Last Friday I did my first load of laundry since I’ve been here. My German housemate pointed out to me that I had been putting powder detergent in the liquid compartment of the washing machine. For nine months. “Yah, you see the little pump. He cannot pump powder.” Somehow it always gets diffused enough to convince me that it had served its purpose.
But, come to think of it, my clothes have always seemed clean anyway. And, assuming that I haven’t been rolling in harmful contaminants, seeming is all that matters. So how necessary is detergent, really, after a rinse and a spin and a few hours hanging in the sun?
In modern civilization, we use resources and much more than we need to, because we rarely get a glimpse of how unnecessary they are. And rich nations have largely been able to preserve this hegemony by remaining blind to the consequences these unnecessary uses of resources have on the global ecosystem. I read somewhere that Great Britain has kept its emission promises under the Kyoto protocol only by outsourcing manufacturing, and therefore emissions, to India. While corporations are greenwashing consumers in North America and Europe into thinking that they can be “eco-friendly” by buying unnecessary products with woodsy color schemes, the much less “enlightened” African continent is inflicting a tiny fraction of the impact on the Earth’s resources. Yet it is suffering the consequences. Nations with agricultural economies which are unstable anyway after generations of imperial leeching are more prone to suffering from erratic climactic patterns. Not to mention the even more fragile dependence on subsistence farming, as I saw in Malawi, where the rains-to-meals ratio is locked quite tightly. The first-world nations have cushioned themselves from these issues by their power to import despite rising food prices.
South Africa’s economy benefits from soil that is fertile in a different way – it contains some of the richest deposits of gold and diamonds in the world. Coupled with its history of apartheid, which allowed a portion of the population to consume resources and produce waste at a rate comparable to first-world nations, this puts it in the unique position of being both a perpetrator and a victim of resource-based environmental problems. One might think that this would produce an attitude of “we are shooting ourselves in the foot.” But this is prevented by South Africa’s limits of national cohesion. The apartheid legacy of contrast has remained, and so the perpetrators can still distance themselves from the victims. Alas! it is only a microcosm of global-scale dysfunction.
South Africa faces many environmental disasters, from polluted rivers and destruction of wetland ecosystems, to waste and energy. For a modern city, Cape Town’s attitude toward recycling is anachronistic. When looking at apartments, I asked landlords about recycling facilities, and received blank stares in response. My current landlord collects newspapers, glass, and tins, but says that “South Africa has a surplus of plastics.” South Africans haven’t fully grasped the idea of separating waste. And taxes for industrial dumping are so low that manufacturers have little incentive to reduce.
One issue that I feel right at home with is dependence on coal. My home state of West Virginia is a top producer and consumer of coal in the nation. South Africa, too, burns coal for most of its electricity. To my knowledge, the violent practice of mountaintop removal, which has been damaging water sources, ecosystems, and communities in West Virginia for many years, hasn’t found its way into the tactical handbooks of South African mine companies, but the other dirty attributes of coal are equally problematic here. 73% of carbon emissions in South Africa come from the burning of fossil fuels (primarily coal) for energy production. Jacob Zuma, the President-in-waiting who still needs to go through the motions of campaigning, recently said, “we want to escalate our national efforts towards the realisation,” (my “rhetoric” LED is now lit up), “of a greater contribution of renewable energy sources, including solar and wind power, as part of an ambitious renewable energy target.” Make it happen, JZ. Make it happen.
But the backbone of any real environmental change is not governments or corporations, but the people: constituents, consumers, those who make tiny decisions which, taken en masse, have huge consequences. A couple of weeks ago the World Wildlife Fund hosted a global Earth Hour. It asked all citizens of the world to turn off their lights for one hour, as a demonstration of solidarity against global warming. I was surprised that in Cape Town, despite its outdated tendencies, this was publicized on billboards and placards. In a minibus taxi one day I heard Desmond Tutu’s voice over the radio, urging my participation. It doesn’t take much of an excuse for South Africans to party, so this event was celebrated across the city. The Cape Town Philharmonic played at the waterfront. I had to miss out on a friend’s braai (barbeque) to play a candlelit gig at a local bar.
As an artist, I am concerned not only with material repercussions of environmental attitudes, but also the psychosocial concerns of a people living with not only the immediate effects and a guilty conscience, but the knowledge that it’s getting worse and it’s nearly unstoppable. This Wednesday I am presenting a performance at the College of Music which is conceived as a reaction to these building pressures, and a mythological response to them. Featuring masks, dancers, props, a storyteller, and music that is edgier than the tastes of most of the audience members, it will attempt to serve as a moment of catharsis. It’s something we all need to experience in order to be emotionally able to face the reality of the situation, and then roll up our sleeves and get to work.
