While You Slept

As you are going to sleep at night, do you think about where your family is? Are they safe? What about your belongings? Have you secured the house? Car? Work? Let's take this to an even deeper level. Do you ever think that while you are sleeping there is someone on the other side of the world just beginning their day? As you lay your head down, someone else is picking theirs up and getting ready to go to work in a factory, as a taxi driver, or beggar. It is interesting to think that the world goes on without you in it, isn't it?

On Wednesday night as Cape Town slept and Chicago began to leave work for the evening, someone, most likely a group of people, wreaked havoc on an already struggling NGO. I walking in to work at Ilitha Labantu Thursday morning to find the front desk split in three pieces, doors off hinges, closets emptied of their contents which was strewn across the floors and all fifteen desk tops and the information they held, gone. As you walked around the building you were surrounded by needless destruction everywhere you looked. This came just one week after another break in where only two desk top computers had been stolen. It is unknown if the destruction was purposeless or if it was some sort of retaliation from an abusive husband against the organization that aided his wife in leaving him. At this point it doesn't matter.

The current focus is on rebuilding both their infrastructure and their information base. But how do you do that when you are an organization that can barely afford to pay your employees? How do you buy all new computers in the same fiscal year that you have had to fire four employees from an originally eighteen person staff due to a decrease in the budget? Funding is consistently a major issues for NGOs across the world, but in South Africa in particular. Before the institution of the ANC government in 1994, international funding flowed into the country for basically any organization doing work that was not sanctioned by the government. After 1994 it was assumed that money was being more evenly distributed and foreign investments began to dwindle. Now there are thousands of NGOs around the country and little money to go around. That is where we find Ilitha Labantu today, strapped for cash and facing the idea of having to  rehab the entire inside of their building.

As I walked out of the office for the day about fifteen minutes after I entered, I kept thinking that while I was tucked away in my bed warm and cozy last night, a decision was made and actions were carried out that would impact the lives of countless people. The world doesn't stop when you go to bed.

Ohana Means Family

A knock on my bedroom door. It’s Dan. “Lydia, it’s time for dinner. Let’s go!” It is Sunday night. Family dinner night. Our four boys have spent the past several hours preparing dinner for us. Salad, baked potatoes, and boerewors with ice cream for dessert. As I sit down at our dining room table and begin to pile my plate with food I look at the eighteen people around me and smile to myself. This is what families look like. “Can you put some salad on my plate?” “Pass the chips down here!” Some people politely ask for help while others crack jokes at the expense of housemates. On the outside there is chaos. On the inside there is love.

We were all drawn to South Africa for different reasons. Some of us are here with the primary goal of serving. Some of us are here to find our callings. Some of us want to be close of lions. Whatever the reason was that brought each of us here, we were all thrown into a similar situation. In January we moved in with a suitcase or two, maybe knowing one other person in the house. We started an adventure together. Five months later we are anything but strangers. In fact, I know a lot of things about these people that I never thought I wanted or needed to know. We have hiked up mountains together (both physical and metaphorical). We have cried together from laughter and from pain. We have done group-bonding activities from the circle of truth in the backyard to flip cup tournaments at our giant dining room table. We have come a long way from twenty strangers sitting together in the Amsterdam airport reading Africa fact cards.

My notion of family has changed dramatically during the past several months. In early February if I was feeling homesick I would get on skype and wait not so patiently for someone, anyone, from home to get online, or write an email to my friends or family. Anything to feel closer to people who know me. Now when I get down about something, an event at my service site, homesickness, realizing that I am leaving Cape Town in less than three weeks, I walk into the house and find a network of support waiting for me. I know who to go to when I need to laugh. Who to talk to if I need a Catholic Worker-esque, social justice conversation. Who will give me great advice. 2 Kimberley Road has turned into my home less because of the fact that all of my junk is here and more because of the people who fill these walls. The people who I have come to know and love as family.

I could not ask for a better family back home in the states. My immediate family. Metanoia. Mary. Open Hands. White Rose Catholic Worker. The random, beautiful, chaotic mess of people that have entered my life throughout the years. These are the people who know my story. Some of them can tell you stories about me growing up as a fat kid. Others can regale you with embarrassing tales of high schools. Still more can give you insight into my transition from angsty atheist to radical Catholic. These are my people. Yet, they will never know what my time in South Africa meant to me like my current housemates. These nineteen people have been with me as I jumped head first out of my comfort zone. They saw me cry at house meetings with Nomfundo. They told me to lock it up when my smart mouth overcame me. They were there as I fell in love with this country and the people and cultures that reside within it. My housemates may not know everything about me, but they know what this experience has meant to me and that is something that only the twenty of us can truly understand.

