We were donated a big (4-feet in diameter) beach ball today and I immediately set about blowing it up. Half-hour later, light-headed and dizzy, I set out to find some children to play with.
When there’s broken glass everywhere, a beach ball has a pretty short life span but while it lasted, fun was had by all.
…six months?”
Here’s how I measure six months in Itipini. On my first day there last August, a new TB patient started the 6-month anti-TB treatment course. Yesterday, he finished, cured.
How quickly time flies!
A few weeks back, I rented the movie Notes on a Scandal and was struck by something the elderly spinster character played by Judi Dench says: “She thinks she’s lonely. She doesn’t know what loneliness is, what it is like to plan a whole weekend around a trip to the laundrette.” Replace laundrette with Internet café and you’ve got a statement that applies pretty well to me, too. Indeed, to be perfectly honest, one reason I’ve started going to Xhosa-language church services lately is that I know they’ll be longer and take up more of my Sunday. There’s no escaping the fact that when you pick up and move across the world, to a city where virtually no one speaks English as a first language (or at all), and find yourself navigating cultural obstacles every single day, loneliness and solitude will become a dominant shaping force in your life.
There’s lots that can be good about this. I happened to read, quite by chance, Thomas Merton’s Steven Storey Mountain on the plane ride here and his paean to the virtues of the contemplative life was influential as I began to confront my new reality here. Working in another culture and in another language, among people who are suffering so much, requires a different sort of energy than I’ve used before and I frequently find myself exhausted by mid-afternoon. In these instances, it’s nice to be able to return to a quiet evening with a good book (or the Good Book, as the case may be).
But I shouldn’t kid myself. By my nature, I am the social and extroverted type; I thrive off of others and I enjoy meeting new people and being involved in a wide range of activities. Each day of my previous life in Nome, Alaska was planned down to the minute because I was balancing so many commitments. I’ve re-located frequently in the past several years and I’ve always been able to make myself feel comfortable and at home fairly easily because I can strike up conversation and get involved quickly. But I realize now that was all dependent on our common language and cultural background. Remove that and it becomes much harder to start meeting people, making friends, and becoming part of the community.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with solitude or being alone (though I now realize that when Jesus sent disciples two-by-two it was as much for their sake as it was for the effectiveness of the evangelism). It’s just that it is not the dominant framework of our society and it is certainly not the way I’ve been used to leading my life up to this point. But it is something that all missionaries have to come to grips with and coming to grips with it requires a re-thinking of how we lead our lives.
Here’s some of the ways I’ve learned to cope:
All of this helps a little bit and helps keep me busy but it’s a dramatic lifestyle change for me and it never truly addresses the root of my problems, namely that I’m here and you’re there. Coming to grips with that reality is likely the enduring struggle of any missionary. Paul writes some place (I forgot where), “this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure.” In a similar sense, this current affliction (loneliness) will pay remarkable dividends in the future (I hope) in the memories and perspective and lessons I’m gaining here. But I wouldn’t mind it if the current price were a little less and the benefits a little more readily apparent right now.
And just think: I get to be a missionary in the electronic age when friends and family are just an e-mail or phone call away. I can’t even begin to imagine what it must have been like for missionaries in the pre-electronic age. Maybe that’s why they all went with their spouses.
Here’s something I was not prepared for: I have a cleaning lady.
Hilda comes to my rondavel once a week and cleans the place inside and out. Like many other people here, her English is spotty at best so it has only been in recent weeks, as my Xhosa has improved, that I’ve felt like I’ve really been able to communicate with her. In any event, cleanliness is more or less a universal concept and we don’t need to be able to understand the same language for her to do a great job on my place.
What’s been interesting is how having a cleaning lady has affected me. At first, I was intent that she not have to work that hard and that I neaten things up before she arrive. To an extent, I still do this but I am so used to having her around now that my behaviour changes in advance of her visits. I no longer make my bed on the day she comes, nor wash the dishes, and I frequently do my laundry on days when she is around because I know she’ll bring it in from the line and fold it.
On the other hand, as I’ve gotten to know her better and learn more about her family and life, I’ve become more generous with what I have. I’ve gone from never tipping her to (almost) always tipping her because I’ve realized that an insignificant amount of money to me is huge for her. I also make sure I have part of a loaf of bread that she can take home at the end of the day.
Here’s an obvious life lesson: sometimes it’s the unexpected that can be most memorable.