Friday, April 10, 2009
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Ch. 12: A Glint of Light in Woodstock
“Avoid conspicuous clothing.” Advice from page three of my passport. My passport, which has no clue where I am, except that I’m not in the United States. I wonder if South African passports say the same thing, or if it’s only America that would have such a superiority complex. You want to go out there? asks Uncle Sam, turning his pointer finger to the dark beyond. The wind picks up and thunder grumbles from somewhere over the Atlantic. I won’t stop you, he says, finger trembling. But please, avoid conspicuous clothing.
Lucky for me, I prefer earth tones. But I do have an orange backpack.
On Saturday I decided that it was about time to inject some fresh energy into my music collection. I planned to head downtown to the fabled Musica superstore at the Waterfront. Despite my best efforts, I wouldn’t make it to the Waterfront. That is, until today, when I found myself sitting in a bank hoping I would not be defeated by bureaucracy, and that I would be able to afford my groceries after all.
Just before I left for the music store, I got a call from Cizzi, a Swedish student who was my housemate briefly in Observatory. She wanted to know if I would join her at an organic food market at the Old Biscuit Mill, a touristy establishment in Woodstock. I wasn’t sure where it was exactly, but she said it was just a walk down Lower Main from where we used to live. It was on my way to the Waterfront, and I needed food anyway. So I hopped on a taxi, which in Cape Town means a minibus that goes back and forth along a certain route, at times stuffing in more passengers than there is enough oxygen to support. But this one was pretty empty, so I was at leisure to talk with the man who collects the money. “Do you know where the Old Biscuit Mill is?” I asked. He showed no sign of recognition, and in Afrikaans he consulted with the driver who showed no sign of recognition. They arrived at a conclusion. He promised to drop me off close by. As we continued along Main Road past anything within walking distance of my old house, I began to get antsy. But he insisted he would take me there. As the taxi was slowing down, the coloured woman next to me turned to me. “Do you want to get robbed? You’re a white guy, and only coloured people live here.” Neither of these points was news to me, so I chose to continue, but to listen to the driver’s advice: “keep your belongings close.” It wasn’t hard – I was wearing an orange backpack, which couldn’t have been closer to my back. He said the Old Biscuit Mill was right there, and pointed a short way down a side street.
I took this short street and rounded the corner. There, with boarded windows and chipped paint, was The Biscuit Factory. I wondered how far I was from my actual destination. I called Cizzi. “What street are you on?”
“Can’t find the name.”
“Do you see train tracks?” I did. She didn’t.
I knew I was at least still in Woodstock, so I followed this street back in the direction I had come. It was parallel to Main Road, and busy enough that I wasn’t too concerned in broad daylight. I ran into a couple who actually knew the place. They told me I was about 3 km away. The midday sun had already brought a shine to my forehead. Forget it, I said, I’ll just go back to Main Road, catch another taxi, and find that music store. I took out my phone and sent a text message to Cizzi informing her of my plans. On Table Mountain, tourists with binoculars would have seen a tiny explosion of light coming from Woodstock as the sun glinted off of my phone’s display. “That one’s on borrowed time,” they would have said to each other. That is, if they had read the warnings in their passports.
Putting the phone back in my pocket, I started down another side street toward Main Road. I heard anxious shouts from a group of people sitting in front of a shop. They were waving frantically at me, don’t go down there. A shirtless man with a crystal hanging from a cord around his neck approached me.
“Where are you from?” He asked. I told him.
“So you’ve heard of the Bronx. You’re in the Bronx right now. Come sit by my sister’s shop for a few minutes. I’ll go fetch a shirt and I’ll take you to Main Road.”
I appreciated his looking out for me, but I had no reason to believe he wasn’t one of the ones he was warning me about. I was just a few blocks from the side street I had taken to get here, which was less residential and more open. I thanked him and told him I would just go back the way I came.
A few steps in that direction, I heard the same question from another man. “Where are you from?” He was a big guy, with two diamondlike earrings. Still walking, I told him where I was from. Next thing I knew, he plunged his hand into my pocket and pulled out my cell phone. In his other hand appeared a big, jagged knife. He pulled my orange backpack off my back without much difficulty. He retreated, and another man walked toward me with eyes that said, you don’t want any trouble, do you? I didn’t but, remembering my beloved sound recorder in my bag, I shouted after my assailant, “There’s stuff in there you don’t want, man.” Then I turned and kept walking, as the other man was drawing closer. Again, I heard a chorus of voices drawing my attention. This time it was a group of people at a filling station. What did they want? And would this guy intercept me if I tried to go to them? Then I saw that they were gesturing at my orange backpack, which was now in the hands of the shirtless man. So I crossed the street and went to this little shop, where I was given back my bag. “Check to see if anything’s missing,” said the shirtless man.
“Just my wallet,” I said, eyeing the sound recorder with relief. He and his brother had approached the guy, but when they saw his knife, they had backed off. He had dropped my bag, and taken only my wallet. Was he afraid of the stuff he didn’t want? I can only guess. I was given a crate to sit on, and I listened as the locals cursed the drug addicts for tarnishing the image of Woodstock and of Cape Town. The shirtless man’s brother escorted me to the police station, where I ran into a filmmaker I had met at a party. He had told me he was doing a documentary on crime in Cape Town. Was he here for research? I asked him. No, his car had been broken into.