This semester I have come to know and love a group of people that I do not think I would have ever chosen to be put in a house with for this long, but I have appreciated them because of and in spite of our differences and similarities. I will never forget what a tremendous effect these people have had not only on my time in South Africa, but also who I have and will continues to become. In the wise words of Tyler Atkinson and and Lilo “Ohana means family and family means nobody gets left behind.” 

Love and Protection

If we were speaking honestly I would tell you that I hate the fact that having a guard outside of our house every night makes me feel better. I would tell you that I struggle asking a boy to walk with me to the grocery store because it is unsafe for me to walk alone. I would tell you that what I have previously known of my independence is gone and that is the most aggravating thing about my life at this point. But on a daily basis I don’t speak honestly. I go about my business in the manner that we are told we must in order to be safe, but on the inside I am screaming with frustration and pain with and for the people who are putting us in this situation, the people who commit crimes around us every day and put our safety at risk.

If I have learned one thing about myself since I came to college it is that I love people. I struggle with a lot of people as well, but the majority of the time that struggle comes from a place of love. Most of all, I love the brokenness inside every human being. I love that we all make mistakes, treat people badly, and are still God’s children. I love that we change and grow, understanding our own downfalls and trying our hardest to become the best person we can be in spite of them. I love the good in seemingly bad or useless human beings. That love brought me to the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless and the Catholic Worker. That love brought me to South Africa. I am here falling in love with abused women who return to their husbands because that is the only life that they know, small children who are growing up in a society that is not giving them the skills necessary to impact and change their futures from the past of their parents, and teenage boys without an education or job who roam the streets of Cape Town committing crimes in order to support their families and/or their drug habits. People are easy to love when you can block out the evil that they have done. When you can’t see the cars they have hijacked, the drugs they have sold, or the women that they have raped.

But what happens to that love when those are the only visible actions? When I see the man who mugged a stranger walking home from the grocery store instead of the father of six living in a shack in Site C in Khayelitsha? When I see the young boy who jumped out fence at two in the morning instead of the grade 12 learner who worries about passing matric? I need to keep myself safe from the actions of others who seek to harm me, but I also need to love them for the human beings that they are. Where is the line? I am so afraid to protect myself for fear of forgetting to love those who I am protecting myself against. I need to be cautious of those around me, but I cannot stereotype and generalize. I need to be in a group when I leave my house, but I cannot let fear paralyze me so that I never step foot outside of our gates. I need to accept the fact that we have a guard stationed outside of our house in order to protect us, not to put us on a higher level than those committing the crime.

I feel called to work with those living in poverty, the homeless. I feel called to live in solidarity with those I work with by being completely entrenched in communities facing social issues such as gang violence and drugs. To follow my calling will be to put myself at risk. How do I both love people with all of my heart and protect myself from them?

How do we love?

It is easy to love when they are strangers and you do not know what they have done. It is easy to love when they are family and you know what they have done, but you cannot ignore the fact that the same blood courses through your veins. It is easy to love when they are your friends and you have picked them despite their transgressions. But what about strangers whose transgressions you are aware of? How do you love past evil to see the good, the humanity?

As a world and a nation we are struggling with this question right now. The United States government has killed a murderer; someone who has negatively affected countless lives throughout the world. We have killed the man who some people see as our nation’s biggest enemy. But, we have also killed someone’s son. Someone’s father. Someone’s uncle. We have killed a man who was once a little boy crying in his mother’s lap. Obviously something went very wrong between then and now, but we must remember who that person was for so many. He was a man made of flesh and bones, emotions, experiences, passions, and hardships, not unlike the man who ordered his death, our president. I am not saying that we should have given Osama a hug and had a heart to heart with him and everything would have been all right. What I am saying is that our actions should be done with love and reflect the humanity of our ‘enemies.’ Where was the love in the actions of our government?

Okay, let’s take this down to a personal level, to the level of two murderers walking into a room and sitting down across from you.

