Savitri on housing

I was watching an episode of “Vice” where a reporter was investigating acres of unfinished and unoccupied apartment complexes in China. These building projects, designed to generate revenue through real estate, are abandoned because they are expensive and located in areas far from work. They were built over farmlands, effectively displacing thousands of farmers and as one woman bemoaned “turned them into beggars”. Contrast that with the surplus of informal settlements and backyard dwellings that I see in Cape Town it is not hard to see that humans are doing things inefficiently. The problem is, how do you fix something so complicated and far along?

Empty apartments in Chenggong, China (source)

Informal settlements in Cape Town, South Africa

I don’t pretend to have the answers nor do I think the answer is so simple that it could be explained in a blog post. I think one thing that has to happen, however, is a consciousness of this problem. Maybe you don’t know what to do about it but maybe someone you tell does or maybe someone they know will have an inkling of innovation. But just as importantly, I think, there must be consciousness of all the parts to the problem. Why can’t we just build housing structures anywhere for all the people who need homes to live in? For one, it would be unfair to move people away from their place of work and family and social community and resources. For another, we need to make sure that the area those houses or apartments are being built are suitable not only for the people who going to be living there but for any people who are living there already. It is not fair to interrupt other people’s environments either.

This dilemma reminds me of my first few weeks in Cape Town. Marita was telling us about an area in Khayelitsha that had suffered a terrible fire and people were currently discussing whether they wanted to rebuild the community with roads that would permit easy access for fire safety vehicles but that would displace approximately 30% of the community. I wondered, why not build multi-level apartments so that the same number of people could live there and still access emergency care when they need it? But then, what would happen to these people while they waited for such a building to be constructed? There always seems to be a “but” and so often short term solutions seem to negate or complicate long term goals. How do you integrate the two and how do you address the “but”s? Maybe someone who reads this will know.

Savitri on falling in love

What I will miss most about Cape Town are the people that I have become friends with. I am forever grateful for the chances that I had to meet awesome people and have awesome conversations. Our interactions allowed me to experience Cape Town in so many different ways, not just as a tourist and not just as a student. Luckily, I will get to see some of these friends in person in the U.S. Maybe I’ll get to see all my other friends someday in the future.

Is it possible to fall in love with so many souls?

Savitri and Vernon

Rasaad

Marita

Sisters at Tafelsig Clinic

Morning bus ride with co-educators

Tekawa & Elise 

Savitri and Sister Castle

Apparently it is!

Savitri on food

Sister Castle and Rakhee have been so generous to us. At the clinic, both have taken us out to McDonald’s and both have brought something to share with us during lunch. Sister Castle made it a point to feed me every day for the last couple weeks even if I had my own food so I brought things for her as well (mainly peanut-butter sandwiches and “dry” bread with avocado). On one of our last days, Rahkee made butter paneer and chicken and despite all the times I’ve said it on this trip I was in heaven. When we visited Sister Castle in her home she greeted us with feasts, truly delicious dishes. Once, she even brought us home during lunch so that we could talk with her daughters and meet her neighbors who were all really friendly and wonderful to talk to. We have been on the receiving end of so much generosity and though I’ve tried to give back in small ways I don’t know how I can ever repay them. Part of me keeps thinking that this is not the last time that I will see them.

These happy moments, unfortunately, are always tinged with a bit of guilt and sadness for people who are not on the receiving end of such generosity, or who have much less to pass around. Although I have so many happy memories in the lunch room with my friends and coworkers I realize that not everyone sees it as a happy environment. For one, not everyone has enough money to bring food with them to work each day and so they would rather spend their time elsewhere than look at other people enjoying their meals. For another, sometimes all that people can have are tea and bread. I know of one generous soul who brings a loaf of bread each day to share with friends who can’t afford to bring in food themselves. These tough realities make me appreciate my meals so much, but feel very guilty as well at the disproportionality of them to others’.

Now I know what happens when you try to feed everyone. When I went to watch the talent show in Nyanga that Avery and some other folks organized I stayed behind to help out. They had brought enough food to feed all the children who participated in the show but we soon found that we were running out and children were still complaining of not being fed. What we ultimately learned was that the children had told their friends that free food was being passed at the community center and so all sorts of kids from the neighborhood were showing up and it became impossible to tell which ones had been fed already and which hadn’t. These kinds of situations make you frustrated that you did not bring enough or did not do enough, but I think that what my peers did was honorable because they did feed these children and helped them foster their creative skills and form friendships with them. They did not get to feed every child, but that kind of goal was impossible given the resources that we had.

