empty hands

Day Five
Good morning!

^{photo credit: Seth Meyers}

A few more facts about South Africa:

*The unemployment rate in South Africa is somewhere around 38%. To put that in context, the highest the unemployment rate got in the United States during the Great Depression was 25%. In Kliptown, the unemployment rate is 98%. 

*White, Indian, colored (biracial Black and white), and Black are the four main categories for race. During apartheid (and, to a large extent, today), whites owned and controlled everything, Indians were charged with managing businesses, and colored and Blacks were the black and brown bodies doing the hard labor.

*Instead of using the word “tribes” or “tribal people,” it is now more correct and respectful to use the phrase “people groups.” 

*Many South Africans speak multiple languages, as in six or more. A number of the languages are similar (kinda like romance languages), so often people will have conversations in which each person speaks the language they are most comfortable with, but yet they can all understand each other.

*I thought the languages (we were most exposed to Zulu and Xhosa) sounded a little similar to Spanish. What was different were the three kinds of clicks made for the ‘c,’ ‘q,’ and ‘x.’ One is made at the front of the mouth, one at the side (like when telling a horse to giddyup), and one is made with the back of the tongue popping against the roof of the mouth. They are beautiful to listen to and (for me) impossible to do. (If you want to see them in action, watch this “click song.”)

Tany’s breakfast plate: fresh fruit, porridge, homemade muffins,
and bread with avocado mash, mushroom saute, and eggs

On our way back to Hillbrow to visit a homeless shelter, we made a stop for some of the members of our group who wanted to do some shopping for the shelter. While the rest of us waited in the bus, we had one of our many pop-up conversations, this time primarily about the previous afternoon’s discussion.

• “What does ‘how are you going to stop the killing’ mean? How can we stop the killing?”
• “It’s disconcerting to realize that we represent the colonizers.” 
• “We don’t represent the colonizers,” someone corrected. “I think what they’re saying is that we are the colonizers.” 
• “How do we listen without being violent?” 
• “What do we do with all the stuff we’re learning?”

As I listened, I realized that I didn’t feel the need to do anything. Quite frankly, I’d probably go back home and pick up exactly where I’d left off … Or not? I’d figure that out later. I didn’t feel it was realistic to think that a couple weeks in another part of the world would change me all that much, and I said as much, and then I went one step further.

“It seems to me that Mennonites often feel that our presence is extra important. Like, just by virtue of being us, we are helping the world around us. I know we have power and responsibility — I’m not trying to sidestep that — but the assumption that our actions are helpful comes across as a bit arrogant. This idea that we must fix the problems — as though we are the ones with the answers — is beginning to feel a lot like the colonial mindset we’re learning about.”

These flat hills are gold mine dumps, and they are scattered throughout Jo’burg.

At the shelter, we were told to keep everything on the bus, including phones, and to greet the men with fistbumps only, for sanitation reasons. We were discouraged from taking photos in the poorer communities. “They have been stripped of so much of their dignity already,” Pokie explained. “To photograph them only adds to the indignities,” which is why I have no photos of Kliptown or Hillbrow.

But I can tell you this much: the poverty I witnessed in the various neighborhoods we drove through was unlike any poverty I’ve seen before. Correction: it was “like” other poverty (rock bottom is rock bottom), but the South African poverty felt different. Thicker, maybe, and more pervasive. People lay sprawled in the median strips, sleeping. Entire communities had erected cardboard shelters, each one the size of a single pup tents, smashed up beside each other on sidewalks lining busy roads. Garbage clogged the creeks and ditches. In those communities, I never, not once, saw a single white person.

^{photo credit: Seth Meyers}

The leaders of MES (mould, empower, serve) met us at the bus and let us into a large room where they explained their programming, and then, when it was time for lunch, about 60 men filed into the room and people from our group began ferrying trays laden with pap and ground beef sauce from the kitchen to the men lining the room, and I immediately felt deeply, profoundly uncomfortable.