Easy Nofemela and Ntobeko Peni walked into Melikaya’s office and quietly made their way to the front of the room as we cleared our cards from the floor. Once Ntobeko opened his mouth we all knew who they were. Red flags were going off in my head left and right as they talked about their military training in the townships with the PAC (Pan-Africanist Congress) rebels. Ntobeko described as a sixteen year old leaving his house after everyone else had gone to sleep to be trained in firearms handling and run secret operations that ended in the death of white police officers and Afrikaners. They were being trained to take back their country.

1993, when Easy and Ntobeko were still in their teens, was declared “The Year of the Great Storm” by PAC leaders. This meant that the violence was to be taken into white communities to bring attention to the plight of the blacks and show that they were willing to do anything for their freedom. The justification for attacking unarmed civilians was that “soft civilians” were the primary beneficiaries of apartheid and the PAC was bound to take that freedom away. It was in August of that year that Amy Biehl was killed.

The drill was that when you saw a delivery truck entering the townships you flagged it down and, if it stopped, tell the driver to remove their personal belongings and set the truck alight without removing any of the cargo. If the truck did not stop then it was stoned to a stop and immediately set alight without the decency to the driver. That day it was a Cocoa-Cola truck and a young white girl driving the car behind it was in the wrong place at the wrong time. After the Coke truck was stopped Amy’s car was attacked. As she ran to find help in a nearby gas station, she was brought to the ground and stabbed to death by young PAC members. She was stabbed to death by Easy and Ntobeko.

Amy was a twenty six year old American Fulbright Scholar living in Cape Town. She was taking classes at the University of the Western Cape and working to register voters for the upcoming elections. Not much older than I am now, Amy was here for some of the same reasons I am: to experience a new culture and make a difference in the life of at least one person in this country. She was killed in Gugulethu, the township that my service site is in, while driving two friends home because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong skin colour. What makes her that much different than I am today?

After being sentenced to eighteen years of prison, Easy and Ntobeko were both granted amnesty from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This was possible only because of the testimony of Mrs. Linda Biehl, Amy’s mother. Against all odds, the Biehl family did what they believe Amy would have wanted. They forgave, both publicly and down to their deepest core, the men who killed her and began to see the situation from the side of the freedom fighters struggling to be recognized as human beings in their own country. This stunning act of forgiveness soon led to the establishment of the Amy Biehl Foundation, an organization based in Cape Town that teaches classes and runs after school programs in schools throughout the townships, where both Easy and Ntobeko are now employed.

So there I was, eighteen years after Amy’s death, sitting across from two of her killers. Questions were streaming through my head. How have they forgiven themselves for what they did enough to work hand in hand with their victim’s parents? Who am I to judge them for turning to violence when I have never been in any circumstance like theirs?  How do I love them while knowing the evils that those hands and hearts have perpetrated?

There it was. My biggest question. How do I love these killers? These charismatic men, both fathers to daughters of their own, sitting in front of me were no longer defined as PAC members or freedom fighters. They were fathers, sons, and productive members of society. In that realization I found my answer. I love them because of all of the children they have positively impacted through their work with the Amy Biehl Foundation. I love them because of their position as father, son, and uncle. I love them because they are human beings who are broken.

The real question is: if I can rationalize loving a killer because of their humanity, why do I struggle so much to love the average, everyday people with their own unique set of flaws I find myself surrounded by?

Candy, Family, and God

When David, our landlord, told us that the trip was over Easter weekend I cringed a little bit. If I were to go this would be the first year that I would miss not only Easter mass but Holy Thursday and Good Friday as well. I tentatively put my name on the sign up sheet and decided to talk to my parents about what they thought I should do. The response was exactly what I expected. "God can find you anywhere. When is the next time you will be able to go to Namibia?" So, I packed my backpack, grabbed my sleeping bag, and I was off.

I spent my Easter weekend, from Thursday April 21 through Monday April 25, camping under the stars and rafting down the Orange River, the river that forms the border between South Africa and Namibia. The area that the river runs through is desert for miles and miles with the only vegetation on the banks of the river and from there rocky, sandy mountains are all that the eye can see. We spent our days rafting down the river and hiking up mountains and our nights sitting around a camp fire talking or laying in our sleeping bags staring up at the stars. This is where I spent one of the most holy days of the liturgical year, Easter. This is where I found God.

To me, Easter usually means three things: candy, family, and God. When I signed up to go to Namibia I figured that each of those things would be lacking this year, but I was sorely mistaken. In fact, I had an abundance of all three. 