After riding around Woodstock in a police cruiser looking for the perpetrator, I wound up back at the station. After waiting awhile, an officer dropped three cards on the table: two debit cards and my Eagle Scout ID, which also has raised lettering but is less useful at an ATM. For some reason they were all bent in the middle. So, where was the diamond-eared man? They had let him go. Something about the card companies and subpoenas. I gave my statement, and listed everything that had been in my wallet. My driver’s licence, I remembered, was not among them. I had used it to get my UCT ID the day before, and apparently had left it at the desk in the Leslie Social Sciences building. On Monday I went back for it. They still had it, and I told them my story. “Should have left your wallet here,” quipped the man behind the desk.
As with any misfortune which can be written about in this tone so soon after its occurrence, there are elements of fortune within it. Thanks to my absent-mindedness, I don’t have to go back to the DMV in June. Thanks to raised lettering, I still have my Eagle Scout ID. Thanks to the residents of the community, who publicly antagonized a violent man who probably knows where they live, I got my bag back and made it safely to the police station. And thanks to my parents dropping everything to help me, I did receive the money wire I was waiting for in the bank today.
While the implication is absurd that everywhere outside the U.S. is more dangerous than everywhere inside the U.S., it’s true that Americans tend to stick out here, and we tend to be targets. Preventing and preparing for crime is part of the everyday thought routines of people living in urban South Africa. While we’ve all learned that prevention is priceless, we also know that fear is futile. As soon as I get my cards working, I’ll jump in a taxi again. And this time I’ll come back with CDs.
Lucky for me, I prefer earth tones. But I do have an orange backpack.
On Saturday I decided that it was about time to inject some fresh energy into my music collection. I planned to head downtown to the fabled Musica superstore at the Waterfront. Despite my best efforts, I wouldn’t make it to the Waterfront. That is, until today, when I found myself sitting in a bank hoping I would not be defeated by bureaucracy, and that I would be able to afford my groceries after all.
Just before I left for the music store, I got a call from Cizzi, a Swedish student who was my housemate briefly in Observatory. She wanted to know if I would join her at an organic food market at the Old Biscuit Mill, a touristy establishment in Woodstock. I wasn’t sure where it was exactly, but she said it was just a walk down Lower Main from where we used to live. It was on my way to the Waterfront, and I needed food anyway. So I hopped on a taxi, which in Cape Town means a minibus that goes back and forth along a certain route, at times stuffing in more passengers than there is enough oxygen to support. But this one was pretty empty, so I was at leisure to talk with the man who collects the money. “Do you know where the Old Biscuit Mill is?” I asked. He showed no sign of recognition, and in Afrikaans he consulted with the driver who showed no sign of recognition. They arrived at a conclusion. He promised to drop me off close by. As we continued along Main Road past anything within walking distance of my old house, I began to get antsy. But he insisted he would take me there. As the taxi was slowing down, the coloured woman next to me turned to me. “Do you want to get robbed? You’re a white guy, and only coloured people live here.” Neither of these points was news to me, so I chose to continue, but to listen to the driver’s advice: “keep your belongings close.” It wasn’t hard – I was wearing an orange backpack, which couldn’t have been closer to my back. He said the Old Biscuit Mill was right there, and pointed a short way down a side street.
I took this short street and rounded the corner. There, with boarded windows and chipped paint, was The Biscuit Factory. I wondered how far I was from my actual destination. I called Cizzi. “What street are you on?”
“Can’t find the name.”
“Do you see train tracks?” I did. She didn’t.
I knew I was at least still in Woodstock, so I followed this street back in the direction I had come. It was parallel to Main Road, and busy enough that I wasn’t too concerned in broad daylight. I ran into a couple who actually knew the place. They told me I was about 3 km away. The midday sun had already brought a shine to my forehead. Forget it, I said, I’ll just go back to Main Road, catch another taxi, and find that music store. I took out my phone and sent a text message to Cizzi informing her of my plans. On Table Mountain, tourists with binoculars would have seen a tiny explosion of light coming from Woodstock as the sun glinted off of my phone’s display. “That one’s on borrowed time,” they would have said to each other. That is, if they had read the warnings in their passports.
Putting the phone back in my pocket, I started down another side street toward Main Road. I heard anxious shouts from a group of people sitting in front of a shop. They were waving frantically at me, don’t go down there. A shirtless man with a crystal hanging from a cord around his neck approached me.
“Where are you from?” He asked. I told him.
“So you’ve heard of the Bronx. You’re in the Bronx right now. Come sit by my sister’s shop for a few minutes. I’ll go fetch a shirt and I’ll take you to Main Road.”
