Mid-Year Report

Okay, so this is a very belated post... but Andrew suggested that other people might also want to see such a thing. Good luck, it is long. But here is the mid-year report that I sent into the fellowship committee!

The mid-year report. Oh dear.

I will admit, I put off writing this report for as long as I possibly could. Writing it has come slowly. For someone as talkative as I, it comes as a surprise that I am actually at a loss for words when it comes to describing my experience thus far. Trying to articulate everything in writing is a challenge. I really feel like I have little to say, yet so much to explain. So I guess I will just have to start from the beginning: What I have been doing.

It took me 41 hours to get from the States to the Pietermaritzburg airport. As soon as I got off the plane I was met by the director of Thandanani Children’s Foundation, put my luggage in the vehicle, and was off to the township of Snathing. We arrived at Malala Primary School, where a handover was taking place as the students and faculty thanked the volunteers who had painted their classrooms, giving their school a wonderful makeover. Students were dressed in beaded outfits, singing in Zulu and dancing at the front of the room. I hadn’t been here for more than an hour and I was already immersed in the culture of the people here. It was a perfect introduction.

I spent the next few months helping Thandanani with the work they were doing in the communities—home visits, community food gardens, Life Skills program, Early Learning Centers, social work, therapeutic camps, etc. I am nothing short of amazed at how much they are able to accomplish with such a small number of staff. Being their 20^th year, it was also time for a much-needed evaluation of all their beneficiaries to see how their programs were doing. This was a task that was handed to me that sounds a lot easier than it is—how do you organize something with people who don’t speak your language [and you don’t speak theirs], don’t have telephones to get in contact with them, don’t have street names and addresses for places to hold such a meeting… but fortunately I managed to pull it off. It took lots of coordination and involved many people, but it happened and I was able to present a report to them outlining the responses from all three beneficiary groups—community volunteers, caregivers and children.

During the holidays, I decided that if I could not be with my family I wanted to make it so someone else could spend some time with their families. For the three weeks around Christmas and New Years I was volunteering at Lily of the Valley Children’s Village, which houses about 130 orphans, 80% who are infected with HIV/AIDS. I helped wrap hundreds of presents and went around delivering them to the children on Christmas day. I sat on the ground with the young boys on New Years and watched fireworks. I realized that I really liked having so much interaction with the children [something I had been lacking lately at Thandanani because I was in an office writing up evaluation reports]. I enjoyed doing the chest physiology exams administered to the children recovering from TB and doing reading club with the school-age children. Although it also involved orphaned kids, the work I was doing was still drastically different.

And then January came. I spent the first few weeks finishing up the things I had started at Thandanani. It was time for me to move on… but to where? I thought about running away to a township and just building my own mud house and learning through immersion, but I knew that wasn’t safe in any manner. I thought about booking a last-minute flight to Haiti to do emergency disaster relief after the earthquake, but that wasn’t practical. I had asked around to different NGOs if they wanted my help, and fortunately I had many great options, but all of them were missing something. So I sat down and had to reevaluate why I was here and what I wanted to learn. I boiled my focus points down to these things: culture [one of the places was a baby orphanage, but I learned when you are at an orphanage the only culture you learn is that of the orphanage, not that of the South African people], community [I wanted to work in the communities], children, education, creativity… Selfishly, I wanted to find a way to combine all of those things into the last half of my time here, to optimize learning and understanding, to leave with a personal impact.

So, I decided to just go off on my own. Take what I have learned and start my own project, one that would combine all of my interests… and I had an idea. Within two weeks of this epiphany I had developed, coordinated, and started Umhlaba Wami. The Umhlaba Wami Photography Project [www.umhlabawami.webs.com] aims to instill confidence, create community, and enhance creativity in the disadvantaged children of South Africa. Right now I go into the rural township of Snathing twice a week to teach a curriculum I made that involves both photography technique [which I am teaching myself along the way] and life skills work that focuses on the self, the community, culture, and issues that these children experience. Most of these children are orphans. I am really excited about this because it touches on everything I wanted to do: it involves work in the communities, benefits and instills confidence in children, gives an opportunity for cultural exchange, and counters the lack of arts education in public schools [while also improving their English fluency]. Every lesson that I make is like a life skills, photography and English lesson all wrapped in one. I have only been teaching this for a few weeks, but the kids seem to be enjoying it, have already churned out some great pictures [like the one above], and other children have already started coming up to me and asking to join the class. The Natal Museum has even agreed to give me space to exhibit their work opening mid-March! I am having a lot of fun with this and enjoying every part of it [well, except for the expense of running this program… but it is definitely a small price to pay considering the benefits]!

            So that is basically the “work” that I have been doing since I came here. At one point I took a short road trip down the coast that ended with 4 days in Cape Town, which was a lot of fun… this trip is also where I had a sudden burst of bravery and decided to do the world’s highest bungy jump! Other than that, I haven’t done much traveling around South Africa, but plans are to go to the Free State this weekend for a wedding and to Gauteng for a week before I fly out of the Johannesburg airport [much cheaper to fly from there]… and possibly watch a World Cup match!

