Wrapping Up

It looks as if time has gotten the best of me lately and I haven’t been able to write much.  Right now, I am moving into my apartment in Cincinnati and preparing to begin my career.  However, before I start that, I wanted to wrap things up from South Africa.  This post is an adaptation from the final report that I wrote for Notre Dame, and I think that it is one of my better pieces of writing.  Enjoy.

Personal Reflection

When I applied to the Cape Town program, I didn’t particularly want to go.  Truly, the fact that my application was submitted three weeks past the deadline might have been an indication of my lack of motivation.  However, I had just finished a job search that left me with a summer break that was either as long or as short as I wanted ^[1],  and I didn’t particularly want to spend my final summer before entering the “real world” sitting in front of a television.  During the previous summer, I did ten weeks of work in Uganda for a small charity, and that marked the start of my first love affair with Africa.  I realized that this trip to Cape Town would provide me with the last opportunity in a long time to return to that beloved continent, and I knew that the job itself would be one that would stimulate my mind and my professional growth.  But still, I maintained a take-it-or-leave-it attitude whenever I approached the entire ordeal.

When I found out that I had been chosen as one of the interns, I gradually accepted the fact that I would be going to Cape Town.  It sounds as if a Notre Dame student should have the capacity to grasp this fact immediately, but for some reason, it took me quite a while.  For the second time in as many years, I had fallen backwards into the trip of a lifetime to be taken on the University’s dime, and I was more or less ambivalent.  I guess it was because the destination did not matter to me.  I could just as easily have applied to an internship on a Caribbean island or at some God-forsaken Arctic outpost, because both would have given me the same chance to postpone entering the corporate world and facing the ceaseless workday.

I wonder, as I write this, if the cosmic king above has a proclivity for unjustly apportioned rewards.

I will admit that at times, humility is not my strong suit.  My know-it-all nature showed itself in my preparation and departure for South Africa when I assumed that it would be more or less like Uganda, only not quite as poverty stricken.^[2] An assumption like that can only be made when one is an inexperienced traveler such as myself.  As the internship began, rather than compare every aspect of South Africa to life in the United States (as I did in Uganda), I would simply make the slightly different but just-as-wrong mistake of comparing it all to life in Uganda.

However, on my first day in South Africa, I was driven on a nice highway from the airport to our apartment complex, which happened to be located above a shopping mall.  As I ambled past shops with organic clothing and designer sandwiches in the windows, it hit me that this was not just Uganda on repeat.  South Africa is its own country with its own history, culture, and people.  And its own problems.

Yes, I knew that it had its own problems; I had learned that much from the preparation class.  I even knew a little about the nature of these problems; I knew some facets here and there that I gleaned from the assigned readings.  But reading never replaces experience, and when I was taken into the townships to learn about Ikamva Labantu’s charitable efforts, I think it hit me that its problems really are different.  Immense poverty, a lack of infrastructure, poor human capital, and many of the other problems I had come to associate with African countries were present in South Africa — but in a strangely bastardized sense.  Poverty had transformed into inequality, infrastructure was present but not universal, and people had human capital but lacked the opportunity to employ it.

As Will and I began to work on our project at Ikamva, we faced some problems.  The most frustrating was the incredible lack of direction.  At first, Will and I were quite aggravated with the daily shifts in our project goals.  It was as if Ikamva management could not settle on a task for us, and as a result, were wasting our time starting and stopping and starting again.  In retrospect, however, it wasn’t that management was absent-minded or inconsiderate – it was that they really had little idea what they were asking from us.  They knew that there was a need, but that was it.  Approximately a week and a half into our internship, Ikamva management finally said flatly, “Do what you think needs to be done.”  It was then that we reached an understanding.  Will and I needed to step up, determine Ikamva’s need, and develop something that could address it.

Let us now abandon the chronological ordering of this personal reflection.  The intent so far has been to establish my mood as I entered the internship, but it was from this exact point onward that I never doubted my decision to come to Cape Town.  The project, the people, the organization, the sights and sounds ^[3] – everything combined made it the best summer that I’ve ever had.  It was not merely a summer away from work.  It was my summer.  In Cape Town.