See, when we’d first arrived, Iziko offered us a three-part framework to help guide our interactions with our contextual Bible studies and the South African culture: see, judge (discern), act, and that day at the shelter what I saw was white people handing out free food to Black men.

It was an innocent act — an act of love and generosity — but all I could see was the white savior image. White people, in the name of helping (and “helping” is, perhaps, a too-generous word) had caused South Africa so much harm. Even though those men at the shelter probably got food handed to them every day by MES staff, what right did I have to give them anything? I would’ve gladly washed dishes, scrubbed bathrooms, or helped bathe people, but I didn’t want to hand a Black person anything.

Each day in South Africa was feeling more and more like a stripping — a stripping of my identity, my assumptions, my religious beliefs. Both metaphorically and literally, I wanted, maybe needed, my hands to be empty. White people had done so much harm in the name of “helping,” and I didn’t know enough — of the culture, power dynamics, and actual needs — to give anything, or even really participate in any meaningful way. My job was to keep my hands empty and be present — full stop. 

So instead of helping, I sat down on a bench and struck up a conversation with Pokie. After all the men were served, we each got a plate of food, and it was delicious.

^{photo credit: Seth Meyers}

We spent the afternoon shuttling around to the various MES organizations — a day care, a tutoring program for high schoolers, a training program for young adults — and then on the way home, we pulled up in front of Montecasino. 

“Go on in and get yourself an ice cream,” Andrew said. “Notice what you see, and then meet back here in an hour.”

To enter the mall, we had to go through a metal detector and have our bags searched, and inside, it was like an indoor city.

The ceiling was made to look like the sky — in some parts it was broad daylight and in other places it was a starlit night. I even discovered a little “river!”

We got ice creams, and then a couple of us walked through the casino with eyes agog. When Arloa, one of our group’s facilitators, sat down at a slot machine to make-believe play and then actual players plopped down in the same row, I made her stay put so I could watch how one goes about gambling.

My conclusion: I do not understand the draw.

That night, the women at St. Benedict’s prepared veggies, salad, curry, and a homemade na’an for supper, which I enjoyed immensely. 

^{photo credit: Tany Warkentin}

After supper, Nkosi let us in a classic web-building exercise in which a ball of yarn gets tossed from person to person creating a web of connection, but in his version the person doing the tossing had to say something nice about the person they were tossing to (and then a couple more people were allowed to piggyback comments). This was no casual activity — it lasted a good hour and a half.

^{photo credit: Seth Meyers}

Here are a couple of my takeaways:

• The South Africans often opened their sharing by first expressing how that person angered or frustrated them. I noticed this openness to disagreement, and the valuing of the other person within the disagreement, at other points, too, and it gave me pause.
• I chose to address Nkosi. After I’d finished (and the follow-up people had spoken), Nkosi said, “This is the first time I have ever been moved to tears by white people — I mean not-angry tears,” which made us all shout with laughter. Was he just saying this, I wondered, or was his perception of white people actually being challenged because of his interactions with us?
• One person opted out of the activity, but when it was Mzi’s turn he (with permission) named this person’s gifts. Among other things, Mzi said that he valued this person’s need to not participate. “You take time away when you need to and I think that’s beautiful.” (Which is definitely not my first thought when someone refuses to participate.) And then Mzi reminded us that re-treat is one of the four Rs of Iziko, along with re-search, re-source, and re-member, and that’s when I realized that my unwillingness (or inability) to serve food at the homeless shelter was absolutely okay. Stepping back — holding back, not doing, re-treating  — is not only okay, it’s also necessary work. 

That’s the thing about Mzi: he had a way of seeing people, really seeing them, which, in turn, helped me to better see myself.

Mzi and Tany

This same time, years previous: a mere trifle, fat cow, the quotidian (11.15.21), my new kitchen: the refrigerator, guayaba bars, success!, Thai chicken curry, gravity, lessons from a shopping trip, the wiggles.