Mthatha Mission

New life = new blog

2009-08-31T01:47:00.002+02:00

Sorry, gang. It's time to retire Mthatha Mission. I'm now a student at Yale Divinity School and have moved my blogging life accordingly. You can find me now at:

http://jessezink.wordpress.com

It's there that I'll continue to write about my transition back into Lower-48 culture and my new beginning at YDS. I'll hope you'll change your bookmarks and follow along with me.

And I'll be leaving this blog up for as long as Blogger will allow as a resource for future missionaries.

I'm Not Dead Yet!

2009-08-18T04:44:00.003+02:00

I just felt compelled to say that after I realized the length between my recent posts.

The truth is, I've been travelling (some more!), seeing family, taking in a wedding, celebrating a birthday, packing, driving (too much), sleeping off all the combined jetlag and emotional trauma of the last few months, and preparing for the next step in my life.

And I'm trying to decide what to do with my blogging presence in this next step.

Details to follow...

Nome

2009-08-05T16:47:00.003+02:00

I’ve completed my month in Nome, Alaska, my former home and an odd interpolation between Mthatha and my return to school in a few weeks.

I’m not going to recount every last detail of what went on while I was there. I had a few memorable moments - singing karaoke for a bar-full of drunk gold miners, interviewing my two favourite Alaskan women - Lisa Murkowski and Sarah Palin - in the same week, meandering across the tundra, contra dancing at a wedding reception, and much more. But mostly the joy was in resuming an old life - spending time with lots of old friends, making new ones, sliding right back into my old role in the newsroom and ambulance department, and generally enjoying myself.

One thought I had while I was in Nome was that everything seemed so easy. Almost everyone I interacted with spoke English as a first language, there were clear tasks required by my job (fill the news folder every day), and I knew how to do those tasks (write story after story after story). Compared to Mthatha, where no one spoke English, it wasn’t always clear what had to be done, and when it was I didn’t know how to do what needed to be done, this was a major shift for me. I was left thinking several times, “This is too easy!”

I also realized how vocational news reporting is for me. It helps that it was all so “easy” but the job spoke me to in a way I hadn’t expected. That, of course, only complicates my vocational discernment plans.

Except for those few moments of comparison to worklife in Mthatha, I must confess I barely thought about Itipini and Mthatha except for the evening when I gave a slide show about my time in South Africa and the time I recycled a sermon for the Methodist Church. At first, I felt a little guilty about not thinking about Mthatha. Here were all those great people, who just a few weeks prior I had been thinking about how much I would miss. And then… out of sight, out of mind!

Well, maybe. But I don’t think so. I have this feeling it’ll all catch up with me sometime in the fall. Right now, I’m feeling very unsettled in this in-between period and I’m still obviously in denial about the fact that I’ve left Itipini. Once I start a new phase of my life, maybe I’ll have more time to think about what has gone before.

Nome is a white-minority community in a white-minority region. As I interacted again with Alaska Native culture, I couldn’t help but compare it with my interactions with Xhosa culture. Mostly, I thought about how traditional cultures of the world deal with the steamroller of Western, consumerist mass culture and I couldn’t help but think about how Alaska Natives and Xhosas are dealing with the same set of issues - what to do with a traditional way of life that is eroding in the face of a culture that sets a new ideal but also takes away the means to achieve that ideal. I thought a lot about cultural alienation, especially in terms of men and masculinity. Inupiaq men face similar challenges to the ones Xhosa men face.

I remember at my mission training two years ago that one of the presenters had a Ph.D. in something like cross-cultural studies. At the time, I rather small-mindedly thought, “What good is a degree like that?” Now I want one of my own.

I also realized the ways in which I now see the world through the lenses of mission and reconciliation. I saw Nome with new eyes and the walls that people sometimes allow to be erected around themselves that cut off relationships. (This is, I am sure, true all over the world. Nome is just the first place I ended up and so I noticed it there first.) Reconciliation is needed as much in Nome as in Itipini. It’ll just take a different form.

I often thought about the line from Ephesians 2:14 about Jesus being the one who breaks down the dividing walls between us. Whatever else Nome is, I would describe it as an a-religious place. It’s not that people are hostile to religion; they just don’t see what it adds to their life. I found myself puzzling over how a message of reconciliation could be shared in a place like Nome. I didn’t come up with many answers.

If you want more from Nome, you can check out this photo album on Facebook (even if you’re not on Facebook - and it’s been updated since I last linked to it) or read this story from a friend’s blog. You can also listen to the stories of mine that aired on the Alaska Public Radio Network - there’s one on the pollock fishery and chinook returns, the Nome wind farm, the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council, wind power in Western Alaska , and formerly used defense sites.

Haven't been posting much...

2009-07-28T21:18:00.004+02:00

...while I've been in Nome. But this should give you a good idea of the fun I've been having.
You can also see more of my pictures on Facebook (even if you're not on Facebook) by clicking on this link. Or you can check here for pictures from one recent event.

More to come on settling back in once I leave Nome.

Testing Times

2009-07-18T20:56:00.000+02:00

I’ve written before about how many people in Itipini are afraid to be tested for HIV because they are afraid what the result might be and afraid a positive test is a death sentence. This is one of the defining features of the HIV epidemic, I believe. I would always tell people how it is better to know than to not know and that there is help available for people that will prolong their life. But I recently got a little taste of that fear myself.

About a year ago in South Africa I thought about getting an HIV test. It would have just been a precautionary step. But it seemed that after a year in the clinic, it might be a wise idea. I never did get tested. Maybe I had heard from too many people at that time that they were too scared to be tested and I let that affect me, even though I had no reason to be scared. Some irrational part of my mind guided my decision-making and the idea of being tested just slipped away, even though it might have been a good example for others in Itipini.

Now that I’m back in North America, it made sense to get a pretty thorough check-up to make sure that everything I’ve been exposed to in the past two years hasn’t left any permanent marks. Naturally, when I went to see the doctor he suggested I have an HIV test. I readily agreed. I was over that irrational thought process.

The lab in Nome has to send the blood out for the HIV test so I had to wait a few days. The doctor had said that if it was negative, he would probably just leave a message on the answering machine telling me that. If it was positive, “we would have to sit down and have a talk.” But, he added, I shouldn’t be worried if I got a message telling me to call him.

A few days after the blood was drawn, I got back late on a Friday night and there was a message on the machine. “Jesse, this is Doctor So and So. Could you give me a call?” The HIV test was the only outstanding item remaining from the visit so I knew it was about that. It had been a good night and the call brought me right back down to earth. Why didn’t he just tell me on the phone? I lay awake in bed that night thinking about what it might mean.

The doctor, unfortunately, was out of town for a few days so I got to stew in my own thoughts. It’s easy to say in retrospect that I was never really scared about what the results might be but I definitely thought about it a lot. The only thing I did that put me at the slightest risk for contracting HIV was handle needles and I never poked myself with them. I covered up even the slightest abrasions when I noticed them. Objectively, I also knew that HIV is actually a difficult virus to transmit. I knew I didn’t have any symptoms of HIV (though given its long incubation that shows nothing). And I knew I shouldn’t be afraid of HIV. I personally know scores of people living successful and healthy lives with the virus.

But there was that tiny sliver of unknowing, the thought that “well… maybe… you can never be too careful… there was that one time I didn’t wear gloves…”

The doctor and I next spoke when I was at work. I don’t want to sound too melodramatic but I closed the door to the newsroom before I picked up his call and tried to get my head from a point where I was writing a story about fish to a point where I was ready to hear about my health.

“Well, Jesse,” he said. “I’ve got your HIV results here.” He seemed to take a torturous path to get to the point. “They did a really thorough work-up on them.” He explained all the ways my blood had been tested. “And, of course,” he added, almost as an after-thought, “you’re negative.”

Phew!

We chatted a bit about when or if I should be re-tested and he apologized for leaving an unclear message. And that was that. (I also don’t have TB, despite daily exposure to it.)

It’s a reminder, I guess, of how we are all the same. Despite my preaching about the importance of testing these last two years, when it is my blood on the line, I get scared and nervous and uncertain just like everyone in Itipini.

Transkei Shout-Out

2009-07-13T07:13:00.002+02:00

Often while I was in Itipini, I found myself wishing that someone would write a version of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed for the people of the world who live on less than $1 or $2 a day. Now, it looks like someone has. The book is Portfolios of the Poor. I haven't read it yet but NPR's Planet Money podcast interviewed the authors in a recent episode. A lot of what they talked about reminded me a lot of my experience with people in Itipini. The authors talk about a visit to a South African village near Mount Frere. That's a Transkeian town that is very close to Mthatha. Listen to the podcast and then go find the book. That's what I'm going to do.

“That baby looks so pale!”

2009-07-03T22:37:00.001+02:00

I’ve been back in North America for ten days now. I endured the long plane flight back and then another series of flights to get to Alaska, where I am now. I’ll be happy not to get on a plane again any time soon.

The major adjustments have all been on relatively minor things. For instance, the size of the produce in the grocery store always gets me. The eggplant is the size of my forearm and the tomatoes are huge. On the other hand, the avocados are puny, compared to the softball-sized ones we ate in South Africa.

On one of my many flights, there was a young baby and as the family boarded all I could think was, “That baby looks so pale! I sure hope it is alright.” Then I realized the baby was white and was supposed to look the way it did. I guess that’s what happens when you work with a bunch of black babies for so long.

In South Africa, by virtue of my skin colour and perceived wealth, I was always the centre of attention wherever I went and regardless of the situation. I didn’t always like it. Now I am just part of the crowd, which has been a relatively easy adjustment to make.

I don’t find myself thinking about Itipini all that often. I don’t know if I should be relieved about that or feel kind of guilty. I’m back at work as a reporter, fishing has become an act of civil disobedience, there's a big parade tomorrow, and Sarah Palin just resigned (!) so there’s lots to keep me busy here.

Star Trek, Jairus, His Daughter, Miracles, and Mission

2009-07-01T01:15:00.001+02:00

Here's the sermon I preached on Sunday at Christ Church Anglican in North Bay, Ontario. If you live in Nome, Alaska you might not want to read it as I'll be recycling several of its themes in sermons up north.

28 June 2009
2 Corinthians 8:7-15
Mark 5:21-43

Let us pray.
Dear God. Why is it so easy for you to perform miracles and so difficult for us? And how can we be more like you? Amen.

Good morning. This is now the third time you’ve let me into this pulpit to preach about my experience as a missionary. I am tempted to begin as I always do, with the reminder that mission is not solely or even mostly about conversion, bopping people on the head with the Bible, and dunking them in the nearest puddle. Mission belongs God. And God’s mission has been the same throughout history - to reconcile people to each other and to God and in so doing build up the righteousness and completeness known by the ancient Hebrew word shalom. For the last two years, ending last Tuesday, I sought this reconciliation in a place called Itipini, a shantytown on the site of a former garbage dump in one of the poorest parts of South Africa. I’ll return in a moment to tell you more about the clinic and community center where I worked but for now I want to begin someplace else: in the movie theatre.

I don’t know how many of you have seen the new “Star Trek” movie. I have. Twice. What stayed with me after the last explosion was the dialogue, especially on board the space ship Enterprise. Have you ever noticed how Captain Kirk gives commands? “Alert the sick bay to prepare to receive injured crewmen.” “Fire on enemy ships!” “Energize!” “Enterprise, get us out of here!” or my favourite, “Mr. Scott, maximum warp!” He just says what he wants. And the shocking thing is that he gets it, every time. The injured crewmen are treated, the enemy ship is fired upon, Kirk is transported into or out of whatever danger zone he chooses, and the Enterprise does go into warp speed.

It reminds me a bit of how Jesus acts in this morning’s Gospel lesson. A sick woman needs healing? Jesus says, “Go in peace and be healed of your disease” and she is. A young girl has died? Jesus says, “Little girl, get up!” and the little girl does get up even though she had been thought dead. Throughout the Gospel, Jesus is able to perform miracles simply by visiting and speaking to sick people.

Let me just say that after two years in South Africa where I knew countless sick people and watched helplessly as many of them died, despite my best efforts to prevent it, this Captain Kirk/Jesus Christ way of looking at the world seems improbable, impossible, out of touch, unrealistic, and, quite frankly, downright insensitive and rude. When I sat in a tumble-down shack next to people about to die, no matter what I said, no matter what I did, they were just never able to get up. Miracles are for Jesus. That connection between word and deed epitomized by Captain Kirk is imaginary and represents a point none of us will ever attain.

That’s what I thought at least. And then one day in South Africa I performed a miracle of my own.

I first met a woman named Pakama about this time last year. She was in her mid-30s and when we met she was very sick. Her HIV infection had turned into AIDS and she had tuberculosis as well. She had just started taking the life-saving anti-retroviral drugs that combat AIDS but for a variety of reasons she still needed to make numerous trips to a local clinic and the doctor to change her ARV prescription so it would be compatible with her TB treatment.

The trouble was that Pakama was quite weak. The clinic she needed to visit was a 15-minute walk away, uphill. Actually I should say, it was 15 minutes away for someone like me, a young healthy person unaffected by HIV. For Pakama, it was impossible. She couldn’t even make it to our clinic under her own steam and we were only 200 meters or so away from her home. When she talked, she had to take frequent pauses to catch her breath between words. She had severe gastro-intestinal problems, likely brought about by the HIV, so she couldn’t eat, which just made her weaker. By the time I met Pakama, I had known lots of other people in similar situations and virtually all of them had died. I didn’t have a lot of hope Pakama would be any different.

In Xhosa, the language that is spoken in Itipini, the word pakama means get up. It’s the imperative form of the word so it means “get up!” When I would find Pakama lying in her bed in her shack, I wanted nothing more to tell her what Jesus told Jairus’s daughter and what Bob Marley sang - “Get up, stand up.” Of course, she didn’t.

Over the course of several weeks, I drove Pakama and her mother to appointment after appointment, in a seemingly never-ending quest through the bureaucratic maze of the health-care system to change her ARV prescription. There were numerous hurdles but day by day we knocked them down, only to be confronted by new and different ones on the other side. Pakama’s health got worse. She could no longer walk at all and had to be lifted into the car and then wheeled around the clinic. I was hopeful but a gnawing voice in the back of head told me not to be surprised if I showed up one morning and learned she had died the night before.

I’ll spare you all the details but eventually Pakama got a new ARV prescription and began taking the right pills. We didn’t have to go to so many appointments anymore but she was still too weak to come to the clinic for her TB treatment so I visited her every day to give her that. Progress, if it was visible at all, came slowly. She spent most days under a pile of blankets on her bed, complaining about the cold.

It was about that point that I took a break from South Africa and came here last August and September. Pakama was on my mind while I travelled and when I returned to Itipini one of the first things I did was seek her out. I found her in her shack, standing up and doing the laundry. After I asked how she was, I had one question, “Uyakwazi ukuzihambela? Can you walk by yourself?”

She glanced away as if embarrassed to remember her previous condition. But she nodded slightly.

“Ndibonise,” I said. “Show me.”

And so on that warm October day, I made Pakama walk back and forth in front of her shack. It had been obvious to me from the moment I saw her doing her laundry that she was much better. But watching her sashay back and forth unassisted like that convinced me that she was well on the path to recovery. But I didn’t think of it as a miracle.

A few months after that, Pakama finished her eight months of TB treatment. As I filled out the paperwork to formally discharge her from treatment, I mentioned to Jenny, the missionary I worked with, that Pakama was finally done. Jenny smiled and looked at me. “You know,” she said. “You saved her life.”

Me? I had saved a life? Impossible! Saving a life is a miracle. I couldn’t do that! The idea made me uncomfortable and Jenny could tell so she dropped the subject. We didn’t mention it again.

I think what made me most uncomfortable about Jenny’s assertion that I had saved Pakama’s life is that it gave me too much credit. What did I do? I drove the car. I lifted Pakama in and out of the passenger seat and in and out of a wheelchair. Surely such simple acts can not lead to such tremendous results?

But as time passed, Pakama gained weight - always a good sign when you have AIDS - and kept improving. I moved on to other patients and she carried on with her treatment and the normal course of her life. As I watched this, I couldn’t help but think back to my early doubts that some morning I would arrive in Itipini and see the hearse in front of Pakama’s shack. And I had to acknowledge that somehow my efforts had helped prolong her life. There was never a “get up” moment like with Jairus’s daughter but a miracle had occurred. Somehow I had found myself accidentally stumbling along a path that Jesus intentionally followed in his ministry.

It’s tempting to look at the miracles in this morning’s Gospel passage as isolated events. But we shouldn’t ignore what precedes them. Immediately preceding the healing of Jairus’s daughter was a journey. Jesus’ ministry was not stationary. Gospel passages, including this morning’s, are always beginning with phrases like “Jesus had crossed to the other side” of the sea or “Then he went among the villages” or “He left that place.” Jesus was always on the move, ranging far and wide over the Holy Land.

I went on a journey with Pakama. It was an actual physical journey of countless car rides to and from clinics, hospitals, pharmacies, and so on. If there was anything I did, it was simply to help her find the way on this journey, to point out where she had to go when she didn’t know, to follow her when she knew the destination, and to help her along when she was too weak to go herself. Mission is a journey. Our task is to accompany our brothers and sisters in Christ on their journeys and let them shape ours.

So Jesus didn’t heal people, like Jairus’s daughter, from a distance. Before he spoke to them and healed them, he went to them. And Jesus’ decision to go to sick people wasn’t made, say, when he decided to go to another town or decided to cross the sea. Preceding the journey part of the healing was a much more basic - and also much more consequential - decision, the decision to be Incarnate among humans, to take flesh as one of us, and be Emmanuel, “God with us.” This is the obvious point but Jesus would never have healed anyone if he had stayed in heaven at the right hand of the Father. If I had stayed in North America, I never would have been able to accompany Pakama on the journey that led to her healing. I chose to share an existence with her.

Jesus’ command to Jairus’s daughter, “Get up” is a phrase that is heard time and again in the Bible, only there’s often another part added, “Get up and go.” God says this to Abraham, to Moses, to Isaiah, to Jonah, to name just a few of the people who learned they couldn’t serve God where they were but had to move someplace else to do it. Jesus’ healing words to Jairus’s daughter are as much meant for us as they are for the little girl he is healing on that particular day. We need to get up and go to the people who are different than us, to share an existence with them and begin a journey.

The healing of Pakama and the healing of Jairus’s daughter share common antecedents - a decision to share an existence, a decision to being a journey. The analogy begins to break down in the actual healing itself. That’s because unlike Jairus’s daughter, Pakama had an imperfect and sinful human accompanying her - me. There was never a moment when someone said to Pakama “be healed.” Healing does not come in a moment, as it did with Jairus’s daughter, but over a lengthy journey. Our job is to choose to take that journey - by faith and with thanksgiving - and pray that we are headed in the right direction.

I know that sometimes when I start talking about people living with HIV in a far corner of the world, it can seem pretty remote from North Bay and this congregation. It is. The tendency - and I’ve seen this in many other congregations - is to pat me on the back, congratulate me on the difference I’ve made, and then blithely forget everything else I’ve said.

But mission is not just for me. It is not just for the group of people who feel called to live overseas for a time. Not everyone - or even most people - is called to work with people with HIV. But all of us are called to journey towards righteousness and wholeness. Mission begins in baptism. The great South African Desmond Tutu says, “We are all missionaries or we are nothing.” By choosing to follow the Lord, we choose to commit ourselves to God’s mission of reconciliation, the seeking and building of shalom. Mission happens all over God’s creation because the needs of the world - mental, physical, spiritual, emotional - are equally obvious in North Bay and Itipini.

When we think about where God is calling us, let us begin by asking this question: how can I be incarnate among these people I want to serve? This may seem obvious - well, I live in North Bay and there are people suffering here. But is that really incarnation? Incarnation is going someplace and choosing to share an existence. Just because we know somebody is suffering doesn’t mean we’re sharing that existence. How do we enter more fully into a shared existence with the wild diversity of the members of the Body of Christ instead of retreating to our familiar groupings?

And after we share that existence, let us ask this: where is this journey going? Is it headed in a direction towards peace and righteousness? Or do we need to redirect its trajectory in a new direction? Martin Luther King Jr. often said, “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.” Indeed. But maybe we need to pull on that arc so it bends a bit quicker towards that righteousness we yearn for.

None of this is easy. Being incarnate among a people can be difficult. It’s worth noting that Jesus’ decision to be Incarnate led to his death on the cross, the same place many of Jesus’ followers ended up. Moses followed God’s call and ended up wandering in the desert for 40 years. Working on a dump gave me countless illnesses I would have avoided if I had never gone to Itipini. There are countless speed bumps and road blocks we encounter on our journeys, some brought about by the failings of the world and some by our own failings.

So incarnation brings risks, both from without and from within. But neither would Jesus have saved the world if he had never been Incarnate. And neither would I have experienced a transcendent journey in mission had I stayed here. Incarnation requires a certain willingness to open oneself to what may come, a willingness to be vulnerable, that is not common in this world of ours that seeks to control everything. But I think we’ll find that the benefits of the decision to be incarnate, to share an existence far outweigh the costs.

Jesus did not come to heal the world. If he did, he would have made a beeline for the leper colonies and gone to work. Jesus came to teach and to save. He left the healing up to us. It is our job to heal the brokenness of the world and work towards peace. That’s what mission is all about. It can seem like a tall order and it is. But miracles happen every day in this world. And they are performed by people like you and me. It’s simple and straightforward. It begins in the decision to get up and go, to go to where there is hurt and suffering in the world, and then to choose to accompany these brothers and sisters of ours on a journey into mission, poking and prodding that journey in the direction of righteousness and peace. We may not know where the path leads or when the journey will end. But it is our calling to set out on that journey nonetheless.

Amen.

Lots of goodbyes

2009-06-23T14:15:00.009+02:00

I’m writing this post from the Jo-burg airport, killing a long layover on my way out of South Africa for the last time. (For now.) It’s over.

I had to say goodbye to lots of people these last few days and weeks. That’s not an easy thing to do, especially when so many of them don’t quite understand just how far away it is I am going.

In lieu of any sustained reflection on the experience or the departure, I’m just going to post some pictures with a few captions to show you some of the people that have been in my life these past few years.

There was my Bible study group, which had a good-bye potluck for me.
Joe, Zama, and I were the only guys there that night.
There was Yoliswa, my fabulous Xhosa tutor these past two years. I’m still looking for conversation partners to keep my Xhosa up in the U.S.
There was my friend Adam, the only white medical student in Mthatha.
My missionary friend Matt came up for one last weekend in Mthatha. As luck would have it, when he left I had to push his car in my pajamas to pop the clutch.
There were professionals around Mthatha I’ve come to now in the course of my daily work. One is Sister Nellie, who is the driving force at Ngangalizwe Health Centre. After a relationship that was occasionally contentious, she was surprisingly magnanimous the last time I saw her.
There was also the deputy principal of Nozuko High School, who has been on me as long as I’ve known him to help him raise money to build a hall at the school so they can host events and generate income for the school. He works so hard with so little reward. I happened to show up during a parents’ meeting to vote on new members of the parents’ advisory board. He wanted me to run for the board and didn’t seem to understand that I was telling him I was leaving. He at least insisted I vote. I have never cast a less-informed ballot.
In Itipini, I had time to lead more round of morning prayers with the pre-school children.
Then I set out to visit all the many people in Itipini who have shaped my life, like the Nophondo clan that was busy washing their clothes when I went to see them…
...and the crowd in one of the shebeens…
...and a former TB patient…
...and the daughter of a staff member who died while I’ve been in Itipini…
...and a woman whose name I love to say, Nomadamazana Malangeni, who is happily lost in a mental fog most days...
...and a current TB patient, who tried to hide his alcohol behind his foot and his cigarette in his hand when he saw me. (You can see the smoke coming from his hand.)…
...and Johnson, one of our watchmen…
...and Zanemvula, one of the few older men in Itipini I genuinely like and respect. I was so touched when his daughter died suddenly last year. As he is one of the taller people in Itipini, I gave him all the clothes I had decided to leave behind. I was a bit embarrassed I had three boxes worth of pants, shirts, sweaters, shoes, and much more to give away and my luggage was still way over weight. He liked it though…
...and then finally the staff, who gathered for a goodbye on my last afternoon.
I’m using the time in the airport to polish off a few more posts I’ve been meaning to write for a while so keep scrolling down to read more about these last few days in Itipini.