One of the biggest assets to me this summer was my partner at Ikamva, Will Coburn.  I am absolutely positive that Will is the best partner I have ever worked with.  I think it is a fair assessment to say that we were mutually beneficial to each other.  When I was content to work a slow day in the office, Will urged a trip into the townships.  When critical thinking needed to be done, we worked together to reach a solution.  Neither of us was ever afraid to speak up in a meeting, and our project benefited because of it.

On a personal level, one of the biggest transformations that I made this summer was because of Will’s professionalism.  Typically, when I have reviewed my partners’ work in the past, I have done so with almost a mistrust of their abilities.  When I’ve sat down to read through a group essay, I’ve always done it with the intention of “fixing it.”  This summer, I learned what it is like to trust a partner’s judgment, and any reviews of Will’s work were done only with the intention of bringing some new ideas to the table.

Ikamva Labantu itself was an absolute blessing.  They are not the most efficient in Cape Town; they are not equipped with the nicest facilities, and they certainly could use some more help from Notre Dame, but my summer at Ikamva allowed me to experience South African development work at its truest.  Just like the Mother City itself, Ikamva operates as one large oxymoron.  It is controlled chaos: when diagrammed, Ikamva’s organizational hierarchy best resembles a spider web, yet programs and projects are nevertheless completed with success.  It is efficient waste: other college interns who were more interested in a vacation than an internship were simply put on projects that were less important, freeing up management time for those who were dedicated.  It is infuriating happiness: when a project seemed destined to fail due to hardships that should never have been encountered, a stroke of fortune would intervene and expand the project’s scope beyond any ambition.

As I mentioned before, humility is a concept with which I still struggle.  As such, please excuse me for what appears to be cockiness as I assess our project.  I will attempt to keep it short and honest.  The project itself was, as described by Ishrene Davids and Helen Lieberman (the CEO and President of Ikamva, respectively), the best project ever developed by a set of interns.  While I would certainly like to take that claim and frame it, this project’s success was not merely due to the efforts of Will and myself alone.  In fact, if free-market economists had not already claimed the invisible hand as their own device, I would be tempted to say that there was a similar force at work that guided our project.  I cannot emphasize it enough: every hurdle, every obstacle that we faced eventually morphed into an opportunity.  Whether through providence, fate, or a secret Magic Eight Ball ® in Helen’s office, our project seemed destined to succeed.

So, a quick description: Will and I were (eventually) tasked with the job of ascertaining the status of the many buildings in Ikamva’s property portfolio.  For forty-five years, Helen has purchased buildings, donated land, invested in the operations within a building, and done practically anything else that she could in order to improve the condition of life in the townships.  All the while, it was entirely illegal for her to even be in the townships.  She was excluded by her community, threatened, and arrested multiple times.  She had friends of hers murdered in front of her.  She escaped murder herself.  Given all of this, it is understandable that while she was doing work over those forty-five years, she didn’t have time to keep proper records of all of the buildings in her possession.  Now that she is nearing retirement, Ikamva is in a mild panic ^[4] over what to do.  Since all of the records are more or less kept in her memory, Ikamva stands to lose millions were something to happen to Helen prematurely.^[5]

Therefore, Will and I concluded that our first priority was to document the buildings.  We needed to, as quickly as possible, document the location and status of every building in Ikamva’s sphere of influence.  This would at the very least ensure that Ikamva knew which properties to keep track of.  With an estimated 900 buildings included in this portfolio, there was no way that Will and I would complete the documentation, so our project also entailed the development of a way to continue the project after our departure.

In order to document each building, we hired township residents on a daily basis to show us from property to property.  At each site, we conducted a brief survey (including contact information, address, legal documentation, repairs needed, etc.), recorded the GPS coordinates, and took photographs of the site.  Then, when we returned to the office, we input this data into a Microsoft Access Database and a Geographical Information System called ArcExplorer.  ArcExplorer allows a user to input GPS coordinates and immediately conduct a query that returns the relevant plot information, such as the erf number (a valuable tool for legal matters).

Our use of ArcExplorer was available because of a partnership that we established with a consulting firm across the street called Sibane.  We are very especially proud of this partnership because we agreed that Sibane would provide a certain amount of pro-bono work each month, and any consultancy on the project done thereafter would be provided on a cost-only basis.  We anticipate that they will provide a lot of value to Ikamva’s operations.

