The Universality of "the" Dream

So to bring my blog back to text and photos, I want to do a long overdue update. First off, I should say where I actually am- Limpopo, South Africa. Currently, I am spending most of my time getting to know the other students here from UVA and the other American Universities. This is after a long pair of flights from Atlanta to London and London to Johannesburg for a 5.5 hour drive to the Acacia Wildlife Lodge. Who knew that my first and second trips to South Africa would fall in the same summer, and be so very different!

Cape Town deserves some serious mention since it was the month long program that began Graduation Day (and for which I arrived late). The program was focused on qualitative methodologies. By this, I mean it focused on mapping and interviewing locals in the townships of Cape Town. Townships are places that black Africans were forced to live in during the Apartheid regime, and today are still generally forced to live in for more socio-economic reasons. It was definitely quite a disheartening experience to see too little having changed with the end of Apartheid, and to see people talk about the Apartheid period as being just as good or better than the current state of living. Particularly with the illness and love that this country has for “father” Nelson Mandela, it made me have to seriously question what he thinks about what he has accomplished. Did he fight for legal equality only? I don’t believe so, but perhaps he is content with that in the sense that it leaves the future up to his colleagues, but then perhaps he is not content. Perhaps he too is disheartened by the opening of colored and white areas to the black elite. Now, this is not quite as depressing as that might sound- the township residents came from small villages to Cape Town during the late 1980s/early 1990s and settled with the hope of moving-up in the world socio-economically. They saw the townships as their way to economic equality or freedom or, at least a way to help educate their children for a brighter future.

If working in Uganda, Rwanda and here in South Africa has taught me anything, it has taught me that there are ABSOLUTELY no greater gifts than love and education. As a young American, I have been incredibly blessed by both of those things family. It’s easy to take things for granted, and thank-you has been said before, it cannot be said enough. Education has always been something I valued, but its value comes from my family. It was put into the hard work of parents and grandparents, and their hope that it would make life better. Not everyone will see the shadow that is a lack of education, but here in South Africa, it has been incredibly obvious who received a good education, and who did not. There is so much poverty that is created through lack of training, lack of skills, and a lack of flexibility in adapting to one’s situation that there is little one can do to help. Maybe an affirmative action could help the next generation of South Africans, but then again, hope has to remain in the hearts of those living here first. Educating children who can barely be fed from funds of social grants and small incomes are already being shown as parent priorities for their children.

South Africa’s townships are fascinating. They are urban slums with pure running water, and toilets on each property. People own their land, and there are not people talking of utter starvation occurring in their households. It is urban poverty- in some ways, a privileged poverty, but nonetheless people live in corrugated aluminum shacks and/or cinder block houses. They have dogs and walls for protection and drugs have become a rampant problem. There is little that parents can do when they feel there is no respect for elders to stress the importance of education, and my project on women showed that feeling safe- was not even in their vocabulary, but danger was.

Again, people don’t feel hopeless; they impress upon you their future, their problems and their desires for change. They work to bring change and they maintain optimism. Even through physical barriers implemented by city planners of Apartheid, people move to the city full of sky scrapers and beautiful natural parks, hikes, hotels, aquariums, marinas, tourism, and homes. There is room for poverty. Cape Town caught me by surprise by being so similar to the US and yet so African: arts markets, refugees, fear of Western Culture, variety of languages, racial suspicion, baboon patrols and even its linguistic clicks. The American dream is really the human dream. It was Gandhi's dream, MLK's dream, Mandela's dream and is that of so many others around the globe. In many ways, this is the most important lesson learned- it’s not American; it is universal. Hope.