Expansion Two: Thoughts from South Africa

Before I delve too deeply into the emotional hurricane that was the South Africa trip, I have new and exciting news (as ever). I will be going with Information Literacy Librarian Sarah Cohen to Seattle in March for the ACRL 14th National Conference, where we will be leading a speaker session based on our proposal, "Percolating the Power of Play." 230 applications were submitted this year, and only 19% were accepted. Admittedly, I have never been so thrilled to be involved in the library space. Now I only hope that the game(s) we have to show will help us prove our points!

I am still not sure I'll be able to put into words all the wonderful, beautiful, heartbreaking things I saw and experienced in Cape Town, but I will do my best to try.

Flying over and into the country, I definitely felt like I was on my first trip overseas. What I saw below me was something so different from everything I knew...I was so excited to see more. Very quickly, the economic diversity of the country began to show, as miles of townships were painted into the foreground of the picturesque Table Mountain.

Going into Langa on our first real day there, we were greeted by throngs of smiling children. They all clambered to have their pictures taken, posing for us and grabbing our hands as we walked down the streets. Some pleaded for small things that we carried, others simply wanted to say hi.

This behavior was almost scary to us - what parents would let their children run in the street with adults from another country? But we quickly found that it was due to a strong sense of community, that every pair of eyes looking out from the houses and shops might as well be the eyes of mothers and fathers, whether they actually were or not.

The feeling of communal love is something we don't often experience in our own culture. Maybe in my backwoods hometown in New Hampshire, and maybe a little bit within the community at Champlain, but in neither of those places is it so prevalent in the atmosphere as it was in the Cape Town townships.

Despite this overpowering presence, there was still sadness tearing them apart. Many things were hurting the people of these small communities: from the half-rennovated hostels that housed as many as three families in a single bedroom,

to the all-too-common poor driving that hurt this girl and kept her at home all day.

The thing that struck me most, though, was that talking about violence, abuse, and gender inequality was not necessarily casual, but it wasn't taboo as we might have expected. It was spoken of as if these things were just a part of life, to be accepted and to submit to. There was no sense of power in the bright young individuals, and even in some of the sharp-witted adults, that we met each day. There was no feeling of empowerment, independence, strength of voice, strength of choice. These young adults were intelligent, expressive, creative, complex, and completely helpless in their own minds to change anything about the world around them.

We found some points of inspiration, some nodes of empowerment in each community. But there is not enough support for them, and there are not enough of them to change every young man and woman's life, to keep the majority of kids off the street and out of crime. It is easy to see why they perceive change as something impossible, because their numbers are so small.

But change has to start with one person, always. Someone has to be willing to speak out, no matter the consequences. They are fortunate that they have such a powerful role model as Nelson Mandela in their recent history. They have fought so much already, and I can see in their faces that they have the strength to fight onward. The only question is if they have the time...

We met so many of what we would call "broken families," without parents and with young girls and boys taking charge of households before they were even out of school themselves. We saw classrooms without teachers, we heard stories of people calling desperately for the police and receiving help hours later, if at all. And we saw the other side of the coin: rich young children, unaware of the tragedy just outside their neighborhood, ignorant of the conditions, more interested in games than even the people sitting next to them. In a word, familiar: more like us, too much like us.

Going into this trip, I expected to find answers, but I didn't expect to fall in love. There was something so simple about the beauty of Cape Town. No matter what troubles littered the city streets, it was so easy to look up to Table Mountain, to see the beauty of the world and pull it closer to your heart. But there's only so much that a pretty reminder can do for you. It's nice, but it's not enough, nowhere near enough for those wonderful, fortunate but unfortunate people. They need more, and if it's something I can give them, I'd like to try. I don't think I'll forget what I saw there for the rest of my life, for even a day or a moment. If I do, I'll spend the rest of my life trying to remember it again.