Finally, in order to continue the project after our departure, Will and I agreed with Ikamva that a new staff member should be hired to take over for us.  We were put in touch with Musa Jikijela, interviewed him, and determined that he was qualified for the job.  Indeed, his last job was with ABSA Bank, and his project entailed visiting all of the ATMs in each township, documenting them, and filing the appropriate work order based on the profitability of each location.  Sound familiar?  Our project was only a small transition from his most recent work.

Our serendipitous encounter with Sibane’s director and our fortunate introduction to Musa are only two examples of things in this project that went incredibly right.  As I stressed before, this project was not merely the result of our own efforts.  Ikamva management was extremely helpful and God Himself must have also had a huge effect on our success.  I’m also sure that there were countless people behind the scenes and out of our own sight whose hard work also made this possible, whether directly or indirectly.  Lastly, I owe a special word of thanks to Melissa Paulsen and Fr. Ollie Williams, who took extra efforts to make sure that this internship was the incredible experience that it turned out to be.  All I can say is that I feel blessed to have been a part of this project.

To conclude, I will merely reassert one essential fact.  This internship started for me as just a trip.  It was the paper application, the printed plane ticket, the line on a résumé.  It was Uganda: Part Two; it was a summer away from work; it was a return to Africa.  As I reflect now, however, I know that it is so much more than that.  Is.  Not was.  Even now, as I sit in my apartment in Cincinnati, I know that my internship in Cape Town is still affecting me.  It is personal growth; it is Catholic social responsibility; it is career experience.  It is new friendships formed and new ideas learned.

It is the best decision I could have ever made.

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^[1]If an individual is ever faced with this choice, it is my humble advice that he or she chooses “as long as possible.”
^[2]An assumption that led me to pack an excessive amount of bug spray, among other things.
^[3]Not excluding the wonderful selection of music on Cape Town’s favorite radio station, FiveFM.
^[4]Yes, another oxymoron.
^[5]It is my firm belief that the loss of Helen, no matter how distant in the future, will always be premature.

Doublethink

A while ago, a Capetonian and I were talking in a bar, and the talk inevitably turned to development here in South Africa.  In particular, we were discussing the attitude of South Africans towards their own economic situation.  In explaining this, she referenced Doublethink, an integral concept of Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984.  Doublethink, as defined in the novel, is:

“The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them….To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.”

1984 is up there as one of my favorite books of all time, so a girl who enthusiastically references it while debating economics is a girl after my own heart.  At the time though, I dismissed the analogy as simply an easy literary reference to make in a bar.  Only now do I really appreciate how appropriately it applies to the South African situation.

As measured by the Human Development Report, South Africa is one of the the most unequal countries on the planet.  I’ve mentioned it before: there are very rich people here, and there are very poor people right next to them.  This dichotomy results in that doublethink.  It is not simply one population refusing to acknowledge the other.  It is not racism; it is not apathy.  The rich know that the poor are there, and they demand that something be done about it; however, at the exact same time they act as if Cape Town’s city center is representative of the entire country.  An unfamiliar observer might call the behavior of a rich Capetonian snobbish or apathetic, but the fact is that they are engaging in doublethink.

The phenomenon is even more glaring in the townships.  As we daily drive down roads lined by tiny, leaky, drafty shacks, Will and I have become accustomed to most of the sights that the poverty here has to offer.  But then we will go to the mall – right in the middle of the township – and see some residents drinking a fine cappuccino at the Mugg and Bean or leaving an electronics store with a bag of goodies.  Again, an unfamiliar observer might simply chalk it up to misplaced spending priorities, but there is something else going on.  The township residents, while aware of their own poverty and the great inequality that faces them, are also almost falsely aware that they are climbing out of it.  They buy the mp3 players and the fancy meals every once in a while because it symbolizes social mobility.  They have something that the rich have, and that is a good sign.

I have yet to decide whether this doublethink phenomenon is a good thing or a bad thing.  Not a day goes by where I do not hear someone criticize the government for failing to live up to their promises, yet that same person remains hopelessly optimistic about the future of South Africa.  In 1984, doublethink is what allows a dictatorship to run rampant, yet it is also what allows our greatest heroes to confront impossible odds and come out victorious.  Maybe in order to grasp the concept of doublethink, I need to engage in a bit of it myself.  Is it a good thing or a bad thing?

Yes.

