South African Patience

I’ve never been a very patient person. Growing up in a culture known for its automatic updates, faster than light internet, and instant commun- ication, my need for speedy service was only encouraged. But now that I’m in a country where Starbucks is not a source of national pride and joy (though I’ve a heard rumors of one actually existing in Cape Town), people are in general a little less antsy when they have to wait for something.

The taxis are a great example. Unlike buses – which run at scheduled times whether they have passengers or not – taxis leave the rank only when every seat is filled. As a system based on demand, there are obviously times when business is slow and an early passenger might have to wait up to 40 minutes to get going. When I first came to South Africa, this irked me to no end. I’d count the minutes, fuming and thinking, “I have places to go!” Now (unless I’m in a bad mood, running late, or it happens to be a Monday) I just climb in, sit back, and prepare to wait. I’m pleasantly surprised when I don’t have to wait long and unsurprised when I do. But instead of glaring at my watch, I just relax and let my mind wander. 

It may seem a strange thing to say, but there really is a different sense of time here. I mean this is the country that took the word “now” and made it into phrases like “just now” and “now now” that could mean anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour later. I’ve learned many things from the teachers at the school where I work and one is that there’s no use stressing about something happening on time. It’ll either happen or it won’t. Maybe it’ll happen three hours later. Maybe tomorrow. But fussing about it won’t make it come any quicker.

I spend many mornings in the Grade R classroom, helping and learning along with the 5-6 year olds.

And time well spent? That doesn’t have to mean I finished X, Y, Z in one hour and I’m going to restart the Alphabet after lunch. No, sometimes it’s just about opening your eyes, closing your mouth, and taking in what’s going on around you. In both the places where I volunteer, I’m surrounded by extremely capable people. This means there are times when they really don’t need my help. At first, I really struggled. I was here to volunteer, wasn’t I? I can’t just sit and wait patiently for the next opportunity to help out. But again, I learned that this could be a gift, as well. Some of the best learning experiences I’ve had here is when I’ve been observing a teacher instruct in the classroom, listening to the children recite poems or learning along with them as they learn the words to “Silent Night” in SeSotho.

In the end, patience has its rewards. I can think of no greater example than when I spent two months in temporary housing, waiting for news about where I would live the rest of the year. It was a frustrating time for me, but I can honestly say that everything worked out for the best, because I can’t imagine living with any other host family than the one I have now! And so, patience took its time, but finally won me over. It’s a battle I’m OK with losing.

Towers of Hope

Three years ago, Towers of Hope consisted of two good souls handing soup out at the church gate. Today its small, yet ever busy staff reaches countless lives through its five ministries.

Towers of Hope is a faith-based nonprofit, operating out of the historic Two Towers Church in Bloemfontein, South Africa. The church’s congregation – once exclusively white – is now made up of people from all walks of life, including prostitutes and people who live on the street – the very people the Towers ministry is aimed at.

Though each of the four full-time staff have a unique story about how God led to them to Towers, the majority of them started off being volunteers.

The organization’s Relief Administrator, Sonica, already had a full-time job when she began volunteering. When she realized that she couldn’t continue with both, she followed her heart and made the decision to take a sizeable pay cut and officially work for Towers.

“When God calls, he calls hard,” she said.

Another member of the team is Lee, who is Manger of Ministry Operations. She was there from the beginning, wielding a tool essential to the ministry of Towers: a pickup truck.

Known as bakkies in South Africa, a truck was needed to pick up donations, like the 30 gallons of soup that a local jail donated three times a week.

“The calling of my life is to serve,” Lee said. “The bakkie was a bonus.”

 

I spend the last week of every month volunteering at Towers. Here I am with Maria, Tower’s cook, and Sonica.

Towers organizes its projects into five core ministries: Serving, Living, Partnering. Embracing, and Empowering. Lee focuses most of her time on the first three while the church’s pastor, De la Harpe, oversees the other two.

Throughout the week and also during the weekend, meals are served through the Tower’s soup kitchen. Though a service that has been around since the beginning, it has grown along with the organization. In January alone, the staff served 1,866 meals.

Besides the soup kitchen, Tower’s ministry of Serving also handles the distribution of food parcels and other donated items. The church is also home to “The Closet” where donations of blankets, towels, clothes, shoes, books, and various household goods are sorted through and given out to those in need.

“We have been blessed with great friends and endless resources of clothes, food, and knowledge from our volunteers,” Lee said.

The other ministries include a garden, inner-city cleanup, bible studies, soccer matches, and outreach to homeless and disadvantaged people. Lee would like to see Towers expand even further, especially in rural areas where more education is needed to prevent the growing numbers of kids who end up living on the street.

But in the end, the biggest ministry of Towers is about having an open heart and a willing ear for those in need.

“It’s just about loving them,” Sonica said.

Honesty, Trust, and Math in the Most Surprising Places

When I think about public transportation, the words honesty, trust and math skills don’t immediately jump to mind. But as with many of my experiences during the last six months, I’m learning that good things can often be found in the most surprising places.

