Road Trip

Dear friends and family,

We leave Friday for an 18 day road trip to visit partners around the country, and we wanted to get a note out to you before we leave. The boys end their term and are released early Friday morning for a two week break. We're taking this chance to drive north (of course, I know) to visit Grace Community Church in Cradock this weekend—they have a pastors' seminar on Saturday where we can meet everyone, and then we'll be at one of the churches Sunday and visit the local community. Then we're on to Mthatha to have a day or two with the head of Bethany Bible College. Both of these communities had MMN workers in the past, and we are all interested in continuing the relationship, listening to their current situation and learning how we might be able to help with future capacity building.

We then keep heading north to Pietermaritzburg to stay with the other MMN family in South Africa, the Sudermans, whom we stayed with in August. We will also meet the two new Mennonite Central Committee couples that have moved there (that reminds me to bring our hymnal for some yummy four-part singing) and learn about what the Mennonites are organizing and getting involved in—one couple fills the new Peace Coordinator position. It should be nice to spend some time with these folks, find some support for our work with Oscar, have time in the Peace library, and re-acquaint ourselves with the Anabaptist network based there. We'll stay through Easter, and then go around the mountain to the neighboring country of Lesotho to visit my cousin! She and her family live in the capital Maseru; her husband is a pilot with MAF and I haven't seen her in years. Both the Suderman and Derksen-Borror families with whom we're staying have kids, albeit younger. That will be a nice energy to be around, and more importantly I think we will all enjoy some contact with North Americans for a change. And this last place has Great Dane puppies to play with—how we have missed our pets…

So the last couple weeks has seen us continuing to get established (something might actually make it into our bank account yet!) and learning and meeting people. It is also the start of the grants and funding season, and we have started helping Oscar with a stack of calls for proposals. Grant writing is much more sophisticated here than Chad or Uganda, and we are doing our best to keep up. I've decided that writing for grants is a pernicious mix of heady, theoretical university paper-writing and the self-promoting canned stuff of job applications. And maybe I'm just ready for a change of scenery—but Oscar has let us know that he is ready for us to be shouldering tasks once we are returned in April.

The boys have not found school too challenging yet to have been stressed with exams (we'll see how the term results are) and they are curious what this road trip will be like. We're happy to show them more of this country, as this little corner is just that. Jacob was inspired by seeing online videos of his Irish dance school doing their annual St. Pat's presentations, and so he volunteered to do a short demonstration at the all-school assembly on Friday. We're pleased to see him put on his dance shoes again after these three months, but he also went to bed sad after practicing, so hard times do still come as well as go.

The big accomplishment this week is that we are completely off our US phone plan—we all have South African phone numbers now. We don't expect you to call us, but we can connect with you for free using What's App if you have a cell phone. Or let us know if you have a different favorite way of connecting. Facebook Messenger has worked for video calling, and we have Skype, too.

I know some of you have mailed things—it takes a while for things to reach us, and it's been suggested that we have the tracking number of packages to see if they get stuck somewhere. Time to do our last errands for the trip, get the proposal off, clean out the fridge, and say goodbye to our sunny beach—it will be fall by the time we get back.

Our love to you, and thanks for your prayers for travel mercies: that's for the car, for our cultural learning and connections, for happy spirits in the closed confines of the car, health and rest on the way. And we love to hear your news! E-mail what is going on with you—we love to read!

Kathryn, for Dan and the boys, too

Review of “Invictus” movie (PG13 - 2009):

Want a beautiful picture of reconciliation, based on a true story?  Want to understand Mandela’s unique vision for transformation?   Want a great sport movie, directed by Clint Eastwood, with Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon?  This is it!

First Month in South Africa

It’s been a long, lovely month of finding our feet in our new place. Finally having a phone line and internet at home is a big relief, and we have learned how to get around, do our shopping, and get Oscar to slow down just a little bit. We were surprisingly tired, although reflecting on how pressed we were in our last couple months in the States, you probably anticipated our need to “just be” a little bit.  I’ve had neck tension and inflammation, and rest and regular visits to an osteopath has managed it, as well as trying some acupuncture again.  John-Clair missed a day of school last week for a stomach bug going around school, Jacob had a bad jelly-fish sting, and Dan twisted his foot, and now we’ve all taken short turns with the flu, so we’ve all had some reasons to take it easy. But we’ve been settling into our new reality—how far away you all are, the noise of the ocean and the strangeness of the languages around us, the immense complexity of the context of South Africa, the uniqueness of this place.  As Jacob reflected the other day on our way to school, driving past a neighboring township, “It’s kind of weird to live in Africa but in a place where they are used to seeing white people.” I asked if that felt like a good or bad thing, and his response summed it up for all of us: “Both.” Understanding South Africa As some of you have seen from our Facebook pictures, Oscar is taking us around to meet and talk with local government leaders, school staff, and pastor’s forums. He’s enjoying orienting us – directing us to cultural learning such as Robben Island and local museums. Oscar has also given us several good books to read as part of our orientation to our work, including A History of Inequality in South Africa, 1652-2002 by Sampie Terreblanche. (We will put reviews of all the good resources we come across on our blog, which will be made public soon.)  I get bogged down in economic discussions, of which we hear many, with talk about the devalued rand and “the black economy vs the white economy.”  Terreblanche, among many others, says that while democratic rights are much improved, systemic change has not happened, government promises are unkept, etc. With a particularly approachable government councilor, I asked the question I’ve heard bantered back and forth for a long time, “Are people really better off now – is your average black South African really better off than he was twenty years ago?” “Oh yes,” he smiled at me, “we are living freely now. We can live with our families, we are united and can go where we want and everything is better.” I was embarrassed by my question, and still not understanding; then we visited the Labor Museum.