“She turned me into a newt.”

2009-06-23T14:12:00.001+02:00

The story I told recently about the young man who burned down the shack of one of our staff members because he thought she was a witch and had cast a spell on his girlfriend got me thinking about witches and witchcraft. We dismiss that sort of thing in the rich world but, as this incident shows, it is a very real and salient consideration in places like Itipini. I started asking around among my cultural interpreters and here’s some of what I learned.

One cultural interpreter sighed when I asked her about the situation and explained that young men are always blaming old women for their problems and doing so with the language of witchcraft. One other young man in Itipini who suffers from severe alcohol- and drug-induced dementia even blames his mother for his troubles but has said he won’t harm her because he loves her.

In my limited knowledge of witchcraft, which, as the title of this post indicates, stems mainly from one scene in a Monty Python movie, it seems that it is always the old women who get the blame so this news didn’t strike me as unusual. What was interesting is that it is the young men in Itipini making the accusations. I wonder if this has anything to do with how relatively powerless the young men are. They can’t find steady jobs, they can’t get married, and they aren’t educated so they can’t get positions of (legal) power in society. In contrast, the women, especially the older women, are doing all the work that keeps society functioning - raising the grandchildren and great-grandchildren produced by these young men, working long hours at informal jobs to keep the young men fed so they can spend their money on alcohol, and so much else that keeps everything ticking along. It struck me as one more indicator that a major need in South Africa is a re-conceptualization of masculinity and what it means to be a man. (As I’ve noted before, that’s not my job.)

One cultural interpreter explained that she believed that a person could acquire HIV in their sleep, independent of sex or bodily-fluid transmission, if someone else cast a spell on them. This woman is otherwise well-spoken, intelligent, and well-educated on HIV, which she has. She is also devoutly Christian and saw no apparent contradiction in her beliefs. When I mentioned this conversation to another friend in Mthatha, he noted that it is another reminder that HIV is not just a medical condition but also a spiritual one. I hadn’t thought about it in those terms before.

What was most stunning to me, however, was what I learned about how beliefs in witchcraft affect our work in Itipini. Two of our staff are responsible for what is loosely called “home-based care.” When people live alone and are too sick to take care of themselves, these two older women bring them food to help them back to health. This seems like a perfectly harmless and uncontroversial thing. Two jobs are created and sick people get the nutritional assistance they need. That is about the amount of intellectual energy I’ve put into thinking about this program.

So it came as something of a shock to me when, in conversation about witches, one of my cultural interpreters said, “You know, people don’t like it when Elsie and Mrs. Nani [our two staff] bring them food. They think it is doctored and they don’t want to eat it because they think it is making them sick.” She stressed that not everyone thought this way but even if some people think like that, it is a major obstacle to the success of home-based care. Sick people need the food so the medicine for say, HIV or TB, can be effective. Whatever the reason, if they won’t eat it then that’s a problem.

But how do you solve it? Is it the fault of our two staff members that they are looked upon with suspicion? Should we take a job away from two responsible and hard-working staff because of the effect they have on the success of the program? How do we convince sick people to eat the food they need, regardless of where it comes from?

I often talk about the obstacles posed by cultural differences but I realize I don’t always specify what I mean by the phrase. This is one of many examples of the obstacles that are a constant in cross-cultural work.

More obstacles

2009-06-23T12:43:00.000+02:00

I found myself thinking a lot in these last few weeks about the many obstacles to education that students in Itipini face. It’s June so that means it is time for mid-term exams, which stretch over three weeks and give students some time off during the course of the school day. That, in turn, meant I saw them more frequently than normal during the day.

One student, Siziwe, lives with her family in a shack just above the clinic. On a few occasions, I had to head that way for other reasons and poked my head in to say hello.

One time I found her warming her hands over the dying ember's of the morning's fire.
Another time, I found her lying in her sister’s bed, bundled up in a blanket in the middle of the morning.
A third time, I found her sitting in the sun with her sister, her sister’s child, and a neighbour’s baby.
Each time I saw her, I asked when her next exam was. But I didn’t quite know how to ask the question that was most pressing: how come you’re lying in bed when you should be studying?

On one trip, I asked Siziwe to show me her bed and she pointed to this tiny thing, which she shares with her younger brother. She can’t sleep very well there. I wondered if that had something to do with the answer to my question. If she can’t sleep well at night, perhaps she needs to spend time during the day catching up on that sleep. And if she’s always cold because there’s no insulation in the shack and there’s not enough blankets, then maybe she needs to spend time during the day warming up. (No one ever believes me when I tell them this but it gets quite cold here during the winter, especially at night.)

I remember how much I studied for exams in high school and college. But I never realized that what allowed me to spend so much time on studying were things I took for granted, like a comfortable bed, thick walls, and a working furnace, among much else.

Trying to pull back

2009-06-20T10:14:00.002+02:00

There’s these two brothers in Itipini I’ve mentioned in a previous monthly e-mail.
On the left is Zanethemba; on the right is his older brother Lizwi. They aren’t always so dour (well, Lizwi is). Here’s Zanethemba in a lighter moment.
Zanethemba came across my radar first back in March when he tested positive for tuberculosis and also had a low CD4 count. He was pretty sick. A few months later, Lizwi came in with the same set of symptoms more or less. He tested positive for TB as well, which is not surprising given that they both share this shack, which is about seven feet on a side.
That was where the story ended until a little while ago. It is nothing unusual in Itipini - people have HIV, people get TB. In this case, they just happen to be brothers and live together.

It turns out, however, that Lizwi has a few children, at least three, in fact, none older than 10. One of them is Siphisihle, the young girl who had TB when I first arrived and whom I invested a lot of energy in then. They had been living with their mother but she dumped them on Lizwi a few weeks back because she figured Lizwi was about to die and she was going to move on to a man who could earn some money. In addition, Lizwi’s wife’s oldest daughter dumped her young baby with Lizwi and took off. That daughter happens to be Tunyeswa, whom just a few weeks ago shocked me with the sharp deterioration in her condition.

Here are all four children.
At one point, the youngest of the three siblings had a very bad lip infection and couldn’t eat or even really open her mouth until the antibiotics went to work. But the children look after each other and care for one another. Here’s Siphisihle and her younger brother Siphamandla.
So now there are four children and two adult men living in a tiny little shack with only two beds just a few feet apart. Neither man apparently knows how to be a father and Zanethemba can’t always remember all the names of his nieces and nephews, mainly because I don’t think he’s taken the time to learn them. Lizwi would like nothing more than for us to figure out a way to get them into a home someplace that could look after them.

There’s all kinds of reasons to be concerned but one I think about often is the potential spread of TB in that shack, especially as Siphisihle has already had it. The TB guidelines call for us to test the people a patient lives with but children need a Mantoux test and in order to get that we have to get them all to a certain clinic on one day of the week. Given how hard it was to get the one child with the lip infection to take his pills, it is easy to get exhausted simply thinking about the logistics of organizing those tests.

We’ve repeatedly called the social worker for help and guidance. Nothing. (Remember how I said the government has an informal relationship with Itipini?) Siphisihle and her older sister go to school. The younger children hang around the shack all day. It is cold this time of year and they don’t always have a lot, or even any, clothes. Lizwi and Zanethemba get food because they have TB and it is easy to include the children in that and check on them every day. The greatest source of hope in this situation is that the children actually do a reasonably good job caring for each other and are in good spirits.

But there are no easy solutions and I want to scream at the complexity of the situation. Tunyeswa has disappeared since she last came in looking so sick. I’m concerned about her health but also about her siblings and child. If I ask her about her children when I see her, will that make her less willing to listen to my advice about her health? I want Zanethemba and Lizwi to get better (and they are, especially Zanethemba, who has improved in leaps and bounds) but I don’t want to absolve them of all responsibility because they’re sick.

And in all of this, I know I need to hold back and not get too involved because I’ll be gone before the situation begins to improve, if, in fact, it ever does.

This is what incarnational ministry gets you. You learn all about the contours of a situation, which is a blessing of sorts, to begin to realize the true complexity of life. But you don’t necessarily get any closer to a solution. You just have to hope that knowledge of the situation is good enough. It feels particularly unsatisfactory.

Hard to find time to do much writing lately but I am taking plenty of pictures

2009-06-20T10:03:00.003+02:00

Much like the Beatles, my last concert was on a rooftop

2009-06-16T11:13:00.000+02:00

Bossy

2009-06-16T10:55:00.003+02:00

Some of you might remember the story of Pakama, a woman who about this time last year was very sick and on death’s door. She has since got the right combination of pills and is thriving.

When Pakama was sick, a dominant characteristic of her personality was her strong desire to live. She was always directing me and telling me what to do, how to push her wheelchair, when she had another appointment, which pills she had to take when, and on and on and on. I’m convinced that it was that will to live that helped her survive when I’ve seen many other people in her position die.

Now that she is better, I see a lot less of her and her bossiness is a lot less endearing, for instance, when she comes in the clinic and cuts everyone in line. I often thought she was only pushy with me but then I watched the other day as the HIV support group in Itipini set to work planting their part of the garden.

Pakama is at the top of the photo in the dark shirt, taking a sort of supervisory and managerial role while everyone else works.
She closely supervises this woman.
Missed a spot!
And another!
And only at one point does she deign to bend over and help out, though being careful not to get her shoes dirty.
I find this series of photos hilarious and stood on the rooftop and watched her work for sometime but that may only be because I know her so well.

No winners in this situation

2009-06-15T14:04:00.001+02:00

Itipini is what is known as an “informal settlement.” The organs of government in the municipality have an informal relationship with the community. Most of the time, I think they’d prefer to think it doesn’t exist. That had tragic results this week.

On Wednesday, there was a young resident of Itipini wandering around with a giant bush knife, threatening to kill one of the employees of the Community Project, whom we call Mrs. Nani.
The young man claimed that Mrs. Nani was a witch and had put a spell on his girlfriend. (Snippets of Monty Python immediately flashed through my head when I heard this and I wanted to go searching for a duck. Then I realized how serious things were.)

I know this young man reasonably well and I also know his girlfriend. She is hands-down the most well put together young woman in Itipini. I can’t see how anyone could think she has been bewitched.

On Wednesday, the young man was mentally unwell and drunk. (In addition to the bush knife, he was walking around with a paint can full of home brew.) Understandably, he was making a lot of people nervous. So we called the police. No answer. (Really!) I took one of the pre-school teachers, Nthantisi, and went to drive to the station. On the way, Nthantisi was very critical of the station we were going to and said they wouldn’t help us. Instead, she called the local emergency number. They answered the phone and promised to come right down. Unfortunately, they didn’t know where Itipini is. (These are the police! They know everything!) So we waited to show them the way. After five or ten minutes, I suggested we call again to see what was going on. The folks at the local emergency number said police officers from our local station were on their way. That was the same local station Nthantisi had just been criticizing. So we returned to Itipini to wait for them. They never showed up. Itipini is less than five minutes from their station.

Mrs. Nani didn’t go back to her home on Wednesday afternoon and slept at a friend’s place. I wondered as I went to bed that night if she would be alive on Thursday.

I was wrong, thankfully. She lived. But late on Wednesday, her shack went up in flames. Absolutely nothing was saved.
The fire department had shown up long after the place was beyond saving. When I arrived this morning, it was still smoldering.

On Thursday morning, the young man was still around. Evidently, the community had performed a little vigilante justice, as he had a bandage across his head and looked like he’d been beaten up. (Why do they always wait until after the fact instead of intervening beforehand?) But he was also quite docile so Jenny took him and Mrs. Nani to the local police station. The young man was arrested and Mrs. Nani made her complaint. But later he was released and is now back in Itipini. Why? Because there's no food at the police station to feed the prisoners.

I’m only tangentially involved in this situation but I get only marginal satisfaction from the outcome. Mrs. Nani lost her home. And the young man isn’t getting what he needs either. Clearly, he needs medical care, mainly psychiatric and substance-related. Jenny commented that he looked pretty pathetic as he was led away.

What kind of police station makes you come to them to get service? Where were the police officers who might have been able to prevent this? And given how much of a problem substance abuse is in Itipini, where are the people and programs to help address those issues?

People in Itipini don’t treat each other right all the time, it’s true. But it seems like the government never treats them the way they deserve.

Skipping School

2009-06-15T13:41:00.001+02:00

A well-known obstacle to education in the developing world is attendance. Sometimes kids just don’t go to school and there’s no truant officer to make them. And oftentimes, they have legitimate reasons for not going.

Luleka, one of the students we support in high-school, missed a day of school because she had to take her younger sibling to the clinic. Their mother was busy taking their brother, who had just had a seizure, to the hospital. Luleka got the role because she’s the oldest daughter.

I don’t know the name of this student but her mother had to work in town one day, which meant the older child had to bring her younger sibling to the clinic and miss school in the process.

Xolelwa, the oldest child in this picture, is one of eight or nine daughters (I keep losing track) in a family. She’s also already an aunt several times over. The three children in this picture with her are a few of her nieces and nephews. I haven’t seen Xolelwa miss school because of these nieces and nephews but she spends a lot of time caring for them in the afternoon. I wonder what it’ll do to her back, having to carry them around from such a young age?

I used to get frustrated when I saw children we support not in school. Now, I just give a resigned sigh. I don’t know how money alone can solve a problem like this.

It's a tough life being six weeks old

2009-06-14T14:01:00.001+02:00

Meaty Mission and Ministry

2009-06-12T09:40:00.000+02:00

I was recently asked what I mean when I use the phrase “incarnational ministry.” Excellent question! Before I moved to Mthatha, I had heard that phrase a lot but never quite understood what it meant. Now it is the foundation of my ideas about mission.

Incarnate means to make flesh. (The -carn part of the word is from the Latin word for meat, hence the title of this post and the word carnival, to say goodbye to meat.) The Incarnation is when God became flesh and choose to live as a human. That’s why Jesus had the name Emmanuel - God is with us.

I consider my mission and ministry in Itipini to be incarnational because I have made a decision to share a particular existence with this group of people. As Jesus came from heaven to earth so I chose to come from North America to Mthatha and live in a place that was completely different to what I knew. (That’s about as far as the Jesus/Jesse analogy goes.)

Incarnational ministry also takes time. Jesus spent 30 years on earth before launching his public ministry. Maybe he was using that time to figure out how things worked and how best to calibrate his message. I’ve spent two years here and am still in the dark about so much.

Incarnational ministry is foundational to my thinking about mission because it is the necessary first step to everything that follows. You learn best about a place when you are incarnate there. You build relationships with people when you share a common existence. Such efforts towards reconciliation as you can manage are premised on this knowledge and these relationships. Nothing I have accomplished here could have happened if I had stayed in North America. That’s obvious, of course, but points to the importance of incarnational being and doing.

There are dangers, of course, not the least of which is that you is expose yourself to potential danger and harm. Choosing to be incarnate requires a certain willingness to take on a measure of vulnerability. Jesus did wind up on a cross after all, which definitely wouldn’t have happened if he had stayed in heaven. But if he had stayed in heaven, he also wouldn’t have been able to rise from the dead and rescue the world from sin and death. Life is full of trade-offs. If I had stayed in North America, I wouldn’t have ended up with countless gastrointestinal illnesses. But I also wouldn’t have had a transcendent and life-changing experience. On balance, I’d say I got the better half of the bargain.

Mission, as I’ve noted often, doesn’t just happen overseas. It happens wherever there are people yearning for right relationship with God and with each other. As we consider our mission opportunities, whether it is down the street or across the globe, the first question is the same: “how can we choose to be incarnate among these our brothers and sisters in Christ?” That is the foundation of rich and enriching mission.

The TB Express

2009-06-09T15:34:00.003+02:00

Our tuberculosis caseload has increased notably in the last few months. I don’t know why. A lot of the new patients have had TB before, which means that this time they have to get 56 doses of a drug called streptomycin. The only way to give it is as an intramuscular injection. Since this is something I learned to do when I was an EMT, for the last several months it seems I have spent a good portion of my day jabbing patients - mainly older, smelly - men - in the butt with needles. (They are pretty funny about making sure I alternate cheeks.) Poor guys. Fifty-six is a lot of doses. But it works, for the most part. They get dramatically stronger and healthier over the course of the treatment.

A few patients aren’t strong enough to make it to the clinic on their own so I load up my syringes and make my rounds. I call it the TB express.

Mandla is first.He lives in one of the tiniest and most tumble-down shacks I’ve ever seen - and that’s saying a lot.
Mavis was always next.
She lived in this small shack.
But I learned yesterday that she died on Friday, shortly after I took that picture of her. Is it exploitative to post it here? Is it wrong to mention I was one of the last people to speak with her?

She was close to the end of her regimen of injections and just had not been improving at all. In retrospect, I imagine she had multi-drug resistant TB but she was never tested for that and, like many others, has slipped through the cracks of the health system despite our best efforts to prevent it.

Luxuries

2009-06-09T15:33:00.003+02:00

It’s obvious that if you spend even a little time in a place like Itipini, you learn a lot about what you’ve taken for granted - running water, insulation, a roof that doesn’t leak, electricity, etc., etc., etc. But the more time I’ve spent getting to know the people here, the more I realize how many intangible things I’ve taken for granted.

I’ve already written about what I’ve noted about the capacity for leadership. Here’s a short list of a few more:

An environmental consciousness - It is appalling how people here treat the environment. Mthatha is a city full of litter. It never ceases to amaze how people casually throw away their trash with no thought of where it ends up. They throw it out the window of cars or taxis, they drop it wherever on the ground. I can’t stand it. The rivers and drainage ditches are clogged with trash.

Privacy - People here have so little private space. Going to the bathroom, bathing, changing, even sex are not private acts here. Personal details about a person - particularly concerning their health - are a lot less private here than I am used to.

Sabbath time - When your existence demands a huge amount of daily physical labour, the idea of taking a break is almost laughable. You simply can’t. It certainly puts new light on the fourth commandment as I imagine the Israelites were a lot closer to the people of Itipini than to us.

Planning ahead - When you don’t have a savings account or a steady job, planning any farther than the end of the day is difficult. The question is, how will I make it to tomorrow? Then the next day? Then the next? I’ve realized that planning my life one year at a time, as I have for the past several years, is a luxury.

I’m sure there are lots more but that’s a few for now.

Rhini

2009-06-09T15:28:00.002+02:00

For the last two years, every few months or so I’ve headed down to Grahamstown (or Rhini in Xhosa) to visit my fellow YASC missionary, Matt. Matt and I arrived around the same time two years ago, he stayed on a second year, and is now, remarkably, staying for a third.

Here are Matt and I after church on Sunday morning.
He goes to church at the Mariya uMama weThemba monastery where he works after-school with these four boys.
Nomamiesi is the Xhosa woman who prepares the snack for the after-school program Matt works at. She also is raising several of the children in the program at a farm outside town. On every visit, Matt and I pay her a visit, drink LOTS of tea, practice our Xhosa, sing, and generally enjoy the benefits the surrogate motherhood.
On Sunday, I drove her and a few of her large brood to church.
I’ll miss Grahamstown.

Sitting and staring

2009-06-09T15:20:00.001+02:00

Not my finest hour

2009-06-05T19:02:00.003+02:00

About every month since January, a young man named Samkelo, not much older than me, has come into the clinic. He is HIV-positive with a low CD4 count and has tuberculosis. Each time he visited, he assured us he was in the preparation process for anti-retroviral drugs and taking his TB treatment daily at the nearby government clinic.

On Tuesday afternoon he came in and looked worse than he ever has before.
He had a miserable and hangdog expression. Just looking at him, I could tell he has not been taking TB treatment.

It turns out that Samkelo no longer lives in Itipini but in a newer settlement somewhat close to where I live. Like many of the other newer settlements around Mthatha, it doesn’t have a clinic so he was coming to us for help. I assumed he had taken a taxi across town. But even if he had done that he still would have had to walk at least a mile from the nearest taxi rank to the clinic.

I asked what time he had left that morning. He had left home at 5am. (It is winter here and it is very cold and dark at that hour.) “And you took a taxi?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I don’t have the money.”

I clocked the distance later that afternoon. It had taken him eight hours to walk eight kilometers to the clinic, stopping for frequent breaks along the way.

His financial situation implicates his health. The clinic where he needs to go for ARV prep and TB treatment is a 20-rand (about $2.50) round-trip fare from his home. (There’s a closer clinic that is a 10-rand round-trip fare but that would require a bureaucratic hassle to change the location of treatment.) Clearly, if he doesn’t have the money for a taxi to get to Itipini one day a month, he’s not going to be able to afford to get his treatment every day of the week. If there was a clinic within walking distance of his home (a settlement that is home to tens of thousands of people), perhaps he wouldn’t have ended up in such poor health. But there’s not.

Since his home is on my way home, I offered him a lift. I drove him almost to his door because I wanted to know where he lives so I could come back and check on him. Here’s what we saw.
In the time he had been gone, his roof had collapsed! He looked at it and sighed. I was at a loss as to what to do. I didn’t want to leave an obviously sick patient to endure a cold night in a tumbled-down shack. But I had only expected my commitment to him to last until we got to his house. I was hungry and tired and wanted to get home myself. And where else could I take him?

What followed was not exactly my finest hour. I smiled, said something like, “Great!”, made a vague promise to come check on him soon, and took off. I didn’t look over my shoulder.

I was wracked with guilt the rest of the afternoon before I suddenly realized there actually was a place I could take him in town that would be able to help him with his TB treatment and ARV counseling. I resolved to visit him again on Wednesday.

When I returned, he was nowhere to be found. I asked the neighbours - all of whom live in much nicer places - if they had seen him and they said he had gone back into town, to a place down near the river where other homeless people hang out. I drove down there and searched all over for him and asked everyone I saw if they had seen him. No luck.

So now I’m in this horrible in-between zone of knowing that I can do something but not being able to do it. My only thought is that Samkelo took a taxi back to his rural village where is mother is. Sick people often do that here. They give up hope of living and return home to die where they were born. It is frustrating whenever it happens because I don’t want to give up hope like that, particularly not in this situation where it is clear - to me - what kind of help is needed. The tricky part is providing that help.

Thinking about all this, I find myself worried at the situation we might have created. Samkelo had figured out a way to get himself out of Itipini. That’s great. No one should live on a dump. But when he struggled so much to make it back to Itipini, the thought in my mind was, “It would be a lot easier for him if he just lived here.” And that’s an awful thought. But is it possible that the presence of our clinic is an inducement for people to live on a dump? Is it such an incentive that perhaps people never even consider leaving, even if they have the opportunity?

On Wednesday, as I was driving around looking for Samkelo, I heard the new minister of human settlement (i.e. housing) say in a radio interview that he wanted to take a broad look at the question of housing. He said something like, “It doesn’t make any sense to build a new settlement if there isn’t a clinic there.” It was tragically appropriate for the situation I found myself in. I just worried it was too late for Samkelo.

What are you laughing at?

2009-06-05T18:57:00.000+02:00

Lighting a Fire

2009-06-03T09:47:00.000+02:00

I wrote in my last monthly e-mail that if mission is a journey we choose to take with others, the greatest challenge I am finding lately is how to encourage people in Itipini and Mthatha to take that journey with each other, independent of my presence. This is especially important, of course, as I prepare to leave in just a few weeks.

I was at a prayer service on Saturday at a hospice in Mthatha for people with AIDS. One thing the people in this hospice desperately need is transport to the health clinic to get ARVs. It is something Jenny and I have recently been providing as we have become aware of the need. One of the men leading the prayer - who had driven to the event in his own vehicle - said something like, “We pray these people will get the help they need.” It has apparently never occurred to him that he might be able to provide the help they need. How do I encourage this man to journey with these patients with AIDS?

It is convenient that my own departure is coming in the season of the church year when we focus on Jesus’ departure from his followers. I don’t want to compare my ministry in Itipini to that of Jesus in the Holy Land but the Bible readings these past few weeks have given me some comfort. For one thing, Jesus talked a lot with his followers before he died and before he ascended about his departure and how they couldn’t come with him. I’ve been trying to do the same.

(In one touching moment, a student I know, upon hearing I was leaving, asked if she could come along. I explained it was a long way. “That’s OK,” she said. “We’ll take the bakkie,” meaning Jenny’s truck that people often pile into when they need a ride someplace. I didn’t know how to explain the bakkie couldn’t make it across the ocean. A long way for people in Itipini is like, say, here to East London, a three-hour trip. How do I explain what a 17-hour plane flight is like?)