Last week, I walked in on our after-school program director Mkuseli singing to himself. This is not surprising as he is very musical and music is an integral part of life here. What surprised me, though, was that he was singing a song I knew, “Homeless” off Paul Simon’s “Graceland” album that was written and recorded with Ladysmith Black Mambazo. He was entranced by the song and I by his singing. When he finished, I asked him where he learned the song and he said he heard it on the radio the other day. I don’t think he had any idea who Paul Simon or Ladysmith are.
This week, I brought my iPod to Itipini and showed him how it worked. Words can not describe how much he loves that thing. For two and a half hours on Wednesday, he walked around with the little white ear buds in his ears humming along. I eventually took it back when the batteries were almost dead. As a sign of how much it affected him, when I went to take his picture, he actually smiled!
He listened to “Homeless” and then I showed him the other Ladysmith music I have, as well as some Soweto Gospel Choir. He eventually got out of the South African section and ranged across my music from Nickel Creek to Joan Jett to the Talent Brothers, my own, sadly defunct, band.
On Thursday, we had some speakers so we could listen together. I also printed off the lyrics to “Homeless” and we sat and sang it together (again and again and again…). He taught me what the lyrics mean and I realized I actually already knew some of it with my limited Xhosa knowledge, including the title of this post. (Xhosa and Zulu are closely related languages and Ladysmith Black Mambazo switches back and forth between the two.) But if you want to learn for yourselves, you’re going to have come visit and sing along with Mkuseli and I.
Also on Wednesday, I was playing with a baby in the clinic and decided it’s never too early to teach a child to waltz. (It was a slow day.) So I started waltzing around the clinic. But of course, you need music to dance properly so I put in the ear buds and dialed up my album of waltzes. (Yes, I have one of those. And to forestall the obvious comment, yes, I frequently march to my own drummer or waltz to my own tune, as the case may be.)
My favourite recent picture: the missionary who teaches the baby to waltz but is interrupted by a phone call while the baby’s mother listens to the music.
That trusty little iPod. Who knew it could facilitate the mission of reconciliation?
UPDATE: Those of you looking for the article I once wrote about how iPods were the greatest threat to American democracy referenced in the comments should look here. I was hoping no one would remember that!
I am approaching the six-month mark of my time in Itipini and I’ve realized that my approach to and attitude about the work here is changing in a pretty fundamental way.
Those of you regular readers of this blog will know that for some time I have been pre-occupied by the distinction between doing and being. What I’ve been forced to learn is that in many cases who I am is more important than what I can do. This is a lesson that I struggle with on a daily basis but have gradually come to accept and come to see as part of the job and one of many important life lessons I’ve learned and re-learned here.
But lately I’ve been noticing myself actually doing a fair bit. I’m teaching English after school, dealing with parents who want their children to go to school, taking patients to the hospital, and so on and so forth. Essentially, I’ve been finding my niche here and trying to exploit its potential. My workday has been lengthening in reflection of my added tasks. (You might recall that at one point I found it quite short.)
It has reached the point where I can look at a situation and see new tasks (and not just opportunities for being) for myself. My English classes are currently confined only to people who are actually in school right now but I know many young mothers who would benefit from a similar class but have dropped out of school. There’s a group of unemployed young men who hang out in our gym every morning and I’ve been wondering what I could do with and for them. It is a new and uncomfortable feeling for me here: the obstacles to my doing something here are less cultural or language-based (though of course those are still dominant) and more centered on my own willingness, drive, and inspiration to make something happen. There’s no reason I can’t start an English class for young mothers not in school tomorrow. What’s stopping me is my own hesitation about adding another commitment and my own uncertainty about just what sort of form it would take.
As the doing/being distinction fades (comparatively), a new frustration is rising to take its place: ineffectuality. I can do all I want and I can do it as often as I want and yet – to paraphrase the first chapter of Ecclesiastes – NOTHING EVER CHANGES! I can try hard to prepare a good English class and the students still walk away living in desperate circumstances with a limited knowledge of the language. I can read “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” with some high school students but that doesn’t help them feed their young babies. The scale of the problems is so gargantuan and what I can do so limited, it is impossible not to feel like a vanishingly small worker in an overwhelmingly large vineyard.
Maybe the distinction I need to start thinking in terms of is process/product. That is, I’m conditioned to judge the results of my action by its product or results. (This is what grant applications want to see – how will you judge your success?) Perhaps what I need to think about is the process I implement that will, say, set students on the path to better English comprehension even if that is not evident now-now (as South Africans like to say). Perhaps by giving students books to keep forever, I am beginning a process of reading that will continue for the rest of their lives. Perhaps the way in which we do something is more important than what is actually done. (Oh… is that a little too post-modern?) Perhaps.
Doing/being say hello to your heir: process/product.
…doesn’t mean you’re in shape!”