Entrance to the museum

Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum “The apartheid dream required the geographical separation of the races” says one plaque. But whites needed the labor of non-whites – what to do? This museum is full of documentation and pictures of the tragic situation that developed: workers that lived in their designated home territories sometimes had to travel as much as 8 hours a day to get to a job, leaving family at 3am to arrive home at 11pm at night, in some instances. Many others opted to move to a hostel, or “bedhold,” and leave their families for 11 months out of the year. Families were not allowed in hostels, and in fact, if you were caught in the hostel neighborhood without a pass, you paid a fine or served prison time. Hostels were strictly guarded with one road in, much like the forced labor camps they developed from. In Strand today, where Lwandle is located, we drive circuitous routes on the limited thru streets to get around. There is much more we learned about – women that smuggled themselves into the hostels to be with their husbands to start families, the lack of food and sanitation, and always, at the end of the day, the constant heritage of this unjust system of exploitation and brokenness. Two hostels were built in the larger Cape Town area. Lwandle hostel was built in 1960 to house 500 men – by 1990, two thousand men, women and children were squeezed into these curtained rooms with bunkbeds. Sometimes sixteen lived in the space for four men the size of a prison cell, the women and children hiding in the cupboard when the guard came around. One woman explained why she took such a risk: I came here to have children because my husband did not have enough time to be at home. He would take leave for only four weeks. We were not able to sit. We did not know each other because we married at a young age. We wanted to know each other very well. In fact, he wanted me to be close to him.

You can see how blocks are laid out, with very little vegetation, and the remaining frames on the roofs for solar water heaters

Inside the block, looking at the cabinets the women had to hide in

How 16 people fit into a room with two bunk beds

Then, as our guide was explaining that by 1991 there was a push to start a school for the children, I slowly begin to get it. I read on – 500 children living in Lwandle, and the government refusing to provide a school because they cannot acknowledge that those children are there. I realize that as we have toured the schools for mainly black and colored neighborhoods, signs over the doorways read things like “established in 2006.” My blood runs cold as I realize there were no schools for black South Africans in this entire area until recently, and in fact, no houses, or families living together, or churches, or shops, or beaches they could go to…

Beach sign

Nathan and Kathryn listening to our guide

I have imagined the end of apartheid as like the end of segregation in the US – and obviously, there are similarities. But I’m finding that much is different, yet even in its different-ness it has a lot to say to the US story. I will be sharing that with you, as much as you want to read of it, and we love to hear back from you your own thoughts on our common stories of injustice, racism and systemic brokenness. To finish the Lwandle story – with the end of apartheid, people didn’t need passes to be wherever they wanted and discrimination laws ended.  Government built schools for the children, families were allowed to live together, and to buy homes in the area (although speculation by whites and lack of resources for blacks made this, what should have been an equalizer, like starting the race several laps behind - Oscar’s words.) Families continued to live in the hostels, but openly, and now they could spread out, live outside of it, open small businesses; and so the various townships developed in the area – low-income housing, with informal housing (read: shacks) that more recent immigrants have put up alongside.  And back to 1991 – the museum noted that the need for a school did not go unheard – a Dutch Reformed Church let their buildings be used for an informal school, supported by the Inner Church Group of Somerset West, the white neighboring suburb. So while I had to leave the museum now even more embarrassed by all that I had seen and heard, I could also be hopeful.  Working with Oscar, who has given himself to the work of holistic transformation, gives us even more hope for a changed future.

Small businesses like these are now allowed in the township

Review of: Desmond Tutu in No Future without Forgiveness, 2000

I recommend this book to understand more about this amazing yet humble religious leader, and to begin to understand what a complicated process he helped lead in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.  It is an accessible, easy read, even considering the gravity of the subject matter.

Excerpt:

“God does not give up on anyone, for God loved us from all eternity, God loves us now and God will always love us, all of us good and bad, forever and ever. His love will not let us go, for God’s love for us, all of us, good and bad, is unchanging and is unchangeable. Someone has said there is nothing I can do to make God love me more, for God loves me perfectly already. And wonderfully, there is nothing I can do to make God love me less. God loves me as I am to help me become all that I have it in me to become, and when I realize the deep love God has for me, I will strive for love’s sake to do what pleases my Lover. Those who think this opens the door for moral laxity have obviously never been in love, for love is much more demanding than law. An exhausted mother, ready to drop dead into bed, will think nothing of sitting the whole night through by the bed of her sick child.

As I listened in the TRC to the stories of perpetrators of human rights violations, I realized how each of us has this capacity for the most awful evil - every one of us. None of us could predict that if we had been subjected to the same influences, the same conditioning, we would not have turned out like these perpetrators. This is not to condone or excuse what they did. It is to be filled more and more with the compassion of God, looking on and weeping that one of His beloved had come to such a sad pass. We have to say to ourselves with deep feeling, not with a cheap pietism, “There but for the grace of God go I.”  pg. 85-86