RUTH, A LONGTIME CIVIL RIGHTS ATTORNEY AND FEDERAL PUBLIC DEFENDER LIVING IN THE UNITED STATES, DECIDED TO TAKE A BREAK FROM HER USUAL WORK AND SPEND TIME VOLUNTEERING FOR GLOBAL CAMPS AFRICA IN SOUTH AFRICA. FOLLOW ALONG AS SHE SHARES HER EXPERIENCES AND HER PERSPECTIVE AS AN AMERICAN AT SIZANANI.
Day 4 - Visiting the Townships
KB picked me up in Rosebank and took me first to a club in Freedom Park and then to Kliptown. Two vochellis were running a suicide-prevention program. We were not there long, but I watched them role-play following a discussion led by a social worker. Sizanani campers are drawn largely from the groups of kids who attend these clubs (held as well in Alex (Alexandra City), Poortjie and a few other townships); they also come from “homes” (essentially orphanages as I understand it).
We stopped to check on a family that cooks for the club. The wife of his longtime friend Bafana was moving large quantities of delectable -looking homemade chicken into tubs (she offered to make me a plate). A young woman who might have been her daughter was there with her tiny one, such a cutie who was feeding and introducing me to the dog. Children so tiny will often talk to anyone. I was just another human paying attention. Here as everywhere, I am drawn to the little ones.
KB then drove us to Kliptown, where he grew up. Where to begin. The level and extent of the poverty was staggering. A lot of lack—roads and floors lacking cement, absence of electricity, homes without roofs, no places to congregate whether in or outside. Mountains of recycling traded for funds and then for drugs, a dump where people not only scavenged but lived. KB filled me in on facts: what it was like growing up, where people congregated to use or sell, the more prosperous areas populated by coloureds.
By S. Honorine VOA - http://www.voanews.com/content/kliptown-a-beacon-of-hope-in-soweto-township/1545472.html, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27915556
Twenty-five years ago a then-ANC member (“then” to distinguish from the politicians of today) took a friend and me into Soweto. What has stood out to me most over the years as I think back is the one- or two-room brick houses they were building, with plumbing. Our hosts’ pride was evident, yet the reaction that has reverberated over the years was how small a number they’d built in proportion to the enormity of the need. Perhaps I was struck dumb by the poverty then as well: I can’t recall, as the Soweto memory always begins for me now with the small brick homes. This, for whatever reason, my age or the country’s, perhaps, feels different. It’s 2022 and so many are still doing without. This was just one part of one township in a nation with a 55% poverty rate. And I was staying among well-heeled accommodations and eateries. Stark, painful, overwhelming.
(I said all this to a dear friend who knows DC poverty far more intimately than most with means. I could not relay well what is different. How do you explain the scale here, the basic unfulfilled needs. Of a different kind. I was reminded of the American acupuncturist telling me about poverty in China. I’d thought at first he was simply blind to the need in DC where he lives, but soon I could hear he knew something beyond my ken. This is beyond my ken. It should be beyond everyone’s, a matter of history. Yet here I am, an educated but ignorant traveler in 2022, in search of understanding. Need to search instead for funds.
KB is still a part of the community, talking to people as we walked and then drove. I’m unclear why he and others show us the townships, and I did ask. To learn and then share, with luck help educate and bring resources I must assume, which I hope somehow to do. But it is also his home, his story. I am grateful, and mute.