I appreciated his looking out for me, but I had no reason to believe he wasn’t one of the ones he was warning me about. I was just a few blocks from the side street I had taken to get here, which was less residential and more open. I thanked him and told him I would just go back the way I came.
A few steps in that direction, I heard the same question from another man. “Where are you from?” He was a big guy, with two diamondlike earrings. Still walking, I told him where I was from. Next thing I knew, he plunged his hand into my pocket and pulled out my cell phone. In his other hand appeared a big, jagged knife. He pulled my orange backpack off my back without much difficulty. He retreated, and another man walked toward me with eyes that said, you don’t want any trouble, do you? I didn’t but, remembering my beloved sound recorder in my bag, I shouted after my assailant, “There’s stuff in there you don’t want, man.” Then I turned and kept walking, as the other man was drawing closer. Again, I heard a chorus of voices drawing my attention. This time it was a group of people at a filling station. What did they want? And would this guy intercept me if I tried to go to them? Then I saw that they were gesturing at my orange backpack, which was now in the hands of the shirtless man. So I crossed the street and went to this little shop, where I was given back my bag. “Check to see if anything’s missing,” said the shirtless man.
“Just my wallet,” I said, eyeing the sound recorder with relief. He and his brother had approached the guy, but when they saw his knife, they had backed off. He had dropped my bag, and taken only my wallet. Was he afraid of the stuff he didn’t want? I can only guess. I was given a crate to sit on, and I listened as the locals cursed the drug addicts for tarnishing the image of Woodstock and of Cape Town. The shirtless man’s brother escorted me to the police station, where I ran into a filmmaker I had met at a party. He had told me he was doing a documentary on crime in Cape Town. Was he here for research? I asked him. No, his car had been broken into.
After riding around Woodstock in a police cruiser looking for the perpetrator, I wound up back at the station. After waiting awhile, an officer dropped three cards on the table: two debit cards and my Eagle Scout ID, which also has raised lettering but is less useful at an ATM. For some reason they were all bent in the middle. So, where was the diamond-eared man? They had let him go. Something about the card companies and subpoenas. I gave my statement, and listed everything that had been in my wallet. My driver’s licence, I remembered, was not among them. I had used it to get my UCT ID the day before, and apparently had left it at the desk in the Leslie Social Sciences building. On Monday I went back for it. They still had it, and I told them my story. “Should have left your wallet here,” quipped the man behind the desk.
As with any misfortune which can be written about in this tone so soon after its occurrence, there are elements of fortune within it. Thanks to my absent-mindedness, I don’t have to go back to the DMV in June. Thanks to raised lettering, I still have my Eagle Scout ID. Thanks to the residents of the community, who publicly antagonized a violent man who probably knows where they live, I got my bag back and made it safely to the police station. And thanks to my parents dropping everything to help me, I did receive the money wire I was waiting for in the bank today.
While the implication is absurd that everywhere outside the U.S. is more dangerous than everywhere inside the U.S., it’s true that Americans tend to stick out here, and we tend to be targets. Preventing and preparing for crime is part of the everyday thought routines of people living in urban South Africa. While we’ve all learned that prevention is priceless, we also know that fear is futile. As soon as I get my cards working, I’ll jump in a taxi again. And this time I’ll come back with CDs.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Ch. 11: The Lord Gave and the Lord Hath Taken Away
I have found myself in Africa for six months now. I am halfway through my stay here, and incidentally, halfway through my university education. No better time to find a new Africa.
I had the good fortune of spending Christmas with familiar faces. Mary Walsh and her husband Roy Heaton knew my father from his nomadic soul-searching days. Now their daughter, Mary Beth, was halfway through her term in the Peace Corps in Malawi. For Christmas, Mary Beth met them in Cape Town, where several of their old friends live. Luckily for me, this meant Christmas with families. Mary Beth was happy to see a more developed city, but, as it turns out, she had to pay for it dearly.
Before she left Malawi, Mary Beth had been bitten by one of the fiercest creatures in tropical Africa – a mosquito. But now Mary Beth was in Cape Town – a malaria-free area – and she hadn’t brought her medicine with her. So when she woke up Christmas morning with obvious signs of the disease, she had no choice but to seek medical attention. So it was a miserable holiday season for her, and she ended up in Pretoria, where the South African Peace Corps doctor took care of her. After a short spell in Pretoria, she returned to Malawi.
Meanwhile, I had met these friends of their family, the Horrockses, who lived most of the year in Malawi. Along with Amy, a friend from the Telluride Association who is on a Fulbright in Malawi, I was up to four contacts in the country. I had standing invitations from all of them, and I decided to take them up. So on the ninth of January I flew to Lilongwe, the capital city.
Malawi is a small, skinny country that borders Mozambique, Zambia, and Tanzania. On the eastern side of the country is a large lake – Lake Malawi. According to the U.S. State Department’s website, 90% of Malawi’s residents practice subsistence farming. It also has a very high population density. This means that if you are standing somewhere in Malawi, there’s a good chance you’re in somebody’s maize field. The country was only invaded by the British in the late 19th century. It never saw a large influx of European expatriates, so the British didn’t bother to Westernize it. Now independent since 1964, it still has rudimentary industry and infrastructure.
