So my time in Cape Town and South Africa is quickly drawing to a close. I finished classes a couple of weeks ago and already have one final under my belt. Classes obviously have not been the only learning experience I’ve had here; rather, they’ve been only a small component of a larger, ongoing, and frankly exhausting mental challenge. Going back over my blogs, it then seems strange, perhaps even negligent, that I never really mentioned the work at the children’s home that I did throughout the semester. In Philly, working with kids is a huge part of my life, and anyone who has any sort of conversation with me is bound to hear me speak of it. So it is weird that I never took time to talk about my South African kids here, virtually, with all y’all, wherever in the world you may be. Perhaps this is because whereas at home working with kids in West Philadelphia is often a very emotional and volatile experience, however wonderful and rewarding and fun, here in Cape Town, going to the children’s home twice a week was a completely different and surprisingly easier endeavor, communicating subtle truths that, unlike everything else I’ve encountered in Southern Africa, didn’t leave me feeling like I’d been involved in an intellectual hit-and-run. It’s funny; one would think that children who are nearly orphaned, if not completely orphaned, living in a hub in the center of a sprawling expanse of tin shacks, an area riddled with unimaginable poverty, crime, and disease, would have a lot more issues than kids living in the US, even in the roughest of neighborhoods. The opposite holds: I’ve rarely seen happier, more loving children.
Baphumelele Children’s Home is located in Khayelitsha (meaning “new home” in Xhosa), a black township on the fringes of Cape Town proper. A township is basically a slum, an informal settlement demarcated by clustered shack upon clustered shack, usually lining the highways and main passages to the city. (Cape Town is desperately trying to get rid of them before the 2010 FIFA World Cup, seeing as they’re so close to the airport. It’s not working.) Townships date back to the 1940s, when black men started to migrate towards cities looking for work and set up homes along the way. Khayelitsha started forming in the 1980s, and today it’s home to over 1 million people. Coming into it by car, you can see the shacks stretching for miles beyond the highway, blanketing the land, their roofs almost inseparable, so close together are the houses. A network of roads criss-crosses the terrain, adding legitimacy to the vast settlement. Khayelitsha’s no temporary camp, however; shops, also in tin or wood shacks, line the roads, and people bustle about. Women balance packages on their heads while children jump rope or play in puddles. There are stray dogs everywhere, garbage everywhere. A glimpse inside the houses closest to the street shows that despite the haphazard outward appearance of the shack, the inside shows permanence and pride, often impeccably kept.
Baphumelele is situated in the middle of Khayelitsha and is home to about 100 children at any given point. It’s not quite an orphanage; rather, parents or families will send children there when they can no longer take care of them themselves. Many of the children have some sort of family, but have been placed there because their parents are sick, in many cases with HIV/AIDS, or they’re too poor to care for the children properly, or because they’re addicted to substances. In some cases, the children have been abused; in others, they really do have no living family. Sometimes it’s a combination of all of those reasons. At any rate, Baph provides shelter and care for kids who need it the most, giving food, clothing, a comfortable home, and even ARV drugs to kids with HIV. Most of all, they get lots of attention and lots of love. Amongst the squalor and drama of the township, it’s a bright spot of joy.
Anyone who knows me knows how much I love kids, so of course I jumped at the opportunity to volunteer there twice a week. (It was also a chance to practice my fledgling Xhosa… and it taught me just how bad I actually am at it.) My job: Run after-school tutoring and enrichment for kids ages 10 to 13. (Sound familiar?) The kids were immediately friendly and outrageously hilarious. Going in the first day, I had a whole lesson planned out, and although the kids were really attentive, I found that something about giving directions just doesn’t translate well from English to Xhosa. Although the kids speak English, they don’t completely understand the mechanics of it; consequently, my attempts to start up a game of Red Rover failed. My head reeled as the kids instead began to body-slam each other and yell in rapid Xhosa “HAYI! HAYI!” (“NO! NO!”) Luckily, one of the kids, Sipho, was willing to translate everything I said into Xhosa, and the game finally got off the ground. It was Sipho who tried desperately to teach me how to do the Xhosa “q” click really, really loudly, like the real Xhosa speakers do. Unfortunately, I never got the hang of it. (Although in Xhosa, it doesn’t really matter how loud your clicks are, just that you’re doing them.) I found Sipho fascinating. He was a little Coloured boy who spoke both Afrikaans and Xhosa, as well as English, with blue tinted glasses and yellowish corkscrew curls. He’d also been a member of… the Cape Town Circus. Yes. He’s loud and outgoing and wildly theatrical, confident, a born performer. Somehow Baph got him an audition for the circus, and he’d done it for a while. Go figure! Sipho left halfway through the semester to go to boarding school, and while we were all happy he was going to a private institution where he’d get a good education, I was very sad to see him go.