Cashing In

Last night, I attended a banquet at the University of Cape Town to welcome their new Director of the MBA Program. At that dinner, I met a few interesting people, but one person in particular dominated most of my conversation time. Hogan Thring is a head manager at the Central Bank of Swaziland in charge of several divisions, including the government account and currency printing.

Naturally, with my interest in economic policy, I was interested to hear what he had to say about all sorts of things. We talked about macro policy in a developing country, the non-profit sector’s effect on inflation in a microeconomy, and Swaziland’s own response to the global recession.

What I did not anticipate was his high level of interest in my project at Ikamva Labantu. He was fascinated by it – especially in how we were linking our database of properties to Google Maps and the municipality maps. I thought at first that he was just being polite, but it turns out that his undergraduate honors degree was done in IT Management, and his thesis was written on using Geographic Information Systems in particular. So it turns out that computerized maps were right up his alley.

Perhaps our biggest shared interest, however, was a project that he managed in his previous post at Standard Bank, a commercial bank in Southern Africa. This project partnered with the international non-profit organization Save the Children. Save the Children had been providing food assistance for many rural families in Swaziland for a long time, but this new project changed the handouts from food to cash. They argued that switching to cash would provide several benefits, including lower transport costs for Save the Children, more diversified diets for the residents themselves, the opportunity to make real spending decisions, and the chance to stimulate a local microeconomy with a cash injection.

Obviously, the project had a few negative aspects as well, not the least of which included the dangers posed by corruption. A bureaucrat in charge of distribution could, in all likelihood, pocket some of the cash without a grandmother even knowing that she was receiving a lower payment than she should. But according to Hogan, Standard Bank and Save the Children teamed up to create a quite comprehensive monitoring system, and, only a couple years later, the program seems to be moving along just well.

If you would like to read more about this program, check out the article in which it is featured: Inspiring Stories from the African Continent.

Thank Googleness!

Often, the internet and other technology is a bad thing for volunteers at a charity.  They end up blogging, putting up photos on Flickr, and wasting the charity’s valuable time.  However, Will and I are really starting to realize how helpful some technology is in our project.  In fact, our project might be impossible were it not for some key nerd tools.

Our basic project is to visit all of the different buildings under Ikamva’s possession and track down the municipal plot number for that building.  Since addresses are all relative and not formalized at all, it is not as simple as it sounds.  Fortunately, we are able to carry with us a GPS navigator.  At each site, we are able to mark down the GPS coordinates, record the building information, and the contact information for the building manager.  Then, when we return to the office, we enter all of this information into Microsoft Access to make it an easy-to-use and searchable database.

Then, we match each building record in the database with an entry on Google Maps.  We do this by entering in the GPS coordinates.  What we are left with looks like this:

After we are done, Ikamva will have on Google Maps a fully color-coded searchable map of all of the different properties in their possession.

The blessings don’t end there.  Since we need to track down the municipal plot number, we are able to take a municipal township map and compare it to our Google Map and find the precise plot to which we are referring. The municipal plot maps don’t have any real street names labelled – only code names like NY115.  Google Maps allows us by sight and GPS to match the common name of the road to the code name of the road, so NY115 becomes Steve Biko Crescent.

Just thought I’d share an example of how computers and internet access can help the developing world.

The Struggle

For the second year in a row, I find myself abroad for the American Independence Day.  Last summer, I was in Uganda, and now, I am in South Africa.  Each time, I am reminded of all that we have to be thankful for in the United States.  We Americans may not have the perfect country, but we should certainly understand that we are incredibly blessed with a level of freedom that few in the world enjoy.

This appreciation might stem from the fact that the only two foreign countries in which I’ve lived have been young African democracies that are only currently earning their freedom.  We learn in school how great of a gift independence is, but I do not think independence can be truly appreciated without a struggle.

Our forefathers fought and died for their independence from Britain.  Women and Black Americans both encountered their own struggle against the status quo as they sought true freedom.  All around the world, great men and women have stood up against tyranny and demanded equality.  Even today, students and revolutionaries in Iran are fighting for their own voices to be heard and votes to be counted.  These people understand freedom, but I think for people like me it has sadly become taken for granted.

This is why I want to share two brief stories that I have heard or experienced just this weekend that imperfectly highlight the importance of the struggle.

The Arrest

The first story was relayed to me by my apartment building’s head of security, Deion.