I spent a couple of days with Amy in Lilongwe. We took a walk through the streets of Old Town – the main trading district. Many of the scenes seemed anachronistic – old Singer sewing machines, hand-painted shop signs, scaffolding made from flimsy sticks.
This last image may be a good symbol for the Malawian professional music scene. One evening I got to play with some local jazz artists. The keyboardist with the group hadn’t had any formal musical education, and he asked me if I had a CD that I could give him that would teach him to play jazz. Later in the week I hitched down to Blantyre, the other main city in Malawi. There I met more musicians who bemoaned the situation – everyone who was good enough to leave the country, did. Visiting an international school, I was invited to teach two music class periods. It was a total of three students, and it was the only instruction they had had, and probably would ever have, in improvised music.
Early in the week I received an email from Mary Beth’s mother in Rhode Island. The Peace Corps office in Washington had decided to terminate Mary Beth’s service in the Peace Corps, in order to penalize her for not taking her medicine, and to make an example out of her for future volunteers. Everyone who had known Mary Beth and her work fought the decision, including the Peace Corps director in Malawi. But in the end, the appeal went back to the initial decision makers, and the decision stood. So, as it turns out, I would be with Mary Beth when she was saying goodbye to everyone she had known for the past year.
I reached her village and found the school where she had been working as a physical science teacher. Her house was filled with students; she was passing out photos to remember her by. Her house is made of concrete, with a tin roof. She has three bedrooms and two common rooms, with only a few wooden chairs, a table, and camp chairs for furniture. There is a small fenced in area outside where dishes are washed, and a shelter for cooking on the other side. The shelter has no chimney, and as I stood by to learn how to cook nsima, the local staple dish, a sort of corn porridge, I found my eyes continually assaulted by the smoke of the fire. The Malawians seemed immune. Behind that shelter there is a vegetable garden, and on the other side of that is the chim, another shelter with a hole in the floor and a BYO toilet paper policy.
We walked with Melita to her village, across a few kilometers of tobacco fields. We went from house to house so Mary Beth could say goodbye to her students’ parents. While Mary Beth chatted in Chichewa, I used only what I knew - by far the most useful phrases in the language: mulibanje (how are you?), ndili bwino (I’m fine), and izikomo (thank you). It’s no coincidence that these are all polite words. Chewa culture places great value on politeness and respect, as well as a virtue that I enjoyed the most as a visitor: hospitality. In Blantyre a man whom I had shared a hitch with went at least an hour out of his way to help me find the place I was looking for, even insisting on paying my minibus fare. In Lilongwe another man took about an hour to give me a tour of City Centre. And here in the village, everyone we visited invited us in for nsima. But Mary Beth had too many goodbyes to say.
The next morning I went with her to her school, where she addressed the students in assembly, giving them instructions on how to write letters to America. The staff and students were in despair – she had spent a year preparing her students to take the physical science portion of the national exam. But it required two years of preparation, and now that she was leaving halfway through, and there was no other teacher for physical science, all the students knew they were going to fail it. In my interactions with the students I got the strong sense that most of them had a strong desire to succeed, and many obstacles in their way. Mary Beth’s departure was one more obstacle.
All the children of the village came to watch the Peace Corps being loaded with all her belongings. She said her last goodbyes and the van pulled away. She is still fighting to be reinstated, and has collected many letters of support from her students, which she will send to Washington. Today I heard from her father that she was home safe, but still having difficulty coming to terms with the events of the last couple of weeks.
Pictures from Malawi at http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/natepmay.
I had the good fortune of spending Christmas with familiar faces. Mary Walsh and her husband Roy Heaton knew my father from his nomadic soul-searching days. Now their daughter, Mary Beth, was halfway through her term in the Peace Corps in Malawi. For Christmas, Mary Beth met them in Cape Town, where several of their old friends live. Luckily for me, this meant Christmas with families. Mary Beth was happy to see a more developed city, but, as it turns out, she had to pay for it dearly.
Before she left Malawi, Mary Beth had been bitten by one of the fiercest creatures in tropical Africa – a mosquito. But now Mary Beth was in Cape Town – a malaria-free area – and she hadn’t brought her medicine with her. So when she woke up Christmas morning with obvious signs of the disease, she had no choice but to seek medical attention. So it was a miserable holiday season for her, and she ended up in Pretoria, where the South African Peace Corps doctor took care of her. After a short spell in Pretoria, she returned to Malawi.
Meanwhile, I had met these friends of their family, the Horrockses, who lived most of the year in Malawi. Along with Amy, a friend from the Telluride Association who is on a Fulbright in Malawi, I was up to four contacts in the country. I had standing invitations from all of them, and I decided to take them up. So on the ninth of January I flew to Lilongwe, the capital city.