Lessons at Baph I anticipated to be a real challenge, seeing as at the after-school programs in Philly it’s always a struggle to get the kids to sit through and complete something wholly academic. I decided to start off each day with something fun, namely, the Power Circle. (Holla to my CSSP folks! When I tell you we got all of Baphumelele hooked on that song and shouting about how they “got their reputation,” I’m not kidding. Although I’m not quite sure they understand what a “reputation” is, nor how to say the word properly.) Lessons were sometimes difficult to do, not because the kids wouldn’t have the patience for it, but because of the language barrier. The kids would laugh at me when I’d try to speak Xhosa to them, automatically switching to English for my own comfort, but it sure came in handy when I would try to teach them how to spell simple English words. When I discovered that everyone was messing up how to spell “strawberry,” writing “strawbirry” instead, I noted that, in Xhosa, the letter “i” makes an “ee” sound, which is why they wrote “i” when I said “e.” When I clarified, saying “i” as in “inkomo” (“cow” in Xhosa), they all burst into fits of laughter over the silly American lady speaking Xhosa. But on the test, they all spelled the word “strawberry” perfectly.
Even though the kids sometimes got a little frustrated with the work, they were always willing to do it. On a particularly nice day, I decided to let the kids have a day off, so we could all run around outside. Instead of wanting to play games in the perfect weather, however, they all whined and said they wanted to do math worksheets instead! !!!!! What??? I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. So I pulled out some subtraction sheets and led the kids inside, where they buckled down for the hour.
As someone thoroughly involved in urban issues and a lover of children wholly interested in their development, I find the Baph children to be a really interesting case study, especially in comparison with the kids I’ve worked with in Philadelphia and Bergen County, New Jersey. Before coming to Cape Town, I thought the results of living in impoverished areas and unstable family situations were pretty much immutable on a child’s psyche and emotional condition. I’ve had children call me “Mommy” before, signaling that I was giving them some sort of love that they weren’t getting at home. I’ve seen children as young as five going absolutely berserk, simulating nervous breakdown. I’ve seen fourth graders crying because they think they’ll never, ever succeed in school or in life. I’ve seen kids held back from succeeding in school by their own parents, simply because that parent is too ashamed that she can’t help her daughter with her homework. I’ve seen kids suffering from malnutrition. I’ve seen kids slide from happy-go-lucky and adoring to threatening and dangerous within a span of two weeks due to problems at home. And this is all in the United States, the wealthiest nation in the world. We do have poverty in our country, and all of the children in these scenarios have been living as a part of that reality. Coming to South Africa, however, has shown me just how relative poverty is. In the United States, the bottom 20 percent of the population, almost 60 million people, still live in luxury as compared to those in South Africa. In the US, even those living in poverty are likely to live in a permanent dwelling with electricity, a stove, clean water, and indoor plumbing. They are likely to have some sort of access to medical care in the event of an emergency, and during childhood, they are likely to receive a full regimen of vaccinations against infectious diseases. They are likely to live past the age of five, and likely to receive some sort of education, approximately 12 years if they stay in public school. Those in poverty are still likely to own a television and a telephone or cell phone, and they are likely to have access to a computer at a public library, if not in their own homes. In South Africa, in Africa in general, none of that holds, especially in Khayelitsha. In comparison to those living in black townships, impoverished Americans live like kings and queens. (This I say not at all to belittle the struggle of people living in poverty in the US, but simply to give some perspective.) So why are these South African kids, who have almost nothing, whose problems seem to greatly surpass those of children living in West Philadelphia or in cars in Bergen County, why are they so happy? Working with the kids over the course of the semester hasn’t given me the whole answer. Perhaps it’s that they don’t watch too much TV, so their attention spans are much greater than those who do. Maybe it’s because they have so little and are not aware of how much they do not have. Or is it something intrinsic to their culture? Children are content to play with empty laundry detergent bottles and take care of each other when one scrapes his knee. They share everything they have, from food and toys to germs and boogers. The teenagers don’t separate themselves from the younger children; rather, they play with them and carry them around on their backs. Against the tragic sight of apartheid’s continued marginalization, the kids are a beautiful sight.
