What I'm thankful for

When people ask me a year from now how I celebrated Thanksgiving in South Africa, I’ll have some awesome stories to tell about hiking in the Drakensburg Mountains and taking a day trip into Lesotho. If the conversation doesn’t stop there, the follow up questions might include, “Is Thanksgiving celebrated in South Africa?” (No, it is not. Thanksgiving is based on distinctly American historical events that have little, if any, relevance in SA.), and “Lesotho? What’s Lesotho?” (It is not, in fact, a dance move. Lesotho is a tiny, landlocked country within the borders of SA. It’s pronounced leh-SOO-too.)

The YAGM volunteers in SA gathered for our first retreat over the Thanksgiving weekend at the home of our country coordinators, Brian and Kristen Konkol. Kristen cooked an amazing dinner complete with turkey and pumpkin pie. We didn’t watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade or drink hot chocolate to ward off the cold. But we did go to the pool at the local university in sunny, 85 degree weather. The seasons are in the southern hemisphere are opposite those in the northern hemisphere. As the US is bracing for winter, SA is heating up for summer. I typically don’t associate the pool with Thanksgiving, but it made me really think about the meaning of the holiday. Is Thanksgiving really about chilly fall weather and pumpkin pie, or is it about giving thanks for the things that matter most?

As we sat down to dinner in the mid-afternoon, there was a shared feeling that, as volunteers, we are becoming more and more like family. Far from our own kin in the US on such a family-oriented holiday, we realized the importance of the people with whom we are sharing this experience. During orientation at LSTC, the chaplain told us that we if we never “psychologically unpacked” that we would have a very difficult time integrating into our countries of service. Bonding with our fellow volunteers and looking to them for support in this experience has been an important part of the unpacking process. We had to acknowledge that we’re all in this together.

One of the most common things people are thankful for is “friends and family.” As Americans we like to think that we create our families through our life choices: that we choose to marry a certain person and to have a certain number of kids, or even whether to stay in touch with blood relatives. We also choose which friends and communities we consider “family.” For South Africans, one’s identity is inherently bound up in the family and community into which one is born. There is no choice in being part of a community, because individuals are inherently defined by their relationships to each other. South African culture places a stronger value on how communities shape individuals than how individuals shape themselves.

Frankly we didn’t choose whom the other volunteers in the SA YAGM program would be in the same way that we didn’t choose our host families or placement sites. The program chose for us. As volunteers were “born into” the same community, not because we sought each other out or chose to serve with each other. Although our placements vary widely across the country, we are defined by our group identity and by the church we serve. We are not best friends, but we are family, I might even dare to say, an African family. And that is something for which I am incredibly thankful.

Pictures courtesy of Amy Swenson