Ch. 10: Peace

My clothes are probably dry by now. I hung them on the line a few minutes ago, taking breaks in between socks to recover from the brutal 9:30 am sun. At the beach yesterday the water was warm enough to swim comfortably. But I was wearing jeans, so I walked, and I have the rosy cheeks today to prove it. It’s Christmas season in Cape Town.

It’s still not quite registering aesthetically. I went to a “carols by candlelight” service with around 2,000 people at Kirstenbosch Gardens, and yesterday I caught my housemate singing along with his recordings of children’s choirs doing German Christmas songs. But I haven’t found the will yet to digitally dust off my Nat King Cole or Vince Gauraldi Christmas albums. Where’s the snow? asks my senses. And where’s the family?

Most of my exchange student friends, including all of my housemates, have gone home. I have moved to Observatory, an artsy and studenty neighborhood down Main Road from my old place. Now I live in a lovely house with two Germans and a Norwegian. My room has a fireplace, but I’m not finding that useful these days. I’ve been most grateful for my warm housemates, and the television which picks up Al-Jazeera, on which I watched my president dodge footwear.

When my housemates at my other place were packing their bags a few weeks ago, it was then that I felt the pangs of homesickness. Then Joseph rang the doorbell. I thought he was the painter. I had the sliding glass door open and I was sitting just inside reading Carl Jung, some time in the afternoon. The painter had been here the previous day, and I hadn’t gotten a good look at him, so when another guy showed up in work-looking clothes I let him in the gate. He walked into the yard just as he would if he were the painter, but then he said his name was Joseph and asked if I had any work that I needed done on the house. He spoke softly and slowly, without any emotion on his face. He didn’t have a sob story. I didn’t have work for him, but he was already in the yard, so I didn’t want to send him away. He said he was trying to pay for his hostel which was 25 rand per night (about $2.50 US). I invited him to sit down and offered him some food. He accepted and I brought out some Muesli and milk. He said this was the first he had eaten that day. I asked him where he was from, and he said Nairobi, Kenya. He had boarded a ship in order to go overseas, but had ended up in Cape Town. He was met with xenophobic violence, and one of his friends was stabbed to death on a train. He spent some time at a refugee camp but found that equally dangerous. Now he was looking for odd jobs and paying his hostel day-by-day. He wanted to go home, but he couldn’t afford to. He was twenty six. He asked about me, where I was from, what I was studying in school. I’m from America, where we also have poor people. Joseph wasn’t a Vietnam Veteran, he didn’t have schizophrenia, and he didn’t seem to be drunk or on drugs. This was not someone who had been abandoned by the system. This was someone who was part of the system – a system where millions and millions of reasonable, hard-working, honest people, people who don’t take dangerous risks, people who don’t blow their money on drugs, have access to an unmanageably small amount of resources. In fact, the system depends on these people to use meager resources so that the richer ones can maintain their lifestyles.

Many of these poor people are immigrants like Joseph. Immigrants are people who have taken initiative to improve their condition, people who had hope for a better life, and left their homes to achieve it. Many people in Africa escape the poverty, corruption, and political, religious, and tribal violence of their home countries and come to South Africa. They settle in townships and find jobs. Then, as the trend has been recently, the local people rape them, burn their houses, kill their family members, and drive them out. They go to government refugee camps, like Blue Waters in Cape Town. But the government doesn’t want them. The government wants them to go home, which they can’t afford to do, or to settle back in the townships, where they will most likely be killed. So the government has left the camps. It has stopped providing food and sanitation services. Local relief organizations are stepping in to the best of their ability.

My friend Alika volunteered with one of these organizations, and was tasked with buying the groceries, and given no further instructions. When she arrived she learned that half the camp is Muslim – Somalian refugees – and couldn’t eat the non-halal meat that she had bought. She also learned that the relief organizations take time off for the holidays.

Where is home for these refugees? Is it Somalia, where they are in the crossfire between Islamic militants and government forces? Is it the South African townships that they were driven away from by locals? Is it the refugee camps which the governments are starving them out of?

Joseph showed up again a couple of weeks later. He had come back to the hostel and found his things out on the street. He hadn’t paid in three days. He said he remembered his brother across town (me) and had come to see if I could help him. I fed him again, gave him some clothes, and a little more money. He asked me if I understood the language of the music I was listening to – it was local jazz, probably in Xhosa – I said no and asked him if he did. He didn’t. We are both far from home.

But I have a home to return to. And while I’m here, I have a place to live. This can all be a bit overwhelming. When I think of home, I think of a place where everyone is home. When I come home in July I know that it will be beautiful and I will be thankful. Then as weeks go by, it will be mundane again.

I am sure that some of you are also away from home for the holidays. For some of you, home may seem mundane. When mundanity is taken away, it is mundanity that we desire the most. I am thankful that I can be here, away from home and the mundane. I hope that the memory of this experience can keep my future mundanity from becoming complacency. Because peace leaves no room for apathy.

I hope you all find peace this holiday season. As always, I’d love to hear from you.