|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Saturday, February 4, 2017
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Sunday, November 20, 2016
Year in Review
|
|
|
|
Thursday, November 10, 2016
Kathryn presents at South Africa's first-ever Restitution Conference
Yesterday's opening of this inaugural conference on the subject of Restitution was a deeply meaningful and spiritual experience. The conference is being held in the Castle of Good Hope, which is the oldest remaining colonial structure in South Africa. All participants upon entering, were guided on a pilgrimage of reflection through the castle grounds. At eight stations, we were led to consider the people most deeply affected by colonialism and apartheid. Moments of silence were also augmented with collective litanies read together as prayers for the country's continued healing. For us, the messages celebrating diversity and prayers for reconciliation across divisions were like a balm soothing our heavy hearts.
Please click on the link below to learn more about this very important conference. You can scroll through the program and read about some of the topics being discussed. Kathryn shares today at 1:30 under the subject heading of, "Coming to Restitution."
RESTITUTION - Something for Everyone
Monday, September 12, 2016
September Update
 |
| Us pictured here with our director, Steve Wiebe Johnson and community leaders from the Lwandle township. |
 |
| Dan at meeting of Grace Community Church leaders, Colesberg |
Our last update “A week in the life” outlined our preparatory
work for a project in the gang-affected high schools, and the cross-community
dialogues being carefully encouraged in a couple of areas. It is slow work, and
as we get to know locals, more than one has told us that we are wasting our
time. I spoke at a Unitarian Fellowship recently, and realized that many people
have distanced themselves from reconciliation, and from how deeply healing will
need to go. But I am fascinated by what I hear from other folks, and I come
back to something I heard at the mediation training that seemed particularly
innovative: Stereotypes are the gaps between real and perceived identities, and
reconciliation is reducing that gap. Think about that for a moment. I had to, but
it fits, doesn’t it? So the rest of this update is going to be more reflective
and personal about the themes that we are working on as peacemakers.
 |
| Kathryn presenting at election mediators training, Cape Town |
Identity work is tricky. In defining ourselves, we carry identity and our baggage with our strongest emotions, and it is very easy to become defensive when put in a mixed group talking about identity. Do blacks ever see me as more than white? You can’t tell by listening or looking at me that I was born in Africa. Then I say I’m American, but how would you know that only one of my grandparents spoke English as a first language? Then there’s my pacifist and Mennonite upbringing with its own flavours and value shaping. And then there’s my unique experience of being raised in an inner-city ghetto in California – my sister is the only other white person I know with this history. Along with the blacks, Hispanics, and Pacific Islanders of my neighbourhood, I was bused to white high schools as part of a desegregation policy in the 1980s*. Black kids wouldn’t sit next to me on the bus because I was white, and white kids wouldn’t sit next to me in class because I lived with black people. So I know what prejudice and fear look like; but from a young age, I could also recognize the common humanity just below the surface.
 |
| Dan with teachers in workshop for conflict management and team-building, Khayelitsha, Cape Town |
My younger sister and I were the only two white kids in our
elementary school of over 700 students. It was an intense place of learning
about our civil rights heroes, with special assemblies for Malcolm X, as well
as Martin Luther King Jr. One skit we did every year was to reenact the Rosa
Parks story; the woman exhausted after a long day who refused to take her place
standing in the black section of the bus. It’s a beautiful story of
conscientious objection that led to change, and I loved the story, especially
because there was a heroine. I suppose I understood that I was never going to
be given the part of Rosa when our classes performed this skit for the school,
but I didn’t know why I always had to play the bus driver. I asked the teacher
this question – while honoured to have one of the few speaking parts, I didn’t
like to always be the villain in the story; could I play a different part? This
made her laugh, but she couldn’t even answer me – I just needed to be the bus
driver. It was not until many years later I put it all together. As the only
white child among several hundred students in the upper grades, that was my
role. That community, still raw from the pain of the civil rights movement just
twenty years before, could not cast me as a different character. There were
parents who were vocal in their disapproval of a white girl even being at their
school, and my teacher both stuck up for my right to be there, and made me the
bus driver.
