Today with
a good nights sleep under my belt, I felt totally adjusted to South African
time and ready for the day. We began our day with a hot breakfast and had some
free time until lunch. So I did with glee what I had been eager to do since the
moment I stepped foot in Kilnerton and saw one of its huge trees and that was
to set up mu hammock. If you’ve been to Appalachian State anytime recently you
may have noticed people there really like their Eno hammocks and I lay claim to
be one of the most avid. I once slept in my hammock in my freshman dorm room
for 6 weeks straight, I have slept in a tower of hammocks seven hammocks high
between two trees. I have slept over water between two Cyprus trees, I have
lounged in Peru, kicked it by waterfalls, slept through stormy nights with a
rain tarp set up in the Grand Tetons. In short I love my Eno to death and have
for 5 years, but never once in all that time have I ever been able to find a
tree big enough, open enough and sturdy enough to allow me to hammock in a single
tree – until today and for me because of that it is a day to praise God for the
goodness of the little things in life. But as in most things it was better to
do it with a companion and I was inspired by the love of this tree and its
hammocking potential by my fellow App State mountaineer Aaron Mitchell who also
set us his hammock. If you made it through that paragraph of my musings,
congratulations, I doubt I will be able to get much more sentimental and
hopelessly idealistic than that. Below is a photo of our glorious spoils.
After lunch
Dana came back to give us an all too critical security briefing. In the wake of
Apartheid, SA has a high security culture. Homes have razor wire and walls
surrounding their yards. Openings are secured with bars on the windows,
multiple locks on the doors and even gates inside of homes to protect bedrooms
incase intruders were to enter a home. People don’t walk around after dark.
Cars have locks to keep the stick shifts from moving on top of all the alarms.
Dana explained to us that SA was a beautiful nation that was great in its own
right. All the locks I needed to get into my room, and the remote controlled
gate at Kilnerton may have seemed a little unnecessary, but shoot, there is no
way that I could be less prepared if I had been born here. If I had been born
in in South Africa, I would have been a child of only a few years when Nelson
Mandela and the ANC finally broke the shackles of Apartheid. All the years
following, the country I lived in would have been in a violent struggle for
racial equality. More than anything we just need to make sure that we keep our
wits about us and be very aware of things that we might be doing that could let
the seedier side of SA see that we are a target. In his 12 years of living here,
an armed assailant has robbed Dana twice. But both times he said, there was
more that he could have done to protect himself.
The
productive part of our day ended with a something that was simultaneously
fascinating and appreciated on levels that are hard to put into words. Now was
our long seminar and workshop given by Miche and Richard on cultural awareness.
We needed to learn how to be effective in this new culture we were going to be
living in. To do this we needed to understand cultural norms, learn appropriate
ways of thinking and speaking that would not only help us have a better
experience, but make sure that we were being good representatives of ourselves,
the Mamelodi Initiative, Cru and the missionary community as a whole. I could
not possibly write out everything that we learned or how much I appreciated
getting to opportunity to understand the community before we became immersed in
it. Richard explained that while we might think it is “weird” for stoplights to
be called robots, the problem is that when we say that we are assuming that
what we have learned is right and what the whole country of SA knows is wrong,
to say its weird to call stoplight a robot is alienating to any South African
that hears it and in general is not a healthy frame of mind for us either. He
then hilariously pointed out that South Africans think it is weird that we call
the thing we wipe our mouths with at the dinner table a napkin, because in SA a
napkin is what a baby wears before its potty trained and a “serviette” is what
one wipes their face with. This was just a tiny example of what we learned in
just one of larger themes of acting inappropriately/ineffectively in our new
culture. We worked together in groups to finish out the time by taking
different statements and pairing them into improper ways of thinking. I was
told that the Peace Corps uses this same set of tools to train its volunteers
entering a new culture.
Richard also explained something
that might have been the most fascinating thing I have ever learned. In the US
we have a low cultural context, which means we say things directly. We walk
into the grocery store, get our food, and exchange the barest of niceties with
the cashier and then we go home. In our culture this makes sense, we saw we
needed food to prepare dinner with so we went and bought it and went home and
did it in the shortest amount of time possible. At the end of the day the
cashier doesn’t really act too nice because they respect the customers time
more than they do the customers social wellbeing and so they neglect genuinely
investing in them and taking a moment to learn their name and get to know them.
In SA, this does not happen. You go to the store, the shopkeeper welcomes you,
the people you encounter on your way are people you are going to engage in
conversation with regardless of whether you are in a relative hurry because at
the end of the day in this culture it is simply rude not to take your time to
be nice to people. I don’t know what excuse we can make for our closed off
lives because these people have all the same technology as we do and it has not
affected them in the same way as it has with us. It seems like in American
culture we have just accepted being rude to each other in exchange for giving
everyone more time, but I know I for one would rather be enriched my the people
I meet in everyday life. I’m pretty sure the SA’ns have something right on this
one.
The last
part of our instruction today was a language lesson, specifically how to
pronounce some common names and sounds that we do not have in English that will
be commonplace amoung the names of our students, many of whom will have names
in the Spedi, Zulu and the 6 other official languages in South Africa.
I learned with some amazement that most of the kids we will
be teaching who aren’t on track to make it into a university are likely fluent
in at least 3 languages; English, Afrikaans and Spedi. Spedi is an indigenous
language spoken by the Pedi people. One can remember this fact simply by
saying, “Pedi people speak Spedi” There was much laughter throughout this
lesson as our American tongues tried to make sounds that we had never made
before unless we had tried to do a sound effect for the clacking of a horses
hooves on cobblestone. This noise is made in place of the “x” in Xhosa language,
which is also commom here. Meaning that you pronounce the name of the language
properly by saying, “ horse hoof on
cobble stone noise and then ho-sa” I am still having a hard time
wrapping my brain around the incredible caliber of teachers we had in Mishe,
Andrew and Richard throughout this time.
Please pray that
God’s strength will be with Mische, Andrew, Richard and Kat
(Mische’s co-director) as they work long hours of logistics to make this all
possible.
Our team would always keep open minds and open hearts, never
assuming anything about this culture we still have so much to learn about.
That our hearts would sincerely be after the heart of Jesus
for the duration of this experience.
That we all stay safe and be able to heed Dana’s advice.
If bad situations do arise and we are robbed, that God would
protect our physical bodies so we can continue to serve him.
God bless and all the best,
Dylan Rollins
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