Wednesday, June 17, 2009

The bridge from the dark past to the bright future was a theme throughout today.

This afternoon we met our pen-pal buddies directly at the VVOCF center. 0-8 year olds went into the intern room to play with Lisette, 6-14 year olds had garbage duty first, and 15+ squashed into the main room of the center, where I joined my two buddies in the discussion surrounding Youth Day. Youth Day is a South African Holiday in remembrance of the youth protest and subsequent massacre on June 16th, 1977 after the government announced that all education would be administered in Afrikaans, the Dutch-derived language spoken by the white minority in power. After squishing about 10 MSU students into the room with 20 seated kids and about seven older students functioning as facilitators, the conversation was directed toward the youth empowerment today. Bruce, our 17-year old translator asked everyone whether or not they liked Zonkizizwe, (their township) and why or why not. The emotion, intelligence, and community shone through their answers, both positive and negative. While it was apparent that they were very thankful for the center and the positive experiences they had there, and that the basic human rights won by the struggle of the previous generation were appreciated, violence, vandalism, corruption, disease, and malnutrition were listed as grievances in the group that inspired many of them to try and leave Zonke. We tried to have a conversation about education as the means of empowerment and an agent for mobility, but there was such a lack of information almost debilitating as the lack of funds for these children.

After the discussion ended, our group exploded out of the room into the games already begun by the rest of the children. Some people continued to pick up trash, Lishonondo, and I went over and picked rocks out of the grounds that are to be used as a garden come the next planting season. It felt good to get my hands dirty with the red earth here. As we worked we talked about families, school, hopes, and goals. Lisho the 18-year old has one younger brother who I met yesterday, who is 5 I think, two older sisters, 23 and 33, and an older brother who drives cars. His father left when he was 1, and doesn’t recognize Lisho as his son, his mother died when he was 8, his step-father died 3 years ago. He has passed Standard VIII, which I think means about 10th grade, but as I later found out from Jeanne, because of his learning disorder he probably will not matriculate (graduate high school), and in general he seems to want to be a farmer. After hearing about the direction of some of the other youth in the community, agriculture does not sound half bad. I hope before I leave I will be able to work next to Lishonondo in his garden, even if only for a day or two.

I only realized after I left the center that both of my buddies were living in child-headed households, having lost both their parents to “sickness” which means AIDS. I prepared myself with all the statistics and personal stories from other people, meeting other youth with similar stories at the other orphanages around SA, as well as the personal connections I made with campers in Kalamazoo over the past three summers. There is still a huge emotional impact in the realization that this life, their life, is now my life as I become brothers to Lisho and Lucky. I wanted to be a part of their world, I’ve been waiting months to meet them, and they’ve been waiting even longer to meet me, and now we’re here. Friday I will visit Lucky and Florence at their home a block or two from the VVOCF site.
This morning set up the emotional experience of the afternoon in a much more profound way than getting lost yesterday. After driving through the “Rich Man’s District” and seeing the walls of Mr. Nelson Mandela’s house, then driving through Hillborough (?), the district famous for it’s xenophobia and atrociously high violent crime rates, exploitation of the poor (especially Zimbabweans), and passing the market for traditional healers, we pulled up at into a building labeled “Constitutional Court”. This building housed the equivalent of the US Supreme Court, with fewer security guards, and more cattle skins involved. It was also built adjacent to and in part with the very same bricks as the apartheid governments prison, most of which had been turned into educational museum-like walk through exhibits. We were led on a tour by a warmly dressed, cool-speaking young South African. DIGNITY, HUMANITY, these words take on new meaning when you see the atrocities that people inflict on other people. It took the bravery of photographers like Bob Gosani and artists like Matlebula to alert organizations like Amnesty International and the Red Cross to the violations of human rights that occurred in these awful prisons.
The tour ended in the room where 11 justices (judges) hear the constitutional cases that have already gone through the Magistrate Court, the High Court, and the High Court of Appeals. The proceedings are conducted in English, but it is the right of any client to have a translator into any of the other 11 official languages. From where the justices sit, you can see outside, in general the whole place felt set up to connect to the people it was meant to serve.