We keep talking in class about realism and idealism and the virtues and vices of both. Ultimately, I think both are necessary in order to understand a situation and fully address it in a constructive way. I understand some of the reality of food inequality and the fact that so many people survive on hunger. But when it comes to bringing solutions to the table I feel more and more cynical, unable to think outside of the box. I do not know how to address these issues in a “sustainable” way or unearth deep-seated problems of food inequality. I want to continue looking and listening to what other people have to say, but for now these realities are very grim.

Savitri on education

There’s a lot more to learning than you might think. For one, resources are always a key player in discussions about education. That school has limited resources, that school is misusing their resources, how can we channel more resources to these school children? When I borrowed a book from the central public library in town and returned it two weeks past its due date I was surprised to find that the fine was only R3. That’s roughly a third of an American dollar. I remember when I would refuse to borrow any books from our library in high school because the librarians were stiff about fines and they grew hefty real fast. On the surface, this is a wonderful thing, a great step towards making learning materials more accessible to students. But it’s not all is it?

On a couple occasions I tutored a young woman in life sciences. She is a junior at a high school in town and commutes via train every day from her home near Mandela Park in Khayelitsha. It was easy for me to remember the information in her textbook, years of biology will do that to you. But even still I was accustomed to looking up answers and explanations on the internet, researching via Google and making outlines for myself to remember key facts on Microsoft Word. She didn’t have any of these things, however. All she had was a blackberry with tiny font and an internet café near home that she rarely bothered going to because it closed soon after her return commute. She was expected to cook meals for her family every day and wash her uniform two to three times a week because she only had a few pairs. And where I had the privilege in high school of exploring my interests and taking classes in (mostly) whatever I wanted she had been pressured by family to pursue a strictly science-based path because that would open the most doors and opportunities for employment.

I can’t even begin to imagine how she balances everything and stays happy and excited with life. Her passion is theatre and the humanities and she is so appreciative I can’t help but feel happy when we’re hanging out. When I was in high school I was very often feeling stressed because I had so much homework to do. I wanted so badly to “excel” that finals were like a bludgeoning to my psyche. How could I have lost so much perspective on reality during these times when I still had so much relative comfort? I had access to all the information I could ever want; my co-educators felt compelled to fund and prepare a library this semester because so many high schools here are without books. It’s confusing and frustrating and I often don’t know what to do or how to feel about it. Even if enough resources are made accessible to more learners, how do you account for things like pressure to cook and clean? How do you interrupt a broader cultural system of gender roles in order to address the insane divide in education privileges?

Savitri philosophy post

I’ve been hearing the metaphor: each of us is a drop in the ocean, but what is an ocean but a collection of drops. If we are committed to working together towards our ideals of equality, then the tide in that ocean will change to become more representative of our human rights. It’s a wonderful metaphor, but it is so challenging to actually apply it to daily life.

For example, donations and fundraisers are important and necessary for people who need help; it is just one of the ways that we can contribute to someone’s cause. But the problem is that giving is not enough. I argue that part of our responsibility is to understand where that money is going and how much is being given to the people we want to help. When the KONY 2012 video became viral it sparked a lot of fires in people’s hearts. The film is very much designed for advocacy, so the first fire instilled was a rage against Joseph Kony and a subsequent urgency to help fund Invisible Children in their campaign against him. The second fire blistered when criticisms arose over the controversial nature of the short film. Part of the controversy was the way in which the film sought to enlighten its viewers: the filmmaker’s young son was shown pictures of two very dark-skinned Ugandan men, one was a “very bad” man (Kony) and the other was an “innocent” and “good-hearted” boy (Jacob). What kind of reality does this instill in a child, whose first exposure to dark-skinned persons is an understanding that they are either extremely evil or extremely good? In addition, there was criticism over the actions that Invisible Children advocated for. They claimed that in order to stop Kony’s LRA they had to back the Ugandan army. However, by the time the video became viral most of his followers were in the Central African Republic, so funding the Ugandan army would not amount to much in terms of rescuing or preventing children from becoming soldiers.

There was another metaphor that we learned: you can’t stay neutral on a moving train. I understand the need for activism, and I understand the need to act now. But I feel so often that I do not know which direction to be moving and which activism to endorse. We must be careful not to be blind-sighted by the appeal of giving and feeling good, thereby releasing us from our own guilt, privileges, and participation in inequality. There must be just as much emphasis on education as on advocacy, because how can we advocate for something if we do not properly understand the whole situation? We must understand why there is criticism and understand where people fuel their bigotry and ignorance. To cast these people off as unreachable only furthers the current and keeps our ocean from cooperating as whole. But at the same time I recognize that it is exhausting for people to constantly be explaining why their opinion is the “right” one. How do we advocate for open-mindedness while pursuing a common philosophy and common interpretation of rights ideals? I have no idea.