So said my high-school cross-country coach one fine autumn day as I shirked my way through another practice and the words rang as true this past weekend as they did then. I entered myself in the “Surfers Challenge,” a foot race along the Indian Ocean coast in East London, the next big city heading southwest from Mthatha.
Employing the patented training routine I’ve used before, notably in Nome’s Stroke-n-Croak triathlon and my bike trip through Maine when I graduated from college, I did absolutely zero training for the event. (It’s all about peaking at the right time you see.) This, despite the fact that the race was longer than anything I’d ever run before, either 16- or 18-kilometers. (The race organizers never said for certain and there weren’t any distance markers along the way.) In any event, it was a long way and I was not prepared at all for it.
The course was actually quite beautiful, right along the beach, with rolling dunes on one side and pounding surf on the other. I might have enjoyed it if I hadn’t been focused on the ground directly in front of me, trying to pick my way through terrain that included sand, loose stones, and flat, wet, rocks. There were also two river crossings, with a swift current and water up to my chest. This was kind of neat, except that the first crossing was at about the 6-kilometer mark and meant I had to run with soaked shoes for the rest of the race.
Emerging from river number one.
One of the major philosophical divisions in political theory is that of structure and agency. A theorist like Karl Marx, for instance, argued that the (economic) structures of a society are what determine a person’s life chances and opportunities. A classic liberal, like John Locke, argued that the will and agency of an individual is what is important. This debate plays itself out in many areas, such as those who argue in favour of equality of opportunity (agency) and those who support equality of condition (structure). When I was studying political theory in university, I learned some folks like to have it both ways and invented a word, “structuration,” that basically means that both structure and agency are important factors in shaping an individual’s life.
Aristotle’s Golden Mean – “moderation in all things” – should be enough to remind us that there’s always some truth in both extremes of any continuum and that structuration is basically correct. You wouldn’t deny that the structure of Europe after World War I – a punitive peace, economic recession, etc. – helped lay the groundwork for World War II but you also wouldn’t deny that the agency of Hitler helped lead to that war.
Why does all this matter and what does it have to do with Itipini? It goes back to my previous post about the Millennium Development Goals and the idea of development more generally. What I’ve realized in my time here is that the obstacles to improving the conditions of our sisters and brothers in Itipini lie in both structure and agency. What’s more, the agency obstacles might be the more salient and, most distressingly, the more difficult to remove.
While many structural obstacles can be deep-seated (and therefore hard to identify), many are not. There is lots that we in the rich world can do to remove these obstacles – pay school fees for those who can’t afford them (or lobby to remove school fees altogether), put new and up-to-date books on the shelves of libraries in the developing world, help distribute necessary vaccines (or ensure those vaccines are widely available) so preventable diseases don’t kill unnecessarily, and so on and so forth. This sort of aid appeals to the sentiments of donors in the rich world (equality of opportunity is a deep-seated belief held even by those who don’t like to admit it) and is easy to address with a check addressed to one’s favourite charity.
(Here’s perhaps the most obvious structural barrier we should all be working to remove: rich world tariffs and other barriers to trade cost the developing world twice as much as it receives in foreign aid every year. The transfer of wealth is not north-to-south but south-to-north because of fat subsidies that see more spent on a cow in Europe or North America than a child in, say, Itipini. I’ve known some good cows but none approaches the worth of even the most aggravating child here.)
But there’s got to be someone ready to take advantage of the removal of those structural barriers. I was in a long and disappointing conversation with some people involved with Itipini the other day in which we catalogued the people who had had the fees for some vocational or other training course (like hairdressing or security guard training) paid but now were still seen hanging around Itipini either because they didn’t finish the course or they weren’t in town working and putting that training to work. It was a distressingly long list we made.
Sure, there are likely other structural obstacles involved – it doesn’t help to train a single mother to be a hairdresser if she can’t find someone to take care of her child during the day. But it is hard to avoid that word that is far too frequently and unjustifiably applied to the poor and which I hesitate even to write now – lazy. One look at the weight of water women carry on their heads every day is enough to convince me the people here are not lazy. But there’s still a part of me that wants to share a few selected snippets of Max Weber’s “The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” with these people.
At what point does the effort to remove structural barriers and provide assistance become a trap that removes incentives to improve one’s own condition? What structural barriers should people have to overcome themselves and which should we seek to remove? If people don’t work to improve their condition or waste opportunities they’ve been given, how should we respond when they ask us for help with immediate needs, like food because they’re hungry? Do we say, “we tried to teach you to fish and you failed so we’re not going to give you a fish now”? And if a person doesn’t use an opportunity we’ve given them, should we stop trying to help them? Aren’t re-birth, renewal, and redemption central concepts to our faith?
