Happy halfway point to all the Global LEADers! 18 days until we depart Cape Town. As much as I love being here, and as much as I do appreciate the once-in-a-lifetime-ness of this particular trip, I’m getting to the point where I’m ready to come home. This week- “service week”- has been very mentally and emotionally draining- playing with kids and writing journals for grades and reading and going to lecture while still trying to pack in fun/chill time and time to maintain some shred of contact with friends and family at home while trying to stay physically fit (yeah right)… it wears on you.

This week, we're spending time in the township in Sir Laury's Pass, a little more than 40 minutes outside the city of Cape Town. The area we're working in is called Sun City- mostly informal housing (meaning self-made structures) mixed in with government houses. 


It's chaotic. I like kids enough, but I just don’t do well with them when there’s over 100 crazy screaming running kids all in the one room at the community center where we’ve been playing with them. I’m not used to being around kids at all, let alone over 100 of them, so I don’t know what to do. I wind up just smiling a lot and holding a lot of hands. I signed up to be a Service Leader for music & dance because I thought it would be a good way I could actually do something for and with the kids, because I love music so much. (I envisioned us playing drums together, but we don’t have the resources for that.) But all it means is that I and two other girls lead endless games of “Little Sally Walker” and act as DJ for the kids, putting on whatever they want to hear from our iPods (but can’t really hear because the speakers don’t rise over the kids’ voices).

In addition to playing with kids, groups of us are paired up with families in the community. We spend time with them in their homes, talking and sometimes preparing or handing out food. My host mom is Ms. Fiela (Fee-lah), an older lady with the heart and energy of an 8 year old. She leads all the kids- especially at the local church- in song and sometimes dance to go along with the music. One of the first things we. Ms. Fiela’s shared some really amazing, very personal stories with us in her home. She speaks so lovingly about her faith- I’m not really a professed Christian, but the way talks about how it turned her life around is very moving for me.

It’s impossible to do anything more than scratch the surface of everything that’s going on here. But here’s an update on my somewhat failing bucket list…

Give tie dye bracelets to kids I work with during service week. 
The only kid I’m consistently working with is Ms. Fiela’s daughter, Samantha. (Side note: she’s technically Ms. Fiela’s great niece, but she was raised like her daughter due to personal circumstances. Samantha calls her mom and everything. Having grown up in anything but a nuclear family myself, I can relate, but I think- for people who don’t know any differently- this type of family is hard to understand. The concepts of family are really cool here. Many situations are born out of very sad circumstances, but the community that arises out of all that is really beautiful.) Samantha is one of the smartest 17 year olds I’ve ever met.  She wants to study business at university. She speaks Afrikaans and English fluently. She hates math (hey-o!) and loves to dance. She’s incredibly easy to talk to. She’s such an awesome role model for the township kids. We can tell how proud Ms. Fiela is of Samantha every time she talks about or to her. It’s very sweet.

Anyway, the bracelet thing isn’t going to happen. It’s a Global LEAD rule that we can’t give the kids anything. It isn’t why we’re there. We’re there to spend time with the families, create cross-cultural bonds, break down social barriers, and so on. It’s actually been really frustrating- trying to feel like we’re actually DOING SOMETHING for the community we’re visiting. Most of us feel like we aren’t. Sure, playing with kids for a few afternoons and talking with Ms. Fiela is great and might make them happy for a few hours, but is it really making a lasting difference? We’ve been discussing and debating it a lot in classes this week. My roommates and I have been talking about it a lot over meals, too. We know “doing something” isn’t always “giving something”- and then there’s different meanings to “giving something”: things, money, time, attention… There are no answers. But so many questions. And it’s so painful to feel like that when we feel so motivated to want to really DO something, to FIX something (especially something tangible). But then you have to ask, what needs fixing? Who says? Is it you, as an outsider, or is it what the community wants? Not everyone wants us in Sun City. It’s obvious to us by the looks we sometimes get from the people at the houses we aren’t visiting. Even some of the kids give us rude hand gestures as we get back on our bus to leave at the end of the days- kids who we had been playing with, who ran up to the bus to greet us a few hours before, who we thought liked us! And then there is so much more to Sir Laury’s pass than just Sun City, where the informal housing is- there are 5 very different (economically) sectors to it. Why aren’t we getting involved in other areas? It’s complicated… and I won’t do anybody any good by taking this rant any further right now.

Visit Stellanbasch, a nearby college town known for some great wine.
A bunch of us are going and staying this Saturday night in a hostel.

Befriend Stella, the sweet, shy dog at the beach house we have our classes in.
The dogs don’t come around anymore. I’m fine with this not happening. This only made the list because (well, first because I love dogs, but-) we made the bucket lists on day one or two and Nikita and I were just trying to think of random things to add to the list, because we didn’t know enough about what we really wanted to do at that point.

