Elise reflects on her homestay

Elise enjoying her time at Ocean View

We spent this past weekend living with families in the township of Ocean View. This is something I had been looking forward to for a while, and am happy to say it fully lived up to my expectations. We were told before leaving that “if you don’t want to be loved, don’t come.” This was definitely the case for me: my host, Auntie Katie, and everyone else we met made us feel right at home. But the people I found most welcoming were the children of the community. All weekend I was surrounded by kids, whether at the creche (or kindergarten) where we volunteered or at home with my Auntie’s grandson, Gideon, and his cousins. There weren’t many moments when they didn’t want to play or crawl all over us. This was especially true of Gideon, who was quiet the first night but couldn’t stop talking the rest of the weekend, and quickly became my favorite thing about Ocean View. Even walking down the street, children would follow us and want to play. I loved that openness and sense of community when kids could be so friendly to an outsider. But despite that overwhelming willingness to love, I could sense undertones of violence in many instances throughout the weekend. The feeling first struck me when I was with children at the park on our second day. Carolyn—my housemate—and I were walking home with a group of little girls when a boy walked over and said something quietly in Afrikaans. All of a sudden he began to hit and kick one of the girls, and relentlessly kept going after them even as I broke up their fight. At one point the girls ganged up on him and he crumbled on the sidewalk crying. Children everywhere fight, but something about this felt very different. There was no argument, no provocation, no surprise, or even much yelling. It seemed like a quiet sort of anger and hurt had briefly emerged during an otherwise pleasant afternoon. Had he learned this behavior from someone, or been the victim of it himself? After that I paid attention to similar instances of abuse. When we visited our Auntie’s sister’s house, a little boy sat outside in the road. Her sister explained that his parents were both on drugs and he waits outside by her house waiting for her to say hello to him in the morning. On Christmas she bought him his only present. The man at our church service on Sunday who gave the sermon spoke about the trauma of his childhood. He is 21 years old, and my Auntie’s relative. I was left with the uncomfortable feeling that a member of the community who took me in is responsible for hurting this boy not too long ago. Ocean View is beautiful. I took a ton of pictures of the mountains and the houses and the people. But alongside the wonderful things—which includes everything from the view to the open hearts of the residents—are deep-set problems with no easy solutions.