A Long View

The young adult stage of life can be one of almost constant transition. Many switch time zones, or even continents, with each new course of study, year of service, or job opportunity. Some move away from home after graduating high school to attend university. Others enter the work force or go to graduate school. Countless possibilities present themselves, many far from home and the comforts of the familiar.

In South Africa, although I’m building some wonderful friendships and have been shown immense hospitality, I can never feel truly at home. As soon as I think that I have something figured out, I realize that there are several more unknown layers of meaning underneath that something. I can never really forget that I’m not a South African. I expect to be made uncomfortable, to be put in awkward social situations, to be asked to do something I’m not prepared for, and to always be meeting new people.

In conversations with people I’ve just met, my accent usually betrays the fact that I’m not South African. The questions that follow often go something like this:

“Where are you from?”
“I’m from the US. I’m here a volunteer.”
“Oh, really. How long are you here for?”
“A year.”
“And when are you leaving?”
“Probably mid- to late-July.”

When are you leaving? Although I’ve been in South Africa for four months now, in some ways it seems that I have still just arrived, that I am barely scratching the surface. A year is both very short and very long, both significant and insignificant. The story of my year of service is an infinitesimal part of the story of the people of South Africa, one that is thousands of years old. In many ways I’m just passing through, a sojourner, fully present but ultimately on my way to the next thing. When are you leaving?

I’m waiting for a moment of repose that never arrives. When I’m on the cusp of completing some big task, I look forward to a moment of calm, of stillness. But that moment never comes. The end of one thing inevitably produces several more things. Inertia hurtles me forward in time.

Regardless of a particular life stage, ultimately, we are all strangers in a strange land, passing through on our way to the next thing. It’s easier to feel at “home” in one’s country of birth, among family and friends who speak one’s mother tongue. Supposedly as a young adult is the best time to serve abroad before becoming a “real adult” and “settling down” with the obligations of a career, a family, and a mortgage. Is to be a “real adult” simply to be deluded into thinking that one’s life is all that predictable, that it brings some sort of stability?

Do we ever really settle down? Is the purpose of life to settle down into the comfort of predictability, or are must we ultimately serve something bigger than ourselves? Or do we ever realize that our lives are always in process, that transition is inevitable, and that we are part of a greater story that is far beyond our comprehension?

We are part of a far greater story: God’s story. Our lives here on Earth are but a tiny part in the history of the cosmos, however significant or insignificant our impact on that history may be. Although that feeling of smallness can be overwhelming, it is also liberating. In not being able to do everything, we recognize that we can do something in a meaningful way.

It helps now and then to step back and take a long view. The Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is even beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a small fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work. Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of saying that the Kingdom always lies beyond us.

We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own.

- Archbishop Oscar Romero

World AIDS Day

A year ago on World AIDS Day I was a student organizing students on a university campus. I was trying to convince my peers that it was in their best interest and the “right thing” to care about a pandemic happening thousands of miles away on “the problem continent” (although it is happening on a much smaller scale at home too). I helped coordinate a letter writing campaign to the US Senate in support of legislation for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which took place during a worship at the campus chapel. Although a profoundly different experience, this year on World AIDS Day I was also a young person among young people. But I was the student and my peers were the teachers. There was nothing spiritualized or theoretical about the day. It wasn’t advocacy; it was “real life” in a way I wouldn’t have been able to comprehend a year ago.

The day started with a march. Hundreds of people sang, danced, carried banners, and distributed flyers and red ribbons to passers-by. Stopping traffic and making active participants of those standing on the side of the road was a powerful way to disseminate information. I had an adrenaline rush from being among so many people singing and marching, and the almost parade atmosphere of the police escort cars and people watching.

The march was followed by a rally. There were speakers, dramas, and singers. On the field where the rally was held were mobile HIV testing sites. Each of the three trailers had several consultation rooms fully staffed by counselors and nurses. Most South Africans are “HIV ignorant.” Of the 600 people that attended the event, over 70 tested for HIV and learned their status. Knowing one’s status is extremely important in stopping the spread of the pandemic. Those who test negative are encouraged to continue practicing safe behaviors and habits. Those who test positive can take the necessary steps in getting treatment and support. The people at the rally weren’t just talking about HIV/AIDS. They were doing something to stop its spread.