And even though Jesus encouraged his followers to carry on his ministry in his absence, I’ve realized recently they didn’t initially do a great job of it. After Jesus was crucified, they huddled in an upper room for fear of arrest. After Jesus ascended, they huddled in a room “for fear of the Jews.” It was only when the Holy Spirit came upon them in their huddle that they went out to preach the Gospel in every language.

I take a lot of comfort from that story. Even Jesus - though he gave his followers the Great Commandment - couldn’t get his followers to journey together in his absence. Jesus had to send the Holy Spirit to light a fire under (actually, over) them and get them out into the world.

It’s not just up to me to get people to take this journey together. In fact, it’s probably not even primarily or mostly up to me. There’s always another Actor. As my time winds down, I find that a reassuring thought.

You can’t purchase shalom

2009-06-01T14:31:00.003+02:00

I’ve been reading the news coverage in preparation for the Episcopal Church’s General Convention. A while back - though recently for me as it only just arrived in my mail - there was an article about Convention’s focus on the Millennium Development Goals, the so-called “Eight Commandments” that are designed to address global poverty.

I should state up front that I generally view the MDGs with suspicion. I don’t find them a useful conceptual tool and I think the Bible has a more expansive - not to mention more poetic - view of what is required of Christians to work towards a more perfect Creation. Mostly, I find the focus on MDGs aggravating because it means I have to explain myself and my work in terms of vocabulary I don’t find useful. For instance, in my limited engagement with them, they don’t speak to the needs I’ve discovered relating to the need for a new conceptualization of masculinity or the difficulties surrounding secondary and post-secondary education.

The Episcopal Life article quoted the report from the Standing Commission on Anglican and International Peace with Justice Concerns (that’s a mouthful - and how can there be peace without justice?). That sent me in search of the whole report and it was refreshing to read:

The MDGs are a new framework for global healing and reconciliation, but they are nothing new for the people of God. These tangible, achievable goals...are but a 21st century articulation of what the church has been called to and worked toward its entire existence….

Even more important than the numbers is the spiritual transformation we have seen take place in the church as we come face-to-face with Christ, working in partnership with our sisters and brothers around the world to end extreme poverty. While one measure of success is certainly in dollars raised, an even deeper measure is to be found in stories told around the church—stories of sacrifices made, lives changed and joy discovered….

The Episcopal Church is experiencing an awakening—at its best humbling and, at times, stumbling—but an awakening, nonetheless.

It came as a frustration, then, that the rest of the article was essentially devoted to budgetary matters. What I’ve learned so strongly while working in Itipini is that while more money is needed to build a more perfect world, what is desperately needed is more relationships. People need to commit to people, no matter how different they may seem.

In my experience, money often serves to corrode mission. What progress towards right relationship - with Nolizwi, Vuyelwa, Pakama, Petros, and countless others - I’ve been able to make has been the result of my decision to share an existence in Itipini these last two years. It takes money to support me here and I never forget how many people have made that support possible. But that money, invested in me (or any missionary), has been able to accomplish so much more than if it had just been written over to buy, say, malaria nets. The fruits of incarnational ministry are a lot harder to quantify than malaria nets but it is incarnate ministry that moves us in the right direction.

(It was interesting to see so much concern in the Episcopal Life article about measuring the 0.7-percent. The entire budget of the Mission Personnel Office - and many other church offices, I am sure - should go under the 0.7-percent category.)

I think I see this disconnect most clearly in my ongoing efforts at a micro-credit program. As I wrote in an early evaluation of it, I had no trouble raising money for the program. In fact, I had way too much money. What I didn’t have enough of was human resources to facilitate the program and provide the kind of real support and encouragement the borrowers needed. I’m convinced micro-credit addresses several of the MDGs. I just wish there were more people working in micro-credit programs around the world instead of writing cheques for other people to work in micro-credit programs.

When it comes to stewardship, we often talk about how we can give our time, talent, and treasure to our church. It’s easy to give your treasure to global mission. It’s a lot harder to give your time and talent. I’ve spent so much time here thinking of ways people in the rich world can contribute their time and talent to people like those in Itipini. I haven’t come up with many so far. It’s a difficult question but one we need to embrace.

Instead of seeing General Convention obsess over its budget, I’d like there to be a conversation about ways Episcopalians can contribute more of their time and talent to the pursuit of right relationship around the world.

(Let me note some obvious caveats. First, I realize budgets are important statements of principle and deserve some degree of obsessing. Second, I’m familiar with the Body of Christ metaphor. Just as it is my role currently to serve in Itipini it is the role of others to raise money and awareness in the rich world. We all play a part. But I worry that sometimes people get so comfortable in the raising money role, they never ask if God is asking them to play a different role in a different place. I also worry that raising money simply becomes a cathartic experience to make us feel like we are “doing something” and obscures on focus on the real needs of the world.)

Shalom is a popular concept these days and rightly so. It’s a handy and deeply true way of expressing our final goal - completeness in Christ. But even if we had all the money in the world, we could never buy shalom. When we spend so much time obsessing about budgets and dollar figures, I worry that we begin to believe we can.

Pictures

2009-06-01T14:16:00.004+02:00

Volunteering in Mthatha - “Saving Africa”

2009-06-01T14:13:00.002+02:00

I’ve been deluged with e-mails recently from people who want to volunteer in Itipini. To save time, please read this post before deciding whether or not to e-mail me.

Most importantly, please be aware I have no control, say, or input over who volunteers in Itipini. I am a missionary of the Episcopal Church who happened to land here two years ago. And I’m leaving in just a few weeks. I’d recommend checking out the web site of African Medical Mission - www.ammsa.org and on Facebook - the organization that operates the Itipini Community Project.

I can share a few thoughts on volunteering in Mthatha, however, that might help shape your thoughts.

First, the longer a commitment you can make the better. You can’t “save Africa” in two weeks (or two years, for that matter). There are SUBSTANTIAL language and culture barriers that make even the most basic tasks extraordinarily difficult. I’ve been here nearly two years and only just now feel basically competent.

Second, if you’re interested in performing a certain role - like teaching, nursing, whatever - think about how much that role relies on certain givens, like a common language. Then take away those givens and think about what your role would be like. Often people who come for a short time wanting to do a specific thing can be more of a burden than a blessing because we have to redirect our energies and attentions to accommodate and assist them in that task. That doesn’t take away from what they have to offer. It’s just the reality of overseas work.

Third, ask yourself what you want to get out of the experience. I have seen countless volunteers show up, determined to “help,” and get so frustrated usually for one of two reasons: the people they want to help aren’t aware or don’t think they need the help; or those language and culture barriers get in the way. I try to share as gently as possible the lesson I continually re-learn, that who I am matters far more than what I can do. As I’ve noted, what I do is often pretty basic - counting pills, alphabetizing cards.

Fourth, remember the advice of Dorothy Day: “Do not give to the poor expecting to get their gratitude so that you can feel good about yourself. If you do, your giving will be thin and short-lived, and that is not what the poor need; it will only impoverish them further. Give only if you have something to give; give only if you are someone for whom giving is its own reward.” This same view is also expressed in something I’ve seen attributed to an unknown (to me) Australian aboriginal group: “If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

I hope that helps structure some of your thoughts. For those of you who have volunteered in Mthatha or overseas before, I welcome your thoughts and comments on this list and how to make it more complete.

AIDS at Work

2009-05-29T14:38:00.004+02:00

The true story in this post is three pictures, seen sequentially. You actually don’t need the text but I’ll throw it in here to give you the context.

A few months back, I wrote about Tunyeswa, a (now-)18-year-old HIV-positive mother who has just had a disastrous life. She has walked out on her daughter more than a few times. When I saw her in February, I took this picture of her with her daughter.
Then in March I saw her again and took this picture.
She had tested positive for HIV in January and we had taken blood for the all-important CD4 count that would tell us how much the virus had affected her immune system. But she never came back with the results, no matter how many times we reminded her of it.

After that picture in March, we didn’t see her again until yesterday. When she walked in, she looked like this.
I’m not sure how clearly it comes through in the picture but it is a stunning and dramatic change. I actually didn’t recognize her at first. I thought perhaps it was a slimmer sister from the same family. Since March, she’s lost more than eight kilograms.

As she still hadn’t got her CD4 results, we drew the blood again and I drove her up to the clinic where the blood gets sent to the lab. I asked, out of curiosity, if the clinic had the results from the test in January. Surprisingly, they did. It was 216. That’s dramatically low, almost eligible for anti-retrovirals. It’s especially low for someone who is only 18. Either the virus has worked remarkably quickly on her or she contracted some time ago.

After nearly two years in Itipini, I actually have more hope about combatting the HIV epidemic than I ever have before. But people like Tunyeswa make me despair. She needs so much help and so much education to understand the significance of her diagnosis and all the work - like regular CD4 counts - she has to do as a result of that diagnosis. And there’s no indication that any of our efforts in that direction have taken root. There are other people in Itipini like this, people who are just - for whatever reason - totally clueless and uninvolved in their own health. I can do what I did today and hand-hold and escort her through the health-care system but that’s not sustainable and it’s not practical for the people in similar situations.

Thinking about Tunyeswa, I found myself thinking again about the line from Desmond Tutu I’ve thought a lot about in South Africa: “For true reconciliation is a deeply personal mater. It can happen only between persons who assert their own personhood and who acknowledge and respect that of others. You don’t get reconciled to your dog, do you?” There’s no indication to me that Tunyeswa is asserting her true, full, and complete God-given personhood in any meaningful way. And I have no idea how to help her do that.

Surprised by Gratitude

2009-05-27T14:20:00.002+02:00

Many of you have asked after my recent monthly e-mail about the health of my cleaning lady, Hilda, who I recently found out is HIV-positive. She is doing much better, thanks to the drugs I was able to secure for her that took care of her oral thrush. Her CD4 count has dropped dramatically in the past few months but I sat with her and explained about ARVs and she is now busily engaged in the preparation process.
Hilda’s situation has prompted a number of thoughts for me.

It’s made me think about access to care again. Like the woman I mentioned in this recent post, Hilda lives in a relatively new housing development and so has to take a taxi to get to the clinic for her counseling. It’s fortunate that her health is still good and she can do this unaided. And it’s fortunate she has a job and only has to go to the clinic once a week and so can pay the taxi fare and combine it with her regular weekly shopping anyway.

It’s also made me give thanks for all the activism in the early part of this decade that brought down the price of drugs so much. The drug that alleviated her thrush is called Flucanazole. (I think I have the spelling correct.) She got it for free from the public health system. Five or seven years ago, that drug cost a whole lot more and the government didn’t provide it. It took unnecessary deaths and a whole lot of public pressure on drug companies and the South African government to make it available. I’ve just finished reading Edwin Cameron’s Witness to AIDS and he tells the story of Flucanazole in detail. Literally the day after I finished reading that, I found out Hilda was sick.

I’ve been thinking about just how much patients know. When I tried to talk to Hilda about ARVs, I was kind of stumped. How do you explain to someone that the thrush took hold because her immune system is weakened when she doesn’t know what an immune system is or does? If you can’t explain what the virus does to your body, how do you explain how to address it? I resorted mainly to saying that ARVs would give her strength (the all-purpose Xhosa word amandla, well-known from anti-apartheid activism), confident that the preparatory process for ARVs would teach her much more.

(Similarly, the other day I took a patient to admit him to tuberculosis treatment at the Ngangalizwe Health Centre. I explained on the way up where we were going and why. It looked like he understood so I left him alone. When I came back, the TB nurse told me the patient had said he was already taking TB treatment. It took me a while to figure out that the patient was taking a vitamin cocktail everyday that we give to HIV patients and he thought it was working on his TB. I had just assumed he realized all the different illness at work on him.)

Mostly, though, what I’ve been thinking about is gratitude. I don’t get a lot of it in Itipini. Basically, I think people there are so used to having white people help them, they come to take it for granted. Hilda is used to waiting on white people, not vice versa. As a result, her gratitude for my help has been overwhelming and overwhelmingly genuine. Last week I dropped her off for an ARV appointment and showed her where to go, the same thing I do for scores of other patients. She was effusive in her thanks. That same day I dropped a patient from Itipini off at the hospital. The only thing she could say as she got out of the car was to grumble that I wasn’t coming to pick her up later. The difference was striking.

My goal was for Hilda to be on ARVs before I leave but health care moves slowly here and it doesn’t look like that will be possible anymore. I’ll just try to get her as far along in the system as I can.

Memorable Encounters at Ngangalizwe

2009-05-25T15:56:00.003+02:00

It seems that I spend at least a bit of each day at the Ngangalizwe Health Centre, the government-run clinic about a fifteen-minute walk up a hill from Itipini. It is our “mother ship,” so to speak. We get some medicines from there and refer people there for preparation for anti-retrovirals or ante-natal care. I am often up there to get pills, because I’ve given a sick patient a ride, or to check results from the lab, among many other reasons.

Here’s one of the clinic buildings, though the whole complex is currently undergoing a dramatic face-lift.
I frequently bump into people I know, whether it be the (formerly) fearsome nurses who run the place, the pharmacist I have to sweet-talk every time I want something, or people from Itipini we’ve sent up for something. I am the only white person I have EVER seen in that clinic so I attract a lot of attention even from patients who don’t know me, who often think I am a doctor.

The other day I bumped into Noncedo, formerly a student in my after-school English class. She was in grade 12 last year and failed the high-stakes test at the end of the year that determines if the student gets a diploma or not. But she didn’t fail by much and in January I strongly encouraged her to go to the supplementary education to prepare to re-write the test. She initially seemed interested but then disappeared and I hadn’t seen or heard from her since about mid-February.
So I was happy to see her on Thursday and asked how she was and commented that I hadn’t seen her in a while. As I was asking why she was at the clinic I glanced down from her face and noticed a tell-tale bump in her abdomen. I switched to my standard set of questions for women when I learn they are pregnant - are you going to the ante-natal clinic? have you had an HIV test? when are you due?

It’s not unusual for me to learn about a new pregnant teenager but as I walked away I couldn’t help but remember a sentence Noncedo had written in a letter to our pen pals in South Carolina last year. I don’t remember it word for word but it was something like, “Some girls think it is OK to sleep with men but that is not our culture and I don’t do that.” (How that worked its way into a letter that was supposed to be about what her favourite subject is is beyond me.)

The pregnancy explains why she lost interest in school and disappeared. There’s this belief around here that pregnant women can’t go to school, which is dumb. Noncedo isn’t due for another month or two. She could have gone to the extra education and already re-written the test by this point.

On another trip on Thursday to Ngangalizwe, I stopped in the Infectious Diseases (read: HIV) part of the clinic. There were five women from Itipini, all getting the results of their most recent CD4 count. They all wanted a ride back, which I was happy to provide. As I watched the women standing by the truck, staring at their results, it reminded me of what it was like to get a test back in middle school. Everyone looked at their results and then started peeking over at their neighbour to see what he or she got. The same thing unfolded in the parking lot. I didn’t catch the whole conversation but it went something like, “What’d you get?” “753” “Oh, that’s good.” “No, not really. Last time it was 943. What’d you get?” “504” and so on. It was heartening to me that they would all be talking so openly about their CD4 counts.

When we returned to Itipini, I marched them all into the clinic so I could record their results. Nothemba, in the middle, didn’t want to have her picture taken.
And so that’s Ngangalizwe. Maybe someday I’ll convince some of the nurses there to let me take their pictures and can write a bit about them.

Waiting in the clinic for mom to be seen

2009-05-25T15:52:00.000+02:00

Long Walk to TB Treatment

2009-05-21T14:58:00.001+02:00

I’ve noted before that transportation is a crucial - and often neglected - part of health-care infrastructure. Good quality care might exist but if a person can’t get to it, they’re out of luck. That’s one reason why I spend a good chunk of my day behind the wheel, driving people places.

Here’s a picture of a neighbourhood called Mayden Farm. It consists entirely of low-income housing built by the government and distributed free to poor people. Several people who used to live in Itipini have now been moved here.
Mayden Farm is one of the biggest such communities in Mthatha (there are three or four). There are thousands of people living here. And in the entire community there is not a single clinic.

I’ve been thinking about this because there’s an older woman who lives in Mayden Farm with her daughter - an Itipini employee - and family. The older woman defaulted on TB treatment a few years back and is now re-starting. That’s good. She was getting pretty sick. But as a re-treatment patient she needs 56 doses of a drug called streptomycin that can only be given as an intra-muscular injection. If she only had to take pills, we might bend the rules a bit and give the pills to the daughter to give to her mother. But since she needs an injection, the mother has to go to a clinic every day for nearly three months.

We’ve all sat around and thought about this and concluded we are the closest clinic to their home. And we are about two miles away. On Tuesday, this mother left home at 8am and didn’t make it to the clinic until 10am. (I thought that was pretty fast.) She’s old and weak and has TB. She can’t go any faster. She shows up, gets her shot, and turns around and starts home again. That is basically her entire day.

There is another clinic about two miles in the other direction and the advantage is that taxis ply that route. But the taxi costs about five rand in each direction or a little more than a dollar for the round trip. That doesn’t sound like much but when you live on a dollar a day, well… This family earns more than a dollar a day but not by much and they need to stretch it pretty far. (She initially defaulted on her TB treatment when she was living in the rural areas because she couldn’t afford the daily taxi ride to the closest clinic for the pills.)

The reality is that Mthatha has experienced rapid growth in the past decade or so and the government hasn’t been able to keep up with infrastructure. (But churches and privately-run schools have. They dot communities like Mayden Farm.) This older woman’s condition should not be life-threatening. It’s serious, yes, but I’ve seen other people with similar symptoms make full recoveries. But because of a set of factors outside our control, this is a very serious situation.

The situation raises all kinds of questions for me. Should I just pick her up every day and drive her to the clinic? (It’s way out of the way on my daily commute.) Is that fair or right? Should we just pay for the taxi? One factor that distinguishes this situation from others is that this is an ongoing and consistent need for transportation whereas I usually provide emergency or one-time lifts places.

We did some more thinking and appear to have reached an acceptable solution that is too complex to explain here but won’t require her to do that walk every day. Still, there must be many other people like her in Mayden Farm and around Mthatha that we don’t know about. What will happen to them?

The title for this post is a corruption of the title of Nelson Mandela’s autobiography. He is famous for saying, “There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere.” Which is true. Fifteen years after he was elected, neither is there an easy walk to treatment.

Juba, the breakfast of champions

2009-05-20T14:25:00.003+02:00

I’ve only ever mentioned it in passing before but it is impossible to get a full understanding of life in Itipini without mentioning the prevalence of alcohol. It is everywhere and affects everything.

It comes in many forms - all cheap - but one of the most common is Juba, a beer(-ish) type substance that comes in a one-liter milk-carton-like container and sells for less than 50-cents U.S. Itipini is littered with empty containers like this one.
Note the warning on the container - “don’t drink and walk on the road, you may be killed” - an appropriate public-safety campaign in a place where most consumers of Juba don’t know how to drive or own cars but still have to get places.

The empties are put to creative use by people of all ages. This shack has walls made of Juba containers.
There’s also Xhosa homebrew, called mqombote (I’m a bit unsure of the spelling), that is basically fermented corn meal cooked over an open fire and then stored in someone’s house.
I’ve learned over time that the different drinks are favoured by different groups of people. Juba, for instance, is for older women and men. If you see a young man drinking Juba, you know he’s desperate. Younger men traditionally drink brand-name beers that come in bottles and is more expensive.

All this alcohol is served out of local shebeens, or unlicensed liquor establishments. The people who are the best off financially in Itipini are, I believe, the ones who own a shebeen. And there are plenty of shebeens around, including one just up the hill behind the clinic. Some people go into town and hang out in front of a bottle store all day.

Naturally, alcohol has the same affect on people in Itipini that it does on people all over the world - it makes them do stupid things, like get in fights and hurt each other, neglect their families, or spend money on alcohol they should be spending on necessities. Lots of those people end up seeking help from the clinic, occasionally when they are still drunk.

Where does the money for all this come from? Addicted people have an income-inelastic demand for alcohol so they’ll find it wherever of course but a major source, I believe, is the government grants that go to older people. In my experience, a lot of those old-age pensions are going right into the shebeens around Itipini.

Alcohol is brought into Itipini in massive quantities. I often see women walking down the dirt road to Itipini carrying a crate of Juba on their head. Or you see men like this one wheeling in a few crates. (I don’t know why he’s crouching over for the picture.)
I saw these two young boys (not in school) pushing this wheelbarrow down Mthatha’s main street a few months back. They both live in Itipini and were taking their load to re-stock a shebeen someplace.
Occasionally, a shebeen orders enough to warrant a truck delivery, like this one I saw a few days ago.Mthatha consumes Juba by the truckload. I frequently see 18-wheeler trucks stacked high and long with crates and crates and crates of Juba. I wonder how many of those trucks Mthatha consumes in a day, a week, a year?

In his book about Rwanda, We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families, Philip Gourevitch mentions off-handedly that some huge percentage of Rwandans were likely alcoholic. (I don’t have the book in front of me and can’t check the exact number.) It would be impossible to calculate that figure precisely but I imagine it’s huge in Itipini as well.

People know that they shouldn’t be drinking, or at least they’re embarrassed to be seen drinking. As I drive down the road to Itipini or walk around the community, I frequently see people trying to hide a container of Juba so I won’t see it. But as soon as I leave it’s brought back out again. I think my main objection to alcohol consumption is that resources are so limited here that any money spent on alcohol could have been and should have been spent someplace more productive.

One of the beer brands, Castle, has a large ad campaign showing a strapping steelworker almost single-handedly lifting an I-beam into place. The caption says something like, “You deserve a Castle.” The trouble is that so few people here have jobs that allow them to have alcohol, which should be a luxury, or have jobs at all. So they miss out on the hard work part of it and skip right to the drinking stage. And when they spend most of the day drunk, they further reduce their chances of finding the kind of work that might make them “deserve” beer.

Playing with Live Ammo

2009-05-18T14:46:00.003+02:00

I don’t kid myself: for most people in Itipini, my impending departure won’t matter all that much. They’ll still get the same kind of services from the clinic, more or less, regardless of my presence or absence.

The people I’ve found myself spending the most time thinking about lately are the people of all ages and both sexes I’ve come to be closest to. If they feel my absence half as much as I know I’ll feel theirs then I have some sort of obligation to help both of us achieve some sort of satisfactory “end.”

One person is Simnikiwe, a child I’ve written about before. I think I’ve played a big role in his life these past few years, especially since his father died unexpectedly last October. Indeed, as you can see from this picture at the funeral, I was standing next to Simnikiwe as we watched his father be buried.
Knowing that I’d be leaving, I’ve intentionally tried to distance myself from him these past few months with modest success. He spends much more time in pre-school and has lots of friends his own age he chooses to play with. Still, on Friday I sat down with his mother and him and made sure he understand that I was leaving and not coming back. He said he understood but how do you communicate such a final concept to a four-year old?

Another person I knew I needed to speak with was Vuyelwa, a young woman I started helping a long time ago. She was the centrepiece of the sermon I preached last September when I was raising money. I had given her some money to start a business selling second-hand clothes and for a while it seemed to be going alright.

I haven’t ever written a follow-up post about her because soon after I returned in October, the business rapidly crumbled for numerous reasons I won’t take the time to explain here. I responded poorly to the situation and basically didn’t see her after October. I let myself be wracked by guilt about the whole matter and tried not to think about it.

I had heard she had moved to a village outside of Mthatha. On several occasions this year, I had thought I should go see her but I had awful thoughts about how she was living and what she was doing and I couldn’t bring myself to face what I believed to be my failure.

But I happened to be driving in that direction on Saturday and felt clearly I needed to see her. I tried calling her on her cell phone, not expecting the number to still work or that she would want to see me. Shockingly, she answered on about the second ring and said I should definitely stop by. A few phone calls later, I managed to find her and we sat down to catch up.