Since I am currently without a car or old red van (the vehicle of my youth as many of my friends will fondly remember), my main form of transport these days is none other than the infamous South African taxi. Now when I say taxis (also called kombis), I don’t want you to picture a yellow cab that you can ride in for extremely high prices (though we do have that type of taxi as well). I want you to picture a crowded and lively 15-seater white van with lots of windows. These taxis range from nicer, newer vehicles to those on the slightly battered side. I was once shocked to find a TV inside one of the more spacious taxis. I’m pretty sure the other passengers wondered why the American was so excited.

Unlike buses, taxis don’t come or leave at scheduled times. Depending on the taxi rank, you can usually always find the one you want, but if you’re trying to get somewhere during their non-busy time, you’ll probably have to wait for the taxi to fill up.

 I’ve often received strange looks as I’ve climbed aboard. Once, a woman actually leaned over and asked me if I was scared to ride in a taxi. The fact is that white people generally don’t ride in them. Besides myself and the other volunteers in my program, I’ve seen less than a handful of other white people using this type of transport.

One thing that has continued to both amaze and unnerve me is the way the taxi drivers accept passengers’ fare. Unlike the machines that bigger public buses have, money is passed up to the driver by hand. Sometimes he has an assistant who will help him gather and give change back, but in my experience, it has most often been only the driver who is handling cash and coin. This would be less worrisome if he wasn’t also navigating his way through traffic at the same time. What has surprised me even more than these drivers’ ability to steer with a handful of coins though is how the money makes its way up to him. Each row gathers the Rand (either coins or bills) necessary to pay the fare and passes it to the front of the taxi. Rand passes through several hands on its way up and yet I’ve never seen anyone try to pocket someone else’s money.

At first, I was wary of giving my money to someone I didn’t know. We’ve been taught from a young age that trusting strangers is usually a bad idea. But in the beginning, I often had to do just that as I figured out the system. I had to rely on the person next to me to give me the correct amount of change if I used a larger bill to pay the R6 fare. I had to trust that they weren’t going to cheat me.

Coming from a culture where (and let’s be honest here) the majority of us use a calculator (perhaps even the one on our cell phone) to do even basic math, I still marvel at how quickly people on the taxi can hand back change and figure out how many fares can be paid with a large bill of R50, for instance. Finally, grade school math teachers everywhere are vindicated! There are situations when calculators aren’t practical!

While it’s true that taxis don’t have the best reputation in the world of public transportation, my experience has been mainly a good one. Seeing qualities like honesty and trust, as well as fairly impressive math skills, in the average taxi has proven to me that there are always new things to learn, even in my daily commute.

Ingredients of a Perfect Christmas

If I’d have written down all the things I needed for an ideal Christmas a year ago, it would have been a much longer list than the one I’d write today. I would have listed a brightly lit Christmas tree, singing “Silent Night” while holding a lighted candle in a dark church, seeing snow gently blanket houses and yards, and eating my oven-baked Christmas meal all snug and warm around the table with my family.

This year, I spent Christmas Day wearing shorts, sitting outside on the grass, eating cold salads, grilled meat, and ice cream with a bunch of people I had never met before. I sweated my way through a four-hour church service, fanning myself with my hymnal while listening to a sermon in a language I didn’t know.

It was a most unusually awesome Christmas.

Santa Claus surprises the children at my school’s annual Christmas party.

Christmas Eve was split between my host family and my bosses’ house. Exchanging presents at both homes brought back memories of my last 21 Christmases back home, whether it was seeing the delight on the children’s faces while they tore through layers of wrapping paper or the laughter that results from the always embarrassing gift of underwear.

Meat straight off the outdoor grill and potato salad made up the perfect summertime meal that night and as I ate, laughed, and pulled crackers with my friends, I forgot to miss all those so called Christmas “essentials.”

Of course, I did miss my family, but a nice video chat earlier that evening with my parents helped them seem closer than their actual distance from me would suggest. My mother’s insistence that we still sing a Christmas carol together over the computer helped me to realize that my parents could still embarrass me despite being thousands of miles away. It was a rather funny reminder that even with all the new experiences I was having, some things never change.

That’s true for the holiday, as well. The two vital components of Christmas that haven’t changed – even though it sometimes feels like everything else has – are the birth of Jesus and sharing this time with those you care about. It’s something we’ve been taught time and time again whether it’s through a sermon or that slightly cliché Christmas movie on the Lifetime channel. But sometimes it takes something more – say perhaps a move to South Africa – for the message to really sink in.

I still love my traditions. This experience hasn’t made me want to throw out my collection of Christmas tree ornaments or run off to Hawaii every Dec. 24, but it has made me realize that traditions are only that. They’re not indispensable ingredients in some elaborate recipe for a perfect holiday. You can make Christmas without them. With Jesus in your heart and good friends by your side, chuck out that long list and just be present. Who knows? Maybe you’ll find that Christmas tastes even sweeter.

There is no Planet B

In movies and TV shows, the human race colonizes space, finding inhabitable planets beyond our solar system or developing new technology that creates oxygen on once unlivable worlds. However, that is fiction; climate change is our reality.