Malawi is a small, skinny country that borders Mozambique, Zambia, and Tanzania. On the eastern side of the country is a large lake – Lake Malawi. According to the U.S. State Department’s website, 90% of Malawi’s residents practice subsistence farming. It also has a very high population density. This means that if you are standing somewhere in Malawi, there’s a good chance you’re in somebody’s maize field. The country was only invaded by the British in the late 19th century. It never saw a large influx of European expatriates, so the British didn’t bother to Westernize it. Now independent since 1964, it still has rudimentary industry and infrastructure.
I spent a couple of days with Amy in Lilongwe. We took a walk through the streets of Old Town – the main trading district. Many of the scenes seemed anachronistic – old Singer sewing machines, hand-painted shop signs, scaffolding made from flimsy sticks.
This last image may be a good symbol for the Malawian professional music scene. One evening I got to play with some local jazz artists. The keyboardist with the group hadn’t had any formal musical education, and he asked me if I had a CD that I could give him that would teach him to play jazz. Later in the week I hitched down to Blantyre, the other main city in Malawi. There I met more musicians who bemoaned the situation – everyone who was good enough to leave the country, did. Visiting an international school, I was invited to teach two music class periods. It was a total of three students, and it was the only instruction they had had, and probably would ever have, in improvised music.
Early in the week I received an email from Mary Beth’s mother in Rhode Island. The Peace Corps office in Washington had decided to terminate Mary Beth’s service in the Peace Corps, in order to penalize her for not taking her medicine, and to make an example out of her for future volunteers. Everyone who had known Mary Beth and her work fought the decision, including the Peace Corps director in Malawi. But in the end, the appeal went back to the initial decision makers, and the decision stood. So, as it turns out, I would be with Mary Beth when she was saying goodbye to everyone she had known for the past year.
I reached her village and found the school where she had been working as a physical science teacher. Her house was filled with students; she was passing out photos to remember her by. Her house is made of concrete, with a tin roof. She has three bedrooms and two common rooms, with only a few wooden chairs, a table, and camp chairs for furniture. There is a small fenced in area outside where dishes are washed, and a shelter for cooking on the other side. The shelter has no chimney, and as I stood by to learn how to cook nsima, the local staple dish, a sort of corn porridge, I found my eyes continually assaulted by the smoke of the fire. The Malawians seemed immune. Behind that shelter there is a vegetable garden, and on the other side of that is the chim, another shelter with a hole in the floor and a BYO toilet paper policy.
We walked with Melita to her village, across a few kilometers of tobacco fields. We went from house to house so Mary Beth could say goodbye to her students’ parents. While Mary Beth chatted in Chichewa, I used only what I knew - by far the most useful phrases in the language: mulibanje (how are you?), ndili bwino (I’m fine), and izikomo (thank you). It’s no coincidence that these are all polite words. Chewa culture places great value on politeness and respect, as well as a virtue that I enjoyed the most as a visitor: hospitality. In Blantyre a man whom I had shared a hitch with went at least an hour out of his way to help me find the place I was looking for, even insisting on paying my minibus fare. In Lilongwe another man took about an hour to give me a tour of City Centre. And here in the village, everyone we visited invited us in for nsima. But Mary Beth had too many goodbyes to say.
The next morning I went with her to her school, where she addressed the students in assembly, giving them instructions on how to write letters to America. The staff and students were in despair – she had spent a year preparing her students to take the physical science portion of the national exam. But it required two years of preparation, and now that she was leaving halfway through, and there was no other teacher for physical science, all the students knew they were going to fail it. In my interactions with the students I got the strong sense that most of them had a strong desire to succeed, and many obstacles in their way. Mary Beth’s departure was one more obstacle.
All the children of the village came to watch the Peace Corps being loaded with all her belongings. She said her last goodbyes and the van pulled away. She is still fighting to be reinstated, and has collected many letters of support from her students, which she will send to Washington. Today I heard from her father that she was home safe, but still having difficulty coming to terms with the events of the last couple of weeks.
Pictures from Malawi at http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/natepmay.
Saturday, December 20, 2008
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.
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.
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Ch. 9: Hair and Healing
On the day the exchange rate peaked, Josh and I were giddy with our newfound spending power. We were planning to go to the Abdullah Ibrahim concert anyway, but we decided to pay for the best seats, and invite two of Josh’s friends. Abdullah Ibrahim is arguably South Africa’s most famous jazz musician. Living in America for a time, he played with the greatest jazzmen and earned an international reputation. He wrote and recorded a song, “Mannenburg” which became an unofficial anthem for the struggle against apartheid. Yes, this Mannenburg is the same place where I worked with Shawco (although an extra “n” was inserted for some unknown reason). He’s from Cape Town, and on the first of November he gave a concert here, this time at the Artscape Opera House – a far cry from the segregated clubs where he earned his reputation.