It was a good conversation and she took the news that I was leaving relatively well. It also put me at peace about a number of things. She doesn’t have a great life - she has no job and there are no prospects in the little village - but she is living in a good home, is teaching Sunday School at her church, can support two of her three children (the third is with the grandmother), and is more or less eking out a living. She’s late for a CD4 count and recently went to the doctor for another reason and didn’t tell him she had HIV so she might have to work on coming to terms with that.
Here she is with her Sunday School class. The child in the red shirt is her son, Bongamusa. I’ve written about him before but hadn’t seen him in months. So I was shocked when he came running out of the house, shouting my name, and tackled me around the knees. He’s a talkative little guy, unlike a number of the children around her who are pretty shy about speaking Xhosa with a white guy.

I was relieved when I drove away from Vuyelwa’s and relieved that I had been able to talk with Simnikiwe. These are just two examples of the kind of conversations I am trying to have before I leave. They are difficult. And they remind me that as a missionary I am playing with live ammo, as it were. These are real people with real feelings and my departure is not some sort of abstract resume line - I worked two years in a shantytown in South Africa - but in some cases is a difficult and hard-to-accept blow to the lives of real human beings who are my friends. It might be different if they had had a sense all along, as I did, that this was always going to be a temporary thing for me or if they had a sense how far away North America is and how hard it is to get to South Africa to visit. But they don’t. And they are not nearly as mobile as I am. They are stuck here while I get to fly freely away. It is one last reminder of the vast power differential between us.

Grace vs. Law vs. Infant Formula

2009-05-14T21:43:00.003+02:00

I once described one of the core jobs of a missionary to be “sharing grace gracefully.” (That’s not my phrase.) And I think that’s still accurate. But lately I’ve been wondering where law comes in.

We distribute infant formula at our baby clinic on Tuesday. I’ve written about how frustrating this can be. One aspect of the frustration is the mothers who claim they “can’t” breast-feed when more often they don’t want to. They don’t want to for any number of reasons I won’t explain here but none of them are very legitimate (in my not-so-humble opinion).

What does grace demand in this situation? Grace is often closely associated with love. I remember during a Bible study on the Great Commission during my mission training, one missionary saying, “I just think we are called to love everyone” over and over again. And she was right, of course. But is that it? And what does love look like in this situation?

If I give the mother who doesn’t want to breast-feed infant formula is that an act of grace? I don’t think so. It’s doing long-term damage to the baby’s health and well-being and wasting resources when they could be used someplace else. The mother in this case needs to learn from law. In this case, that’s the idea that - as it says on all the infant formula - “breast-feeding is best for your baby.”

Love is not handing stuff out. It is not charity in the non-King-James sense of that word. But that’s the easiest kind of mission and one so many of us are so quickly drawn to because it makes us feel like we are having an impact with a minimal amount of effort. And the people getting the stuff often appreciate it and that makes for great pictures and a lovely moment. But what happens when that moment is passed? And where do you find the resources to keep creating those moments?

I’ve come to see the grace we need in mission as an active concept and one that doesn’t necessarily make situations comfortable. In fact, it should make them difficult. Being graceful and loving can’t be divorced from the fact that the law exists and exists for a positive and salutary reason. Somehow the two are tied together.

In the lectionary reading for this Sunday (John 15:9-17), Jesus closely follows his commandment to love one another with a comment on the sharing of knowledge. “I do not call you servants any longer because the servant does do not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends because I have made known to you everything I have heard from my father.” Somehow the missionary is called to - gracefully - share knowledge of the law so that we can all move more closely to right relationships. In a cross-cultural context, that requires building meaningful relationships and finding a common vocabulary. It’s a lot harder than handing out tins of baby formula but it’s so much more right.

In lieu of actually writing anything...

2009-05-14T21:41:00.001+02:00

Snapshots

2009-05-11T17:42:00.005+02:00

I mentioned in a previous post that things have seemed very busy in the clinic lately. There are lots of stories of people I’d like to tell in detail but I keep putting them off and realize now I’m never going to be able to get to them with the justice they deserve. So here are some quick synopses of some of the patient care we’ve been involved in lately.

Zanthemba has AIDS and tuberculosis. I took this picture in March, shortly before I left for Djibouti and Ethiopia, when he had just started TB treatment. I wasn’t sure he’d be alive when I returned. But he was and he still is. I recently sent him up to begin preparation for anti-retrovirals. Given how many difficulties I’ve had with the ARV prep process in the past, it was remarkable how easy it was this time. I chalk that up to my increased expertise, relationships with the right nurses, and the fact that Zanethemba knows me and trusts me and does whatever I tell him to.

Lindiswa just gave birth to her second child. She’s 17. This is notable for a few reasons. Both children are by the same father and they have been traditionally married. I’m not sure how I feel about that but there it is. She stood out from the crowd of other young pregnant women because she was transparently honest and open about how difficult it is to be pregnant and she was absolutely hilarious about it.

Ntombizine is about my age and just gave birth to this baby. She came into the clinic kind of nonchalantly one morning and tried to tell me something. I was having trouble understanding so I asked Dorothy what was going on. “She just had her baby,” Dorothy told me. Oh. The baby had been born a few hours before in her shack and now Ntombizine wanted a ride to the government clinic to formally register the birth. I was happy to oblige, though I must confess that being around newborns always makes me nervous. They seem so fragile. Ntombizine also has AIDS but - through a process that was much more complicated and involved than it should have been - got nevarapine almost at the last possible minute to prevent transmission of HIV during birth. Then the nurses at the clinic told her not to breast feed, which infuriates me, but that’s a story for another time.

Jackson is very sick. In fact, I haven’t seen him in a few weeks and I wonder if he is still alive. He used to be a pretty energetic and kind of funny older man but his condition has deteriorated so rapidly and I was shocked when he came in looking like this. It’s kind of unclear just what is wrong with him. I think it has something to do with excessive alcohol intake and a swollen abdomen but there are some eye problems and possibly TB at work as well.

Nomantombi used to be an energetic and kind of confrontational young woman. I respected her energy, even if I didn’t always appreciate being on the receiving end of it. She’s HIV positive but was seemingly asymptomatic for all the time I knew her. But rapidly in the last few months she has markedly deteriorated and now labours just to make it to the clinic. I have been giving her lots of rides to appointments so she can ultimately get on ARVs but it has been a frustrating process that is taking too long to bear fruit.

Her medical records make fascinating - and tragic - reading. She’s 21 now and the records start when she was 8, documenting when she first starting taking family planning (age 12), when she had her first baby (age 14), when she tested positive for HIV (age 15), how she was brought in after a bout of glue-sniffing, all the times she had been assaulted, and much else. Perhaps if - when - she gets ARVs, it will mark a new start to what has been a difficult and obstacle-ridden life.

To close on an upbeat note - and not one primarily medical-related - here’s a picture of Ziyanda holding her first quarter report card. You might remember Ziyanda and all the obstacles she has endured in her education from an earlier post. She did remarkably well in the first quarter, including an 80-percent in English. I can’t communicate how astounding that is, when you consider what I’ve already written about what “doing well” means around here. (She also got a 13-percent in science. “Bad teacher,” she told me.) When she showed me the report card she also wanted to talk about going to college and has already begun doing the research into scholarships and application deadlines. I wish I was going to be around to help her see that process through.

(On another education note, Mbuyiselo, the young man who also has a complicated history that I once wrote about, has apparently been kicked out of school. I just found this out and haven’t been able to track him down yet. If it’s true, given all the work I put into getting him into school, I’m going to want to punch that guy in the teeth when I find him.)

And these are only the people I have pictures of. Numerous other cases like these walk through the doors every day.

Shedding a Burden

2009-05-07T20:17:00.004+02:00

I have felt very busy lately in Itipini. Not to the point of being overwhelmed but such that every minute of the day seems to be occupied, moving from one situation to the next. It is such a contrast to what it was like when I first arrived and it has made me feel very competent, which is an unusual feeling.

What I hadn’t realized until today, however, is that I’ve been carrying a tremendous burden around these last few weeks while also being so busy. Up until today, virtually no one in Itipini knew I am leaving in the not-too-distant future. The burden I was carrying was the obligation of sharing difficult news in a tender and honest way. As I’m in denial about the fact of my departure, I’ve been putting off sharing that news for several weeks.

But I booked my plane tickets this week and that was sort of what told me I needed to go public with the news. Because there are so many people in Itipini who will be affected by my departure and I wanted to do them the favour of telling them all individually or in as small groups as possible, that meant numerous similar - painful - conversations.

I began before the clinic day began when I told Dorothy and Mkuseli in the clinic. Dorothy gave the sudden shake of her head I’ve seen her give when she learns someone has died. Mkuseli looked like I was telling him I’d killed his mother. “Bad news for Itipini,” he muttered darkly under his breath.

After the clinic day was over, I gathered the rest of the staff together and told them. My pulse was racing and I was as nervous about this as I ever have been about addressing a group of people. This conversation was almost entirely in Xhosa; I’ve been laying awake late at night lately figuring out the right vocabulary. I talked about wanting to be in two places at once. I talked about how there is a season for everything. I stressed the finality of it all and that this was not a temporary break but a pretty permanent termination of my work in Itipini. Remarkably, by the time I go around to my future plans they were smiling a little bit.

I next headed downtown to see Vuyelwa, the young woman I’ve invested a lot of energy in helping her get started in the hair-styling business. Her mother is on the staff so I knew she’d find out when she got home and I wanted to tell her in person. As the words were coming out of my mouth - actually before I even said anything - she could tell where the conversation was going. “No, no, no!” she cut me off and clearly wanted to end the conversation. I plowed ahead. She was kind of smiling by the time I left.

Later, after we had finished reading “The BFG” for the day, I told my English class. I have never had their attention fixed on me as carefully as it was at that moment. I tried to meet each one of their gazes individually as I spoke. The ones who’ve been with me from the beginning were the most disappointed, I could tell. A few wanted to know what was in it for them. “Don’t forget to buy us blazers before you go!”

It was a draining series of conversations and I still need to announce it publicly tomorrow morning after our Friday morning education session. But I realized as soon as I told Dorothy and Mkuseli that a huge burden had lifted from my shoulders. No longer did I have to worry about this piece of news. For better or worse, that burden is now on the shoulders of all the people I told today. I’ll help them bear that load - I spent some time in the middle of the day privately talking with Mkuseli about the news - but it is no longer mine to bear. I feel guilty about dumping this on them but it’s a relief.

Parting may be such sweet sorrow but preparing to part is just sorrowful.

Accountability

2009-05-07T20:07:00.003+02:00

I often toss off the phrase “cultural and language barriers” like you should know what it means. The language barrier part is pretty obvious. And I’ve written about the culture barrier before in many different ways but the idea encompasses a wide swath of life. Here’s an example.

I live on the grounds of one of Mthatha’s hospitals and frequently visit another. Here’s the entrance to Umtata General Hospital.

As you can see, at the entrance are private security guards. Their job is to make each visitor sign in and check the trunk of each car as it leaves to ensure no one is stealing anything.

Here’s what I often see when I leave.

The guard simply removes the cone - the automatic bar has long since broken and not been fixed - and allows me to pass without checking a thing.

There could be eight gazillion reasons for this. Maybe he recognizes me and knows I’m a trustworthy type. Maybe because of the racial history of South Africa he’d never actually press me to search the trunk.

But the fact remains that he hasn’t done his job. And this isn’t a one-off sort of thing. It happens all the time. A job that the government is paying a private security company to do is simply not done.

The larger point is this: who holds these guards accountable? As far as I can tell, no one. And that is one aspect of the culture in Mthatha that I have had to adjust to. The usual standards of accountability to which I am accustomed simply do not pertain. And I shouldn’t pick on the guards. I see this lack of accountability in scores of situations all over town, including Itipini. People don’t do their jobs or do them late or do them half-heartedly and nothing seems to happen. There are no apparent consequences for inaction.

(A related cultural trait here is people who follow the letter of the law but not the spirit. One time I was leaving the hospital with some donated medical supplies, exactly the kind of thing the guards are supposed to prevent being taken from the hospital grounds. The boxes - clearly labeled “medical supplies” - were so big they didn’t fit in the trunk so I had them in the back seat. The guard dutifully checked the trunk, saw it was empty, and waved me through, not noticing or caring about what I had in the back seat. He had completely missed the larger purpose of what he was supposed to be doing.)

There was a brief gasp of accountability in February. Before then, the guards were government employees who worked about as hard as the private security guards do now. But then on February 1, all the government guards were fired and replaced by the private ones. For about a week and a half, the new guards were very diligent in checking trunks and making people sign in. It gradually began to lapse and now we are back where we were before.

I also should be careful what I wish for. The fact that I don’t have to sign in each time I enter the hospital is a tremendous time-saver and I’m glad they don’t make me open the trunk every time I leave.

On the other hand, this lack of accountability hit home this past weekend. I haven’t driven my red car in a few weeks because Jenny is out of town. It has been parked at the hospital, where I thought it would be safe behind a fence on guarded hospital premises. But when I happened to see it the other day, I noticed someone had tried to steal the front windscreen by cutting loose the rubber caulking. As you can see from this picture, I can stick my hand between the windscreen and the car frame.
The guards at my hospital are supposed to make frequent rounds of the grounds to prevent exactly this sort of thing from happening. But as the nights have gotten colder these past few weeks, I’ve seen them out less and less frequently and more frequently huddled in their hut at the gate. No one apparently held them accountable to do their job and my windscreen is the result.

This post kind of makes it sound like I’m complaining about the car. I’m really not. I’m just trying to point to some of the larger cultural trends that routinely frustrate me here.

“Give me formula, feed me for a week; encourage me to breast-feed, feed me for…”

2009-05-05T20:30:00.005+02:00

Tuesday is the baby clinic day in Itipini. That means mothers (almost exclusively) bring their newborns into the clinic for immunizations and check-ups. As an enticement, we distribute baby food and infant formula. That way the mothers keep coming back every week and we can check on not only the health of their babies but also of the mothers themselves and their other children who might tag along. It should be pretty straightforward, if always verging on completely chaotic. Why then have I found myself dreading Tuesdays?

The main problem is the infant formula. The idea is to give formula only to children of HIV-positive mothers. Those mothers shouldn’t be breast-feeding because of the risk of transmitting the virus to their children. (And even then the South African health guidelines recommend exclusive breast-feeding for the first six months even for HIV-positive mothers for a variety of reasons I won’t discuss here.) That makes sense to me.

But there seems to be this view among a number of the young mothers that infant formula is better than breast-feeding, that somehow some powder concocted in some lab someplace could do better than what thousands of generations have survived on. Even if formula is equivalent to breast milk, there is still a tremendous cost associated with formula feeding in a place like Itipini. The water is more or less clean but the bottles aren’t always sterilized, for instance. What’s the point of preventing babies from getting HIV if they’re just going to die of diarrhoea?

But these young women are insistent on formula. I don’t quite know why. Perhaps they worry about how breast-feeding will make them look. Maybe they think that things you have to pay for (and formula is expensive!) are automatically better than things your body produces for free. And so they concoct some story - I have a wound on my breast, I’m not producing, etc., etc. - to explain why they’re not breast-feeding. It is particularly galling when I see them breast-feed as they are waiting in line to be seen and then sit down in front of me and begin to spin me a tale.

Today, for instance, a woman who gave birth less than a month ago, came in complaining she wasn’t producing any milk. She’s been breast-feeding and we’ve been giving her vitamins and a nutritional supplement. I checked to see that she had those. She did. I made to send her on her way but she protested, quite vigorously, in front of the entire clinic. “Nothing’s coming out! The baby is hungry!” and on and on and on. As she has a history of this sort of behaviour, I told her to wait outside a few minutes to calm down. Not thirty seconds later, I looked out the door and this is what I saw.
(Note that she's smiling!)

The question all this raises for me is the difference between the short term and the long term. Sure, I could have given that woman today formula to shut her up and get her out of my hair. It was a tempting thought. But breast milk works on a supply and demand model. If the baby needed more milk, the mother would eventually produce more. If I filled that demand gap with formula, the mother would not produce more and the child would end up in some mixed feeding purgatory. My seeming “help” in the short-term would actually exact a long-term cost on the health of the baby.

The difficulty is convincing the mothers that breast-feeding now will pay dividends in the future. Most people come into the clinic with an attitude of “I want my problems fixed right now.” Telling them that what they can do for themselves over time is better than what I can do for them now is a difficult message. Anyway, people here work on a different timeline than I’m used to. They’re thinking about getting through the next day or week not, primarily, the long-term health of their baby.

The obvious answer is education, teaching mothers about the importance of breast-feeding and its benefits. But that takes time and can be difficult to do in a meaningful way. Plus, how do you have an extended chat about the importance of breast-feeding with a young mother when there are scores of babies and mothers waiting in line behind her? The end result is that we end up giving more formula out than I believe we should and that always frustrates me.

The larger question of short-term versus long-term assistance continues to bedevil me. Everyone knows the “give me a fish, feed me for a day; teach me to fish, feed me for a lifetime” saying. The trouble is what to do before they’ve learned to fish on their own. Doesn’t on some level giving people fish reduce the will to learn to fish on their own?

When gaining weight is a good thing

2009-05-05T20:14:00.004+02:00

I first showed this picture about 11 months ago.
At the time, I was wondering why some people who are sick with HIV wait so long before seeking treatment, often dying before the anti-retrovirals can take effect. But this woman, named Nomanesi, had been very active in her own care and, on the day I took that previous picture, had just received her first ARVs.

I saw her in the clinic again today, a routine visit in which she came to get some vitamins we distribute to HIV-positive patients and a nutritional supplement. She had also just returned from the ARV clinic so I made her repeat last year’s picture.
I also checked her medical records. In the 11 months since she’s started ARVs, she’s gained 12-kilograms. That’s a substantial amount of weight and an undeniably good thing. She looks healthy, feels stronger, and generally has a better quality of life.

Also today this gentleman came into the clinic.
He tested positive for HIV about a year ago but hasn’t been in the clinic in more than six months. He’s long since run out of vitamins and the nutritional supplement. More importantly, he’s never had a CD4 count that would track the progression of the virus and determine when he can start ARV preparation. Today he was weak, gaunt, barely able to walk on his own, and had all the symptoms of tuberculosis. We drew blood for a CD4 count and gave him sputum pots to test for TB. I hope this time he doesn’t wait six months before returning to the clinic.

There's been too much text on this blog lately

2009-05-04T15:42:00.001+02:00

"Swine flu"

2009-05-03T21:22:00.001+02:00

Seems folks in the Western media have been consumed of late talking about this swine flu thing. I'd like to second everything my friend Heidi preached this morning.

Now, maybe later you can blame me for disregarding the first signs of a serious global pandemic. But I’m sorry, I think the media storm that is thundering all around us is ridiculous. Not only that, I think this is self-centered richer nations making a big deal out of something that pales in comparison to what poorer nations deal with on a DAILY basis.

Let’s talk about… sex!

2009-05-01T20:55:00.001+02:00

When I was a teaching assistant for an introduction to political science course in college and leading a discussion section on some of the challenges confronting Africa, I asked, “Why is HIV epidemic in parts of Africa but not Canada?” One student slouched in the back of the classroom raised his hand. “Because Africans have more sex?” (What he said was somewhat cruder actually.)

The inescapable fact about the HIV/AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa is that the primary means of transmission is heterosexual intercourse. That means any conversation about HIV is necessarily also a conversation about sex. Of course, it makes many people - including me, with my years of safe church training - uncomfortable to discuss sex and that impedes conversations about HIV.

I don’t know if I have special insight into the matter but I’ve been reading Edwin Cameron’s Witness to AIDS recently and he keeps discussing the complicated relationship between HIV, race, sex, and stigma in Africa and that sparked a few thoughts. Plus, people ask me about this quite often, it seems, so surely someone is interested somewhere.

One major question in explaining why HIV is epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa is whether or how it is related to different sexual practices or mores among Africans. This is what my erstwhile student was getting at and it is a very contentious issue. Helen Epstein’s book The Invisible Cure says Africans have sex differently than, say, Westerners and that explains the epidemic. Eileen Stillwaggon’s book AIDS and Ecology of Poverty says it is not a factor.

The people I have met in Itipini are not, I think, any more promiscuous than anyone else their age I’ve met in other places I’ve lived. I haven’t done an exhaustive survey of the sexual habits of everyone I’ve ever met everywhere I’ve ever lived but I think - based on what I see and hear and understand - that people in Itipini largely have one sexual partner at a time and that they are faithful to that person for an extended period of time.

What makes sex different in Itipini - and many parts of Africa - is that there is less privacy attached to it. This is for a very obvious reason. When a family of six, say, lives in a 10 foot by 10 foot shack with one or two beds jammed together, the older siblings are going to know exactly when and how their younger siblings were conceived.

I’ve asked some of my cultural interpreters in Itipini about this and they say this is just taken for granted. One told me that when she was growing up and living with her aunt temporarily, her aunt brought her boyfriend home and they started having sex in a bed just a foot or two away from where my friend - then 8 or 10 years old - was sleeping. My friend says she lit a match, looked over at the bed, and asked her aunt why she was crying and moaning. “As you can imagine,” my friend told me with a grin. “They were not very impressed with me.”

What I don’t have a good grasp on is how that firsthand knowledge of sex affects children as they grow up. I have seen young children striking sexually suggestive poses at times in Itipini, as if in imitation of their parents or older siblings, but I wonder if that’s a universal thing now, given the hyper-sexualization of western/global culture. I usually try to put a stop to it. But I wonder how many parents in Itipini do that. Children in Itipini are allowed to run freely from a shockingly young age. There are reasons that can be a good thing but it also means that there aren’t often parents around to put a stop to behaviour I would deem inappropriate. I saw two young boys, both three, the other day with their pants off peeing by the side of the road the other day. They both had conspiratorial grins on their faces that said they knew they were up to no good and were enjoying getting away with it. I told them to put their pants on but that was about all I had the vocabulary for.

And that’s a major problem. If I want to be relevant to the challenges facing people here, sex is obviously something I need to be able to talk about. But talking about sex in one’s own language is hard enough; in another language, it is enough to be paralyzing. For one thing, how do you figure out the right vocabulary, words that are neither distantly medical nor vulgar or rude? Then add in the gender overlay, that I am a young man talking primarily with young women about this, and then the power overlay, that I am educationally and economically more powerful than everyone I talk with, and it’s enough to make me just want to give up, which is what I mostly do.

Just one of those ongoing challenges in Itipini.

“Xa sibambisene singenza lukhulu”

2009-04-30T19:35:00.002+02:00

Things have been different these last few weeks in Itipini because Jenny is away, raising money and visiting family. That means Dorothy and I are left to hold down the fort and keep the clinic and general Project area functioning. So far, so good.

Each day, when I check to see how many patients we’ve seen, I’m surprised to see it’s above average. The days go quickly and relatively easily. Dorothy and I are like a smoothly-oiled machine, mowing through one sick patient after another after another.

It’s been a pleasant affirmation for me of how far I’ve come in my time in Itipini. I can actually do stuff now! I find myself marveling at how much Xhosa I understand and how easily it comes to me when I need it. I can handle fairly complex situations without it consuming my entire day. A patient has defaulted on TB treatment and wants to start again? There’s a post-ictal man on the stretcher outside the door? There’s a hysterical woman screaming and covered in blood? A TB patient can’t make it to the clinic for her daily injection? A young woman wants a pregnancy test? A patient needs to have her prescription for psychiatric medication refilled? All these patients are in the clinic at the same time? Check, check, check, check, check, check, and check! (The hysterical woman only had a bloody nose it turns out.) Meanwhile, I’m finding medical files, dispensing medication, counting pills, and keeping track of our supplies to ensure we don’t run out. I’m also continuing to deal with education and micro-credit-related issues.

That’s one interpretation of the situation. Another is that I am just barely hanging on. In Jenny’s absence, most of my job is simply maintaining current operations. That sort of routine maintenance should be pretty easy, right? It is anything but. The language barrier may be less now than it was but it is still significant. Working in a second language is exhausting! Patients are still demanding. I still struggle when I see the difficulty of the lives people here lead every day. I reach the end of the day and am ready to keel over.

But Dorothy and I carry on and still seem to finish each work day in good spirits. I’ve been telling her a lot lately, “xa sibambisene singenza lukhulu.” She laughs because it was the ANC’s campaign slogan. Loosely translated, it means “working together we can do more.” We’re doing fine now but we’ll be able to “do” more when Jenny gets back. Hurry!

