First week in South Africa

The boys started school on Wednesday, dressed in their blue and white school uniforms.  They were warmly greeted – Jacob is starting grade 7 again, John-Clair is grade 9 and both are in classes of ten students. It’s fun to be the only Americans on campus, and to start the new year with enthusiasm, but we will see how the long haul settles in. Jacob left today (Monday) for a class camping trip with the upper primary grades. He doesn’t sleep well away from home, so is not exactly looking forward to it, but we hope it will help him bond with his small class. They have both sat in their Afrikaans class, but it will probably turn into study periods for them because of how far along the other students are.  Jacob starts German, John-Clair has started Spanish. They both need to do some catch-up with classmates, but the language classes are even smaller, so they are getting good guidance. John-Clair’s English teacher commented that he might not be challenged in her class, and that’s the point I realized that while this is a Cambridge curriculum, several (many?) of his classmates do not speak English as a mother tongue. She will assess if he can be moved up.

In the boys’ words We asked after the first day to recall an embarrassing moment at school. John-Clair relayed being asked a question in Spanish class to which the answer was yes, and he stumbled through all his languages first saying “Ah oui, I mean yes, hiki, ah, SI!” and was very embarrassed. (He told a similar story two years ago – getting on the school bus for the first time, being greeted by the bus driver and replying to her sunny “Good morning” with “Bonjour!” and turning beet red.) Jacob said he sat next to a talkative boy and the hardest thing was the boy whispering him a joke while the teacher was busy, and Jacob couldn’t quite follow when it was supposed to be funny, or even when it ended, since it kept going, and so he just kept laughing. Both boys are missing friends from Seattle, and Jacob is really struggling since his phone has been missing since last week.  Reinventing ourselves Speaking of phones, we feel like we have spent the week reinventing ourselves - like when you find you need i.d. to get i.d. – we needed a car, to order school books online, get insurance, set-up an office supply budget, start a bank account, etc.  But you need phone/internet to really make those things happen and every day presented new challenges to this, and we felt like we were really chasing our tails a couple times. (Couldn’t buy the car because couldn’t transfer money because couldn’t contact Seattle bank because couldn’t get the phone hotspot to work because couldn’t buy the data plan, etc.) So while the place is absolutely beautiful, we are having flashbacks to other African experiences. I hear other South Africans complaining about the bureaucracy of the country – just noticed that to get our library card we need two outside references – but then this is the first African town we have lived in that has a public library! But we have a car now (still no internet at home yet, so writing this offline, but not complaining) and it’s a great deal. A used VW Golf (that’s like a Jetta here) stationwagon, in great shape and low mileage. Oscar had been bussing both his family and ours around this first week, so this has been a great relief to all. It’s also fun to relearn driving stick-shift with the left hand, and keeping to the wrong, I mean left, side of the road.  Working with Oscar Oscar, and wife Zandi, have been wonderful orienting us, driving us around, patiently helping us shop and choose a car, sharing some meals, and giving us a little time to get settled. We had an orientation to SADRA (Southern Africa Development and Reconstruction Agency) on Friday, and have begun planning for the year, and the next several months. The next election is in June, and there is a lot to do to prepare for that in hopes of diffusing violence that can often happen in the lead-up to contentious elections, which this is sure to be. SADRA is making a point of working in fragile democracies, and working at building civil society at any entry point. Oscar also has an intern this month from St. Olaf, a Mennonite young man who had growing up years in South Africa and is now helping with some peace education curriculum. This week we will observe some follow-up trainings for school peer mediators he will conduct while piloting the new material, and then look at some curriculum we’re calling “Rethinking Diversity.” Racial tensions continue to increase in the schools, and we want to look at the specific issue of violence against immigrants in our trainings and not just conflict management. As Oscar puts it, Trump makes his anti-immigrant statements on a national stage – loud and hurtful but relatively benign in policy; local leaders here who control social services and police responses to xenophobia are spouting the same rhetoric and more directly affecting the day to day life in the here and now for immigrants and refugees. Here is where we need transformation. We are learning a lot, and have spent a lot of time over the last four days sharing stories with Oscar of experiences across Africa. What I knew was a complicated social structure here is even more complicated, with a longer history than the U.S. We have a work plan for the week, ending with a family trip to Robben Island on Saturday. The boys start extracurricular activities next week – tennis and a by-audition choir, and Jacob wants to start martial arts. The gamba survived the trip to Capetown well, and we just bought John-Clair a used guitar yesterday. So we will have music in our house again, and are working on internet and then setting up a home office. We are adjusting to temperatures of 80-100 degrees each day, but the ocean winds quickly cool off the house every night, so we are hardly uncomfortable.  Fresh food is abundant, and we have been healthy, so things are going well, and we are excited to start work. Thanks for your continued prayers and kind thoughts, Kathryn, Dan and the boys