Hike Lion’s Head, a peak at Table Mountain, at sunrise
Doing this next Monday or Tuesday! There was a hike this morning, but with service week being so draining, I wasn’t up for it. I ran for a little while in the gym here instead. And I’m doing it again in the morning. There’s an erg (a rowing machine, for all you non-rowing savvy folks) in the gym, too, but the screen doesn’t work, and it slides a few inches forward every time I move, so it’s too much trouble to really get use out of. Bummer…

Surf
I think I’ll be doing this next week- “Education Week”. We’ve been going to class most every day of the whole trip, but next week we’ll be learning more about South African history (by visiting Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for many years, and so on) and local culture (visiting a vineyard, etc.). We have a ton of free time- most afternoons are free, and we even have at least one entire free day- so we’ll be called for our “adventure activities”, like surfing, pretty last minute on those days.

Yoga at sunrise on the beach outside our apartment

My friend Morgan and I are going to do this some time next week when we have a little more time.

Create a secret handshake with a local kid

Hasn’t happened yet, but maybe/hopefully tomorrow, when we go back into the township at Sir Laury’s.

Learn something from a local 

An ongoing process. I’ve learned lots of things from locals- about music from my friend Yongama, language from Thinkwell, stories from Ms. Fiela…

Learn some bits of local languages (Afrikaans, Xhosa)
I did try to learn Xhosa from our bus-truck driver, Thinkwell, one night at the hostel in the forest on the Garden Route. Xhosa is a Zulu-based language (I think, I could be getting things mixed up) that has clicking on letter like q’s and c’s. It's a really difficult language for an American-trained mouth to speak. My friend Michelle- a UGA student who’s my age- was actually born in South Africa and is fluent in Afrikaans. I tried to have her teach me a few words but I’m no good at the pronunciation.

My uncle also sent me a bucket list for me from him, and one of the bullets was that I don’t become a vegetarian- something that I have repeatedly talked with my roommates about wanting to try to start (for the 100th time) while I’m here. The things I do for you…

Most of the things on my Cape Town bucket list just seems so inconsequential, in retrospect. Many feel very selfish. (Maybe a lot of it is because of the book on Taoism I'm reading right now, but everything feels like a struggle between selfishness and selflessness.) Being here has made me hypersensitive about spending money. I’m at a weird emotional place with everything going on right now- all the thoughts and conversations and lectures we have, being privileged American college students… it’s a hard topic to discuss, but it forces you to view your actions and what’s going on around you from a very different perspective. I’m at a point in my life- being a student, and without a job- where money is just becoming “real” to me. The impact it has on EVERYTHING, whether you like it or not, is overwhelming. It’s a heavy, messy topic.

In the States you hear the "classic Africa story"- they don't have anything, they're starving, and so. Lots of "they"s and stereotyping and misinformation. Some of it is very much inaccurate; some of it is based in truth. Issues and needs are so completely varied across the board. In a place where there is so much poverty and hunger and so little government funding where it's needed, it's crazy for me to think that in the houses in the townships, people have electricity and TVs and cars and cell phones. They're not always the nicest or the newest, but they're there- in a soup kitchen for children who may not eat otherwise. Everything here is so squished together, living side by side- microcosms of cultures, races, varying levels of wealth, hunger, safety and health with danger and death. I've commented in previous posts about how mindblowing it is to me that the extremes of the financial world live LITERALLY across the street from each other, like in Sir Laury's Pass. I just can't make sense of it all in my mind.

Back to money becoming more “real” to me, so are things like actually planning out my future, which is another heavy, messy topic...

Last week, on the Garden Route, we talked about & jotted down some things on our life bucket lists. The things on mine were mostly about education, music, and adventure- three things I have a lot of passion for. Specific activities- running a marathon, seeing the Northern Lights, surfing in every ocean, writing music for a film- are mixed in with more conceptual goals like sharing music as much as possible and continuing to learn throughout life.

I’m not really sure where I was going with that thought-train except this: at the beginning of this trip, I was so sure I wanted to go into Public Relations and work with non-profits to promote music as an education source- which sounds great, right?- but now, I’m not sure that’s the best thing for me to do. And I’m fairly desperate for some guidance, if anyone is up to the task. All I know is that I keep going back to music and education, and I feel like there’s a reason for that. Maybe/definitely all this uncertainty about what I want to “do with my life” is being fueled by not knowing how or what to do to “make a difference” in the township this week… again, so many questions, and no answers.

This post is about as piecemeal as my brain feels right now. I apologize to anyone who was just looking for an “I rode a lion today!” post. This one may have been a bit of a bummer.

With love, M