After a stable life in Cape Town for the past 5 months, I prepare for Tuesday when I will stradle my two worlds on an airplane. A brief stay in Johannesburg, where I started my sojourn 10 months ago, allows me a moment for reflection.
My students have been excited for my departure to America - excited even more for my return so I can tell them "all about America." "But," I say, "I can already tell you about it, you know that!" And they start with cheeseburgers. "How big are the cheeeese buh-gahs in Ah-meh-rrr-i-ca?" & "Can you bring us one?!" Oh boy! What did I start?
My cousin Leigh asked me yesterday if people treat me like I'm an American here. A multi-faceted answer - yes & no. Many of my well-traveled friends consider me not to be American - or at least a "typical" American. My SA heritage supposedly discounts me from the heavy stereotypes. Meanwhile my students want to know if I've seen Beyonce or Chris Brown & if I can bring them an amazingly huge cheeseburger. These stereotypes that individual countries and continents run on create interesting, yet often times, pointless divisions.
Ask any person in SA who has been to other parts of Africa about poverty and 3rd world conditions and they will tel you "THIS is not Africa." While, in fact, it is. No different from the comparison of 3rd world Rio Grande Valley in Texas where people live in half-built shacks, to the rest of the 1st world USA; South Africa is mostly first world in comparison to the rest of the African continent. Meanwhile, IN South Africa, many of my students come to school hungry. Their parents have enough money to send them across the city, but their education comes as sacrifice to proper nourishment.
My standards of poverty may not have changed as dramatically as they would have had I gone to Ethiopia or Uganda to work. I have not faced malaria, HIV, or cholera on a daily basis. Debilitating malnutrition has not impacted the school community severely. Clean water is an issue in some areas, but my students benefit from higher urban standards (though not always the best). When I started my work in Cape Town I expected I would work in the townships and deal with these issues more regularly. Instead, I am at a school quite privileged in its staffing and resources compared to many government schools. But poverty is still there and these students suffer its consequences.
Which gets one thinking, what is poverty? Having set out to work with underprivileged groups, I am not working with the MOST underprivileged. It's easy to start feeling guilty and to wish to tackle all the worlds problems, which becomes a bottomless pit for the humanitarian soul. But I have had to learn to keep my head above and to find relief in my work rather than guilt. For where do you draw the line with poverty? Who is too rich to deserve your help?
Is is someone lacking one of the major three needs - shelter, clothing and food? Is it substandard access to all three of these areas? Is it a lack of love and a supportive community? What does it take to help one succeed - to have the tools to live a healthy life? Is it a mother sacrificing food to send her children to school? Is it parents sacrificing all free time with their children so they can feed them? Through many long conversations with my Dutch friend Karlijn who worked in a poor, rural area of Ethiopia I have begun to see I will never be poor; I have not even the capacity to be poor.
My first world status elevates me above all else in a world where most standards of living are less than that of the USA. Secondly, my racial, economic, and educational background will always give me reach for opportunity. Even someone from America or Europe of a contrasting background to me will find that their currency will enable them a last minute medical visit, surgery or ticket home in case of emergency. In other words, we 1st worlders will almost always have a way out.
As my life opens here in Cape Town, as an educator, an illustrator, a social worker, an artist, a foreigner I feel as though I have never had so many options spread before me. It is spectacular to behold that my dreams to be here have come true. And that there are even more to be dreamed. It is this beautiful excercise of dreaming that has enabled chance in my life and room to explore multiple avenues. In a "first world" country such as South Africa, where 25% of the population is unemployed, it is the lack of dreams that embitter and entrench many. I have had such privilege, love and encouragement in my life and this is why I will never have the capacity to stop, to allow myself the label of poor or broke. I will always have a way out. Or, better put by a woman I met recently, "You have one leg up girl. You have one leg up." (Incidentally, she was a toothless woman from Asheville, NC living in Hermanus!)
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