Like I said before, I’ve only got questions… and more where these came from.
(This other post talks about structure and agency issues without even mentioning the words. They’re everywhere!)
One aspect of life in Itipini that is now routine to me is the pigs that are everywhere. Normally they run away from me and particularly my car when I am driving. But the other day while driving back to the clinic, one darted out in front of my car and I couldn’t swerve in time. I hit it with both the front and back wheels and when I looked in the rear-view mirror it was writing and squealing in agony, clearly on its way to death’s door. When I came back later, it was gone, obviously dispatched by some kind soul (or, more likely, someone who couldn’t handle the sound of the squealing).
Coming not a week after my first-ever speeding ticket, my first pig road kill is adding to a growing list of driving firsts. I’ll be happy not to add anymore any time soon.
While giving a tour last month to some visiting students, I was describing all the various things we do in Itipini and a new phrase popped into my head – “greasing the skids.” What we do can best in Itipini is to grease the skids of someone’s life to help them overcome the manifold obstacles that confront them every single day. If you liked physics, you could think of these in terms of the friction formula f=μN. We can reduce the coefficient of friction (μ) and thereby reduce the overall drag someone is experiencing.
Examples of this are numerous:
These are pictures of two of my co-workers. Dorothy, a nurse, sees patients in the clinic and Nthantisi (pronounced “TA-tease” for those of us who can’t master the “nt” dipthong) teaches in the pre-school. (Dorothy is the one who doesn’t like having her picture taken.)
Every morning I pick both of them up at a bottle store (the South African term for liquor store) that is owned by Dorothy’s sister-in-law and is quite close to Itipini. I navigate the usual collection of customers stumbling around the parking lot, do my best to exchange a few words in Xhosa with the sister-in-law, say, “Masihambe” (“Let’s go!”), and off we go to work.
One of the blessings of spending such a long time here is getting to know more about the fabric of life. Dorothy and Nthantisi have been instrumental in shaping my understanding of that fabric.
Nthantisi is in her mid-40s and has 3 children, the oldest of whom is my age. I don’t think she’s ever been married. In addition to teaching in the pre-school, she runs a spaza shop (kind of like a convenience store) out of her home, where she re-sells items she buys downtown; sells airtime for cellphones; cuts and styles hair; and has about a half-dozen tenants in single rooms she’s built out of mud bricks. She also built her own home one room at a time out of mud bricks she made herself. It’s pretty nice. At Itipini, she’s become the integral link in an effort we’ve launched to secure some serious government funding for the ladies who make crafts at Itipini. Some days I can’t believe all the work she has to do just to support her lifestyle.
Personality-wise, Nthantisi reminds me a lot of what I imagine Whoopi Goldberg to be like – loud, overbearing, and hilarious. In our car rides to work, she makes us laugh and laugh and laugh. She has a way of using the all-purpose South African exclamation “Yho!” at just the right time that never fails to amuse me. She is also fond of “Jesus Christ!” which shouldn’t make me laugh but does because of the way she says it.
Dorothy is quieter but she has some pointed and sharp opinions and is not afraid of sharing them, about say, my Xhosa ability, the alcohol consumption of various community members, and so on and so forth. She has a crustiness that is the prerogative of women her age (69) and is made of steel. When a patient gets caught in her tractor beam, it’s game over for them. Since she’s fluent in Xhosa, she is a huge help in counseling patients, particularly those who have just tested positive for HIV or those who seem to drink all the time.
Underneath it all is a really wonderful sense of humor that has taken me a little while to draw out. One time I was playing the guitar outside the clinic with some children and she came out to ask me to quiet down. I serenaded her with “You Are So Beautiful” and she walked back into the clinic shaking her head and chuckling and I escaped my “talking-to.”
Dorothy has been a widow for nearly 30 years and only started working at Itipini two years ago, when she realized she was bored with retirement and the clinic was looking for another nurse. She is originally from Libode, a village about a half-hour outside Mthatha and goes there nearly every weekend. Why? Because of all the funerals. Since the onset of HIV, funerals are a regular weekend occurrence across South Africa and people are expected to attend funerals even for distant family members. I used to ask Dorothy on Monday mornings about her weekend but I got so discouraged about hearing about funeral after funeral after funeral. One Monday morning, I asked her if she had been to a funeral on Saturday and she said something like, “I was supposed to but I took a back way into Libode so they wouldn’t see me. People expect you to go to all these funerals but it gets in the way of work you have to do. I did what I needed to and then came back to Mthatha.”
So… a slice of my daily life.