A long, hard wait

2009-04-29T16:00:00.000+02:00

Here's another good election-related article about the Transkei region:

So what has changed for Bhonani and her family in five years?

"Nothing," says the old woman. Dressed for our visit in her Sunday best -- a too-big brown melton jacket and a peach dress -- Bhonani Mayixhale is emphatic. "They are just promising and promising." She voted ANC during the last election, but shrugs her shoulders when asked why. "The councillor said we must vote ANC."

“nguBold”

2009-04-27T21:56:00.002+02:00

There’s a Xhosa expression that is, alternately, “nguBold” or “nguDays.” They are rooted in the names of soap operas. Both mean, essentially, “it’s a long and complex story” and is used when you don’t want to or have time to tell someone all the details of a particular narrative.

I thought of that expression on Wednesday when I invited my friend Noxolo over for lunch. She is probably my closest friend in Itipini but it had been some time since we had had time to catch up with each other. Plus, I wanted to tell her I am leaving Mthatha in the not-too-distant future and didn’t want to do that in the midst of a busy day in Itipini.

Noxolo is a self-identified born-again Christian, who is devoted to her small church in Itipini. She once told me that she gets so tired and frustrated living in Itipini, mostly with its crime but also with the people and their pettiness. But she said she isn’t making plans to leave (even though she probably could pull it off) because she thinks the best thing to do is to live her life in Itipini as an example for everyone else to follow.

But I have never heard from her the story of how she became Christian - and left behind what she frequently describes as a dissolute lifestyle - and so before I broached the subject of my impending departure, I asked, simply, “How did you become a Christian?”

The floodgates opened. For the next 90 minutes or more, she sat and quietly told me her life story. I prodded her along at times but mostly it was just her talking and talking and talking. It is a remarkable story and my head was spinning by the time it was over. I don’t think life is reducible to individual experiences or moments but if the only thing I take away from two years in Itipini was Wednesday’s conversation with Noxolo, I think it alone might have justified the entire struggle of these past two years.

Here’s the thing: I’m not going to tell you what she told me. It’s not my story to share and besides, nguBold. It would take more space and time than I care to spend detailing all the nuances and details of a story that drew me in fully and completely.

I hope you’re not offended. I’ve told you a story about a story when the story itself is much better. (For those of you saying now, “But you’ve told us about other people in the past!” I want to note that in those posts I was primarily writing about my interaction with those people and not their backstories. Here, the story is all Noxolo and no me.) But I think my experience illustrates a couple of important things.

First, Noxolo’s story is not unique. I am sure there are many other similar stories among people in Itipini. I’m fortunate that Noxolo chose to share hers with me. A Xhosa-speaking Studs Terkel could do wonders in a place like Itipini.

That leads to a second point. This is not a story that Noxolo would have shared with me the day after I got off the plane. The time we shared together on Wednesday afternoon is the fruit of a relationship we have been building the last nearly two years. I’m fortunate that Noxolo is now comfortable enough to struggle with English around me. I notice she is unwilling to speak English with other, newer white people even though by the standards of Itipini her English is quite good and didn’t really hinder her story-telling. With most people in Itipini, I probably don’t have enough vocabulary in common to hear their stories the way they deserve to be heard.

The third point is that as I spend more time here I became aware of all the many complexities influencing lives in Itipini. That is paralyzing and it has been making it really hard to write for this blog lately. It reminds me of The Dude’s line in “The Big Lebowski”: "This is a very complicated case, Maude. You know, a lotta ins, a lotta outs, a lotta what-have-yous. And, uh, lotta strands to keep in my head, man. Lotta strands in old Duder's head."

By the time it came for me to tell her I was leaving, it all seemed kind of anti-climatic. And she heartily approved of my post-Mthatha plans, which eased the potential pain of the moment.

It's all over

2009-04-26T14:34:00.004+02:00

The results from the South African election are official. Here's an article that caught my eye. It captures the class dynamic I saw at work in the election.

Jacob Zuma and the ANC ran a brilliant campaign that successfully framed the 2009 election as a face-off between well-off blacks and whites on the one hand and the poor black majority on the other -- rather than on an examination of the government's record in power.

Zuma was voted in by the majority of poor black South Africans, for whom little has changed since 1994. To win elections in South Africa the support of the black poor and working class in townships, rural areas and informal settlements, more than 60% of the population, is crucial.

There's also this piece, which addresses an issue no American president-elect, for instance, has ever had:

The voters appear to have made their choice abundantly clear in South Africa's election. Now the president-in-waiting, Jacob Zuma, must make a delicate diplomatic choice of his own: which of his wives will be the country's first lady?

Reports conflict on how many times Zuma (67) a Zulu traditionalist and unabashed polygamist, has married over the years. His first wife is Sizakele Khumalo, whom he has known for 50 years and married in 1973.

He wed Ntuli last year, and reportedly was married again in January to Thobeka Mabhija, a Durban socialite with whom he is said to have two children.

“Give me money - that’s what I want”

2009-04-22T21:54:00.002+02:00

I’ve noted before that I’ve received a number of e-mails in response to my two previous posts about the proposed change in the church canons of the term “missionary” to “mission partner.” A common theme in those e-mails goes something like this - “I don’t care what we’re called so long as they don’t cut off our funding.”

That’s a legitimate concern. The Episcopal Church - based on the news reports I read - is facing a financial picture that could be described as bleak. General Convention this summer will no doubt be asked to approve a budget that has substantially less revenue than anyone would like.

But already the mission program has felt the impact of budget cutbacks. The Church Center has apparently already made the decision to stop sending new non-YASC missionaries. There haven’t been any regional retreats for missionaries in several years. There’s ongoing discussion about how to fund a pension for lay missionaries.

So again, concerns about funding are legitimate and deserve to be treated seriously.

However, what I reject is the idea that the quest for more funding is divorced somehow from how missionaries talk about themselves. Indeed, thinking about funding without thinking about how we talk about ourselves amounts to putting the cart before the horse. The former is a fruit of the latter.

I say this based on my own experience as a missionary. I almost decided not to join YASC because I was worried about raising the necessary $10,000. I’m glad I overcame that hesitation because raising the money proved to be far easier than I ever imagined. I sat down, thought about why I wanted to be a missionary, how to communicate that idea in the best way, and then wrote letter after letter telling different versions of the same story: I wanted to be a missionary to experience the Gospel overseas, learn from my brothers and sisters in Christ around the world, and attempt to share my gifts in a new setting.

When I opted to return for a second year, it was much the same. I sat down and thought about what I had experienced and learned and how best to relate that. In my travels last September to different churches, I told a series of similar stories that communicated, I hoped, the same message: mission is about reconciliation but before reconciliation comes a process of reification and relationship-building. I again had less trouble than I imagined raising money for my personal support and, this time, for African Medical Mission.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently because Jenny is in the U.S. right now raising money for AMM. I don’t think she’ll mind if I say that before she left she was nervous about the trip. I tried to reassure her with one piece of advice: just tell the truth. What you do every day, even if it is commonplace to you, is important and profound and unusual to the people you’ll meet. Together, we reflected on the cast of characters we encounter and identified a couple individuals whose stories best exemplify the work of AMM. I have no doubt that she is doing superbly on this trip.

As I see it, the thought process goes like this. We figure out who we are, what we’re doing, and why we’re doing it and then we figure out how to communicate that in the best possible way. Funding will be one fruit that flows from this process. And, as I’ve noted, language is a first-order commitment for me; our descriptions shape our reality. So by using the phrase “mission partner” - an anodyne, legalistic, and constricting phrase, lacking in any euphony - we rob ourselves of some of that important self-definition and hinder our ability to communicate and thus secure funding.

If missionaries did have more funding, I would dearly love to see retreats reinstated. I think many missionaries know deeply and intrinsically who they are, what they do, and why they do it. I know Jenny does. But fewer missionaries can communicate those deep truths as well as they need to be. In my relatively brief time here, I’ve noted how the unusual and outrageous quickly becomes commonplace and it becomes difficult to find new ways to tell what is essentially the same story. Or you conclude that the story isn’t worth telling anymore, even though it clearly is. If that’s happened to me in two years, imagine what it must be like for a missionary who has been overseas for decades. I think retreats would be a great forum to help missionaries reflect on their experience and encourage them to share it in new ways.

I’ve been told many times what a “great” missionary I am and how valuable my blog is. Thanks. But I’ve been fortunate to meet and see “in action” a half dozen or so Episcopal missionaries around Africa. Their experiences are all different than mine but no less fascinating, important, or valuable. If all of us could tell our stories in the way they deserve to be told, I’m convinced I’d be receiving fewer e-mails noting our lack of funding.

Election Day

2009-04-22T21:49:00.001+02:00

It was Election Day today in South Africa. That meant a day off work for me. What a great idea!

Driving around, I felt simultaneously excluded from a process I couldn’t take part in and swelled with pride at the sight of so many South Africans making democracy work. I saw some pictures of long lines in news reports but all the polling stations I passed were less busy, which I take as a sign of increased efficiency. (Or it could be I slept in and so missed the morning rush.) Let’s face it: after the ’94 election, it’s impossible for Western media to write a story about a South African election without putting in a picture of a long line somewhere. I don’t know how representative those pictures are.

Many of the people - in fact, virtually all of them - who had told me at some point in the last six months that they weren’t going to vote evidently changed their minds and voted today. That surprised me and impressed me. Unlike in the U.S., where people talk about their vote all the time, there is a strong social norm not to disclose who you voted for. And you definitely don’t ask, as I found out the hard way.

Towards the end of the day, I stopped at the ANC election headquarters in Mthatha. There were a lot of supremely confident folk sitting around, basking in the glow of an anticipated victory. I asked for - and received - a t-shirt to commemorate the moment. And I took the opportunity to remind them about Itipini and told them not to forget its existence. (Though in the mental fog of Xhosa, I neglected the negative and so ended up reminding them to forget Itipini.) I am sure that virtually all the people in Itipini I know voted for the ANC. It’d be nice if they saw something for that.

The talk among most white people and middle-class Africans I know in South Africa has been largely anti-ANC, particularly anti-Zuma. I’ve heard repeated sighs of, “How are we possibly going to elect him when he is such a flawed candidate?”

Briefly, I disagree. I’m no great fan of Jacob Zuma, think he’s said and done some dumb things in the past, and think the ANC has many other capable people who are not, unfortunately, in positions of leadership. Regardless, it’s a mistake to think that one election will change the course of history. I don’t fear that Zuma will pull this country (any further) off the rails. Elections are just one part of the overall fabric of democracy and we make a mistake when we invest them with so much significance.

What I’m hopeful will happen in this election is that the ANC will be held below the two-thirds super-majority it currently enjoys and that the results will further encourage the formation of the kind of credible opposition this country needs. That will amount to an encouraging - and realistically achievable - consolidation of South African democracy in this election.

The Hebrews wandered 40 years in the wilderness before reaching the promised land. This election only marks 15 years for South Africa. But the results can move the country closer to that promised land and I hope they do.

Moving (Back) Day

2009-04-20T21:36:00.002+02:00

I’ve written before about Nolizwi, one of the students in my after-school English class. To re-cap briefly, her mother is quite sick with AIDS in a rural village and she moved to Mthatha in January to live with extended family and go to school. The extended family lives in Itipini and that is how our paths crossed. She is a bright and curious young woman. If she just had the opportunity to apply herself to school, she’d do great, I’m convinced.

But she had trouble with the extended family, moved in with some even more distant family, was robbed because she had a longer walk to school, and broke her arm, among much else. She asked for help and we eventually set up a situation where she could live with the children of one of our pre-school teachers. About two months ago, I helped her move there.

The new situation was not ideal from the get-go. There are about seven people living in the house and all younger than me. The pre-school teacher lives in Itipini but the house is in a government housing project, called Zimbane, some distance away. So there really isn’t any adult supervision by our standards but this kind of arrangement is fairly common.

Beyond that, Nolizwi had been informing me about how difficult it was to live with these people and how difficult they made her life. They always wanted her to provide her own food, for instance, even though that was explicitly not the carefully-crafted arrangement we had agreed upon. It was difficult for me to know what to do. Obviously, I could have helped her buy food or stepped in and “solved” some of the problems and once or twice I did that. But a) that kind of thing isn’t sustainable especially if I’m leaving in a few months and b) I didn’t want Nolizwi’s housemates to think I would always be there to bail them out. The whole arrangement had to work without my continual intervention. The trouble is that since my intervention brought the arrangement into existence, everyone had come to depend on it. I had several difficult conversations with Nolizwi in which she said, basically, “I’m hungry” and I said, essentially, “Sorry, but you need to work this out without me.” That wasn’t easy.

I saw Nolizwi for the first time in a few weeks on Thursday. I had been away and then school had been on its Easter break. I asked how she was. She handed me this letter, which I reproduce verbatim here.

Dear Jessy

There is nothing more that I want to tell you the place you gave me I’m no longer living in it because of the behavior of the people I was living with. I thought I must live at Corana [with the very distant relation that requires a long walk to school] for a while just to relieve some stress they cause during the holiday. Now I find it hard to go back there because of the way they make me feel. I feel it is over my dead body even you cannot solve it because they are critticising and discriminating me.

When you gave me food that I must go and prepare it for myself they ask me if there it is going to cook itself or I will eat it raw because you give me no paraffin. I didn’t bother by answering them but they kept on bulling me even wearing my clothes and my school clothes and even the blanket you gave me is their mat. Nontombi uses it as her babies blanket when I am at school and I find it hard to use it at nights because of the smell of a babies feceases.

When I think about the situation they are putting me trough they break my heart and make me think about where I came from. Even though they bully me I can have a place to live and my soul rest because at Corana I am not bullied and they care about me and my education.

When I go to school in the morning I use my legs to walk all the way to school [a 5-km walk; she leaves at 6am when it is quite cold and dark] and when I come back I borrow R5 [for a taxi so she won’t get robbed again] from anybody whom I find that day and go back to Corana because my fear is to go back to Zimbane Valley and these people they bully me again.

This situation is hard you will also find it hard to solve it too but I hope that you will find a plan to solve it for mi because I am desparette and I’m sure that I can not learn anything good while I still leave with them.

The things that happen in these last months makes me think nothing good about my life. Its not my intentions to leave school before time because there’s nobody at home who is educated and I want to be a good example but according to the situation I think I will drop out of school. And the fact them abusing me is also adding to the stress of my mother lying in a bed useless and has nothing to do for her children.

WHAT CAN I DO PLEASE HELP MI

Not exactly the kind of pick-me-up I was looking for on a Thursday afternoon to make me feel good about myself and my efforts. (I was pleasantly surprised at how good the English is.)

I told her she absolutely should not drop out of school and that she needed to keep devoting her energies to that. And I told her that Corana seemed like the best place for her right now and she should keep living there. On Friday, we went to Zimbane, picked up her things, and drove back to Corana, the same place I’d helped her move from two months ago. (I’ll have more to say about our arrival in Corana in another post. It wasn’t exactly warm.)

We were literally right back where we started. All my energy and effort these last few months has amounted to nothing except heartache and trouble for Nolizwi. It’s a clear example of how one’s best efforts and intentions to help - when mediated through cultural and language barriers - can actually end up doing more harm than good. It’s an example of how misplaced people’s expectations are when they expect me to solve their problems for them. I can’t do it. And it’s not my job! I’ve found myself asking if Nolizwi wouldn’t have been better off if I had just stayed out of her life altogether.

Ultimately, I’ve taken comfort from the idea that the relationship Nolizwi and I have is of some intrinsic value. It certainly is to me. I hope it is to her. The situation then becomes an example of the folly of measuring ourselves by our results. We don’t have any control over those!

And yet… the results of my actions in this situation - however unintended they may have been - clearly did some serious damage to Nolizwi’s emotional health and I can’t help but feel responsible for that somehow. The intrinsic value of the relationship pales in comparison to the emotions expressed in this letter.

People here look at me as a problem-solver. I wish they wouldn’t. It’s completely unjustified because I haven’t solved any problems. But there becomes this temptation, and it’s a sinful one I think because it puts you at the centre of things, and you say, “Hey, if they’re looking to me for this maybe I can do it” and you give it a shot. And then you get a letter like this one.

Really, the better option is to turn it back on them and say, “Where is grace in this situation? How can it help you help yourself in this situation?” But that takes time and more energy and effort. And what would Nolizwi have done for herself when she showed up in February in tears, recently robbed and with no place to live?

Hitting the big time

2009-04-20T21:31:00.003+02:00

Time Magazine made it to Mthatha! I swear, it is not as bad as this makes it out to be.

Which makes it all the stranger that the ANC has done so little to improve the region. Today much of the Eastern Cape is still typified by mud-walled, grass-roofed huts without running water, where boys ride horses, girls carry babies on their backs and families subsist on cattle, sheep, goats, chickens and maize. A new power grid has reached most homes — but supply is erratic. Most roads remain unpaved. In Mthatha, 74% of the population earns less than $150 a month and 43% are unemployed, according to a June 2008 report by the South African Medical Journal. In 2007, East London's Daily Dispatch newspaper revealed that poor maternity care at the city's Frere Hospital was resulting in around 200 stillborn babies every year — and that the corpses were being buried in mass paupers' graves. A tour of Mthatha General Hospital suggests conditions as grim: paint peels from rotten ceilings, the floors are filthy and in the casualty department, an old woman lies slumped in her wheelchair in a lake of urine.

Then there is the violence. Parents in Mthatha don't let their children walk to school for fear of robbery, or worse. The South African Medical Journal noted Mthatha's murder rate was 133 per 100,000 in 2005, twice as high as that in Colombia, and nearly three times the South African average. Walls and streetlights in the town's main drag, Nelson Mandela Drive, are plastered with posters offering "Safe Abortion, Same Day," "Quick and Safe Abortion, 3 Hours," even a free lottery ticket with every "100% guarantee, 2-hour" procedure. Nobu Sipoka, director of the Mthatha Child Abuse Resource Center, says there is no precise data on the incidence of child rape, but says she founded the center because anecdotal evidence from doctors suggested it was unusually high. "It's symptomatic of the unemployment and the poverty," she says. "This is not a happy town." An hour away in the village of Mvezo, where Mandela was born 90 years ago into a small gathering of huts on a narrow, windswept spur, the Mandelas' immediate neighbors are outspoken about their disillusionment with the ANC. "My life was better during apartheid," says Vincent Ntswayi, 53, who held a steady job in Johannesburg during white rule but has only been intermittently employed since. "Freedom turned out to be just a word. Real freedom, real power, that comes from money — and I haven't got any money."

I was driving through town today behind a convoy of trucks bearing "Vote ANC" signs. Most people were wildly cheering as it drove past. I'm not sure how many people like Mr. Ntswayi are out there.

The article also fails to note that Mandela very publicly endorsed Zuma.

Curtain Raiser on the Election

2009-04-20T19:30:00.002+02:00

The Economist puts Jacob Zuma on its cover and raises the curtain on Wednesday's election:

WITHIN weeks, Jacob Zuma is set to become the most powerful man in Africa, a continent of a billion souls that is still the poorest and, despite recent improvements, the worst governed on the planet.... As the party’s candidate, Mr Zuma is unquestionably Africa’s next “Big Man”. But it is a phrase that goes to the heart of the continent’s troubles. Too many African countries have been ruined by political chiefs for whom government is the accumulation of personal power and the dispensation of favours.

He is undoubtedly a man of remarkable qualities. In contrast to his dour predecessor, Thabo Mbeki, Mr Zuma can charm the birds out of the trees. Unlike the racially twitchy Mr Mbeki, he feels good in his skin, happy to acknowledge, even celebrate, his modest background.
But his flaws are just as patent. He has been entangled for years in a thicket of embarrassing legal cases from which he has only recently been extricated—on a technicality. His financial adviser was sentenced to 15 years in prison for soliciting bribes for Mr Zuma. He has also been tried, and acquitted, on a rape charge. At the least, he has sailed perilously close to the wind. To put the kindest interpretation on his financial dealings, he has been naive and sloppy, not the best qualities for looking after Africa’s biggest economy. During his trial for the rape of an HIV-infected family friend, at the height of the AIDS plague in a country which has the world’s highest recorded rate of rapes, he showed gross chauvinism and staggering ignorance, notoriously explaining that after having sex he had showered to stave off the disease. He is an illiberal populist, sneering at gays and hinting at bringing back the death penalty.

There's a longer article about South Africa as well.

The election is Wednesday. It's a holiday and I'm intrigued to see what it will bring. As I've noted before, I'll especially be watching the turnout.

An Ethiopian Excursion

2009-04-18T16:55:00.012+02:00

After Djibouti, I headed for Ethiopia, a country that is like no other in Africa or, I imagine, the world.

Ethiopia has a unique history in Africa - it was never colonized and actually defeated the Italians in the late 19th century. They use a unique language (Amharic) that has its own alphabet. They use a different calendar and keep time differently (that was endlessly confusing). Unlike the rest of Africa, they have an indigenous Christian church, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, that traces its lineage to the fourth century. They also have (or had) indigenous Jews, a remnant, they believe, of the Queen of Sheba’s visit to King Solomon. And the people themselves look different than many other sub-Saharan Africans. It’s hard to describe how but many women, for instance, have straight hair and everyone has higher and more-pronounced cheekbones than I’m used to seeing in South Africa.
All this difference adds up to a unique people who take great pride in their heritage: they’re different, they know it, and they’re proud of it. In my brief experience in the country, I’d say Ethiopians are more nationally solipsistic than any other Africans. Naturally, as an American, I fit right in!

While they are indeed different, that doesn’t obscure the fact that the country is quite poor. The back of the 10-birr note has a picture of a tractor plowing a field on it. I did not see a single tractor in my entire time in the country. I did see many oxen-pulled plows, however, plowing up huge tracts of land in the rural parts of the country in preparation for the rainy season. There are so many beggars on the streets of Addis Ababa and many of them are profoundly crippled, with appendages bent in unnatural directions. Several times, I passed distributions of food aid, primarily from the U.S. government. Paul Theroux, in his book Dark-Star Safari, likens Ethiopians to “a family of aristocrats who’ve pawned the family silver.”

In transit between Djibouti and points in northern Ethiopia, I ended up with three nights in Addis Ababa. It is a gigantic city. I know this because I’m thrifty and walked most everywhere, including to and from the airport a few times. There are fancy hotels, like the Sheraton, overlooking sprawling slums. All the road signs are misspelled (including, incredibly, “Hale Silasie Drive”) because the Chines re-did them several years ago. I tried several times to see a movie in one of the theatres but I kept getting stymied by the different time-keeping methods Ethiopians use. Their 10 o’clock is not my 10 o’clock.

I visited Holy Trinity Cathedral, one of the holiest sites of the Orthodox faith. It is also where Haile Selassie is buried in a gigantic tomb. Selassie has clearly been rehabilitated in the eyes of Ethiopians and he is in several paintings in the cathedral, including one that shows him making his famous (to Ethiopians) plea to the League of Nations when the Italians were threatening the country.I also visited a museum in Selassie’s old palace. The museum had some interesting exhibits on the many fascinating aspects cultures in Ethiopia but what I liked best was you could see the Emperor’s bedroom and bathroom.
But my main destination was northern Ethiopia. There are a tremendous number of world-class historical-tourist destinations there and spending a week among them is liking reading the first chapter of “War and Peace.” It barely hints at the entirety and leaves you wanting more. But a week is all I had. I saw this trip as a down payment on a return visit.

I went first to Bahir Dar, a good-sized town on the south edge of Lake Tana, the source of the Blue Nile. (In Uganda, I went to Lake Victoria, the source of the White Nile.) It is a huge lake and on many of the islands in the lake are monasteries, still active and hundreds of years old. I couldn’t find anyone with whom to share a full-day journey on the lake so I only spent the morning on the lake, visiting three monasteries. They are remarkable places - old churches with beautiful paintings, libraries with ancient translations of the Bible, simple living quarters of mud and sticks, prayer caves half-way up cliff faces.
I went out in a 15-foot motorboat but locals ply the lake in small craft made of papyrus. That’s the stuff that is used to make paper. Used another way, I guess, it’s watertight.
That afternoon, I rented a bike and rode along the Blue Nile to Haile Selassie’s old palace. It is through beautiful countryside, agrarian and obviously poor. The road was once paved - the only paved road in the area, I am sure - but is now cracked and returning to dirt. There are more horses and donkeys on the road than cars. The palace is not open to visitors but the view from the hill over the river and Bahir Dar is great. It was easy to imagine Selassie being driven to his life of luxury in the palace while his people toiled and starved around him.
What do you think American tax dollars are being spent on in this sign?