Abdullah played in a trio with two American guys, leading them through a continuous stream of tunes and tune-fragments. After the show, Josh’s friends went home and left us with two tickets to the “after party” which one of them had received from her dad. The “tickets” were lanyards with tags that said “VIP.” We followed the other similarly-important people we saw into a room, where we played our part by helping ourselves to a free glass of wine each. We soon discovered that the “after-party” was a press conference. In walks Abdullah with a handful of journalists. He sits at a table with his trio and some record execs. “Hello,” he says. Then he moves on to the questions portion.
Only one journalist seems to have anything on his mind. He asks some questions about the new solo album that he is releasing, and about Abdullah’s music in general. “A reporter once asked me, ‘What is improvisation?’” Abdullah begins. “I said, ‘Let me take you into the township at midnight. When you see a gang coming around the corner, it’s time to improvise.” I chuckle to myself, swirling my glass of wine. Township improvisation, I’ve been there.
Jethro from the Khoi Khonnexion is tall and skinny, with dreadlocked hair and two front teeth missing. He moves in jerks and speaks in bursts. He is a vegetarian and lover of cannabis. He calls himself “the ghetto poet.” He comes from Kalkfontein, a township north of the city with Afrikaans- and Xhosa-speaking residents. He invited me to his place to experience township life, and I accepted.
The tour started at the home of Jethro’s “B-minor” and the children she had with him. It was one room with some divisions – a kitchen, a living room, and a curtain hiding what must have been a bedroom. We left after an argument erupted in Afrikaans. Walking through the township, Jethro was venting to me. She had cut off their children’s dreadlocks. Uprooted them. Ashamed of her progeny’s indigenous identity, she had sheared off its expression. Too lazy to nurture them, she had relegated their care to a cold, buzzing, metal blade.
We wound around houses, stepping over streams of wastewater. Homes were small, so many were in the streets and in their yards, washing clothes, nursing babies, eating, smoking, laughing. We entered a house, walking in on a woman who was affixing her wig. Everyone wants the hair they don’t have, she said. She acknowledged that black people try to imitate white people’s hair, but she guessed that if I had a sister, she was probably not content with her hair either. I do, and she’s not.
“Hold on,” says Abdullah, “there’s another question.” The cameramen stop breaking down their tripods, packing up their boom mikes. It’s me – I have put down my wine glass and walked boldly to the front. “How is your music connected with the indigenous people of Southern Africa?” He spoke earlier about pitching his idea for an M7 school to the San in the Kalahari. The M7, focusing on music, menu, martial arts, meditation, medicine, movement, and mastery, is not doing so well in its Cape Town incarnation. People here are not excited about it, but the Kalahari San, he said, welcomed the holistic approach. “I am indigenous,” is his response to me. He starts pounding on the table and singing in the voice of a shaman.
Jethro walked me to his place, built out of corrugated metal and sticks. He lives in one room about six feet by ten feet, with a bed, a bookshelf, a radio, and a chest for his food, upon which stood a pot of coffee. The radio runs on a car battery; there is no electricity in any of these homes. His sculptures and paintings stand in monument to his self-identity – an indigenous man in a world out of touch. He was still upset about the hair, and only after about eleven neighborhood kids came by, calling him “uncle Jethro” and expecting his leadership as a soccer coach, did he cheer up. I went with them to their game. Jethro shouted instructions through the whole game, but was not disappointed with the end result, a 3-1 loss. Neither was the team. They paraded home through the streets, chanting their team name, “Love and Peace,” with a spirit of victory.
It was getting dark, and I was hoping that my improvisation could be limited to my ignoring of the shouts of “Boer” (Afrikaner) as I passed by the locals, and my escape from a confrontation with a drunk man, who took me weakly by the arm and tried to lead me away. Jethro was walking with me to catch a taxi. On the street corner we saw a woman limping, with a large sore on her ankle, and leading a child. Jethro spoke to her, then told me to wait there. He ran off toward a field, and I was left to respond to all the strange looks with eyes of nonchalance. I could see him in the distance, and he seemed to be gathering plants. A couple of minutes passed, and I was finding it harder to look like I belonged on that corner. Finally, Jethro returned. The woman was a Khoisan, he said, but she was never given traditional knowledge of medicine. The remedies she needed were growing practically in her back yard.
“Doctors don’t know anything about healing,” says Abdullah. Modern medicine is about separateness – first dividing body, mind, and spirit, then taking the body in isolation, and then specializing in a particular organ or system. Healing is breaking down the separations. In a country where separation was the rule of the land, healing is now badly needed. This is the imperative that drives Jethro’s poetry and his actions.
He navigated the minibus taxis with me, and walked me to my door. By then it was totally dark. I asked him how he would get home, as the taxis were already thinning out. He said he would manage; I later found out that he walked – a four-hour excursion. Safety does not concern him much. As soon as he opens his lips and shows his missing teeth, he said, everyone knows he is not worth robbing.
