Stories.

The past 13 days have been somewhat of an extended story time. I’ve been asking questions and engaging in conversations with various people I meet, making an effort to get to know and spend time with local South Africans. Most of the time, I find myself listening to clips of autobiographies, stories of people’s perspectives and opinions of the change in this country over the past several years. Here are three stories I’ve heard:

• I was in a restaurant this past week, sitting near a table of older white folks that were celebrating a 75th birthday. When one of the men came over to our table and asked us about our American accents/ why we were in Cape Town, I took the opportunity to ask this man a little about his time in this country. It is almost impossible to imagine what it would be like to live through the past 70 years of South Africa’s development, and I was fascinated by this man’s response to the question, “What would you like to see in Cape Town over the next 10 years? What would you like to happen politically, economically, culturally during the next decade?” He thoughtfully paused, wrinkling his forehead, and responded passionately, “Helping people. No one helps each other, and everyone only cares about themselves. No one reaches out of their own way—even whites to whites or blacks to blacks in their own communities—and people need to go beyond themselves.”

• One of my housemates made a local friend who came over for dinner last night. He was born in Rhodesia, but had lived in South Africa since he was a child, and he experienced the end of apartheid when he was 12. I asked him about his family, his past, his thoughts on the country, and he talked for half an hour about the problems with gang and crimes. “Specifically in the black communities, gangs rule and run the show. Five and six year old children grow up aspiring in be gang members because it is the only source of hope or power that they can reach, the only future that they know. Most of the gangs have initiation tasks that range from rape to murder to assault to armed robbery, and the young members are trained to see these acts as a way of life and needed for survival.” Though Cape Town is known as the gay capital of Africa, he added, “Corrective rape is a common act used on lesbians, where groups of men violently rape homosexual women in order to ‘correct’ their sexual orientation. Traumatized and abused, the victims can get STIs and sometimes become pregnant, and they are stigmatized by their communities.” When I asked him how the problem of gangs could be addressed he replied, “With feeding programs, education programs, and jobs. These people are hungry—so they steal for food. They don’t have an education and can’t get a job, so they are ushered into gangs where their basic needs are met through crime and terror. Sometimes they are arrested and sent to Pollsmoor Prison, but they leave a better criminal than when they first arrived, and they are sent back to the same gang power structure that runs their communities.”

• I met a young black girl in Pick n’ Pay (the grocery store) last week and found out that she attends the University of Cape Town. She grew up in Pretoria (in a fairly well-off community) and is a ballerina, planning on pursuing her ballet through a full scholarship program in Canada next year. She asked me what I was studying, and so I told her about my plans to go to nursing school and work with healthcare programs developing nations and she smirked a little bit. “Okay, Emily. I’ve got a question for you. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I met a girl earlier who wants to do something like you, and I just don’t understand. Why do so many people in your country want to come ‘save us’ as their career? I don’t view the people in the townships as any different from me. They chose to live in the slum; I chose to live in a different neighborhood. They are happy and like it there. South Africa doesn’t need helping or saving.” I carefully paused, replaying images of hungry children in rags, exhausted mothers, and drunk teenage boys that I had seen in a township just a few days before…and so I asked her if she had ever been to a township. “Me? No, I do not go to the townships.” I replied by telling her that I want to work with people in the townships, develop relationships with them as partners and friends, not save them. We exchanged phone numbers and are planning on hanging out this week at school, so I’m hoping to grow our friendship. I’ve found that her response to the townships though is a common belief here—even when talking to some volunteer organizations on the UCT campus, the ones I interacted with said that the majority of their volunteers are international students and that the idea of community service is not very common here. However, the local people I’ve met so far are very friendly and warm, and so I’m interested in engaging in more conversations about their thoughts on ‘giving back’ and spending more time with my new friends.