I also spent some time in Bahir Dar’s market. It is much like markets all over Africa, I am sure. What is fascinating is spending time in the clothing section. All the clothes we donate in the rich world get packed up and re-sold in places like Bahir Dar. As a result, you can find all kinds of brand-name clothing for pretty cheap. And you see Ethiopians wearing random t-shirts, like “Marist Cheerleading” or “Smith Family Reunion 2003.”
From Bahir Dar, I flew to Lalibela, truly a wonder of the world. In the 11th and 12th centuries, the Zagwe dynasty built 11 churches out of stone. When I say “built,” I should really say carved. The kings looked at a cliff face, I imagine, and said, “Let’s make a church.” And they did. The workers set to it, carved away the excess rock, and left behind these churches that are hewn completely from stone. The craftsmanship is remarkable. What’s even more remarkable is that the churches are still in use.
I went through the churches with a tour guide and then on my own. The most memorable part is a 50-meter or so tunnel through a cliff that connects one church to another. It didn’t matter if my eyes were opened or closed as it was pitch black. The guide encouraged me to turn off my head lamp and, guided by his voice and hand, I made my way through, thinking of all the people over the centuries who’d been through this passage before me. (In several places, especially on the stairs leading into the churches, the stone is worn smooth and slippery from centuries of use.) I have never been so relieved to see the literal light at the end of the tunnel.
There are priests in each of the churches, prepared to show you some of the artefacts they have there, mostly finely-worked crosses. They’re happy to let you take their picture but they put on their sunglasses first to guard against the flash.
If the Lalibela churches were in the U.S., they’d be roped off, with cautionary signs and railings everywhere. As Lalibela is still developing as a destination and the churches are still used, there is none of that. It was fun, then, to roam freely around the rocks and churches, peeking into caves where monks once lived and finding out where various passageways lead. It reminded me of what Tolkien’s Moria might have been like or Aragon’s journey through the mountains. Apparently, some people still live there; wandering off the usual guided route, I came across a woman sleeping in one of the hideaways. She was not happy to see me.
We may be nearly a millennium removed from the construction of the churches but the way of life in the area is still largely similar to what it was when the churches were built: rural, agrarian, feudal, and poor. It strikes you as soon as you drive out of the Lalibela airport. The homes are made of sticks and stones and mud and straw, making the rondavels I know in South Africa seem like mansions and reminding me very strongly of how Rohan was portrayed in “The Lord of the Rings” movies. I was there on a Saturday, which is market day. Because Lalibela is on a mountain, you can see people streaming into the market from all the surrounding villages.Coming home from the market with her purchase.

I took a morning trip out to Yemrehanna Kristos, one of many churches scattered around the area that surrounds Lalibela. This one is built into a cave, high on a mountain, and is made of wood and marble. How’d they get the marble there, when there is no obvious source nearby and it’s up a steep mountain? I asked my guide and he said it came from Jerusalem on clouds. Works for me. At some point, you’ve got to start believing in miracles to come to grips with what you see in Ethiopia. As it was Sunday morning, church had just let out and people milled around outside in an Ethiopian version of Coffee Hour.
In the back of the cave, there are thousands of skeletons, just thrown helter-skelter. People just wanted to die there, I guess, and the priests granted their wish. There are skulls everywhere, some partially hidden so you keep stubbing your toe on them. Some of the faces have fascinating expressions on them.
From Lalibela, I went to Axum. I hadn’t intended to stop here but that’s how the flights worked out and I was glad they did. Axum was the capital of an ancient empire that spanned the Red Sea and was known to Rome and Greece. As a tourist destination, it’s now known as the final resting place of the Ark of the Covenant (if you believe Graham Hancock’s “The Sign and the Seal”) and for the tombs and obelisks left behind by the Axumites. (And no, I didn’t see the Ark.)

I didn’t have much time but I made the most of it. The obelisks are stunning. They are carved granite, taken from a quarry a few kilometers from town, somehow transported to town, and then erected… all more than 15 centuries ago. There are several that are beautifully carved and quite tall. Others are smaller and plainer. The biggest one collapsed, likely when it was being erected, split into several pieces and crushed the tomb it fell on. That, it is theorized, was the end of that.
The obelisks are in all the tourist pictures of Axum but what I really liked was the old tombs, scattered all over town. They’ve all long since been raided but the craftsmanship is quite impressive. And they are located right in the middle of ongoing life. To find one - it dated to the time of Jesus - I had to walk down a side street in a residential neighbourhood. After exploring the tomb, I looked around for a few more burial sites the tour book said were nearby. I found them and then saw a similar-looking rock structure 10 feet away. I poked my head over it only to find it was someone’s cooking area, clearly still in use. On my way back to the main road, I played soccer for a little while with some of the neighbourhood children.
Jesse Zink, tomb raider.

I again rented a bike and rode out through Axum towards the old quarry. It is hard to believe Axum was once the capital of a mighty empire. Now it is just a big, sprawling, city with very few paved roads. I saw a donkey and camel talking to each other.
I also checked out the Ethiopian Rosetta Stone. It’s a big - bigger than Rosetta - and carved in Greek and Ge’ez, Amharic’s predecessor. Apparently, the stone curses anyone who tries to move it so the Ethiopians have sensibly left it where it is and built a stone hut around it. The Rosetta Stone is guarded by the full resources of the British Museum. This stone is guarded by this guy.
I spent a lot of time thinking about the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Because Ethiopians believe the Queen of Sheba was one of them and they share in a Solomonic inheritance, there is interesting Jewish iconography in some of the churches, like a random Star of David occasionally with a cross in the middle.
I had several tour guides at various points but I don’t think I ever heard a single one say “Jesus.” Instead, it was “God died on the cross,” “Mary gave birth to God,” etc. One repeated painting I saw depicted the Trinity as three identical old men. That didn’t seem very helpful to me.
I think there are also elements of Islam in the faith, though I bet they'd deny it. All the churches face east and the body language of people at prayer was reminiscent, though not identical, to Islamic forms of prayer.

It also has many characteristics of a pre-Reformation, pre-Vatican II church. The liturgy is conducted in Ge’ez, a dead language. The bread and wine are consecrated in a separate location (appropriately called Bethlehem, literally “House of Bread”) and then brought back to the church for distribution. The priests are obviously a separate class (and they have to be married to be priests). There’s a separate area in each church called the Holy of Holies that only priests can enter. People approach priests to kiss their cross and be lightly tapped on the forehead with it. In one airport, an obviously high-ranking priest walked into the departure area and virtually everyone in the lounge stood up and made their way to him to be blessed. He looked obviously disinterested.
It is also an established church in that I understand church and state are closely intertwined. I found myself wondering to what extent a church like this can exist only with an uneducated and poor population and thus to what extent the church is complicit in the continued poverty and under-development of Ethiopia.

Ethiopian food is quite good. If you’ve tried it, you’ll know that its major component is injera, a sort-of bread that you tear into pieces and use to scoop up the rest of the food. I say “sort-of bread” because it reminded me more of a cross between a pancake and a sponge and tasted about that way too. I was never quite sure what I was ordering because English is not widely spoken by waitresses, it seems, but it was always good. I could never finish all the injera that I was given, which turned out to be fortuitous as I always finished my meals with messy hands and had plenty of injera left to wipe them on. Its spongy nature cleaned my hands just great.
It’s possible to have too much of a good thing and I eventually had to start looking for meals that didn’t include injera. They were tough to find.

Ethiopia is a very inexpensive country, especially compared to Djibouti. I’m used to bargaining but I occasionally felt bad doing so because the initial price was so low. When I rented a bike in Bahir Dar, the first price he offered was less than 50-cents an hour. It’s hard to argue with that. (On the other hand, some people try to take you for all you’re worth. The guy I rented the bike from in Axum quoted me a price of 55-birr for five hours. I offered 20. He said, “If you want to bargain, I say 55, you say 50.” That didn’t seem like such a good way to me.)

Given the world-class historical sites in the country, the tourist infrastructure is, shall we say, still developing. You can either stay in expensive, ritzy places or down-at-the-heel hotels. Guess which I choose? But given all that I had been lead to believe about the quality of accommodation in the country, I was favourably impressed. Sure, most didn’t have hot water or toilet seats or shower curtains or any of the finer (or necessary) things we associate with hotels but they were clean and safe and cheap.

Ethiopia has trended notably authoritarian in recent years and there are lots of security people with big guns on the street. You have to go through security to get into the airport and then again to get on the plane. They are always checking your passport in the airport. It is also (relatedly) quite a closed society. Uniquely, in my African travels, the country did not have a single ATM capable of taking my debit card. (Visa is not everywhere I wanted to be.)

Obama is very popular in Ethiopia. In fact, he’s probably on more shirts than Bob Marley and Selassie combined. (Sometimes the picture is not of him so much as it is a random black guy who looks vaguely Obama-ish.) They may love him but they won’t go so far as to credit him for his work. You can still get an obviously pirated copy of his books on the street for cheap. They’ve been photocopied and rebound.
Speaking of reading, I had several flights and Ethiopian Airlines makes you get to the airport two hours early so I had plenty of time to read and rapidly made it through what I’d brought with me. To my surprise, there were actually quite a lot of books for sale in Addis. Most were in Amharic but I found several interesting English ones. Even then, however, by my final flight out of Axum, I had absolutely nothing to read and amused myself in the departure lounge reading every word in my passport twice. It was the most horrendous waiting experience I’ve ever endured.

Everything I’ve ever read about Ethiopia mentally prepared me to get the worst gastro-intestinal infection ever. Knock on wood, I’m fine!

I’ve posted more pictures to Facebook, which you can view - even if you’re not on Facebook - by clicking on this link.

Whadja djo in Djibouti, Djesse?

2009-04-14T15:08:00.006+02:00

My recent travels took me first to Djibouti and then to Ethiopia. Unlike previous posts about my travels - to Uganda and Lesotho - where I’ve written a day-by-day account, I’m just going to note some of the highlights and post pictures. This post is about Djibouti; I’ll discuss Ethiopia in a subsequent one.

The impetus for the trip was a visit to a high-school friend. This trip has been in the works for a long time and I had initially planned on only visiting them. But my friend insisted that if I was going to be so close to Ethiopia, I also had to work in a visit to a few of its many remarkable sights. Plus, Djibouti is a small place without too many tourist destinations.

We spent the first three days exploring the countryside outside Djibouti City. We went to a couple beaches where I got to snorkel over some neat coral reefs, marvel at the fish, and get a modest sunburn on my back. We also visited Lac Assal, (one of) the lowest point(s) in Africa and a lake saltier than the Dead Sea. I went swimming and floated across the top of the water. As I did, an Afar nomad, as his people have for generations, approached with his camel and began to mine the salt by hand to be loaded onto his camel and traded in distant parts.
The reason Lac Assal is so low is that this marks the place where two tectonic plates are pulling apart. As a result, there’s also a lot of volcanic activity and we explored a volcano and the neat lava tubes.

I also stood on the crack (maybe) where the Arabian and African plates meet and tried to cause an earthquake by pulling them further apart. It didn’t work.
The Djiboutian countryside is remarkable. It’s desert but not in the sandy sort of sense that I’ve always understood that word. It’s harsh, dry, rocky, and forbidding. I was reminded of my previous experience in a harsh climate, in western Alaska. But in Alaska, I felt like I understood the internal logic of Alaska native life. I had much less time in Djibouti but I had no clue as to the internal logic of Somali and Afar nomadic life by the time I left.
My friend eventually had to go back to work so I had two days to explore Djibouti City, where two-thirds (more or less) of Djiboutians live. This was an opportunity for me to try out my French and wilt in the heat. The city is a pleasant place with a sort of faded, shabby French charm. Je parle francais bien… kind of. I managed to order some food in cafes and buy stamps for post cards but otherwise Xhosa kept popping into my head before French did and I had to keep shoving it down.
The rhythm of life in Djibouti is distinct. Business and social life is hopping throughout the morning. Around noon or one, however, the khat shows up and life shuts down for the afternoon. Khat (also spelled qat in Somalia) is a narcotic that is legal in the Horn of Africa region but illegal in the U.S. It has to be consumed shortly after harvest so it is cut each morning in Ethiopia and exported post-haste to Djibouti, arriving mid-day and making a mockery of the idea that Africa’s lack of infrastructure impedes trade. When there’s a market (and inelastic demand), the product gets through! It is impossible to describe how different the rhythm is in the morning - pleasantly chaotic - and the afternoon - lethargic. You just see men sitting in the shade with their piles of leaves in front of them, blissfully chewing away.
Djibouti also heavily subsidizes the price of bread. Between that and the khat, I was reminded of the “bread and circuses” of ancient Rome or the soma of “Brave New World.”

I bought some postcards from a guy with one leg on crutches in the street. It was confusing because I was bargaining in French and he kept trying to get me to buy more than I wanted. In the confusion, I walked away with the postcards but forgot to pay him. As I walked away, he started shouting after me and I was convinced he was trying to make a scene to get me to pay twice. So I sped up, convinced I could casually stroll and still outwalk a one-legged man. Well, he could motor on those crutches and he could also shout pretty loudly - “monsieur! monsieur!” - so we began to attract a crowd. That made me pause, think for a moment, and realize I was still holding in my hand the money I had meant to give him. I turned around, smiled, and gave it to him and our small crowd dispersed. I can’t imagine I gave white tourists a very good name that day, however.

Djibouti is just a short boat ride away from Yemen and we went out to a Yemeni restaurant one night and had some great fish, cooked on the side of a clay oven. Like all good food, it’s eaten with your hands.

Djibouti was the first Muslim-majority country I’ve ever visited. Flying in the first night, I thought to myself, “Look at all those church steeples!” Then I realized they were minarets. I was only woken up by the call to prayer one time. Djiboutian women seemed to run the gamut in terms of dress, from a loose shawl over the head to a full veiling, though I only saw a few of the latter. Oddly, I thought, for a Muslim country, in the market there were numerous stalls that seemed to be devoted solely to selling women’s underwear on full display for all to see.

I borrowed a bike and rode out of town a ways. There are camels everywhere with appropriate road signs.
I rode past homes that looked no better than what I am familiar with in Itipini. But at least in Itipini there’s a little greenery. Here, it was just desolate and barren-seeming. Oddly, for a country where it hardly ever rains, it rained on my bike ride and I got spattered with mud.
Djibouti is a major port and, given the ongoing testiness in Ethiopia and Eritrea's relationship, the only port for getting goods to Ethiopia. There’s a road between Djibouti and Addis Ababa and it is constantly plied by a never-ending stream of trucks. It takes about three to five days for the trip, depending on whether or not the truck breaks down. There’s also an old railway line connecting Addis and Djibouti and that would be the most sensible way to transport the goods except that a) it needs a lot of repair and the two countries can’t agree on how to pay for it and b) the truckers’ union is politically powerful in Ethiopia (all the drivers are Ethiopian) and stops any discussion of switching to rail. Most of the trucks aren’t big enough to handle the shipping containers, which means they have to be unloaded in Djibouti and repacked on a truck. And because Ethiopia is such a closed society they don’t have enough foreign currency to pay for all the stuff so it just backs up in Djibouti and - literally - collects dust. The inefficiency makes you want to scream. But as I’ve learned time and again here, efficiency is a Western value and is not equally valued (nor should it be) by everyone.
(Eriteria is a tragically fascinating country, colloquially known as “North Korea on the Red Sea.” They’ve now also picked a fight - there’s no other way to describe it - with Djibouti and are even more cut off the world. Check out the excellent “I Didn’t Do It For You” by Michela Wrong for more.)

I’ve posted some of these pictures and others to Facebook. You can check them out even if you don’t have a Facebook account by clicking on this link.

The Jesse Review of Books

2009-04-10T16:12:00.001+02:00

No matter how deeply enmeshed I become in life here, the reality remains that I am an outsider in this community. So no matter how much I try to do and how involved I become in life here, I still have loads of time to myself and end up using a lot of it for reading, in the hammock, on the couch, while eating, before bed, anywhere, really.

Someone once told me about a friend whose Christmas letter every year is an annotated list of books he’d read that year. It struck me as such a good idea I’ve adopted it as my own. Herewith, a partial list of some of the books I’ve read since arriving in South Africa. If it seems like I am mostly laudatory in my reviews, it’s because I cut out the ones I didn’t like.

Send me your feedback and especially your suggestions!

Books about Africa

Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela - It looks intimidatingly long but once you get going, you are so swept into the story it goes quickly. Mandela is so modest at times you need to read other accounts of the time to get a full sense of the genius of his leadership.

Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller - Written by a graduate of my alma mater, Acadia University, this is a beautifully-written account of life in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe during the civil war there. I can’t think of many other descriptions of the life of white Africans that are as good as this. The life she describes is hard and tragic.

Ah, But Your Land is Beautiful by Alan Paton - A wandering, rambling, and occasionally hard-to-follow story that makes lots of good points about race relations in South Africa along the way. But not nearly as good as some of his other stuff.

The Zanzibar Chest by Aidan Hartley - An African-born foreign correspondent writes about his assignments and search for family history. I like the stories of his reporting the best, in Ethiopia, Rwanda, Somalia, and elsewhere. He doesn’t shy away from writing about how hard the events affected him.

Rabble-Rouser for Peace by John Allen - A biography of Desmond Tutu. Well-researched and good background for someone like me who didn’t know too much about Tutu beyond the obvious before arriving.

The Shackled Continet: Africa’s Past, Present and Future by Robert Guest - A somewhat depressing view of the future of Africa by a writer for The Economist. He’s done lots of great on-the-ground research, though, and writes well.

Country of My Skull by Antjie Krog - An account of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings in South Africa and what it was like for a white South African to report on them. It’s written in an unusual style that is either poetic or deliberately obscure or somewhere in between. Raises a lot of interesting questions once you get a handle on the writing style.

Swahili for the Broken-Hearted: Cape Town to Cairo by Any Means Possible by Peter Moore - A slapdash and humourous account of Moore’s travels. It reads quickly. I’ve been to some of the places he visited so I liked comparing notes.

Number Two to Tutu: A Memoir by Michael Nuttall - The memories of Tutu’s second-in-command bishop.

Three-Letter Plague: A Young Man’s Journey Through a Great Epidemic by Johnny Steinberg - I wrote about this when I read it. If you’re at all interested in the people I work with and how AIDS affects them, this is necessary reading. It’s called Sizwe’s Test in the U.S.

I Didn’t Do It For You: How the World Used and Abused a Small African Nation by Michela Wrong - This is one of my all-time favourite books about Africa. It’s an account of the recent history of Eriteria, now known as “North Korea on the Red Sea” but at one time a promising country. The research and reporting is fantastic. I happened to be reading this while a friend was visiting and I got so engrossed in it she complained I didn't pay enough attention to her.

Tomorrow is Another Country by Allister Sparks - A short but definitive book on the democratic transition in South Africa written shortly after it happened. Fascinating. This is a great one to read with Long Walk to Freedom.

We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families by Philip Gourevitch - Another all-time favourite book about Africa. Absolutely brilliant reporting about the Rwandan genocide and its aftermath that provides the necessary background to understand the ongoing conflict in the Great Lakes region.

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Adichie is young and has already written two great books. This one is about the Biafran civil war. It’s a great story and makes an important point about who should be telling the stories of Africans. Hint: they don’t look like me.

In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the brink of disaster in Mobutu’s Congo by Michela Wrong - Not as good as I Didn’t Do It For You but still some fascinating stories of the last days of Mobutu’s regime.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe - I had to read this in high-school and didn’t quite get it then. Re-reading it here, I think it should be required reading for anyone working with people who have lost their culture when white people showed up. When I got to the concluding scene, I all of a sudden understood suicide in Alaska a lot better. It was almost literally a lightbulb moment.

Dark Star Safari by Paul Theroux - Another trans-Africa trip but this time the writing is beautiful and the stories captivating. I especially like in Uganda how he goes from having drinks with the prostitutes to meeting with the prime minister.

The Heart of Redness by Zakes Mda - A book about life in a Xhosa village, this one including the fascinating history of the Great Cattle Killing.

What is the What by Dave Eggers - Simply spectacular about one of the Lost Boys of Sudan. I am always interested in how Africans perceive Western culture and norms and this has a lot of information on that.

Fiction

The Magician’s Nephew by CS Lewis - My least favourite Narnia book. What’s the point? There’s no plot!

Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck - Reading both of these put Steinbeck high on my list of favourite American authors. Classics, both, and hilarious.

The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe - I got caught up in this but I’ve since tried to read other Wolfe and haven’t made it very far.

Snow by Orhan Pamuk - I never quite picked up the thread of this book. Pamuk’s won the Nobel but I think there’s something lost in translation from the Turkish.

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan - McEwan is a genius author and I read him just because his writing is so beautiful.

Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje - I hope when the current horrific violence in Sri Lanka finally ends, Ondaatje can memorialize it as well as he did earlier violence with this book.

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison - Justifiably a classic.

Enduring Love by Ian McEwan - Not McEwan’s best but again, great writing.

Development / Foreign Aid

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins - Absolutely horrendous. I’d probably have been sympathetic to the argument but his writing and argument lack any kind of rigour that it is easy to conclude the opposite.

Banker to the Poor: The Story of the Grameen Bank by Muhammad Yunus - Disappointing. I’d hoped for more detail and less chest-puffing from Yunus.

Christian Microenterprise Develoment by David Bussau and Russell Mask - Really disappointing.

Religious Books

The Seven-Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton - Fantastic. Read this book.

A Wing and a Prayer: A Message of Faith and Hope by Katharine Jefferts Schori - Obviously put together quickly following her election as Presiding Bishop and so disappointing. The ideas are interesting enough but the overall package of the book makes them a bit repetitive and anodyne. I hope she has time to write a fuller account of her faith sometime because I’d be interested in that.

William Sloane Coffin Jr.: A Holy Impatience by Warren Goldstein - Good biography of an interesting guy.

Grace in Practice: A Theology of Everyday Life by Paul F.M. Zahl - Zahl is all about grace but I think he lets himself use more law than he realizes. I didn’t agree with the entire argument but it was an arresting read and one that I still think about quite frequently.

Crossing the Jordan: Meditiations on Vocation by Sam Portaro - Portaro, my former chaplain at the University of Chicago, uses Jesus’ life as a model for our vocational discernment.

The Dignity of Difference by Jonathan Sacks - I liked the Jewish perspective on globalization and related issues but the book is already a little dated. I also think that because Judaism doesn’t have a conversion impulse (like Christianity or Islam), it’s easier for a Jew to call for tolerance.

A Generous Orthodoxy by Brian McLaren - McLaren ranges widely and tries to incorporate a wide variety of religious traditions into his orthodoxy. Some of his chapters, especially the one on how to use the Bible, are really good. Others, less so. I appreciate the emphasis on generosity.

Other

Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World by Nicholas Ostler - This is a dense account of how languages developed and evolved. Interesting but again, dense. It makes for quite the slog.

In the Deep Heart’s Core by Michael Johnston - I’ve read this book before but just like reading about the author’s time teaching in the Mississippi Delta. He tells his stories well.

Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder - Another one I’ve read in the past and just like to re-read. Compared to Three Cups of Tea, which I found indigestible and couldn’t finish, I appreciate that Kidder takes a somewhat critical eye of Farmer at times. Kidder asks similar questions that I find myself asking here.

Staying Tuned: A Life in Journalism by Daniel Schorr - It seems like all of Schorr’s reporting was done at diplomatic cocktail parties.

The Ugly American by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick - What’s remarkable is that this book came out before Vietnam, basically predicted how America could lose the war, and America still did everything it said not to. I’m pleased to report my “Ugly American” self-assessment for Americans living overseas is quite good.

The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters by Rose George - I’m never too old for bathroom humour but this is about some really serious issues that we see in Itipini. (Does it still count as bathroom humour if people don’t have bathrooms?) I would have liked to know more about sanitation in the developing world than the developed but her explorations of sewers are interesting.

Night by Elie Wiesel - I lay down in the hammock one afternoon, started this book, and didn’t get up until I had finished.

In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan - I’d read some of Pollan’s articles in the past but never his books. I liked this book, though I was probably disposed to agree with most of it before I even started.