Many of the kids have never left Khayelitsha before; they all describe it as being “huge,” and they can’t fathom anything greater than it. To end the semester, my group partner and I decided to take the kids on a field trip. The morning of the trip, I got a couple of phone calls from a number I didn’t recognize, during which the caller would hang up as soon as I picked up the phone. Frustrated, I decided to call back. It was Andiswa, one of the 13-year-olds, whom I had given my phone number to a while ago. She tearfully accused me of lying to her, insisting that I was not really coming, that I’d made the whole field trip up. When she put one of the sisis (“sisters” in Xhosa, caretakers at Baph) on the phone, I discovered that most of the children were crying, afraid that the van wasn’t coming to pick them up for the trip. I tried not to laugh as I reassured them that the van was on its way. The game plan was to take the kids to see “High School Musical 3” at the local mall, before having a picnic lunch at the beach. A day of hilarity ensued: Like I said, a lot of the kids had never left Khayelitsha. Andiswa freaked out and clung to me for dear life as we rode the escalator, letting out low groans of fascination and fear the entire time. A bunch of the kids insisted that the movie screen was a wall, then gasped with wonder when the show began. All of them sang along to Troy and Gabriella’s crooning; they knew every last word, even though the movie had just come out. (I, on the other hand, suffered through my despise of Disney’s mutilation of musical theatre… I lost count of how many times my eyes rolled into the back of my head. I’m still peeved about how the media let Vanessa Hudgens get away with those nude-y internet pics, just because she’s part of the money-making machine. Ugh. The kids were a great distraction from the movie, though.) When I took some of the girls to the bathroom, I had to show them how to wait in line for the sink. (Since they don’t get out much, they don’t exactly know manners. They did a really good job, though, and later on showed their friends what do to in the same situation.) The excitement continued once we got to the beach, where they kids cheered for the KFC fried chicken we’d brought them. (Tell me why the first American fast food in Africa had to be KFC chicken??? Hmmm...) Seeing them run around and enjoy the water, then fall asleep in the sun on their blankets was the sweetest thing. And of course, I shed a few tears as we loaded them back onto the van, saying goodbye for the last time. I’m a little tired of saying farewell to kids I come to love, even in such a short time. But I refuse to stop allowing myself to love them. They’re just too cute, and they give too much love in return.
It seems like everything that has composed my life in Cape Town—school, dance class, Baphumelele—is drawing to an end. In fact, it is. But I still feel like I have a lot more ahead of me before I go home, like I’m just getting started. Next on the agenda: East Africa! I’m going to Kenya for about three weeks with a friend here who’s from Nairobi, and we’ll be traveling the country together. I’m super, super excited about this, since Kenya is a completely different story and has a different feel than South Africa, which is incredibly Westernized. I’m also really looking forward to striking out on my own for the first time, without a lot of Americans around to fall back on. The only thing I’m disappointed about is that I’ll be missing the event of the season by about a week and a half: “Obama the Musical” at the Kenya National Theatre in Nairobi. How my heart leapt when I thought I’d actually be there for it! However ridiculous the display, and I have no doubt that it would be positively preposterous, I would have died perfectly contented to see two of my favorite things, Barack and musical theatre, joined as one. Strangely enough, things at the Kenya National Theatre only run for three days at a time, dashing my hopes. But I feel that I’ve already done my duty to my country by completing and sending in the absentee ballot, which was quite a process and not nearly as satisfying as voting in a booth, especially for a first-time voter in a presidential election, and especially especially in the most contentious and important election of our generation. But a took a picture to commemorate the occasion.
Such love to all of you! I’ll be home in a little over a month (yeesh! Where did the time go?), so make sure to keep your schedules clear! And in the meantime, write to me, email me, comment me, Skype me while you can! Or else I won’t bring you a souvenir. ☺
Hleka,
Christina