Last weekend, the police were responding to an emergency in my apartment complex, and so Deion allowed them to enter via the emergency exit door.  Once the police had arrived and taken care of the emergency that was mainly a false alarm, they decided to leave.  Deion requested that they leave through the normal entrance to the building since it was no longer an emergency, and since he did not want them setting off the emergency exit’s alarm.  The police, however, insisted on leaving through the emergency exit.  As Deion said, he stood in front of them to ask just once more.  This angered the police officers and they proceeded to grab Deion by the neck and place him under arrest.  He was told that he was arrested for the “kidnapping” of twelve police officers, held for the night, and released the next morning when he informed them that he had security footage of the entire ordeal.

The Protest

The next brief story came from my guide as I drove through Khayelitsha, one of the townships surrounding Cape Town.

Fifteen years ago, the first squatters arrived in one of the neighborhoods in Khayelitsha.  Since informal housing is a rather standard occurrence, they lived there peacefully, and were even looked after by the city when it came to sewage and sanitation services.  However, for all of these fifteen years, they have lacked electricity.  The typical response to this problem is to illegally siphon electricity from a neighbor for a fee.  The neighbor, who has electricity, would charge a certain amount of money to the squatter for the rights to his or her electricity.  Recently, however, the government has started to arrest squatters who were found to be siphoning electricity.  Since they were not paying the government itself for the electricity, they were considered thieves and arrested as such.

This Friday, as we were driving on one of the main roads in Khayelitsha, our passage was blocked by large boulders, huge steel shipping containers, and mounds of trash that had been moved into the streets overnight as a form of protest.  The squatters were fed up, and they were demanding legal access to electricity.  Unfortunately, we could not get the camera out fast enough to capture the ordeal, but on our return trip, we were able to get some pictures of the leftovers:

In this picture, you can see a mound of trash that had been piled in the street next to one of the steel shipping containers that had been dragged into the road and set on fire.  By this time in the afternoon, both had been removed from the road:

In America, we don’t really see too many of these sorts of things happening on a day-to-day basis.  However, in the developing world, where independence is still something of a goal rather than a state to be maintained, struggles like this are commonplace.  Radio announcers talk just as often about democratic rights as they do about Jay-Z’s latest song.  Flyers around town advertise for political rallies that support not a specific party, but rather, an idea.  Organizations mobilize voters, companies make donations, newspapers publish criticisms.  For so many countries around the world, the struggle for freedom is still taking place.

In America, we mustn’t let ours go to waste.

Due to a Scheduling Mix-Up, You’ve Arrived in Paradise.

This past weekend, my group took a brief vacation out to the Eastern Cape of South Africa.  The plan revolved around a safari about ten hours away.  First, we’d drive halfway there, stay the night, and do the second half of the driving on the next day.  After the safari, our trip would be divided in the same manner.  However, the travel agent made a slight mistake and mixed up the order of our stays.  As a result, our first day’s drive lasted ten hours and we got to stay in a nicer room because of it.

Actually, the nicer room was technically a manor.

A manor that technically normally costs $4,500 per night.

So, fate’s tendency to reward those who don’t deserve rewards struck again, and we were far out of place.  The room was actually a private villa with four bedrooms, a private ranger, butler, and chef, and everything included.  Not a bad deal!  So we pampered ourselves for the evening, doing our best to keep in mind that such extravagance actually injects capital into South Africa’s economy.

The next couple of days were by far the highlight of the weekend.  We were woken by our ranger at about 6:00 a.m. and taken for a morning game drive, after which we would come back and have a fully prepared breakfast waiting for us by the fire (it’s cold here now, remember).  Then, we’d drive out again for the afternoon/evening drive, watch the sunset from a mountain peak, and drive back to our rooms for the night.

The highlight, then, was getting to see all the animals!  To see more of the pictures, check out my Flickr feed (link in the right sidebar), but suffice it to say that I saw cheetahs, rhinos, giraffes, porcupines, wildebeest, antelope, water buffalo, and… LIONS!!!  My last safari in Uganda was without any lion sightings, but on this safari, we happened across a pride of lions on both days!  Now for the obligatory pictures:

From The Ground Up

As we continue our project, Will and I have been visiting a great many Ikamva-affiliated buildings lately.  Most of them have been private crèches, or (as we know them) pre-schools that are run by mothers in their own homes.  It is not too foreign a concept to understand for us Americans: parents (usually single mothers here) have to work in town, and they need someone to take care of their children while they are away.  Enter the crèche.

