This is the first election in which my younger two kids get to vote, so yesterday I exercised my birthday privileges and requested (read: decreed) that we all go do early voting together.
I typically like to vote on the the day of the election — there’s an excitment in the air and a fun community feel (a couple times, I’ve physically run to the polls to cast my ballot) — but this year I decided to vote early. I’ll be out of the country up until a couple days before the election, so I wanted to get it done ahead of time, just be absolutely sure I didn’t miss it.
So yesterday afternoon we all met in the parking lot outside the polling station (my husband and I were on our way back from a hike, and my older daughter came from work). There were some last minute jitters — what was on the ballot again? had the online registration been done properly? — but then in we went. The correct names were found in the database, addresses recited, and then the poll workers handed us each a ballot, still warm from the printer, and we filled in our circles, fed our ballots into the the maw of the quietly-blinking machine lurking in the corner, grabbed our stickers from the table by the door, and back out to the parking lot we went.
It was painless, fast, and efficient, and it delivered a nice little civic-duty buzz to boot.
Remember last spring when part of our family went on a learning tour of the South? Well, a few months later, the trip leaders sent an email saying there would be a second learning tour the following year — to South Africa. And now, in two weeks, I’ll be joining that trip, and writing about it. Expect magnificent essays because . . . it’s SOUTH AFRICA!
I’ve traveled through Central America, and lived in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Puerto Rico (and I briefly set foot in Canada for a few days), but now here I am flying over the Atlantic to a whole new continent. I know, I know, so many of my friends and relatives (including my older kids) are world travelers, and a trip to South Africa doesn’t seem like a big deal but for me it feels borderline preposterous. Unreal. Just thinking about it makes me feel fizzy inside.
We’ll be in Johannesburg for the first week and then we fly to Cape Town for another six days, and then a bunch of us are heading to Kruger National Park for several days of safari. It sounds exotic, and it is exotic, but it’s not going to be an easy trip. If I learned anything from the trip to the South, it’s that these trips are Work. They are physically exhausting and emotionally draining, and this trip (in particular) is requiring a lot of preparation.
The readings are hard. Some are so dense that I feel like my brain is breaking, and some are so graphic that my stomach turns. In fact, I had to make a rule that I would only do my South African readings in the morning. Anything later than that and it was too distruptive to my sleep. (My sleep still does get disrupted by the distressing images, but less so.)
My husband has been reading some of the books, and he’s been coming along to the movie nights, too. His involvement has helped ground me in this swirl of new information, new feelings, new questions. Generally speaking, he has a much (much, much, much) more comprehensive understanding of history than I do, so it’s been helpful to be able to toss around my questions with him.
Slowly, I’ve been getting my footing, locking down key dates, familiarizing myself with the different ethnic groups, the various political parties, the geographical lay of the land. Now I’m beginning to dig into the theories, the motivations, the world views, the political systems, the deeper (and slippery-er) complexities and the ways in which South Africa’s story connects to Nazi Germany, slavery in the US and the US’s genocide of the Native Americans, and the turmoil in Palestine.
Recently, the entire group, plus our South African leaders, have been having weekly zoom meetings. This is not a learning tour, they said, and it’s not an excursion. Tourists pass through a place; pilgrims allow a place to pass through them. A pilgrimage is a way of unlearning speed, and it’s a different posture from “mission.” Pilgrims are there, not to make a difference, but to eat together. If you cannot hear the mouth eat, you cannot hear the mouth cry (Rwandan Proverb).
I fly out in three weeks. I’m over-the-moon excited and more than a wee bit apprehensive. It’s gonna be A Trip, that’s for sure.