What struck me about the types of people in attendance was that they were either young or old. This year World AIDS Day fell on a Monday, which could explain why there were not as many adults present. Many were probably working. The number of young people there, especially those that participated in the program and decided to get tested, was a strong testament to power that youth can have in transforming a society. There was strength in their commitment to change, to taking ownership of their generation.

The young people of South Africa have inherited so many challenges: high rates of crime and unemployment, limited access to quality education, and a failed health care system. These are challenges most American students and young adults cannot even fathom. As a young person myself, I know how quickly some in the older generations write me off, won't take me seriously, or condemn me as apathetic and uninterested. Many older people think youth are more fascinated by the latest video game or designer brand of jeans than becoming involved in the community. Yes, it is true, that there are many young people that do need swift kick in the pants to get off the couch. But this year on World AIDS Day, I was a witness to the power that youth can have to making a positive impact on their communities. Young people may have a lot to learn, but they also have a lot to teach, especially to their western peers.

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

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.

HIV/AIDS and Gender-Based Violence in the South African Context

Below is a very brief paper that I wrote for PACSA as part of introductory section to a much larger project. Many of the statistics are startling, but eye-opening to the realities of the South African context.

The high prevalence rates of both gender-based violence and HIV/AIDS have created interrelated crises in South Africa. At 5.5 million people, South Africa had the highest number of HIV infections of any country in the world in 2007 according to Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the World Health Organisation (WHO). The Department of Health in South Africa stated that 18.3% of adults (15-49 years) were living with HIV in 2006, although the prevalence rate varied widely from province to province. In Kwa-Zulu Natal, 39% of pregnant women tested positive at antenatal clinics. In South Africa women are disproportionately infected with HIV. Among 15-24 year-olds, women represent 90% of new infections. The HIV incidence among women 20-29 years-old was approximately 5.6% in 2005, nearly six times higher than the incidence rate among men of the same age range. As AIDS-related illnesses are the leading cause of death in South Africa, it cannot be denied that this country faces a health crisis of massive proportions.

The spread of the HIV/AIDS pandemic is directly related to the elevated occurrence of gender-based violence in South Africa. According to People Opposed to Women Abuse (POWA), a woman is raped in South Africa every 26 seconds. Every fourth woman is in an abusive relationship, and every six days a woman is killed by her intimate male partner. One in four girls (under the age of 16) has been sexually abused. If a rapist is HIV positive, his victim is also likely to become infected. When a woman is in an abusive relationship, she is far less likely to be able to negotiate using condoms with her partner, a proven method of preventing HIV infection. Women are also more likely to be infected than men for biological reasons. The friction from forced sex creates lesions through which the virus can be transmitted in semen and blood over a wide surface area. A common misconception is that women are more likely to be infected through risky sexual behaviors, such as promiscuity, but a large South African study demonstrated that 61% of all HIV positive women had been faithful to one partner their entire lives. The high level of gender-based violence in South Africa is not only a crisis in its own right, but it is also contributing to the spread HIV. The HIV/AIDS pandemic and the pervasiveness of gender-based violence must be addressed as two interrelated crises facing South Africa today.

Stay in touch for more about my experiences organizing for the 16 Days Campaign Against Abuse of Women and Children and World AIDS Day (1 December).

PACSA: an NGO in SA

As with any aspect of the development sector, immersing oneself in a NGO like PACSA requires learning a new alphabet soup. My first week on site, I attended a CCOH workshop, which was sponsored by CABSA. A few weeks ago at long-term strategic planning, the staff discussed several OD concepts. In a month’s time I’ll be attending the SACC conference, which is not the same as the AACC conference a week later. On Wednesday I wrote a brief paper on the connection between HIV/AIDS and GBV, usually know as VAW, in South Africa. Are you following?

