in its basement! Like here in SA, I was a privileged, on my way to being well-educated white that could afford the luxury of denial.

The townships are an interesting phenomenon, in that as a North American, it would be possible to spend an entire year in SA without setting foot in a township. I could attend and serve a white, suburban congregation. I could socialize with white university and seminary students. I could do all my shopping and find entertainment in the city center.

By the very nature of my work here, that option, to never go to a township, is out of the question. I spend part of my week, often the most difficult part of my week, working in a place where it becomes impossible to look away, to be in denial. It becomes impossible not to be in touch with the realities of limited access to health care, water, electricity, and sanitation. When children come to the crèche in tattered clothes and hungry for their morning porridge, it is difficult not to ask why. Why was I numb to this reality that literally billions of people on this planet share? In my remote, insulated Boston bubble, even as an activist and organizer, I had the convenience of looking away when I chose to. I was not confronted with hard realities life and death on a daily basis. For the majority of the world’s population, looking away is not an option: it’s a daily existence.

Early one morning last week, as I was sweeping the floor of the crèche, I couldn’t help but think to myself “Is this what I signed up for? How naïve was I?” One of my primary motivations for coming to the African continent was to put faces and stories to the statistics. I was asked during one of my interviews for this program, what makes the statistics any different from the stories of the poor that you could read? Why not just buy a book? The statistics do not even begin to paint the picture. The fact that one person dies every four seconds from treatable, preventable, poverty-related causes translates into the reality that I have started mentally preparing myself for the possibility of losing one of the children at the crèche during the year. The statistics don’t pull at your heart or sink in the pit of your stomach like being present for children born into desperate circumstances by no fault or choosing of their own. Sharing my presence is so hard sometimes, because I can’t look away. I no longer have that luxury. You are there when kids are laughing and sobbing, satisfied and hungry, healthy and HIV positive. Although the gifts of time and presence can be difficult to share, I would not trade that opportunity for anything. I thank God for the privilege and the ability to do more than read a book.