The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken by Terry Teachout - I found this for less than a dollar in Addis Ababa when I was desperate for something to read. The research and writing are great but I didn’t come away with many warm feelings for Mencken.

Currently Reading

Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander

AIDS and the Ecology of Poverty by Eileen Stillwaggon

The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama

White Teeth by Zadie Smith

The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis

Back

2009-04-09T14:23:00.002+02:00

I'm back in Mthatha and will get around to posting some new content some day soon. In the meantime, check out this great article from the Economist that, I think, is in a similar vein as my earlier musings on what I called "One Talent People."

Going, going… gone!

2009-03-24T14:57:00.002+02:00

I’ll be out of town for the next two weeks so don’t be looking for any new posts until Holy Week.

In the meantime, you can reflect on the news that the Episcopal Church Center is not placing any new non-YASC missionaries this year due to lack of funds.

I’ll tell you the story of this child and his family when I return.

Getting better

2009-03-24T14:56:00.003+02:00

I was driving into town the other week and gave this woman, Nomvuyo, and her son a ride.
It turns out she was going to the Infectious Diseases clinic for her monthly visit to refill her anti-retroviral prescription. Nomvuyo is a smart and “with it” person so I asked her about her health progression. Almost exactly two years ago she started taking ARVs. Her CD4 count at the time was 53. Now her CD4 count is 695. Not bad!

(It’s possible she was the beneficiary of a mix-up at the lab, something that I have long suspected happens, and that her first CD4 count was someone else’s. She mentioned that when she had a low CD4 count she didn’t feel sick at all, which could confirm this. It’s good for her but less good for whoever really had a CD4 count of 53.)

ARVs work. The challenge is getting them to everyone who needs them.

The Glamour of the Missionary, redux

2009-03-24T14:54:00.000+02:00

For all I write about some of the exciting and depressing things that happen here, like the micro-credit program or a patient struggling with HIV, most of my time seems to be spent on mundane tasks. Of late, one in particular has been occupying my time: checking to see if our medical records are proper alphabetical order. Here’s where we keep them.
Over the last several weeks, I’ve been through virtually every card in those filing cabinets on the bottom, the card drawers in the middle, and the expanding folders on top. Along the way, I’ve managed to show several prodigal cards their proper place in life. And I’ve weeded out lots of cards from people who haven’t been to the clinic in over a decade and only came for one or two visits. I find myself wondering what has happened to them. Some of them probably just moved. Others are probably dead, based on what their health was like on their last visit. For other patients who have been coming to the clinic since we began keeping records in 1995, their cards make for fascinating reading and tell such intricate stories of all the challenges these people have faced over the many years.

When a baby is born, the parents get a Road to Health card to keep track of their immunizations and growth. The parents are supposed to keep them but we end up with a lot of them and now have a huge pile of really old cards. I even found the Road to Health card for a young woman who is now 20 years old, in Grade 11, and in my English class. I presented the card to her when she came to the clinic last week with her son.
One great thing about sorting cards is that it is so easy. Cards don’t speak Xhosa to me. They obey my instructions. When I get up for a moment, they’re right where I left them when I come back. They’re not demanding or excessively needy. They don’t take any coaxing and prodding to do what they’re capable of. This project has given me a tremendous sense of accomplishment, something that has been hard to come by here.

The reluctant loan shark

2009-03-23T14:22:00.001+02:00

When I first wrote about the micro-credit program on this blog, I emphasized how I didn’t want to become a loan shark and hunt people down for their repayments. I wanted to design the program so that people would naturally want to make their repayments.

As I wrote in a recent update, that hasn’t quite worked. In recent weeks, I’ve been talking with some of my cultural interpreters to figure out how to revive this idea. I asked one, “Why isn’t it the social pressure of having other waiting borrowers entice the first borrowers to make their repayments?”

This person responded by telling me, basically, how out of touch with it was and how radically different our lending practices are from the high-interest places in town that our borrowers are familiar with.

Naturally, they are ruthless. They charge excessive interest. They take a person’s all-important I.D. until the loan is repaid. They make the borrower pay the loan back in a few large payments over a short time. This explains, for instance, why all our borrowers showed up with their I.D.s the first time we met them and wanted to negotiate as short a repayment time as possible. (I discussed the program extensively with this same person before we launched the program and none of this ever came up. Would have helped.) My cultural interpreter seemed to think that if I just started hounding after the borrowers, they would repay.

Here’s the problem: I’m not sure I want to be that kind of guy. I manifestly do not want to be a loan shark and I do not want to be a coercive force.

But what if being that kind of coercive force is what is necessary for a program like this to work? What if the only incentive they’ll respond to is a constant nagging for money from me? How would that one-talent servant have done if his owner kept asking after him, rather than dumping the money on him and leaving? It doesn’t strike me as very graceful.

I haven’t decided what to do yet but I received some helpful clarity the other day when our growing HIV support group asked to meet with me. They wanted to know when we would loan more money, as I have long promised but continually delayed because I’m still waiting on more repayments. I said, “If you want to see me as just another white person who is here for you to take advantage of, fine. But we’ll run out of money and not have any more to loan. I don’t want to be like the people in town and take your I.D.s. You need to help us help you.” (That’s not verbatim. It all came out in mangled - but demonstrably understandable - Xhosa.)

There were lots of head nods and knowing laughter all around. I told them to get back to me when they had thought about it for a while. We’ll see.

This has all been a reminder to me of the importance of learning the context of a group before doing anything. The context in this situation is not just the other lenders in town but also an attitude that is common here that white people exist to hand out money and have plenty of it. It’s easy enough to say this but when that context is shrouded in an unknown language and different culture, it is significantly harder to learn. I don’t know what I would have done differently if I had known this last July but it would at least have been nice to know.

A-Twitter with Excitement!

2009-03-20T19:21:00.004+02:00

Part of my job as a missionary is educating people around the world about what happens in this particular corner of it. That’s how we work towards reconciliation and it’s one reason I’ve devoted so much time to this blog.

In the continued effort to share the story here, I have recently joined Twitter - check me out at twitter.com/jazink.

For those of you who don’t know, Twitter is often referred to as a micro-blogging site. I write tiny updates about what I’m doing. You can either “follow” me and have the updates sent directly to your cell phone or you can just read along at the web site.

(A note to other users: I can't receive tweets in South Africa so don't be sending me any of those @ messages I don't understand anyway.)

Part of my reason for doing this is that I’ve realized how much of my daily life here never makes it onto this blog. I find that daily life mundane and routine by this point but when I stop and think about it I realize just how different it is. For instance, I had a great series of interactions on Thursday, first getting this really sick patient onto TB treatment and then having an unexpectedly great meeting about micro-credit (almost entirely in Xhosa without a translator) and then having a wonderful English class. Or there’s the time I had five really sick HIV patients in the back of the truck and found myself not feeling sorry for them or wanting to help them but cursing how heavy they were to pick up and help in the back. I’m not sure that writing about it in mini-posts is the best approach but it is at least worth trying.

This is definitely an experiment and I have no idea how it will pan out. For one thing, it might become too expensive for me to keep sending all those SMS messages. Once I've been at this a little while, I'd appreciate your input on how effective a means of communication you think this is.

But for now, check it out.

twitter.com/jazink

Life under Law

2009-03-20T19:20:00.000+02:00

I usually have a short break when the clinic closes but before my after-school English class starts. I was hungry the other day and stopped in a fast-food place I almost never frequent.

I had been there once before to order all the meat pies for our Game Day last December and the owner/franchisee was sitting behind the counter and recognized me so we exchanged greetings, perfunctorily of course; it’s not like we’re best pals. He didn’t look very happy. He was just sitting behind the counter, watching his employees work. He’s white. They are all black.

As I was scarfing down my snack on the picnic table outside, he came to speak with me. Apparently our business dealings in December convinced him I was a worthy conversation partner. Or maybe it was my skin colour.

“Do you know any white girls?” he asked.

Where is this going? I thought.

“I need someone to help behind the counter. These ones I’ve got right now they rob me blind. I have to sit and watch them all day. I’ve been back there since December and haven’t had any break. I need someone to help when I want a vacation.”

I thought about it for a moment and realized I didn’t know a single young white woman and not that many older ones either. There are white people in Mthatha but they’re not part of my daily life. I do know plenty of educated, intuitive, stunning, vivacious, thoughtful, playful, hard-working, honest, caring young women but they’re all black.

He added: “It could be a man, I guess.” It was clear it had to be a white man.

I honestly told him I couldn’t think of anyone. He seemed disappointed and asked me to keep an eye out. I won’t.

Walking away, I wondered how I could have handled the interaction better and tried to broaden his horizons a bit.

Obviously, this has a lot to say about race relations in this country. What I found myself dwelling on the most, however, was how clearly and simply it demonstrates what a life completely devoid of Grace and completely dependent on Law looks like.

This fair town I call home - Mthatha

2009-03-20T19:19:00.000+02:00

“Mission Partners,” redux

2009-03-18T14:54:00.000+02:00

Several weeks ago, I wrote a post expressing my objection to a proposed General Convention resolution that would change all canonical references in the Episcopal Church from “missionary” to “mission partner.” That post has since sparked a lively and occasionally contentious conversation in my e-mail inbox, in my mail, and over the phone. I want to add to that previous post to update those of you who haven’t been involved but are still interested in the topic.

I have had trouble pinning down the particular reasons this proposal was made in the first place and the resolution approved. My impression is that the reasons given to missionaries by the Church Center have continually changed, confusing me. I haven’t been able to find a copy of the resolution or an account of the Standing Commission on World Mission meeting that approved the resolution. (If anyone can help me out with that, I’d appreciate it.)

Whatever the reasons, one that has been mentioned frequently is the history of the mission. I agree that missionaries have a very mixed history but I also think that the picture is more complex than the dominant “Poisonwood Bible” and Spanish conquistador stereotype allows us to acknowledge. In re-reading Titus Presler’s “Horizons of Mission” recently, I am struck by how many examples of humble, servant missionaries he can find across time.

Regardless of how many examples of grace we can find among missionaries in the past, it is certainly true the church and its members have sinned in the past and those sins need to be repented of. But it is equally true that the church and its members are sinning in the present. I wonder sometimes if our focus on the past obscures our focus on not only the present but the future.

By the way, I have a whole wealth of experience as a sinful, fallen missionary. Every time I read about what missionaries have done in the past, I can’t help but think about all the sinful things I’ve done in my own time as a missionary and wonder just how different we really are these days. Some things change over time; the nature of humanity is not one of them. Will changing how we describe ourselves change who we are? I think not.

One theme that emerged in the ongoing conversation is that it made more sense to invest our energy in our mission being and doing than debating language. I want to agree but for the fact that language for me has always been a first-order commitment of fundamental importance. None of us is the God of Creation who simply speaks to create but I strongly believe the words we use shape the reality we inhabit. Any discussion about language is a discussion about reality. Many people acknowledged this in e-mails, listing other contested words (like evangelism, proselytize, born again, saved, and even church). Each of them deserves a conversation at least as long as this one.

I have also been thinking about the ways this impacts our search for the unity Christ prayed for among his followers (John 17:20-24). I interpret this prayer, in part, as a call to learn more from our brothers and sisters in Christ across the spectrum of views that
characterize Christianity. I think part of this search for unity begins in grappling with the language we hold in common, such as “missionary.” I read a book recently about the search for unity between the Roman Catholic church and the Anglican Communion and was struck by how much the conversation in that forum has been about words - what do we mean when we talk about the eucharist or forgiveness or any number of other issues?

In particular, I think about more conservative/evangelical/fundamentalist Christians who have a particular interpretation of “missionary” that is often rooted - almost solely - in the Great Commission (Matthew 28:16-20). The Biblical roots of my conception of “missionary” are broader than that and I think that if we run away from “missionary,” we cede the word to an interpretation I disagree with and we end this particular and important conversation with our fellow Christians. By keeping the word, we prevent it from being reduced to this interpretation and we keep the search for unity moving forward.

I wrote this in the last post but it is worth emphasizing that whatever the merits of “missionary,” “mission partner” does not do justice to the full range of mission being and doing and is unnecessarily constraining. I think of “business partners” or “dance partners” when I think about partnership. To me, it is an anodyne, dry, and legalistic word that is difficult for me to associate with an expansive and engaging word like mission. My missiology encompasses much more than partnership; the virtue of “missionary” is it can include it all.

I should note I have heard from some missionaries who welcome the change to “mission partner.” I’ve heard from missionaries who work in non-Christian-majority countries about the potential dangers and struggles they face as a result of the label. “Missionary” is perceived differently in different parts of the world and I really appreciated those perspectives.

What’s more, I’ve learned that other churches in the Anglican Communion, including, I believe, the Church of England and the Church of Australia, use “mission partner” so it’s not like the Episcopal Church would be going out on a limb with this decision and blazing a new path.

So my particular view is not held by everyone. But there are a substantial number (a majority?) of missionaries who do strongly believe that “missionary” is an accurate and true word that deserves to be retained. These people came from a wide variety of backgrounds and were engaged in a wide variety of ministries.

I’m working my way through David Bosch’s “Transforming Mission,” a simply superb book. He writes about the need for “bold humility.” Yes, I think retaining the word “missionary” is a bit bold in this day and age. Maybe we’re just not comfortable being that bold anymore and the retreat to “mission partners” would make us all a lot more comfortable. But it is possible to be bold humbly and I think that is what missionaries are called to do.

Whatever your thoughts about this question, what I have most appreciated is the conversation itself. Conversations like these have an essential importance in the current existence of the church. That the conversation takes place and how it takes place are as important as the eventual decision. I certainly didn’t anticipate sparking anything like this with that first post but am glad of the result and hope it continues.

The Great Pumpkin

2009-03-18T14:44:00.003+02:00

Makiwa is one of the cooks in the kitchen and makes the lunch every day for the pre-school children. She’s appeared as a character on this blog before when her husband died and I took some staff to his funeral. She’s also the mother of Simnikiwe, a child whose picture has appeared many times on this blog, most recently here.

I haven’t mentioned her much because she is such a solid, dependable part of my routine. (Good narrative needs conflict!) When I need a break from the clinic, I will often sit down in the kitchen and work on my Xhosa with Makiwa and whoever else is around. Sometimes I give the women in the kitchen the limited produce from my garden. I think she is just a fantastic person.

A few years back, she was given a house in one of the housing developments the government has been building around town and so moved out of Itipini. As a result, she and Simnikiwe walk about an hour to Itipini each day, she to work and he to pre-school. Often I pick them up along the road and give them a lift part way.

Last week, she asked me if I could give her a ride all the way home. The water had been out in her neighbourhood for several days and she wanted to fill up some buckets in Itipini and take them home. I happily obliged.

When we arrived, I took the buckets out of the car and went to say goodbye. She told me to stay, however, and went around the back of the house and came back with a pumpkin. She insisted I take it as thanks, I suppose, for giving her a lift.

My first inclination was to turn it down. After all, she has more mouths to feed and less money to do it than me and she worked hard to produce that pumpkin.

My next thought, however, is that there’s a strong argument to be made for treating poor people like equals. (This is one of many reasons it’s a good idea to charge even a little interest on a micro-loan.) If Makiwa freely chooses to give me something, I shouldn’t be so patronizing and know-it-all to presume that I know better what she needs than she does herself.

(Makiwa seemed to realize what I was thinking because she showed me around her huge garden and made sure to point out all the other pumpkins that were still growing.)

So I took it and it felt really good. Instead of being the person who gives all the time, I became the recipient of something tangible and real that was an honest expression of someone’s respect and admiration for me. Having given so much while here - and not always being sure that I’m doing it in the best way - this was an important moment for me and it made the evening seem particularly sweet.

Here we are, the next day in the kitchen.
(The other cook in the kitchen is Wee Mama and she deserves an encomium too. I’ll write about her someday too.)

Learning to give up

2009-03-13T15:18:00.001+02:00

Imagine this situation. You see a pressing social problem - HIV, say, or alcoholism or unemployment - and you think you have a great solution to some aspect of it. So you work away at it, bringing on board interested parties, doing research, and laying the groundwork for a really successful intervention. You launch your effort and it takes wing and then...crashes back down to earth. For whatever combination of reasons, your amazing idea hasn’t worked quite as you expected and the social problem you had set out to resolve persists, unchanged.

This is not - quite - the situation I find myself in but I might be heading that way. I am making progress in my work here and I am seeing improvements but sometimes they are hard to see. What is always too easy to see is the way in which some things are not moving in the right direction and are reverting to the pre-intervention stage. I don’t want to dwell too much on any of my impending failures so I’m going to spare you the details of any of the many stories I could tell as illustrations. (More to come on my failures - or, ahem, how I’ve found ways that don’t work - in later posts.)

But the larger point is this: surely, there are South Africans who are dedicated to the idea of improving living conditions in their country. Maybe, similar to me, they have attempted to make concrete fixes that have failed or been less successful than they had anticipated. Don’t you think after a series of such failures they might just give up any hope of improving things and conclude that the way things have always been is the way things will always be? Why then would you even begin to try if you knew you were going to fail?

It is not a major challenge here to start something new. That’s easy. Anyone with a little energy can get something started and there are always people who seem eager and willing to help at the start. (It is particularly easy to find funding for new ideas; less so for continuing old ones.) The major challenge is continuing what has already been begun. That is what saps all the energy and takes so much effort.

Jenny reminded me of the the prayer for steadfastness recently: “O LORD God, when thou givest thy servants to endeavour any great matter, grant us also to know that it is not the beginning but the continuing of the same until it be thoroughly finished, which yieldeth the true glory; through him that for the finishing of thy work laid down his life, our Redeemer, Jesus Christ. Amen.”

Indeed.

Dads

2009-03-13T12:36:00.000+02:00

In 19 months in Itipini, I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen a father bring his child in for medical attention. And two of them happened today!

Sacrifice, vulnerability, and being a missionary

2009-03-11T19:13:00.002+02:00

People often tell me what a great sacrifice I am making to be a missionary. (This is often part of that erroneous “noble pursuit of a missionary” thing.) Sure, it’s true, I make some sacrifices to be here. There’s no Mexican restaurant, movie theatre, or quality library in Mthatha and I miss all of them equally. I miss out on family events and regular contact with close friends. All these are pretty obvious but it’s a price I’m willing to pay for the experiences I get in return here.

Another sacrifice missionaries make is their time. Instead of sending a cheque over to South Africa (treasure), missionaries look to the root meaning of sacrifice and “make holy” our time and, presumably, talent in the cause of global reconciliation by choosing to live in a different place for a sustained period of time. (All those cheques are what enable us to do it.) Lots of people do this, however. They invest immense amounts of their time and talent in worthy causes closer to home. That’s as much a sacrifice as mine.

There’s another kind of sacrifice that missionaries make and I’ve been looking for the right kind of vocabulary to describe it. Basically, it has to do with the idea of vulnerability, of opening oneself to difference and all the nerve-jangling, mind-warping, and uncomfortable effects that creates. It means acknowledging that we don’t have all the answers and being open to the idea that answers might come from wholly unexpected places. It means setting off into the great unknown, knowing that the unknown may contain surprises we don’t want to encounter.

In our society, we look for as much comfort and as little vulnerability as possible. We try to create protective cocoons, in our familiar social circles, in our gated communities, in our usual routine haunts, and so forth. The sacrifice of the missionary is to forgo that (perceived) comfort and be open to what ensues.

Here’s an example. I’ve taught some of the pre-school children that if they squeeze my nose, I’ll make a honking nose. But occasionally the honking machine malfunctions and I blow a great big buzzer on their hand. Hilarity ensues. When you think about the lack of hygiene and cleanliness in Itipini, by letting children put their hands so close to my mouth, I’m making myself vulnerable to getting sick. And sometimes I do get sick. But it’s worth it to play that game and have a slightly deeper relationship with those children.

I don’t like to equate myself with the heroes of the Bible but what I’ve described is exactly what they did - let children squeeze their noses. No, I mean, give up the cocoon of comfort and set out. Abraham, Isaiah, Jonah (once he got it), Daniel, Paul, and, of course, Jesus did this. So did many others. They sacrifice the comfort of the known for the vulnerability of the unknown. Clearly, I think this sacrifice is worth it. I’ve found that by opening myself to new experiences - even ones that make me uncomfortable and uncertain - I learn more, gain more, and get a better idea of what’s going on in the world.

Vincent Donovan, the former Catholic missionary, writes at the end of his book Christianity Rediscovered, “a missionary is essentially a social martyr, cut off from his roots, his stock, his blood, his land, his background, his culture. He is destined to walk forever in a strange land. He must be striped as naked as a human being can be, down to the very texture of his being.”

This is crackpot entomology but the “vul-” in vulnerability are also the first three letters for the Xhosa word for “open.” It is a reminder of the connection between openness and vulnerability. That openness and that vulnerability are the calling of the missionary. It’s a sacrifice but one that is well worth the price.

Greasing the skids… on the road to dependency?

2009-03-09T08:33:00.002+02:00

In the past, I’ve described the kind of work we do here as “greasing the skids,” reducing the coefficient of friction in people’s life. If we can help a child go to school by paying his school fees, then that child will hopefully have a better shot in life. (That assumes the school is of decent quality, a doubtful proposition.) I once described this work as being at the margins of life in Itipini but added, somewhat hopefully:

Perhaps if we help people overcome some of the issues at the margins of their
lives, some of the more substantial problems will become a bit more manageable
and or at least seem in the realm of solve-ability.

The trouble is while I may see what I am doing as “greasing the skids” the person in Itipini might take that initial help as a sign that I am willing to solve all her problems for her.

As a result, people start coming to me asking for help on those “more substantial problems.” I’ve written about Nolizwi before, who, after we helped her get started in school, came to me after she was kicked out of her home and robbed. I’ve written about Nomzame, who we helped go to college but now keeps coming back with more and more problems. There are countless other situations like this.

Here’s a secret: I don’t know what to do in those situations anymore than they do. I imagine these people are coming to me thinking I can snap my fingers, produce some money, and solve their problems. That’s not true. I can’t. What’s more, I don’t want to. I want them to be solving their own problems, with some help around the edges from me. But they, having seen the help around the edges, want it in all aspects of their life.

I think this happens in the clinic as well. People with HIV, say, wait until they are very sick before coming to be seen. I imagine they are thinking to themselves, “Well, Jenny has given me medicines in the past that have made my cough feel better so she can handle this as well.” But there are some things - like advanced AIDS - that we are helpless to address. We can only help around the edges, giving nutritional supplements, drawing blood for CD4 counts, and sending them on the way for anti-retroviral preparation but all that is meaningless if the person waits too long to come see us.

What I’m describing is the evolution of dependency, how a little help to “empower” people can quickly turn into making the person dependent on help in all aspects of their life. It doesn’t happen to every person but it happens more frequently than I once imagined possible.

The solution is the sort of personal development I once wrote about, to encourage people to see and use their own God-given gifts. Maybe then they would feel like they could handle bigger problems on their own. But that’s not easy and it’s made less easy when I effectively am giving people contradictory messages - OK, I’ll help you with this right now but in the future you should handle it yourself.

“I have gladness on you”

2009-03-07T10:28:00.001+02:00

Khayakazi is 22 and a mother. As of this year, she is also - again - a high-school student in Grade 11.She dropped out of school a few years back when she gave birth but approached us in early January because she wanted to go a year-long vocational program that would train her to be a health-care assistant of some sort. I went to check the program out, talked it over with her, and asked other people’s advice. One piece of advice I heard stuck with me: “If she doesn’t have her matric [the high school diploma], it won’t matter what course she takes.”

So I sat Khayakazi down and asked her what she thought about going back to school. She hadn’t been a bad student before giving birth and I thought she had a fairly good shot at getting the matric if she returned. To my surprise, Khayakazi was very excited about the idea and almost immediately turned from being set on the health-care assistant course to wanting to go back to high school.

Now she is in school, faithful in her attendance, and clearly overjoyed to be there. She speaks about school with such excitement and is working hard. I don’t see her often because she gets back from school generally after I’ve left for the day but I ran into recently and asked how things were going. “I have gladness on you, Jesse, because you helped me,” she responded. We might need to work on her English a bit but I’ll take the gratitude as a good first step.

