Thursday/Friday - Saturday morning reflections

Thursday I worked with the building team again and then spent the afternoon talking to the in-house techie at Mukhanyo and MCDC (just to refresh, Mukhanyo is a seminary and MCDC is Masibambisane Community Development Center - "Masibambisane" means "let us bear the burden together" in Zulu or Ndebele and "Mukhanyo" means "light"). 

The techie guy is named John Grant and he's really cool. Firstly, what I like most about him is that he is the only white guy I've met who is living in one of the villages.  Very John Perkins.  He's living in a pretty rough one too, meaning a lot of shacks and little to no municipal infrastructure - straight up poverty. His wife and kids and he all spend the weeks here in the nearby Vezebuhle village and then travel to Pretoria, where they are originally from, on the weekends.  So he gets props in my book for living with the people. 

As a side note, all the white people here tell me that this or that is dangerous.  I think it may be true but it may also be a case of white American fear.  What would our media be without fear-mongering?  We have a whole industry that trains us to not trust anyone.  So these good people move here and tell visiting "cua's" (local term for white people) how dangerous everything is.  It's like when people say of Hunting Park "Don't go to that neighborhood."  Based on what, the ten o'clock news?  I have yet to hear a firsthand story of someone getting roughed up here.  But I will try to follow all their advice anyway. It just bugs me and I wonder if it's a little irrational and fear-based. 

So John Grant has this ambitious plan to provide wireless internet to this whole rural African area of many square kilometers.  We were talking about how applications like Craigslist could be really practical here and other ways that the internet could help folks find an escape from poverty.  That would be the whole point of setting up a wireless network, as opposed to, say, feeding people's YouTube addictions.  So if there is anything that I could see myself working on here if I were to come back, it would be something with this guy.  Perhaps a fully equipped "media center" that would bring the internet to a village and also would let me have a place to mess with all my fantasies of chaning the world, or some little part of it, through internet media.  I really do think that's possible, by the way. 

Thursday night I went out with a couple of people to a lady named Anna's house.  She's a black lady from around here who lives in one of the nicer villages and is in a fairly high position at MCDC.  Her title is or soon will be executive director, I think.  I had a blast.  It felt like being in the states.  We laughed, ate, watched a South African soap opera, listened to music, danced, and prayed together.  It was so much fun.  I really enjoyed meeting her and her two daughters (the oldest one is 15 and can dance all these old-school hip-hop moves just like she grew up in the b-boy era, really interesting to see how american culture is so internationally pervasive).  I am really happy to see that a local black person is having a significant role of influence at MCDC.  Black and White is such a big deal here and this organization would eventually fail, I believe, if people like Anna don't get to make major decisions. 

By the way, if anyone from MCDC is reading this stuff, sorry for putting your business out there.  I'm just trying to process my time here and and share with my friends.  What you are doing is great. 

Missionary Culture.  I'm in the middle of this heavy missionary culture and I'm not sure what to think of it.  It may be harder for me to understand and navigate missionary culture than the South African culture.  A lot of nice people have moved here to spend their energies helping the poor,etc.  That's all very commendable and I don't want to take away from that.  But sometimes it just seems really weird.  Like, why are these people really here?  I think that deep down I am always looking for the selfish motives in everything and I have always believed that people in ministry are sometimes the biggest frauds because on the surface they appear to be so giving, but deep down it's really all about them.  I'm not saying that's the case here, but all of these thoughts are going through my head as I weigh the situation here and my potential involvement in it.  If I get involved here, I want it to be because I want to do it and enjoy it, not because I need to be known as a compassionate person or because I am working to free myself from white guilt.  (By the way, things here are really bad and we are all complicit.  But that is really just a call for an awareness of the interconnectedness of our wealth and their poverty.  Think globally, act locally, but don't become a martyr to free yourself from the guilt of it all.  That kind of approach makes their poverty just another venue for self-obsessed consumption, "If I go there and do this, then I will feel better and have a more rich expericence of life."  No, just come here because you love people or something simple like that.  Am I making any sense?)

Yesterday I went out with a couple of guys who are doing these "ecocircle" gardens.  It's a nice idea, but it doesn't seem to be working.  They set up these gardens for people in the villages.  The gardens are these cloverleaf shapes and the dirt is dug out and replaced with a mixture of compost and the original dirt.  Then a soda bottle is placed in the center of each of the three circles.  The bottle has pinholes in it and when you fill the bottle with water, it provides a slow drip irrigation for the plants.  I think the only real advantage of this is that it conserves water.  However, water isn't really in short supply, so I'm kind of missing the point right now.  I'm not sure how much food one of these circles produces either.  I think it was a nice idea worth trying, but in the end I can't see how it will help people.  Again, I might be to fresh off the boat to understand why these are useful. 

One thing that I see over and over is that it never helps to do something for someone that they can do for themselves.  On that note, I spent a few hours last night in Leona's shack.  She's awesome.  She does the cleaning here at the farmhouse where I am staying.  She was in an abusive marriage and left the guy last year, got in with the people at MCDC, and got this job.  She was living here at the farmhouse in a really nice room but didn't like being dependant like that so she bought a "stand," or land parcel, and built a one-room shack on it.  When I say one-room, think room for a queen size bed with a couple of feet on each side.  Earlier this year she added another room of equal size for a tv, frige, and a couple chairs for guests.  Myself and a few local guys hung out at her place watching American music videos and drinking some local choice beverages.  She told me that to get this shack, she ate the South African equivalent of Ramen noodles for a long time and saved the extra money.  What I love about this is that she did it all on her own and she is so proud of it.  In contrast, I see a lot of things being done for people, including building homes, who aren't in any better shape than Leona and I don't think they'll have the same pride when it's all done.  They could do these things for themselves, but someone is doing it for them.  Anyway, Leona is really cool and I had a great time with her and her friends.  I think we're doing something again later today. 

Speaking of American music videos, it kind of breaks my heart to see these dirt poor peers of mine staring at videos of 50 cent (they all call him "50 cents" which cracks me up), Tupac, and the culturally appropriate R. Kelly (here in S.A. it's kind of acceptable to have relations with young'ns.).  It's all this talk of sex that really bothers me.  Having sex outside of a *faithful* marriage here will very likely get you killed via HIV.  But when it comes down to it, it seems like the biggest influence that America has on this place is the reinforcement of a local cultural obsession with sex through our own sex-obsessed hip-hop culture.  People here don't even understand half of the quick words to a song like 50 Cent's "Little Bit", but they just stare at the images of a lifestyle that is out of reach for just about everyone in the world, including most Americans - a fact which is lost on them probably.  The messages of these songs however, if understood, is deadly.  Having a ton of sex is cool, fun, and acceptable, etc.  Hooray for America.

After that DVD played out, we watched two episodes of a popular Nigerian comedy called "Nicodemus."  Still a lot of stuff about sex, this one was at least really funny and a fascinating insight into African culture.  If you ever get a chance to check it out, this show is packed full of lots of little things that I'm picking up on here.  I really enjoyed sitting with these folks and watching something that is so non-American.  I felt like for this night they opened up their world to me and that was a precious gift on an evening when I was bored out of my mind and desperate for human connection.

Learning the language:

"Yebo, baba/mama" = "Hello, guy/girl"
"Sharp" - pronounced "shop" = basically a catch-all for "okay" or "yes" or even "goodbye"

So that's all for now.  Hopefully this isn't so long that it bores people.  I have a lot of down time when I'm here at the farm house.  There's pretty much nothing to do but write, read, and play a bootleg version of Bubble Bobble - I can get to level 49 without dying now.