 I feel as if the entire first half of this year was devoted to adjusting—it was not until the beginning of 2010 that I was able to call Pietermaritzburg “home.” [I am lucky because I live in the “city” but still work in the rural areas.] I honestly still felt lost for the first few months and at times just begged for a sense of familiarity. I lived in a place where I wasn’t feeling entirely safe, by myself, with no transportation, I couldn’t go out alone after dark, because I am a woman I couldn’t go running, and for the life of me I couldn’t speak Zulu. I was lonely! [And recently I feel as if my safety has been compromised so I might be finding a new place to live soon.] But I learned a lot from these experiences. During the holidays I spent my time 40 minutes away from where I have been staying, volunteering at Lily of the Valley Children’s Village. It was when my three weeks were done, and I was packing up to go back to Pietermaritzburg, that I got incredibly excited to be in a familiar place where I know how to walk the streets and get back into my previous routine. It felt like going home—it took me months to get to that point, but it felt great and exciting. One of the biggest but most gratifying challenges of living abroad is taking a place that is completely new and unfamiliar to you, immersing yourself in its culture, and being able to call it home. It is not only learning about your surroundings and then embracing the differences, it is learning about yourself and your comfort threshold—what you can handle about your new environment and what you can accomplish there. It took leaving my place to realize the comfort I had there—I accept that I cannot walk outside after dark and cannot go running nearby, but I have also forced myself to branch out and find friends, speak the little Zulu I can, and be willing to walk an hour away to find a field to go running on. It has been fun. And as an extremely extroverted person, it is the first time in a long time I have taken the time to spend time with… myself. I couldn’t be more grateful for this experience.

I am also learning a lot about South African weather—that it is incredibly unpredictable. Today was a scorcher at 100-degrees, as it has been for the past week. Yet as I look outside my window, I see the sky dimming, the branches of the trees dancing uncontrollably and being pushed to the side with every huge gust of wind. It sounds like a wall has collapsed and the ground starts to shake—thunder. A storm is coming! Yet I am still sweating.

I came here really wanting to understand post-apartheid race relations and family dynamics during a time where many families are split due to the prevalence of HIV/AIDS. I wanted to understand an unfamiliar culture. I wanted to help to educate children. I wanted to build strong connections. As you can see, I put a lot of pressure on myself, but fortunately many of these things came to me easier than I had planned. Others had to be worked for.

The first day I arrived in South Africa we stopped on a dirt road in Snathing because a young lady, maybe my age, was carrying a feeble old woman up a hill to their home. They had just returned from a very long walk from the clinic, and there was no way to get her gogo, or grandmother] up the slippery hill except for carrying her on her back. Fortunately we came just in time to give them a ride up the very long and steep hill until our vehicle couldn’t make it up the narrow path. I was amazed. The dedication to keep a family unit strong is something I have seen a lot here, working with elderly women who have no income and live in mud houses, yet will take in 6 orphans in order to give them a “family” to grow up in. Then again, there is the other extreme where the parents who neglect and abuse their children because they simply don’t want them—but that is a conversation largely revolving around the prevalence of teenage pregnancies here that needs to be saved for another day. In short, the older generation values life, tradition and the essence of “ubuntu” much more than the younger generation. It is a very noticeable contrast and can really show some of the cultural and social effects of the apartheid.

When I said I was coming to KwaZulu Natal, people who knew the area asked, “How are you going to learn about race relations in a place that is so predominantly one race?” Sometimes I doubted my decision, and thought I should have gone somewhere a little more mixed like Johannesburg or Cape Town. But once I went to Cape Town, I knew I had made the right decision to not stay there. When I was in Cape Town I blended in—unless I spoke, I was just another “coloured.” I walked around the streets unphased, trying to pinch myself to remember that it wasn’t just a misplaced San Francisco. The sense of comfort I had found there after staying in KwaZulu Natal was astounding—for four days I was at home. People spoke English, I didn’t stick out, I recognized the food and could easily navigate the city. But I wasn’t learning nearly as much as I was in Pietermaritzburg and the communities I worked in. Granted, I could still work in township communities around Cape Town, but at some point I could hop over to Long Street and find a safe haven of comfort. Here, I don’t have that. Only in my own bedroom am I able to escape wondering eyes… and I don’t mind that anymore. I have learned a lot from this experience and also from personal accounts of those who live here, both white and black [and from the large Indian population, also]. The most obvious sentiment here is that the apartheid really messed things up—despite the years under a democratic majority rule, the sentiments and feelings towards other races are so deeply ingrained that it will take a long time before the apartheid actually becomes history. All the government can do is change the laws, but they cannot change the way people view each other.

And that is all I will say about the South African government, because it is a mess of its own.

I really wish I could put into words my experience thus far in South Africa… but I really feel like I can’t, not yet. It has been so exciting, terrifying, heart-wrenching, informative and profound. Every person I have met has their own special story that in some way touches my heart. On a daily basis I see the need of the people here, the struggle of children growing up in the “orphan generation,” and the important celebration of little victories. I have been up-close to deplorable conditions that are wrapped in an oasis of beauty. The spirit of South Africa and the delight in sharing the rich culture is absolutely amazing. I have been personally impacted ne my life is constantly being shaped in ways that I still can wrap my mind around. I have been able to connect with people here to share their fears and celebrate their triumphs—and this connection is all I can ask for. I only hope it grows stronger in these last few months.