A long while back, I noted how in the Biblical story of Naaman, he is reluctant to bathe in the River Jordan because he thought curing his leprosy couldn’t be that simple. But it was and it was a good reminder that sometimes things are simpler than they seem. All Khayakazi needed was the suggestion that she return to school and off she went. That is something I can easily and happily provide.

“Andingomali yavuza”

2009-03-07T10:27:00.001+02:00

One of the hardest tasks I’ve experienced lately is dealing with all the money we need to pay for school fees, uniform parts, supplies, etc. Theoretically, I think this is a very good idea. Many children would not be able to go to school, especially high school, if someone did not pay the fees for them. Others would be hit or fined if they did not have the right uniform. This becomes a prime example of what I once called “greasing the skids” for people here and I’m happy to be involved in it.

But money is fungible and once people see that we are giving out money for some things, I think some of them decide to see how far they can push us. One high-school-age student showed up in early February and said she wanted to go to high school. I almost immediately rejected her out of hand. The school year was three weeks old by that point and I knew there wouldn’t be any space left in Grade 10 anyway. (Saying no to someone who wants to go to school and will otherwise have to sit out the entire year is not easy, by the way.) But through the hard work of a family friend, she found space in a school across town and asked if we could pay the fees. We agreed and off she went.

She showed up a week later and said she needed money for a uniform. I gave it to her. A week after that, she showed up and said she needed money for school supplies. I told her to buy them for herself. Didn’t she know when she went to school that she would need a uniform? Didn’t she know she would need school supplies? Why did she dribble her visits out over so long, missing a day of school each time, thinking I would be so easily be able to dispense money?

There’s a young woman now in college, who began working with me on the application last December, was admitted in January, and began classes in February.
Along the way, she needed money for application fees, the necessary photos, and a whole host of other things and I gave it to her, bit by bit, because I didn’t want money to be the obstacle to her application. When she got in, I asked her to make a list of all the expenses she foresaw for the year, not only tuition but also room and board, supplies, and so on, so we could decide what she could afford to pay and what we could help her with. But before she gave me that list, because she comes from such a poor background she got a bursary that waives tuition and room and board. I still asked her for the list but she never gave it to me.

As a result, she sporadically shows up and asks me for more money, for food, for instance (“they don’t give us enough”), or any of eight thousand other expenses. I have been pretty firm about turning down all these requests. There are big expenses, like tuition, that might justifiably be out of a person’s reach but everyone is going to have to eat regardless of what they do and I don’t want to be responsible for that.

There have been lots of other requests like this. The hardest ones to deal with are the people who say they need the money “by tomorrow” because it is the “last day” for whatever they need the money for. This is really hard but I almost always reject all these requests because I don’t like being treated like a bank or an ATM machine from which people can just make withdrawals on the spot. It’s hard, though, to say no to such desperate requests. (I should note that many of the dire consequences promised if the money is not paid “by tomorrow” have not come to pass.) I say “ndikhangeleka njengo neBank?” or “ndifana noBank?” - “do I look like a bank?” or “do I seem like a bank?” I mean it as a joke but people look at me with a look that says, “well… yes!”

What I object to is the constant requests for money, like I’m just a bottomless pit ready to spray money around. Money doesn’t build relationships. It reduces my role to the simple one of distributor of money and reduces their role to supplicant. We are not our whole selves in these situations. I also feel bad because I know I’m not consistent in my approach to requests.

I’ve been working on learning Xhosa idioms lately and one I like is “andingomali yavuza.” Literally, it means something like, “I’m not leaking money” but it is the equivalent of “I’m not made of money” or “money doesn’t grow on trees.” I’ve used it a lot - so frequently in fact that people anticipate it and say it for me - but we have so much money compared to people here that no one really believes it.

Back to work on “The BFG”

2009-03-06T14:06:00.004+02:00

A new school year is well underway and that means I’ve started again with my after-school English class. We’re reading Roald Dahl’s “The BFG.” In retrospect, it was a mistake to pick this book for several reasons - there are eight gazillion made-up words that are difficult for non-native speakers to grasp and the humour is really only relevant to English-language speakers. I spent too much time this week trying to explain the humour inherent in the chapter on “whizzpoppers” but didn’t make much progress.

We are plowing ahead nonetheless. Here are the pictures.
I wrote a while back how there were three new male high school students and how excited that made me. I’d be a lot more excited if they showed up to class. So far, they have missed virtually every session while all seven girls have made every single one.

Sigh...

Note that I am kneeling in this picture

2009-03-03T17:09:00.000+02:00

The extent of our blessings

2009-03-03T17:07:00.003+02:00

Sometimes I get frustrated with our pre-school headmistress, Ncediwe. She’s on the right in this picture. She’s a fine teacher and has been working in Itipini for ages. She genuinely cares for the children and on most days does a great job teaching.

My frustration is not with her as a teacher but as headmistress. We turn to her when we have questions about the pre-school, like about the schedule or which teacher is responsible for which part of the day. She seems a bit clueless at times about some of the bigger picture issues involved in running the pre-school.

I was letting myself get pretty frustrated with this situation and at one point thought to myself, “Doesn’t she know anything about leadership?” And that’s when I realized she probably doesn’t.

When I was growing up, I had numerous role models and examples of good (and not-so-good) leaders. I assumed there would come a time in my life when I would be in a position of leadership and began to look for what I admired in people in positions of leadership. Lots of people supported me in this and helped me develop as a leader. I even led several sessions at a summer camp on leadership development for high-school students.

I realize now that Ncediwe probably had none of those opportunities. I doubt anyone saw her when she was young and said, “That girl is going to be a leader someday and I want her to be a good one.” She probably didn’t have a lot of great examples of leadership when she was growing up. When I find myself facing difficult decisions, I often think to my role models and ask myself what they would do. That is probably a foreign concept to Ncediwe.

(Even if she had been taught about leadership when she was younger, I often find myself questioning the kind of leadership exercised around here but that is all for another post.)

It is a cliche that when you go work in the developing world, you learn how blessed you are. It’s a cliche because it is true but even at this stage of my time here I am continuing to realize the true extent of my blessings.

That’s important because one of the Bible passages that is at the core of my beliefs about mission is Genesis 12:1-3, where God blesses Abraham not so Abraham can bless himself but so that all the nations of the world can be blessed. My blessings are to build up others. In order to do that, I guess I need to know more about just how blessed I am.

And so, with Genesis 12 and Ralph Nader’s view that “the function of leadership is not to produce followers but to produce more leaders” in mind, I am - slowly and tentatively - figuring out how sharing ideas about leadership works in a different cultural context.

Micro-Credit in South Africa, the Land of Grants

2009-03-03T17:04:00.000+02:00

About six months ago, I wrote about how I had launched a small micro-credit program in Itipini for nine borrowers. I haven’t written much about it since then so it is time to give a bit of an update.

The short answer is that progress is mixed. There are some borrowers who have are current with their repayments and are earning money for themselves. They seem to have “got it” and understood the purpose of the program - start a business with a loan, pay back the loan, and then keep the remainder of the profit for themselves.

There are another group of borrowers who aren’t quite regular with their payments but do make a sporadic effort to repay. For instance, a person who is supposed to make a repayment every two weeks might only pay money every month.

The final group, encompassing a small plurality of borrowers, hasn’t “got it” at all and for one reason or another is no longer making repayments. Their business idea appears to have sputtered. It is this group that I want to focus on in this post.

Why haven’t they “got it”? Why aren’t they making repayments? Micro-credit is a fairly straightforward proposition and I made sure before we made any loans that all the borrowers understood some basic business concepts relevant to their particular business. (“You’re selling chickens? OK, for each chicken you sell, how much do you need to set aside to buy another chicken and how much do you need to set aside to repay me and how much do you get to keep for yourself?”) All the borrowers had to come a series of meetings and classes where I thought I presented a fairly coherent set of ideas and checked to make sure people understood them.

One thing that got in the way was the unexpected. One borrower got pregnant (actually was pregnant, unbeknownst to us, when we made the loan) and then gave birth, which took up most of her time. The infant son of another borrower died and, because there are such high expectations around here for funerals, she had to spend all her money on the funeral, including the loan. Another borrower just up and moved back to the rural villages for about four months, a place where her business idea was not viable and so she spent her capital on herself, I presume. (I don’t know how she slipped through our screening process.) Another borrower was doing really well selling chickens for a few months and we gave her money to expand the business so she could get better economies of scale. It was exciting and she was showing a real entrepreneurial spirit until she was robbed and completely cleaned out. She lost any enthusiasm for the idea and basically gave up. Another woman, who has HIV, saw her health deteriorate remarkably quickly and she lost the energy to work. She has since recovered somewhat but not before spending the principle of the loan on herself while she was sick. I didn’t foresee any of these contingencies, perhaps an oversight on my part, but even if I had I don’t know how I would have planned for them.

When you read about micro-credit programs around the world, there is a lot of emphasis on group-based borrowing, where five (or so) women form a group and only one of them can get a loan at any given time and the other women are her support to repay the loan. For a number of reasons I didn’t think that would work in Itipini but reasoned that we had existing relationships with the borrowers we could use to check in on them and I made everyone have a business support partner. Neither idea seemed to work very well. In a few instances, the business support partner began to think it was his or her right to a cut of the profits (not the idea at all) or generally just fought with the borrower. When I repeatedly asked our borrowers about the progress of their business I would often just get bland replies, like, “I’m selling fine” when it was clear they weren’t. But it is hard to help someone when they won’t talk about the problems they are having.

The other inducement to repay money was the lengthy waiting list we have. The first borrowers know that no one else can get money until they have repaid a substantial percentage of their initial loan. This appears to have no effect at all, as the initial borrowers don’t seem to mind they are affecting others and those on the waiting list seem pretty philosophic about the whole situation.

The final set of obstacles I did foresee when I first thought about the idea last year but hoped I would be wrong. Many people in Itipini get grants from the government, whether for old age, having AIDS, or being an unemployed mother. The latter grant is the smallest (about $25/month/child) but also the most common among our borrowers, who are generally young women. In a very clear way, I am seeing how these grants take away the will to work among the recipients. Here’s an example.

One common business idea (that I will never fund again) is to sell airtime in town. Most cell phones in Africa (and around the world) are pay-as-you-go where you buy airtime in advance and when it runs out you can’t make any calls. The major cell carriers sell airtime in bulk at a discount to individuals who then sell it at face value and make a small profit. I see these people all the time, wandering around town wearing special jerseys and looking for customers. It is an easy business to get into as you only need a cell phone, which most people have, and the initial money to purchase the airtime. If done right, it can result in a profit of $6-$10/day, which is substantial.

What you also need, however, is the will to get up every morning, walk into town, and spend the entire day wandering around looking for business. I don’t know how to accurately gauge someone’s enthusiasm for hard work but I did my best to explain to all of our prospective borrowers the kind of commitment they were making when they took the money, to get up each morning and spend the entire day in town. (I also made sure they had a childcare plan.) Everyone said it would be no problem and they were excited to at last have an opportunity to work.

Well, it didn’t quite work out that way. In fact, it barely worked out at all. Soon after making the loans, I saw one or two of our airtime sellers in Itipini. I asked what they were doing and they said they were selling airtime in Itipini that day rather than in town. This might work occasionally but there isn’t a sufficient market in Itipini to support this business and they really had to get to town. Gradually, I saw these airtime sellers more and more in Itipini, sitting in front of their shacks, and less and less in town.

And yet when the time came to make a repayment, they were good at making them. And when they missed one and I asked where the money was, they could produce it. But they clearly weren’t going into town. What I eventually realized is that they were paying me back out of their grants, actually the grants they received on behalf of their children. The loan was no longer a loan but a low-interest cash advance.

The crucial idea in micro-credit is that the money has to be given in the form of a loan and it has to be repaid. This not only gives the lending organization capital to make future loans but critically it gives borrowers incentive to earn money so they can repay the loan. But having a supply of money each month as grant recipients do takes away that incentive in a very clear and direct way.

(We also contribute to this. Since many of our borrowers have HIV, they qualify for the free distribution of bread and corn meal in the morning. If a person has a grant and food every morning, where’s the incentive to wander around town selling airtime every day? One of the most gratifying things about our successful borrowers is that I hardly ever see them coming for food anymore.)

When I first wrote about this program, I said I did not want to become a loan shark. I haven’t been hounding our borrowers for their repayments. I only want to take repayments that come from profits, not grants. If that means the borrower defaults, then that’s the way the cookie crumbles.

I am probably too close to the end of my time in Itipini to lend more money to another set of borrowers. Even if I had more time, I’m not sure I’d be eager to lend more money. There are some people who have surmounted the grant barrier and are doing well but I don’t know how to identify those people and help them. And I don’t know how to work with people who would get caught in a grant trap.

Three Sleeping Babies... And One Not

2009-03-03T17:01:00.001+02:00

A visit long in the making

2009-02-28T10:45:00.002+02:00

More than two months ago, I wrote about how Petros, a young man I know in Itipini, was in jail on murder charges. I wrote about my struggle to decide whether or not to go see him. Then I promptly forgot him.

Actually, that’s not quite true. He was at the back of my mind but there were so many other things at the front of my mind I let him slip back. I was conscious he was slipping to the back of my thoughts but the idea of visiting him was too intimidating for me and I was glad to have him off the front-burner.

About two weeks ago, I learned from his sister that he had had a court appearance (postponed until next month). When she saw him there, she said he was not well and had been in the hospital. That put Petros front-and-center again and after doing some reconnaissance work, figuring out when visiting hours were and what was required, and thinking about how I would approach the visit, I drove onto the prison grounds Thursday morning.

There were several false starts. It turns out there are (at least) two prisons on the grounds. I went to the maximum security one, called the “Mthatha Maximum Centre of Excellence.” (From what I saw, it was not a centre of maximum excellence, I can assure you.) But he wasn’t there and they had no record of him. I was going to check the medium security prison but I had to get back to Itipini so I decided to find his sister and figure out where he was. Relying on her from the beginning, rather than going solo, might have been a good idea.

(I hadn’t told the family or anyone in Itipini about my plan, in part because I didn’t know how they would react. You’ll recall that my good friend Noxolo was fed up and ready to forget all about him the last time I raised the subject. She’s not related to Petros but she’s a good barometer of the mood in the community.)

It turns out Petros is in the medium security prison so I returned in the afternoon with his sister, Sesi, and her friend, Phatiswa. But the guards would only let two of us in. I immediately volunteered to wait outside but Sesi insisted that Phatiswa and I go see Petros while she waited. We navigated our way through the gates and were shown to the visitor room. Phatiswa and I were an odd couple. She is quiet and withdrawn (around me) and I was nervous and looking for her to show me the way. We both kept deferring to each other.

I had no expectations for the visit but the room was generally consistent with everything I’ve seen in movies. There was a long glass wall with benches on both sides and collections of small air holes in the glass so we could speak to each other. There was Petros, waiting on the other side.

He was obviously happy to see us and although I was nervous I couldn’t help but smile to see him as well. He looked healthy and said he had never been in the hospital. It was really difficult speaking through the glass what with the Xhosa and the swirl of all the other conversations around us but I learned lots of interesting things.

He said he was eating enough and there was enough room to sleep at night. (News accounts of this particular prison have made it sound horribly overcrowded.) They aren’t let out during the day so he mostly watches television.

He has a lawyer, whose name he forgot, working with a public defender-type agency. I never asked anything about the charges or the alleged crime. I didn’t know how to and I didn’t see it as the point of the visit.

I think he was a little disappointed we hadn’t brought him anything. He asked for things like toothpaste and cookies, which other visitors had brought their prisoners that day. As I wrote in my previous post about this, I don’t want this relationship to be about gifts or what I can buy him. I just told Phatiswa to tell Sesi when we got out and let the family handle it.

Mostly, I was just impressed that he was laughing and smiling. I let him and Phatiswa talk to each other while I marveled that something I had made out to be so difficult and overwhelming in my head was actually turning out to be just fine. In fact, I was already making plans for a return visit.

On the way out, I asked Sesi if she knew of any other people from Itipini in jail. She would make a great chair of some sort of family support group because she started reeling off names before saying, “There are 13 people from Itipini in jail.” I didn’t recognize any of the names - I know very few young men in Itipini - except for Petros’s accomplice, whom I barely know. Still, the number was a bit stunning. It made me even more resolute not to purchase Petros any treats. If word gets around that I’m doing that, I’ll be opening myself up to appeals from the families of the other dozen.

But I did start thinking about next steps on the drive away. Petros can read English pretty well and I began to think about where I could find the right kind of books to give him and just what the right kind would be. I thought about going for his court date, although I’m not sure how effective that will be. Cases here are delayed and postponed again and again and again and people spend months or years in prison awaiting trial. It is likely that at his next hearing he will just be told to come back in another month.

I did find myself questioning the value of the visit. We weren’t there for longer than 15 minutes and it was so difficult to communicate. What could possibly be gained by going back? I don’t underestimate the importance of showing Petros that he has not been forgotten. But I also don’t see what we’re going to “do” at the next visit. Haven’t we already exchanged all the news we have to exchange?

My last post on this topic generated a considerable amount of e-mail. I welcome your feedback on this post as well, especially suggestions for what I could do for Petros that wouldn’t make the relationship just about me buying him toothpaste.

Hard at work

2009-02-26T17:21:00.000+02:00

“Zithengele”

2009-02-26T17:14:00.003+02:00

The school year started a month ago but we haven’t quite finished the job of getting everyone sorted out. (Why this is our “job” is an issue that comes up below.) Specifically, there are still some students who don’t have school uniform shoes yet, or, if they have them, are either too small, too worn out, and generally unusable.

I should say first of all that I don’t actually think not having a pair of shoes is the end of the world. Children run around Itipini all day barefoot even if they do own shoes, especially in the summer heat. Why not just go barefoot to school as well? The trouble is that rules are rules and the rules say each child needs to have a uniform or else they can’t go to school. Yes, I agree. It’s a dumb rule.

I wanted to illustrate this post and so began taking pictures of students’ feet. They thought it was kind of weird but they just love having their picture taken so they obliged. All of these are “good shoes.”
Lots of families are good about outfitting their children with hand-me-down uniforms bits or spending some of the grant most of them get for each child on the uniform. But shoes are a particular obstacle because they are quite expensive. A good pair of shoes can cost half a month’s grant and that grant is used to cover a lot of expenses beyond shoes. The expense of the shoes is the main reason we haven’t purchased any yet. I simply did not have enough cash when we went uniform shopping.

I’m not quite sure how this happened but last week a hoard of mothers (about 30, I’d say) all showed up on the same day and at the same time demanding shoes. Not requesting but demanding. That put me in a bad mood to begin with and after several false starts, Mkuseli and I began to see them one-by-one. We basically had two requests - show us the old pair of shoes and tell us if you get a grant. If the old pair of shoes was in decent shape or could be repaired rather than replaced we sent them off to do it for themselves. Replacing a sole only costs about two dollars here. If they got a grant we also told them to buy the shoes themselves. You can get a cheaper pair of shoes for about six dollars or a quarter of one child’s monthly grant.

Our principles seemed great until they met reality. The trouble is that the two of us and the mothers disagreed about what constituted a decent shoe and whether they could legitimately afford to buy them themselves. Plus, it was the middle of the month and the grants come at the end so all of the cash from last month is gone but this month’s hasn’t been distributed yet. As a result, each conversation became a knock-down, drag-em-out affair (in Xhosa!) with the mother explaining her financial history to us and how she could not possibly afford them and us explaining how shoes are expensive, we can’t afford all of them, and this is what grants are for. That brought the reply that the grants aren’t big enough to cover everything they are stretched to cover - notably food - and this was a bridge too far. I was tough and unyielding (for me) and found myself saying repeatedly, “zithengele” or “buy them yourself.”

There was also something else at work. Not all the mothers were being completely truthful with us. One mother swore she didn’t get a grant when I knew that she did because she had told me so when we interviewed her for the micro-credit program. (Why she needed us to buy shoes when she was ostensibly making money for herself is a topic for an upcoming post.) I told her as much and she blinked briefly and then began to concoct a story about how she actually didn’t get a grant for this child. In another case, as we finished with one mother, she handed off her old pair of shoes to a second mother so the second mother could display them again as evidence of how much her child needed new shoes. This might have worked but they did it literally right in front of me with no pretense of secrecy. Another mother came in and showed off two pairs of shoes in absolutely horrendous shape and I was about to agree we could help her with shoes until Mkuseli pulled me aside and whispered angrily in my ear that those weren’t the shoes the children were wearing to school and were just the oldest and rattiest pair the mother had been able to find.

That is when I decided I had had enough. The heat, the language barrier, and especially the dishonesty made me end that day’s proceedings. I went outside and announced to everyone still waiting that if they got a grant, they were on their own and if they still needed help they should come back the next day after school with their child in uniform so we could see the shoes on the child’s feet.

Almost no one came back the next day, which confirmed for me a view I’ve been developing that many people will try to ask us for money on the chance it might work and if it doesn’t then they’ll find another way to manage. I have seen this to be true in many, many situations. I am always surprised at how much more money than I expected is floating around in Itipini. This is not to say that life in Itipini is just fine but that people can often find a way to cope without my help.

It also made me wonder how much I’ve been lied to in the past. The same day as the shoe situation, a woman had come into the clinic with one child and asked for files for two children. One of our rules is that a child has to be in the clinic to get medicine or formula because we want to see the child ourselves rather than rely on the mother’s report. (Not that the mother’s report is incorrect but that unless we do this one mother will come get formula for her baby and her four neighbours’.) I asked this mother where the second child was and she indicated a child sitting on the floor next to her. This ploy might have worked except a) I knew the child to be the son of another woman sitting on the bench and b) I had just found that child’s file. I shook my head and asked again where the child was and the mother again indicated the same child sitting on the floor. I was pretty frustrated by that point and just walked away and let the mother wait a long while before I helped her again. I can catch these situations now but I wasn’t always able to. And what am I not understanding now?

Back to the shoes, I am of several minds about the issue. I want children to have as few distractions as possible at school and if having shoes will focus the mind then they need them. But I also don’t want to create the expectation in Itipini that we’ll just buy shoes for everyone even if people can buy them themselves. That is, in part, what the grants are for. I want people to understand that when they buy something for themselves it is better for all concerned because it gives us more money to spend someplace else. (Try explaining that in Xhosa!) If a mother doesn’t get a grant, she should be working with the social worker to get one, not appealing to us for help. (It would help, of course, if our social worker actually came to visit us or was even in his office at the right hours.) I also don’t think every child needs a brand-new pair of shoes. Poverty sucks but I’m not going to opt for the Cadillac option (expensive new shoes) when there’s a lesser version (repairing the shoes) that will do.

It all becomes a very complicated lesson in situational ethics. I know I wasn’t consistent throughout the many conversations and several mothers called me on it. But I tried, I really did.

The continuing saga of my mail

2009-02-26T17:13:00.000+02:00

I’ve written before about how I get my mail at the hospital and how sometimes the folks at the hospital have a hard time getting to the post office to pick up the mail. When I went to check on the mail the other week, there was none - no surprise - and I asked if I could give someone a ride to the post office to get the mail.

“No,” my friend there replied. “The problem is the hospital has not paid the bill at the post office. The post office won’t let us take the mail.”

I decided to let the matter lie that day but came back a few days later to ask again. They still didn’t have any mail as the hospital still had not paid the bill. I decided to put a little pressure on and began asking a series of friendly questions.

It turns out the provincial government in Bisho has put some sort of freeze on purchases so everything needs to be approved by there. This purchase had not been approved and so the post office cut off service. My friends in the mail room assured me they personally thought it was very important that the hospital get mail but had been unable to similarly convict any of their managers or supervisors.

“When is something going to happen?” I asked vainly.

“Just wait until Jacob Zuma is president and then all your problems will be solved,” said one of the employees, putting a wee bit too much faith in the results of April’s elections. More seriously, he added, “We are planning a strike on this matter next Wednesday in front of the manager’s offices.” I think he meant demonstration and I think he was trying to impress me.

I’ll be impressed when I get all those back issues of The Economist.

(P.S. It is a public hospital and a public postal agency. When the money gets paid really what happens is it gets transferred from one line on a government’s budget to another. It seems so minor and insignificant but it’s major enough to cause me grief.)

It takes a real man to use a pink umbrella on a sunny day

2009-02-26T17:12:00.001+02:00