SADRA has initiated a local cross-community dialogue right
where Oscar (our Director) lives – leaders of white and black bordering
neighbourhoods sat down together for the first time a couple of weeks ago, and started
to get to know each other. We have been using John Paul Lederach’s Little Book of Conflict Resolution,
where he talks about how to build new relationships and break old patterns of
relating. He underscores the importance of identity, saying “In my experience,
issues of identity are at the root of most conflicts.” How we relate to others
has everything to do with how we define ourselves. If after defining ourselves
we decide that it is not worth investing in a relationship with those who are
different from us (also a defined identity), then discussions about
reconciliation and restitution become academic. As SADRA, we are trying to
integrate identity work into our peace trainings, and sometimes we feel like
pioneers on uncharted ground.
 |
| Kathryn with community activists, Manenberg, Cape Town |
 |
| The politics of identity, Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg |
If reconciliation is working to close the gap caused by
stereotypes, now is the time to work at that both here in South Africa, where
twenty years have passed since their painful civil rights struggle, and in the
US as you approach your national elections. Anyone working to expose the gaps
between perceived and real identities, who can stay patient and listening
instead of defensive, and can live with the mystery of contradiction, is
actively engaged in peace-making. Join us in this exciting work, and let us know
how it’s going!
Wednesday, August 10, 2016
Excerpts from Jonathan D. Jansen’s Knowledge in the Blood: Confronting Race and the Apartheid Past, Stanford University Press, 2009.
Preparing to work in South Africa, I’ve read a fascinating book written by Jonathan Jansen, the first black South African dean of the University of Pretoria, the center of traditional Afrikaans institutions. This is a dense and academic book on the different knowledges that we carry around with us – such as internal, historic, and embedded. As he says, “The problem with embedded knowledge is that it is not there; it is the claims, silences, and assumptions about knowledge concealed in the belief and value systems of those who teach and learn. Changing curriculum without changing the curriculum makers is especially difficult under conditions of a sudden and radical social transformation.”
"For the ordinary white South African, and Afrikaners in particular, the transition remains a traumatic experience. For a psychotherapist’s perspective: ‘South Africa is an intensely anxious society, living with many unresolved fears and collective fantasies, much repressed anger, guilt, and shame. Many black-white relationships are unstable and ambivalent. The necessary collective healing will have to go far beyond the superficial political processes of reconciliation, reparation, and truth-seeking about the past – urgent though those are.’ To understand why this is so, it is important to recognize “the reserves of social knowledge” on which the memories and identity of the Afrikaner are built.” (pg 45)
"For the ordinary white South African, and Afrikaners in particular, the transition remains a traumatic experience. For a psychotherapist’s perspective: ‘South Africa is an intensely anxious society, living with many unresolved fears and collective fantasies, much repressed anger, guilt, and shame. Many black-white relationships are unstable and ambivalent. The necessary collective healing will have to go far beyond the superficial political processes of reconciliation, reparation, and truth-seeking about the past – urgent though those are.’ To understand why this is so, it is important to recognize “the reserves of social knowledge” on which the memories and identity of the Afrikaner are built.” (pg 45)
In the South African experience the victims
and the perpetrators had to live together and together make sense of the
experiences of defeat and victory. (pg
57)
"The problem with embedded knowledge is that
it is not there; it is not easily read off the outer coating of a public
curriculum. It is the claims, silences, and assumptions about knowledge
concealed in the belief and value systems of those who teach and learn;
concealed behind the classroom door, they influence and direct the substance of
what counts as the actual knowledge transactions among participants in the
learning process….Changing curriculum without changing the curriculum makers is
especially difficult under conditions of a sudden and radical social
transformation…What the teachers of the new university curriculum were
struggling with was knowledge in the blood." (pg 179)
Notes how we have just exchanged the
sensitive word “race” for “culture,” from how blacks are to how they
behave. Race-essential understandings,
tensions between deep change and mandated change, and how this is reflected in
new curriculum that actually affirms racist narrative are a part of the
problem: “Ubuntu’s problem [the new curriculum at UP] is not that it peddles
this offensive knowledge on a university campus; the dilemma of this curriculum
is that it makes explicit what is often concealed in white understandings of
the Other and what is less evident in the knowledge, values, and beliefs that
underpin the supposedly neutral scientific knowledge presented across the
institutional disciplines.” (pg 194)
"The problem with South Africa before and
after Apartheid is that we insist on collapsing race and economics into the
same face; whites are rich and privileged, blacks are poor and under-served.