Something that has really stuck with me the past few weeks is the sentence, “There is no Planet B.” We are nowhere near the Star Trek-like travel which will let us fly away from a ruined earth.

I heard this slogan when I attended an inter-faith rally in Durban, where Desmond Tutu spoke about how important the issue of climate change is today. The rally took place on November 27^th, the day before the COP 17 talks began.

Desmond Tutu waving at one of my friends!

It was quite disheartening to see the low turnout for the rally. An estimated 4,000 people attended, leaving many empty seats in the giant stadium. Even though my friends and I knew of several instances where people wanted to come, but were prevented because of transportation issues, there was obviously also a general lack of interest – regardless of the fact that this is a topic that concerns everyone. The environment is one of the few things that we all share, no matter what our race, ethnicity, sex, or location on the planet. We are all at fault if things turn pear shaped and we destroy our home.

However, I can’t stay up on my high horse for too long. I mean, I’m the girl that spent less than 48 hours in a house before going out and buying another trash can, because one per household was just not enough. During college, there were many instances when I didn’t take the time to sort my garbage into the different recycling bins. I didn’t buy the more eco-friendly products, especially when there were cheaper alternatives. I shut lights off when I wasn’t using them, but I didn’t really think too hard about my energy consumption.

So what’s next? Should I erect a giant windmill in my backyard and install solar panels in my house? Perhaps not, but maybe I’ll be able to see things in a different light and make little changes here and there. It won’t change the world, but as the Checkers commercial says, maybe it will change the way we live in it.

Some of my fellow MUD4 volunteers and I pose in front of the stage at the rally.

So different, So familiar

  After three flights and many hours spent sitting in airports, the twelve of us were glad to finally be in Pietermaritzburg, where our orientation would begin. We piled into a large taxi – excited to begin our year in South Africa. The radio was on and I began to listen, ready to hear a hit from one of South Africa’s most popular bands. Instead, my ears were greeted with the opening notes of American singer and rapper Travie McCoy's “Billionaire.” It was my first hint that not everything was going to be new and foreign to me.

  Though Coca Cola and Sprite taste basically the same, our experience with cream soda at Nando’s (once described as the McDonald’s of South Africa in terms of its popularity) left us wondering why the cream tasted like lime. Money here is called Rand and is definitely cooler looking than U.S. Dollars (Sorry, Uncle Sam!) When it comes down to it, an ELEPHANT is just more interesting to look at that than George Washington. (Sorry, George!)



Up close and personal with some wild giraffes and zebras in Bisley Park



  Though English is one of the 11 official languages in South Africa and spoken many places, it is more similar to British English than American English. Words like plaster (bandage) and biscuit (cookie) are used, resulting in some rather strange looks coming my way when I use the Americanized version.  Fortunately, thanks to an obsession with Harry Potter and other forms of British culture (as my family and best friends can testify to at length) I’ve adjusted fairly quickly. Like cars in the United Kingdom, the steering wheel is on the right side of the car.  I won’t admit how many times I’ve almost gotten into the wrong side of the car. I definitely won’t admit how many times I HAVE gotten into the wrong side of the car. (It was only once and no one noticed.)

  The most obvious change is the difference in seasons. Winter only recently ended here while back home it’s starting.  As a Midwesterner who has frozen through more winters than I want to remember, it will surely be a shock when I am eating braai (barbeque) outside during the Christmas season. If I miss the snow and cold (and that’s a big if) I can always watch my DVD of “White Christmas.” I could even watch it while in my swimsuit, just for dramatic effect.

  Though changes in language and food are easy enough to explain, differences in culture and attitude are harder to pinpoint. No matter the country, all people (not counting those on reality shows or CSI) share common values of family, friends, and love. They like to laugh, share stories, and work hard to provide for their families. Like many countries, South Africa has its share of problems – the HIV/AIDS epidemic directly or indirectly touches the lives of so many, thousands upon thousands of people live in clusters of tiny, one room shacks that are sometimes barely across the street from someone with a three-car garage, and travel beyond one’s hometown is a luxury many people can never afford.

 

Shacks near Pietermaritzburg



  But South Africa is not just the poverty that exists in its borders. This country has a proud history of sports – the most popular are soccer and rugby, whose history is tied intricately with the politics and reuniting of a country torn apart by apartheid. It has thriving industries (Americans only have to visit the grocery store to see the bottles of South African wine that line the shelves). South Africa is also its people, who are friendly and generous, so welcoming to strangers (especially clueless Americans who are always asking questions). I have been so humbled by the generosity I have been shown during my stay here.

  Our first Sunday in South Africa, the twelve of us worshiped at a church affiliated with a local university. While many of the song were familiar, the congregation surprised us by singing them to completely different tunes and rhythms than we were used to. It was the perfect example of how something can be both new and old, both familiar and foreign at the same time. It’s been one of many lessons I’ve learned in my short time here and I know it won’t be the last surprise in store for me this year.