Where it becomes different, however, is in the quality and availability of options.  On a global scale, American pre-schools admittedly range from excellent to exceptional.  This is not a bad thing, it is just to say that American children have all of their basic needs taken care of at more or less any institution that cares for them.

Here in South Africa, kids have it a little rougher.  There is little government regulation or oversight for the mothers who run crèches, so at the saddest end of the spectrum, there will occasionally be those who beat the children in their care.  However, this is thankfully rare.

For the most part, crèches are merely inadequate.  It may be dark to say so, but at the very least, they are not trying to hurt the children.  One reason for this is because of the government’s accreditation program.  While the government does not strictly regulate the operations of crèches, it does offer food support if the crèche meets a minimum standard of quality and registers for assistance.

On the other end of the spectrum, we are lucky to see a few crèches that are rather high quality, especially given the incredibly strict budgets under which they operate.  These are typically the ones with passionate owners and high community involvement.

But on an aggregate scale, pre-school care here is lacking.  At virtually all schools, the children get adequate playtime.  What are they playing on?  Some of the nicer facilities have playgrounds and jungle gyms.  Some of the poorer ones simply have a play area in a garage or backyard.  A mediocre crèche that we visited today had this tire-supported slide as its playground:

What about teaching?  Lessons are typically taught in song (mind you, these are 0-5 year olds), and again, the teaching quality varies greatly across locations.  In some of the poorer crèches that we visited, there was one teacher for two or three different classrooms, which generally resulted in a lot of naptime for the older ones while the teachers calmed the babies crying:

Facilities at each crèche also varied.  Some had full plumbing, solid roofs, and sturdy doors, but most had leaks in their roofs, broken toilets, and one or two shattered windows.  I must be careful, however.  The picture I paint, while shocking, should not be depressing.  They are definitely moving in the right direction.  In the past, mothers who left for work simply kept their children locked in their homes.  This is a cultural habit that is dying.  The crèches are getting better.  More and more of them are feeding their children cooked meals, investing in their facilities, and working to prepare their children for school.

The conditions may vary greatly right now, but if there is one constant, it is this: no matter how poor the area, the kids are always looking on the bright side.

City Life

Lately, I’ve been talking a lot about township life and the work that Ikamva Labantu does, but I haven’t covered any of the “extracurriculars.”  There’s plenty of stuff to do in Cape Town, and I’ve been keeping pretty busy outside of Ikamva as well.  After all, you don’t think I’ve been spending all of my time doing charity work, do you?

As far as travels go, we’ve so far confined ourselves to Cape Town and the surrounding areas.  We’ve traveled south to a penguin colony, climbed to the summit of a mountain, toured the cellars of a winery, wove around a rolling colonial garden, and greeted our ocean friends at an aquarium.

(There are more travel pictures up on my Flickr account.)

Cape Town also has an incredible array of restaurants, bars, and clubs to frequent in the evening.  In order to convey the diversity of the venues offered, I offer an example of the nighttime hotspots we’ve visited so far:

The Waiting Room: A rooftop 70’s themed disco lounge.

The Bang Bang Club: A thunderous European-style nightclub with terrible house music and high cover charges that reinforced the European motif.

Che Bar:  A communist-friendly coffeehouse that also serves mojitos and margaritas:

The Shack: A dive bar that spanned between two unconnected buildings and reminded me of either most of urban Africa or a scene from Aladdin.

The Dubliner:  An “Irish” bar that played American baseball on TV and American music over the speakers.

Perserverance Tavern: The oldest tavern in South Africa built with Dutch architecture and featuring the best roasts of meat I’ve ever tasted.

As you can see, it isn’t exactly slim pickings here.  The same can be said for food.  Those of you who know me know that I am in paradise here with the wide array of food available.  In the rare-but-delicious category, I’ve had kudu, springbok, and gemsbok, which are all what I call safari animals.  Also confirmed on the menu: ostrich and zebra.  Stay tuned!

Seeds of Change

Today, Will and I ventured out into the field again to continue archiving the different properties in which Ikamva has a vested interest.  We tagged along with Ntsinka Haleni, the head of Ikamva’s garden sector, and visited several gardens that Ikamva controls.