This may be true of blunt averages as a national measure of social status, but
it conceals the thousands and thousands of poor whites and the struggling
classes among them who barely make it. Apartheid was as much a racial system of
oppression as it was a capitalist system of exploitation; among the victors,
the nationalists want us to believe only the former, and the Marxists only the
latter. But it was both…" (pg 215)
Change: Observations from historical
inquiry (post WWII Germany):
- “Perpetrators and beneficiaries of evil systems do not change even in response to direct confrontation with horrific knowledge.
- The reversal of attitudes is unlikely to come from the participating generation – that is, those directly involved in atrocities whether as known perpetrators or as complicity bystanders. However, not only the passage of time allowed a critical consciousness to emerge; there were also changes in the surrounding environment [compelling writings, etc.]
- The capacity for the perpetrators to change arose after the political elites recognized more than one pain and ‘the link between the suffering of victims and perpetrators’ was established…not recognition simply of dual sufferings but of their connection as ‘causally related and inextricably intertwined,’ without the danger of sliding onto the quicksand of moral relativism.
- Crucial role of educational knowledge in this process of reorientation…for the understandable impulse to launch ‘teacher training’ in a new history in post-conflict societies fails to take account first of the cognitive constraints and second of the emotional loyalty to a fallen regime of truth.
- How adults change recognizes the impossibility of bringing everyone into common knowledge…and resting with the knowledge that insisting on the one great unifying story in not a prerequisite for nation building even though it might be the pipe-dream of the nationalist impulse.” Excerpted from pgs 251-254
Acknowledgment
of brokenness "The origins of brokenness come from the spiritual world of
evangelical faith. It is the construct of brokenness, the idea that in our
human state we are prone to failure an incompletion, and that as imperfect
humans we constantly seek a higher order of living. Brokenness in the
realization of imperfection, the spiritual state of recognizing one’s humanness
before the forgiving and loving power of God. But brokenness is more; it is the
profound outward acknowledgment of inward struggle done in such as a way as to
invite communion with other people and with the divine. Brokenness compels dialogue." (pg 269-270)
The Necessity of Establishing Risk-Accommodating
Environments
"White students do not rush into pedagogic
spaces confessing guilt or acknowledging racism; nor do white parents suddenly
own up to years of privilege at the expense of black citizens. Even when such
compulsion is felt, it is extremely difficult for human beings to unburden
themselves in private or public spaces… When I do such workshops on risk
accommodation within the classroom, invariably a teacher becomes adamant: there
can be no reconciliation without truth. People need to acknowledge their racism
and their privilege as a very first step, or there’s nothing to talk about.
This is a particularly Western way of thinking: “fess up,” as if this were an
involuntary reflex to some central command. The explosion of talk shows in
American public culture in which the most personal and bizarre behavior is
displayed without restraint to live audiences strikes many in the Third World
as disgusting. This is not the real world. Guilt and shame are more common
responses to burdensome knowledge than the apparent reveling in extreme and
obnoxious behavior. It is essential that
the teacher create the atmosphere, and structure the teaching-learning episodes
so as to reduce the risk of speaking openly about direct and indirect
knowledge. Students must be able to speak without feeling they will be judged
or despised for what they say. To repeat, this creation of a risk-accommodating
environment does not mean that “anything goes” and that a student can spout
offensive words about another group without consequences. Long before the
pedagogic encounter, the atmosphere should have been set, the terms of
engagement explained, the rules of dialogue shared. Such difficult dialogues
can take place only if trust in the teacher-leader is already ensured through
demonstration of an example of conciliation within and outside the classroom.
The notion the ‘the lesson’ starts in the classroom is misguided." (pg 275-276)
Sunday, June 26, 2016
A Week in the Life of a Peacemaker - June Update
A week in the life…Hello friends and family! Remember how we didn’t really have any specific answers to your questions about what we would be doing? We said it had to fit the circumstances on the ground, and we tried our best to give ideas? Well, we finally have some answers, and as last week ended, I realized I could just describe our work week! Questions welcome as always.
SADRA currently has five pillars that it simultaneously works
on – peace education in schools, community conflicts & xenophobia, church
leadership, women in peacebuilding, and election monitoring/crisis
management. These can and do all flow
together, and this is a good week to see how they weave together…
Day 1
As usual, we start the week with a staff meeting – the three
of us pray together, review the last week’s program and to-do lists, and then
set up the coming week’s work. We also
catch up on some administrative work. This is going to be an interesting week!