Abdullah played in a trio with two American guys, leading them through a continuous stream of tunes and tune-fragments. After the show, Josh’s friends went home and left us with two tickets to the “after party” which one of them had received from her dad. The “tickets” were lanyards with tags that said “VIP.” We followed the other similarly-important people we saw into a room, where we played our part by helping ourselves to a free glass of wine each. We soon discovered that the “after-party” was a press conference. In walks Abdullah with a handful of journalists. He sits at a table with his trio and some record execs. “Hello,” he says. Then he moves on to the questions portion.
Only one journalist seems to have anything on his mind. He asks some questions about the new solo album that he is releasing, and about Abdullah’s music in general. “A reporter once asked me, ‘What is improvisation?’” Abdullah begins. “I said, ‘Let me take you into the township at midnight. When you see a gang coming around the corner, it’s time to improvise.” I chuckle to myself, swirling my glass of wine. Township improvisation, I’ve been there.
Jethro from the Khoi Khonnexion is tall and skinny, with dreadlocked hair and two front teeth missing. He moves in jerks and speaks in bursts. He is a vegetarian and lover of cannabis. He calls himself “the ghetto poet.” He comes from Kalkfontein, a township north of the city with Afrikaans- and Xhosa-speaking residents. He invited me to his place to experience township life, and I accepted.
The tour started at the home of Jethro’s “B-minor” and the children she had with him. It was one room with some divisions – a kitchen, a living room, and a curtain hiding what must have been a bedroom. We left after an argument erupted in Afrikaans. Walking through the township, Jethro was venting to me. She had cut off their children’s dreadlocks. Uprooted them. Ashamed of her progeny’s indigenous identity, she had sheared off its expression. Too lazy to nurture them, she had relegated their care to a cold, buzzing, metal blade.
We wound around houses, stepping over streams of wastewater. Homes were small, so many were in the streets and in their yards, washing clothes, nursing babies, eating, smoking, laughing. We entered a house, walking in on a woman who was affixing her wig. Everyone wants the hair they don’t have, she said. She acknowledged that black people try to imitate white people’s hair, but she guessed that if I had a sister, she was probably not content with her hair either. I do, and she’s not.
“Hold on,” says Abdullah, “there’s another question.” The cameramen stop breaking down their tripods, packing up their boom mikes. It’s me – I have put down my wine glass and walked boldly to the front. “How is your music connected with the indigenous people of Southern Africa?” He spoke earlier about pitching his idea for an M7 school to the San in the Kalahari. The M7, focusing on music, menu, martial arts, meditation, medicine, movement, and mastery, is not doing so well in its Cape Town incarnation. People here are not excited about it, but the Kalahari San, he said, welcomed the holistic approach. “I am indigenous,” is his response to me. He starts pounding on the table and singing in the voice of a shaman.
Jethro walked me to his place, built out of corrugated metal and sticks. He lives in one room about six feet by ten feet, with a bed, a bookshelf, a radio, and a chest for his food, upon which stood a pot of coffee. The radio runs on a car battery; there is no electricity in any of these homes. His sculptures and paintings stand in monument to his self-identity – an indigenous man in a world out of touch. He was still upset about the hair, and only after about eleven neighborhood kids came by, calling him “uncle Jethro” and expecting his leadership as a soccer coach, did he cheer up. I went with them to their game. Jethro shouted instructions through the whole game, but was not disappointed with the end result, a 3-1 loss. Neither was the team. They paraded home through the streets, chanting their team name, “Love and Peace,” with a spirit of victory.
It was getting dark, and I was hoping that my improvisation could be limited to my ignoring of the shouts of “Boer” (Afrikaner) as I passed by the locals, and my escape from a confrontation with a drunk man, who took me weakly by the arm and tried to lead me away. Jethro was walking with me to catch a taxi. On the street corner we saw a woman limping, with a large sore on her ankle, and leading a child. Jethro spoke to her, then told me to wait there. He ran off toward a field, and I was left to respond to all the strange looks with eyes of nonchalance. I could see him in the distance, and he seemed to be gathering plants. A couple of minutes passed, and I was finding it harder to look like I belonged on that corner. Finally, Jethro returned. The woman was a Khoisan, he said, but she was never given traditional knowledge of medicine. The remedies she needed were growing practically in her back yard.
“Doctors don’t know anything about healing,” says Abdullah. Modern medicine is about separateness – first dividing body, mind, and spirit, then taking the body in isolation, and then specializing in a particular organ or system. Healing is breaking down the separations. In a country where separation was the rule of the land, healing is now badly needed. This is the imperative that drives Jethro’s poetry and his actions.
He navigated the minibus taxis with me, and walked me to my door. By then it was totally dark. I asked him how he would get home, as the taxis were already thinning out. He said he would manage; I later found out that he walked – a four-hour excursion. Safety does not concern him much. As soon as he opens his lips and shows his missing teeth, he said, everyone knows he is not worth robbing.
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