Candy

The day before I left Cape Town a box appeared on our dining room table with my name on it. I always love getting mail, but I especially love mail here. It thrills me to know that when I open a box the last person to see and touch the things inside was one of my parents. I have come to realize that it is those little things in life that make me the most happy. Inside, the box was filled with a couple of things that I had asked for as well as loads of candy and plastic Easter eggs. My parents know how much I love our annual Easter egg hunt, so they sent it to me in South Africa. As I packed my backpack later that night with only the bare essentials I stuck a package of Peachie O's at the bottom and was thankful for how much my parents love me, especially when it is shown through the little things. 

Family

My family and friends help me to form and practice my faith in the ways that I do. It is during Lent and Easter when I begin to remember and understand why these people are so close to me. I thought I was going to struggle on Easter because of this. I convinced myself that instead of being a joyous day of celebration I would spend Easter feeling sad that I wasn't at home with my friends and family. That was not the case.  The longer that I am in South Africa, living in a house of twenty people, reflecting on my life here, with every conversation my love for my housemates grows. This weekend was a perfect example of that. As I rowed down the Orange River on Easter morning with Madeline singing Ben Sollee in my ear behind me, I realized that these people have become my family in South Africa. They may not know everything about me, but they are the only ones who will ever know what it meant to be in South Africa with me. These are the ones who know me here. After saying grace at dinner at base camp, I looked around the table and felt at home. 

God

I love the tradition of the Catholic church, but that is not where my faith stops. My biggest goal in life is to find God in everything that I come across. People who are homeless and people who make millions. Sprawling cities and acres of vacant fields. Churches and slums. I came a little closer to accomplishing that goal on Easter Sunday. Looking out over the water and the mountains I found God in the beauty that surrounded me and the feeling of complete comfort that I felt. How could a place so breathtaking and peaceful not be a place where God resides? Although my Easter wasn't spent in a church or with my family, I found the presence of God in the nature that surrounded me and with the people who I have grown to love.

Although my Easter turned out to be quite unconventional when compared to years past, I would not have changed anything. Back in Cape Town I am sore, a little bit sun burned, and overwhelmed with love for God and family, where ever they might be in the world. 

uMlumgu in the Creche

"uMlungu!"

The solitary cry of a small child can be heard every time that I walk into a creche. Slowly, as the other children catch on it becomes a chorus of tiny voices proclaiming the same message.

"uMlungu! uMlungu! uMlungu!"

Loosely translated, their cry means "white person." School aged learners know better than to use this slightly derogatory term to describe me, but the three and four years olds have not discovered the offensiveness of the word. They just know that it is incredibly descriptive of this tall, blonde, white stranger, a variety of human being that is rare in the townships. My unfamiliar complexion draws the children close to me, wanting to touch my hair and give me high fives. They are interested in me and show that by jumping and climbing all over me. There have been times that I have been brought to the ground by a group of small children as I tried to walk into a creche.

A large part of my experience at my service site is following my supervisor, a field worker in the Youth department, around to different sites in Guguletu, Nyanga, and New Crossroads. We have gone to community centers, primary and high schools, the police station from which I have ridden in the back of a South African Police Services car, NGOs partnering with our organization, day centers for the elderly, and everywhere in between. Although I learn a tremendous amount from all of these places, my favorite adventure is going to the different creches, or preschools, in the area.

I get so much hope and energy from these small children who have seen and experienced so much in their short lives. Whenever I play with kids I always think about what they will become. Will this one be the next head of the ANC? Will that one follow their dream of being a heart surgeon or Advocate and succeed? Will the one playing on the makeshift slide end up killing someone in a carjacking? You never know.

One of the other students in the program has a gift when it comes to children. There is nothing that makes her happier, or that she is better at, than spending her days with little kids and making sure that they have the opportunity to play and just be kids. She told me once that every time she holds a child she puts their little hands in hers and says a prayer that those hands will never hurt another human being or that child.  I say that prayer now whenever I play with the kids.

Today I said that prayer twice, once for Thando and once for an unnamed child who cannot wink. During my supervisor's presentation about abuse I could see that Thando, who could not have been older than four, was taking everything very personally. As he stared intently at the giraffe in her hands I could see his little body tense as she began talking about HIV and AIDS. He knew exactly what she was saying. Without much warning, Thando began to cry. Not ordinary crying, but the kind that involves your whole body. After being calmed by his teacher, Thando resumed his place next to me on the floor as he did the horribly pathetic triple breath thing that small children do when they are trying to breathe after a big cry. Thando and all the kids like him who witness abuse, pain, and suffering could use the extra prayers.

