Hello! It’s been over a month, since our last post. I knew you all were
enjoying summer vacations and wouldn’t notice something not arriving from us. But as you finish your Labor Day weekend, I know that we are overdue
for an update.
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Us pictured here with our director, Steve Wiebe Johnson
and community leaders from the Lwandle township. |
The boys are almost done with their third quarter, and have
been heavily involved in netball and the school play. We moved in July into a
nice big rental house, where we are happy to be able to have pets and to host
visitors, like you, as well as meetings and local networking for relationship
building. And we have been working hard – as we get used to things here, we
take on more responsibilities at SADRA (Southern African Development and Reconstruction
Agency). Among other things, we helped host a training for election mediators,
and became official election observers last month. Our mission director visited.
We continue with school trainings. Dan works with the pastors’ network, and we
are starting to work on some of the needed infrastructure for SADRA, like
social media. I’m currently working on developing monitoring and evaluation
materials for our peace education projects, such as measuring understandings of
conflict and level of gang affiliation, for example, before our intervention.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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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.
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| Kathryn with community activists, Manenberg, Cape Town |
In July, our family attended the National Arts Festival in
Grahamstown, where we saw an amazing diversity of talent and thought-provoking
presentations. One such was the panel “Theatre as a tool for activism and
healing,” with experts from South Africa and all over the world. They concurred
that the expectation of theatre to bring cross-cultural healing has both marred
Art as genuine expression for its own sake, and skewed the agendas of theatre
organisations that need funding. Money is available for the Romeo & Juliet
stories of cross-boundary love, but not enough is being done within communities
struggling with identity issues. “Social cohesion” has become a catch phrase in
development and non-governmental work, and one South African panelist gave
this example: the government has just launched an anti-racism song – they throw
tons of money at something like this and expect social change. Theatre can be a
very effective component for healing, but while trying to prove itself in a
cause-and-effect scenario with a happy ending, it can lose the complicated truths
and contradictions that arise with our need to both mourn and celebrate. Back
to my elementary school skit - who
should
play the bus driver in the Rosa Parks skit? Should it rotate to be fair? Does
fairness matter? Do we get so paralyzed by these questions or political
correctness that we fail to immerse ourselves in the good stories?
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| 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!
