April 2018 Update

Dear friends and family, It’s been so long since we’ve written! We hope your new year has been good, and that you’ve seen some of our photos and work updates on Facebook, if you have that. Since we’ve last written, we’ve had to move to another rental house (again, and for the last time here, we sincerely hope), had the epic cross country road trip at the end of the year, and a blazing start to our third year of work here in South Africa. New House and Dog After a year in our Strand house we discovered it wouldn’t work to have a dog there after all, so we didn’t renew the lease and found a house in the neighbourhood of the boys’ school for less money (Somerset West; see our new address below). Unfortunately, the outgoing landlords, frustrated by our decision, refuse to return our deposit, so we are working at that through a housing tribunal mediation. The stress of this situation, along with the work of moving, took its toll on us, but we are very happy to be in our new home with our new dog, Willow! Technically, she is Jacob’s Christmas present – a one-year-old whippet/border collie mix. She is a good dog, if rather stressed from her shelter experience. We keep the bunny hidden away in our back yard; Willow has the front and side yards, and she has figured out how to share the house with our kitty Miems. And we have a garage for the first time since being here – table tennis tournaments encore! Download Support Card (general) Download Support Card (CA specific)

Bringing Willow home. SADRA Work Now that we know our way around, we can do a lot more to help Oscar and SADRA Conflict Transformation. We’ve already done three trainings this year – teaching mediation to community leaders from Nyanga, the community with the highest crime rate in the nation, church leaders from our local township area dealing with anti-immigrant unrest, and the big Manenberg schools peer mediation training. This is the year’s highlight for me (Kathryn) especially, as this is my area where I have built relationships with the three schools and their students. We were full past capacity this year and seemed to have particularly challenged youth – one had buried his father the week before; one had just given birth; several used our five-day residential retreat to detox from drugs; many struggled to give up cigarettes and just sleep “normal” hours. As they described violence in their neighbourhoods, Oscar kindly asked how many had lost an immediate family member in the last two years – 8 of the 56 teenagers stood up. My heart breaks in those moments, and the chance to smile into these faces, hug their thin shoulders, praise them for working hard, and see the changes that happen in their lives over five days are an immense blessing to me. The fact that they feel invigorated with new skills to better understand and interact with their complicated lives means we are doing the right thing. April will be just as busy – Dan is at a rural training with Oscar in the north this week, and then Oscar and I go on our annual pilgrimage to Joburg/Pretoria to visit embassies and explain to diplomats the importance of supporting community peacebuilding as part of their intervention strategies. We’ve been able to do so much more in the last year as an organisation, thanks to a one-year grant from the French government; we now need a follow-up partner to continue. We will host the fourth roundtable dialogue with the provincial electoral commission – current topics of water and land access and economic disparity will play heavily in the next elections and we are putting heads together as proactively as possible. By the end of April, we will need to have started relationships in local township schools to start Peer Mediation there, and we continue to do follow-up and support of community mediators we have trained. Here’s a story from one young trained pastor – there had been several break-ins in his neighbourhood, and one youth was found entering a home that wasn’t his and people had come out and were accusing him of the crimes and the conflict had become violent enough that his life was in danger. Our young pastor stepped in and was able to diffuse the crowd, explaining that he knew the youth as a younger brother from out of town, visiting his brother’s home. He literally saved the man’s life, and he thanks us for giving him the skills to handle that situation.  Youth from Manenberg practicing Peer Mediation skills at the training in Franschhoek. Drought and Day Zero Many of you have asked how Day Zero might unfold as Cape Town dams reached critical levels. As we cautiously enter the rainy season, day zero has been put off till next year, but it’s imminence has changed our lives. We use, re-use and sometimes re-reuse every drop of water with new life-style habits. Rinse water is used for washing, then for toilet flushing or watering plants. Handwashing water is used for household washing, then flushing. Our clothes washer empties into our tub (no more baths; wet-wipes and quick showers only) to be re-used. I’ve even come up with “cluster cooking:” we were already re-using our pasta water to cook oatmeal, but with a block of time I can cook several things at once with just a couple liters. For example, blanch vegetables for dinner’s pasta salad first. Use water to cook pumpkin for pumpkin breakfast bars. Then boil some butternut for tomorrow’s bisque, then cook macaroni in this water for the pasta salad. Now half this nutrient-rich, already-thickened water is broth for the butternut bisque, the other half makes yummy oatmeal. No waste! Four dishes on about three litres of water, and no pots had to be cleaned in between. You get the picture – this is how Capetonians exist these days – we are not the only ones to have switched from filter coffee to espresso and we share tips like this with each other constantly.  We have a new version of “let it mellow” – just ask me if you want to know what it is . . . I hope the rest of the world is paying attention and considering how they use this most precious of resources. Day Zero would have meant a turning off of most taps, and we would have queued daily at a water distribution point for our daily ration of 25 litres each. This would have been chaotic, but it was a good exercise for us all to practise getting down to 25 litres a day. Thanks for reading through our eclectic update – we always love hearing from you and are ever so appreciative of your ongoing support. It’s been a difficult couple of months, but I’m happy to say things are stabilizing out better and we’ve had some breathing space and positive energy again. Much love and hugs to you all, Kathryn, Dan, John-Clair and Jacob Dan and Kathryn Smith Derksen 4 Sir Lowry St. Somerset West 7130 South Africa Bird's nest hang out at Babylonstoren Farm on Easter Monday. Copyright © 2018 Smith Derksen MST, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you know Dan & Kathryn Smith Derksen Our mailing address is: 4 Sir Lowry St. Somerset West 7130 South Africa Our phone numbers are: (D) +27 79 153 2095 (K) +27 79 254 8979