Day 2
Manenberg High Schools: Oscar, Dan and I visit the principals of the three schools we have targeted as most needing intervention for gang violence in the Manenberg township area, which is about half an hour towards Cape Town. Oscar successfully trained administration at one school during a crisis period two years ago, and student violence was greatly reduced. We want to begin in these two other high schools, and met last month with school deputies and one principal. Today we will check in with all of them, and also have an appointment with the remaining principal, as his buy in is crucial.
However, gang violence has become much more complicated under the new democracy, and our advisors have warned us that we will need a multi-pronged approach that also addresses gang violence in families and the community, and that other NGOs have come into the area and failed. Sure enough, this third principal, tells us frankly about the US-based Ceasefire Program that evaporated without even a final report before finishing their program. We will need to tread wisely in these schools, but with our interest in gangs and violence reduction, we all feel commitment to follow this through.
IEC (Independent Electoral Commission of SA) meeting: Our afternoon meeting is with a SADRA trainer and advisor Dan and I meet for the first time. We run through our plans for Manenberg with him, as he grew up in that area, and glean his ideas. He has a history of working with human rights and currently works with the police; integrating police into our plans will be important. But today’s meeting is primarily to talk about the IEC, where he is an election monitor with Oscar. He is helping SADRA plan a 2-3 day training (and apply for funding at the EU) focused on crisis management for our region’s 27 election monitors in preparation for the August elections. These monitors are community leaders, including religious leaders, who become equipped to respond as election tension or violence occurs.
Manenberg High Schools: Oscar, Dan and I visit the principals of the three schools we have targeted as most needing intervention for gang violence in the Manenberg township area, which is about half an hour towards Cape Town. Oscar successfully trained administration at one school during a crisis period two years ago, and student violence was greatly reduced. We want to begin in these two other high schools, and met last month with school deputies and one principal. Today we will check in with all of them, and also have an appointment with the remaining principal, as his buy in is crucial.
However, gang violence has become much more complicated under the new democracy, and our advisors have warned us that we will need a multi-pronged approach that also addresses gang violence in families and the community, and that other NGOs have come into the area and failed. Sure enough, this third principal, tells us frankly about the US-based Ceasefire Program that evaporated without even a final report before finishing their program. We will need to tread wisely in these schools, but with our interest in gangs and violence reduction, we all feel commitment to follow this through.
IEC (Independent Electoral Commission of SA) meeting: Our afternoon meeting is with a SADRA trainer and advisor Dan and I meet for the first time. We run through our plans for Manenberg with him, as he grew up in that area, and glean his ideas. He has a history of working with human rights and currently works with the police; integrating police into our plans will be important. But today’s meeting is primarily to talk about the IEC, where he is an election monitor with Oscar. He is helping SADRA plan a 2-3 day training (and apply for funding at the EU) focused on crisis management for our region’s 27 election monitors in preparation for the August elections. These monitors are community leaders, including religious leaders, who become equipped to respond as election tension or violence occurs.
Day 3
Xenophobia and community dialogues: This is a short
work day for us, as the boys are taking exams and both done mid-morning. So we decide that’s a good day to drive all
the way into Cape Town (about an hour one way) to visit the French Consulate
and the Alliance Française. These two
contacts were made during our meetings with the French Embassy last month in
Jo’burg, and Dan and I are able to have a nice long meeting with the AF
director. This is a
relationship-building meeting, and we describe SADRA, and he describes the AF’s
work in xenophobia and LGBTI rights, upcoming events and how SADRA might
intersect. The AF has started an informal community dialogue series, and he
invites SADRA to facilitate an evening, something we talked about wanting to
do.
Day 4
Western Cape Department of Education: Another day of driving – we visit the DoE
(north of Cape Town) to meet with the Safe Schools Co-ordinator for the
district that includes Manenberg. She
needs to understand our interest there, and we need to know what government
efforts are in the area as well as the issues she sees. She talks about how bullying is a new
problem, and how they are piloting an after-school program in two schools (not
in Manenberg). Government funding shrinks every year, but as someone that has
been trained by Oscar, she knows his programs and is keen to support us in
Manenberg however she can. The meeting
ends with her inviting us to help with a mini-Truth and Reconciliation
Commission she is trying to get funded to deal with community wounds in the
nearby coloured community of Elsie’s River.
Of course, Oscar says yes.