As working at an NGO means that one is inherently working on a deadline, the reader will have until the end of this reflection to memorize these:

AACC All Africa Council of Churches
CABSA Christian AIDS Bureau of South Africa
CCOH Churches Channels of Hope
GVB gender-based violence
NGO non-governmental organization
OD organizational development
SACC South Africa Council of Churches
UNAIDS United Nations Joint Program on HIV/AIDS
VAW violence against women
WHO World Health Organization

My work at PACSA is primarily with the gender desk, which tackles GBV, offers youth peer education in schools and churches, advocates for gender equality, and explores gender, theology and spirituality. Every day is different and may include a myriad of different projects. For example, last week I working on pulling statistics from the latest UNAIDS and WHO report on the AIDS pandemic for a publication and editing a master’s thesis on emerging conceptions of masculinity in post-apartheid South Africa. Most of the work is academic and based on organizational development principles. When I first arrived, some of the staff asked me what my discipline was, as if I am here to do research. It is sometimes difficult not to feel intimidated, because I don’t have a doctorate in development economics. I have been able to put my writing skills to good use though, as the majority of the staff do not speak English as a first language. The staff is something of a UN, representing not only South Africa (Zulu, Indian, and white), but Malawi, Swaziland, Kenya, Germany, Holland, and now the US.

My placement sites at PACSA and the crèche create an interesting counterbalance to one another. Working in a township with limited access to electricity, water, and sanitation is, in many ways, as “on the ground” as development processes become. But I spend the other half of my week in a downtown office, complete with internet access, staff learning workshops, and a Christmas party in the planning. Like so many aspects of life in South Africa, the work at my placement sites exist in stark contrast to one another and yet are intimately connected. The type of work I do at the crèche, which is community-based, is often supported by NGOs like PACSA. Often my work at PACSA gives me a new idea or approach to try with the students and staff at the crèche. It is as though I travel between two different universes on a weekly basis, but my work at both sites is addressing economic inequality in South Africa. I look forward to continuing to work and to learn at each site, as the experience at one enrichs the other.

Birth Certificates and the Hokey Pokey

After my first visit during orientation, I thought that I had a good sense of what I was getting myself into. A month ago I thought I had my year planned out. The crèche is situated in a township, and the children who attend are from the immediate neighborhood. There are few material resources (toys, books, art supplies, furniture, etc.) at the disposal of the staff and the learners. The entire school day takes place in the large, open fellowship hall of a church. I thought that I would be spending my time writing grants and working with the Department of Social Welfare to find more sustainable sources of funding for the crèche. Essentially, similar to what happens in so many development projects, I wanted to throw money at the “problem.”

At first it was difficult not to be overwhelmed by both the poverty that the children were born into and the chaos often created by their sheer numbers. I kept thinking to myself, I don’t have a degree in early childhood education or development or public health; I’m not qualified to do this kind of work! I quickly discovered that my calling in life is not, in fact, to be a isiZulu-speaking preschool teacher. I spent my first few weeks doing crowd control and many renditions of the Hokey Pokey. The children discovered early on that I can be used as a human jungle gym, especially during piggyback rides. With as many as forty-five learners (in addition to the toddlers) and often only one teacher, the staff was thankful just to have another set of hands. I was constantly chasing after stray toddlers, wiping snotty noses, and tying, if not completely retrieving, shoes. In those first few weeks I learned the rhythms of breakfast, morning attendance, snack, play, story time, lunch, and nap time. Names started attaching themselves to faces. In my mind some sense of order began emerging from the chaos.

In the quite moments of the early morning while the students were arriving and in the early afternoon during naptime I asked, and continue to ask, a lot of questions. How is the crèche funded? (Funding comes from school fees and subsidies from the Department of Social Welfare, both of which are inconsistent sources of income.) What is the institutional relationship between the congregation, whose space is used, and the crèche? (There is none.) What are the crèche’s biggest needs? (The laundry list is quite long.) But I realized I was asking the wrong sort of questions. I focused almost exclusively on what the crèche did not have, when I needed be asking what resources did the crèche already have that could be used more creatively, efficiently, etc. Ironically YAGM introduced me to this method in orientation. It’s called an asset-based approach to development. There was a disconnect in my mind between knowing the theory and putting it into practice. I’m constantly revising my approach, asking myself how the work I am doing will best allow sustainable development to take place.

Instead of bemoaning my worse than embarrassing proficiency in isi-Zulu, I started looking for ways to use my gifts to the crèche’s advantage. (Although it still amazes me how much one can communicate to a four-year-old whose mother tongue is different from one’s own.) Using my organizational skills I’ve started working through the student records and the financial books, both of which need attention. I’m working with the teachers and staff to write policy and procedure for a myriad of different situations and finding the most effective ways of communicating home to the parents. These projects are easily more than a year’s worth of work, but I am doing what I can with the time that I have been given. Like anything in life this work is in process, and it is one that I am blessed to be a part of.