As I learn more about the garden program, I realize that it is quite extensive in its reach and vision.  At each Ikamva location that we have visited so far, there has been a small vegetable garden maintained by a local township resident.  Since all of the locations had some club activities for seniors (cooking, knitting, etc.), I had assumed that the garden was simply an additional activity that some seniors took a part in.

However, it is more than that.  First, the few seniors that actually plant and care for the gardens are actually employed by Ikamva.  By employing them, Ikamva creates a few jobs and gives the gardeners something to be proud of.  And they are certainly proud of their gardens.  At one site that we visited, the gardener showed us how he had dug the paths through the gardens in a particular manner – so that they formed a heart shape.  That gardener also plucked two carrots out of the ground, washed them, and gave them to us as gifts for visiting him.

Another gardener today happily posed for pictures as he worked on his cabbage patch.

Another revelation to me was that the vegetables that the gardeners plant are actually carefully chosen by Ikamva’s central staff.  First, the staff tracks where the food goes from each garden.  Does the food feed seniors or children?  How many beneficiaries are there?  Then, the crops of each particular garden are chosen to match the nutritional needs of that beneficiary population.  Seniors need different nutrients than growing children, so the foods that are grown are slightly modified to meet these different needs.

The gardeners also work to both build community relations on behalf of Ikamva and keep Ikamva accountable.  By working daily and remaining visible to the local community, the gardeners act as signs of Ikamva’s hard work in the townships, which establishes a grass-roots relationship.  When a visitor enters the premises, he or she is first greeted by the gardener, who seems quite happy to tell the work that Ikamva does at a particular location.  Whether the gardener offers a glowing review or remains slightly more critical, the community learns about Ikamva’s actions, and Ikamva is very responsive to any concerns that arise.  What I thought was a very basic program seems to be quite important to Ikamva’s field operations.

“The Future of Our Nation”

My work this summer will be with the non-profit organization Ikamva Labantu.  Ikamva was founded by Helen Lieberman, a fascinating woman with charisma, power, and enthusiasm that belie her years.  Forty-five years ago in 1964 during the harsh rule of apartheid, Helen, like many, saw the injustices that were being committed by her government.  She saw blacks in the townships without a voice in the government and without freedom of their own.  They were dying, and the leaders were turning a blind eye, if not pulling the trigger themselves.

Helen then focused her efforts on alleviating poverty in the townships.  For the next 26 years before apartheid ended, she moved through the townships and built preschools and senior centers.  She worked with local residents to educate and inform them about health issues, and she created crèches for children to stay while their mothers were at work.

As apartheid ended, Helen’s work began to take new shape.  Ikamva Labantu was founded as an official non-profit organization.  It is now a very effective and expansive organization with many of the same goals and vision as Helen had back in 1964.

Ikamva, however, is still formalizing as an organization.  Much of Helen’s work was undocumented and informal during apartheid.  After all, it was illegal.  Whites were not allowed to own land in the black townships, nor could they sell land to blacks.  So every time Helen bought a plot of land, erected a building, and turned over official ownership to a local resident, she was committing a crime.  She was arrested.  She had death threats posted against her.  She fled her own murder with the help of her would-be murderer’s wife.

It is an understatement to say that Helen was certainly busy during all those years.  One result of this, however, is important to my work.  Each building that she built, each partnership that she created, and each plot of land that she purchased went more or less undocumented.  Sure, Helen could take you through the townships and point to where she operated, but there is nothing in Ikamva’s headquarters that could give that same information.  As a result, operations can be confused at times.  Buildings can fall into disrepair and land can be taken over by squatters.  My job then, for these eight weeks, is to trace 45 years of hard work and document its effects.  To what land does Ikamva have rights?  Which deeds does it hold?  What are the conditions of all of these buildings, and what improvements need to be made?  What opportunities present themselves for Ikamva’s expansion?

In all, Ikamva has vested interest in some 300 different buildings.  As my partner and I visit each site, interview locals, navigate township bureaucracy, assess the state of the operations at each building, and archive all of this information in a dynamic and useful database, I am hoping that we can present Ikamva with a top-level understanding of all of its operations and all of its property holdings.  We hope that by doing this, Ikamva will be better able to strategically plan its investments so that, in the long run, it can help as many people as possible.

In the native language Xhosa, Ikamva Labantu means “The future of our nation.”  With prudence, dedication, and wisdom, our work will contribute to that future.