Mendicant

Mendicant- (adj) begging or living on alms

Spending my afternoon combing the beach for seashells because I want to send a gift to my family because I’m halfway around the world to go to University to follow my passion because my parents support me and I don’t have to work to support myself, to scrounge for food, to fight for my rights as a human being. That’s wealth. I’m wealthy. And still I complain! about being away from home, about how hard it is to find the classes I want, about not making friends easily. I know that I’m lucky, but I had no idea how rottenly spoiled I am. How rottenly spoiled,  how self-centered and unjust is everyone who lives in ease and comfort, who worries about sports or fashion or having fun while fellow human beings suffer in squalor?

We went to the townships of Port Elizabeth on Wednesday. We stopped and walked around in New Brighton, a black township, to visit the Red Location museum and the Red Backpacker lodge. It’s called the Red Area because of the color of the rust of the metal sheeting that people use as walls and as roofs. These people, these astounding people. Little children, first and second graders, walking home from school on their own through the Tsotsi-riddled streets because their parents are forced to work all day long or because they don’t have parents, are waving, smiling, and laughing at us as we drive past in a colorful bus.

New Brighton

Xhosa mammas, who are considered unemployed, baking bread for the street children at a minimal profit but taking everything they make and devoting it to starting football clubs for the school children because the municipal, provincial, and national governments won’t make one for them. These women, who say to the spoiled foreign kids “I’m so happy you are here,” “Let me give you,” and “I can take care of you while you are away from home.” Smiling and laughing and singing in the face of hopelessness as they tell us of how they were treated in the past. And I’m complaining because the people I love are far away because we’re all following our dreams. I’m happy with my life conditions and I’m grateful both for what I have and for this little patch of perspective I have been given by the people of New Brighton. I feel ashamed, though, of what I’m doing with this life I have been given. I know all problems can’t be solved by one person. I’m satisfied with the issue I’ve selected; I think conservation of biodiversity is a problem of equal level with widespread poverty. Our biggest problems are indicative of the vast inequality that riddles the world. I just don’t understand how anyone aware of these problems can sit back, in gated homes with fancy cars and swimming pools and not feel ANY obligation to change the neighborhood, city, country, world that they live in and share with other humans. But we go back to fancy homes and ocean views. It’s embarrassing, disgraceful, and disheartening to see how quickly my fellow students can put their own meager needs ahead of a struggle for equality that has been raging in this country for hundreds of years. We are encouraged by the granting of civil rights across racial lines, but Apartheid is still present. The Coloured and African people have been economically suppressed/oppressed for so long that their rights are only improvements on paper and in spirit. No one has the means to move from their wooden and zinc sheeting shacks to a home in Summerstrand, to send their children to a school adequately equipped with teachers, books, and athletic equipment. No one has the means to be educated at a university to get a better job to move their family to a safe, healthy neighborhood. 

And yet the people sing. 

Mamma Lindi and me

Mamma Lindi invited me back next week to a St. Valentine’s day African jazz concert to feel what love means in Africa, in South Africa, in New Brighton. I want to go and be able to show her that she is inspiring, that she has changed my perspective on life and wealth in only a few moments of generous interaction, that people with material wealthy beyond hers want to help the African people escape from Apartheid’s reluctant tendril scars. 

I went to a conference on Friday about teaching young minds, especially students entering college, to think about their behavior and mindset to become more like Nelson Mandela. The workshop was long, dull, and failed to engage most of the students, but I thought there were larger problems than the program’s execution. We were bussed out to the NMMU campus in Missionvale, which happens to be in the townships. We drove past all the informal settlements, where no doubt some of the students have friends or family. We know they’re there, right outside the walls of the new campus, but for the duration of the entire workshop, no one says anything. Is not the reason why we admire Madiba so much his ability to put the needs of the many before the wants of the few? I think the world needs a workshop to think like Mandela as a whole. Thinking like individuals, albeit wise, caring individuals, still leaves the rest of the world looking for help.

I know townships are a part of South Africa’s history, but isn’t it time to put that history in the past? No one deserves to be forced to live without running water, solid walls, or proper schools and healthcare. This is why I wanted to come to South Africa- to learn new things and wrestle with the problems of today and tomorrow.