My second anecdote needs to be prefaced. I have the creepy tendency of winking at people in inappropriate situations. I wink at strangers across crowded bars, friends in the middle of pleasant conversation, and even professors after catching their eye during a lecture. I always love to see people's reactions.

Most of the time the littler kids don't understand that I am winking at them on purpose or they just don't catch it because I generally don't get any reactions. Today I decided to try it out again and I caught the eye of a tiny girl in bright pink pants who was probably about three. She saw me wink, stopped walking, and stared at me. All of a sudden she began to blink furiously and her face twitched. She was trying so hard to wink, but just could not figure out how it was done. Her face moved sporadically in that fashion until she gave up, turned on her heals, and walked away from me.

How can you say that you don't believe in God when you come in contact with the Thando's and the girl's in pink pants of the world? God is present in the hope and joy that they are now and the responsibility for our world that they will hold in the future. God resides in the creche.

Feud Within the Human Family

I came to South Africa yearning to be shaken up. I wanted to get my hands dirty. I wanted to be exposed to poverty that I could not fathom. I wanted this experience to change and shape how I view my place in this world. Every day that I am here I get a little closer those goals. I can feel God pushing me and making me think critically about what I am being exposed to. My heart and mind are being constantly challenged to understand my surrounding and love in spite and because of it all. This tends to happen at the most unexpected times.

Mid air while bungee jumping
off of Bloukrans Bridge

Last week I went on a road trip across South Africa with 17 of my housemates and our guide Jimmy. We drove along the Garden Route stopping in small towns along the way en route to Durban, Johannesburg, and Kruger National Park. This included bungee jumping off of Bloukrans Bridge, the world’s highest bungee bridge (216 m which is about 72 stories), and spending two days in Coffee Bay, a rural area in the Transkei. We saw parts of South Africa that few tourists take time to see, mainly because we drove from one side of the country to the other and spent countless hours staring out the window. 

Small shop in a village in the Transkei

As we drove through the country we passed through many small towns that were poor, made up of mostly black inhabitants, and always had a vast area of informal settlements. After seeing a couple of these towns something struck me: none of this happened by accident. Many of these people have been controlled and actively suppressed, keeping them poor, by different minority groups for centuries. Their government has failed them. No wonder reconciliation is so difficult when you are faced with the need for forgiveness in everything that surrounds you. How do you forgive what can be seen as the root of all of your problems? If you get to a place where forgiveness is an option, whom do you forgive? The government? Your colonizers? White people as a whole? It was in asking these questions that I came to realize that apartheid and other systemic failures like it were not the fault of the government alone, but a failing of the entire human family, who for centuries has found it acceptable to use and abuse other human beings. By this common failure we are all bound, as well as by God, love, and the dignity we claim as God’s children. Through this brokenness, we are also connected by our struggle to repent for our sins and malicious acts, as well as those of our brothers and sisters.

Traditional Xhosa houses in the
Transkei

I sat with this notion in my heart for several days until I was overcome by it in Johannesburg as I walked alone and silent through the Apartheid Museum. While walking in I heard one of my housemates express that seeing all of these horrible things made her hate being white. That statement started an avalanche of thoughts and emotions within me about my own culpability in the matter. You can blame the British and the Afrikaners and the chain can go one forever without end, but it must be taken into account that the injustices of apartheid and systemic violence are occurring all over the world at the hands of people of every race, colour, and creed. How can we say that apartheid and everything that goes along with it is the fault of only whites when we look at the African slave trade of other Africans, civil wars in Latin America, and a vast array of other human rights violations happening all over the world? I am not saying that no one can be blamed for these atrocities. In fact, I am saying the opposite. Every single human being holds fault for the injustices of the world. We are all broken and through that individual brokenness we add to the brokenness of the world, but that does not take away from the fact that we are all our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. We must all share our responsibility for the current state of our world that we have been given to care for. There is a feud within the human family and we are all called to work for its end.

But here is the real question: How do we as the human race work to repair these injustices? My answer: by loving every individual with everything you have and everything you are. I am a firm believer that the only way to change the world is to do it one person at a time.

I thought that I was just going on vacation to see the rest of South Africa. What I didn’t know was that God had a plan to work within that and open my eyes to my place in the human family.