Electoral
Commission Launch: The rest of the
day is spent at the official launch of the IEC Municipal Elections – press
covers all the political parties that have come to sign the Code of Conduct,
including the important clause that election results will be accepted by all
parties. The Western Cape includes 402
wards, 1586 districts, and over three million voters. Want to understand what can be contentious in
an election? Think about the hanging
chad issue of 2000, and multiply that on every level, with added political
complexity. Voter registration has been
so hotly contested there have already been riots, tires burned, etc. At the following reception, we meet more of
Oscar’s co-monitors.
Day 5
Pastor’s training follow-up: We divide up today – Oscar is doing some
independent mediation work. Dan does a follow-up training with a fellowship of
pastors Oscar has been working with. The
initial two day gathering last month was to give them space to plan and figure
out how they are going to work together.
Internal conflict and confusion has crippled the organisation, and
members have been dropping. As an outsider, Dan has been able to guide them
through a process of discernment, and today is meeting with several of the
leaders in follow-up. Their constitution
and leadership roles have been hazy at best, and the founder/president needs to
be brought on board of needed changes and transparency.
Women’s meetings:
Meanwhile, I drive to the local government office to try and set-up
meetings with the women leaders. I met
two of them earlier, and after getting some good ideas on women’s rights at the
training in Jo’burg last month, I feel ready to talk about women’s issues in
Strand and our township, Lwandle. Both
women are out sick, but I get their contact information to try later in the
week. In an ironic twist, I then get
sick and still have not had those meetings.
Any actual trainings will need to wait until after the election, but if
I can get in some informal discussions soon, that will help direct our
work. I do meet with the local
councillor, however, and hear about how some contenders for office are being
physically threatened, and there is some real fear about the election.
Xenophobia: That evening, I drive to Cape Town for
one of those discussions hosted by the AF – they are showing a new documentary
on xenophobia made by the Scalabrini Center for Refugees. Besides being a topic
we work in, I also want to scope out who comes to these events and their
format. I have another aim, too; I
invite two young men to join me whom I met at the Peacebuilding Institute last
month. One of them is getting a degree in Peace Studies, and has requested we
consider how he might contribute to SADRA.
He is also here from Zimbabwe, so this is the perfect event to see him
in action.
At home, I re-write our Manenberg plans in light of things we have recently reflected on, to be sent out to the school principals with Oscar’s approval. I also draft a concept paper on a new pillar that we have been talking about – Food Security. I can’t let the cat out of the bag just yet, but there are several factors coming together (funding possibilities Oscar and I learned about in Embassy visits, situations we viewed with rural pastors on our drive in March, rising food prices and the increased need for sustainable agriculture) that are seeming more and more relevant.
Day 6
Just kidding… Not going to go on. On weekends we do cultural things like go to weddings, concerts, museums, and different churches, etc. Sorry this is so long – but it feels like you need the details to keep up with all this! I hope a window into one of our weeks helps you understand how we are working with Oscar, and what is ahead for us. Now the boys are on winter break, so it’s harder to both get in full days like this, but it allows me to write to you. On the home front, we recently did a search for a rental home, as our current lease is up next month and we are ready for a more permanent place that accepts pets, so we will be moving soon. We found a lovely, partially furnished house on a hill with a view, and a guest suite that you will hear more about next month.
All our love, and thanks for reading,
At home, I re-write our Manenberg plans in light of things we have recently reflected on, to be sent out to the school principals with Oscar’s approval. I also draft a concept paper on a new pillar that we have been talking about – Food Security. I can’t let the cat out of the bag just yet, but there are several factors coming together (funding possibilities Oscar and I learned about in Embassy visits, situations we viewed with rural pastors on our drive in March, rising food prices and the increased need for sustainable agriculture) that are seeming more and more relevant.
Day 6
Just kidding… Not going to go on. On weekends we do cultural things like go to weddings, concerts, museums, and different churches, etc. Sorry this is so long – but it feels like you need the details to keep up with all this! I hope a window into one of our weeks helps you understand how we are working with Oscar, and what is ahead for us. Now the boys are on winter break, so it’s harder to both get in full days like this, but it allows me to write to you. On the home front, we recently did a search for a rental home, as our current lease is up next month and we are ready for a more permanent place that accepts pets, so we will be moving soon. We found a lovely, partially furnished house on a hill with a view, and a guest suite that you will hear more about next month.
All our love, and thanks for reading,
Kathryn and family
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)