struck.

The beach in Durban where the FIFA Fan Fest was set up just six weeks ago.

It's been eleven days since I've worked at St. Leo's.  In that time, which started out as a Friday I'd wanted to take off to spend time with Becky in Cape Town, all public servants in South Africa are on strike.  Government schools (and some private ones) are closed, as are government hospitals and most clinics.  The sick can't get treatment, and more importantly, those with HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis who depend on regularly scheduled medicine have no access to their prescriptions.  Children enrolled in government schools  sit at home or at a relative's house, bored out of their minds, because their families cannot afford to send them to private school in the first place.  Sadly, many of these kids depend on their biggest meal of the day coming from the school kitchen, and they will go hungry unless they find aid elsewhere.

Themba is in hospital with a stomach ulcer and other complications, and when Becca and I went to see her today, she told us that she'd had a phone call from Smangele Khumalo, a learner in Grade 5.  All Smangele told Themba was that she was very hungry; Themba did her best to convince her that the strike would end soon, then hung up the phone and cried for the rest of the night.  We also spoke about how fortunate Themba is to be able to afford care in a private hospital-- otherwise her ulcer would go untreated and the fibroids they found would have gone unnoticed.

I've been talking a lot with people, both in South Africa and at home, about everything going on, and the general consensus is that the issues causing this strike are so deeply rooted in South Africa's turbulent and segregated history that it's really hard to be hopeful about the outcome.  There has been very little said on the government's part, and the president is no better; Jacob Zuma's latest announcement was that he had attended the highly anticipated Springboks/All Blacks rugby match in Soweto last Saturday with his cabinet members.  For people who suffered through centuries of being powerless to now have as much influence as they can get is a recipe for disaster (see: Julius Malema, and also the ANC's recent announcement to enact a media tribunal on all journalistic coverage of government policies and activity).

And the poor of South Africa cannot win.  Those who wish for higher salaries are using the only advantage they have-- their ability to work-- to change the minds of those they elected to power in the first place.  And those affected by the strike are equally annoyed at the government.  The ANC was elected to power in 2009 by the very people it is now turning its back on.  The blame game turns into an endless cat-and-mouse chase with lots of pointed fingers and not much progress.

But no matter who is to blame, the fact of the matter is that people are starving, children cannot attend school, and the sick will die without access to proper treatment and medication.  The results from matriculation exams (the equivalent of the Leaving Cert, GCSE, or other final exams to graduate high school) in this country were already abysmal, and now with exams so close, there is a very good chance that South Africa's meager 15% pass rate will dip even lower.

And all this in a country that just six short weeks ago played host to one of the most widely-viewed sporting competitions in the world.  In Durban alone, trillions of rand were poured into the construction of a beautiful airport and magnificent stadium, as well as the complete and much-needed renovation of the Golden Mile along the beach front downtown.  People were hired as "beach guards" to look after worried tourists' buckets and spades while they took a dip in the balmy Indian Ocean.  Peace Officers strolled along the road with municipal police to keep people's minds at ease.  In the fan parks, people gathered in the warm Durban winter to watch soccer together, regardless of nationality, race, economic status, or age.

But now it's over, and garbage collects on the beach while police officers busy themselves with forcing the homeless off benches along the promenade.  Now that the strike is in full force, they've been dispatched to places like Addington Hospital in the city, where they were forced to fire rubber bullets into a crowd of protesters.  Parents of some of the learners at St. Leo and elsewhere have lost their jobs, and the scar that runs so deeply in this achingly beautiful country cannot be covered up any longer.

In one of Durban's newspapers called The Mercury, a piece by someone named Danie Joubert was published in yesterday's Opinions section.  Though the column was striking in many ways, this passage in particular stood out to me:
It is obvious we have our social investment priorities wrong.  We can convince ourselves to spend hundreds of billions on sports stadiums and infrastructure that had a one-month emotional impact and a limited future utilisation return value, but we cannot convince ourselves to invest the seed capital in human capital formation that assures future harmony and prosperity for a nation.

I can only hope that some sort of agreement can be reached, and soon.  With the lives and well-being of the poor, especially children and the sick, at stake, a resolution needs to happen before things get any worse.




.

this just in...

We had to close school at 10:00 this morning.  Amid alphabet matching games and practicing vowel sounds with Grade 3, Themba received a text message from someone she knows that there had been threats sent out against St. Leo's; it would have been dangerous to stay open.  I asked Olwethu, one of the girls in Grade 7 who won a scholarship for high school, if she was happy to have the rest of the day off.  "No, it's boring at home," she said.  It made me think a lot about how I've taken my education for granted... if thirteen-year-old me had had an unexpected early dismissal, for whatever reason, I would have been absolutely over the moon.  But for the majority of kids at St. Leo's and elsewhere here, school is the one thing that keeps them busy, interested, and happy.
I hope this strike doesn't last too long.

So instead, we're at home baking peanut butter cookies, I'm throwing my clothes into a bag, and hoping that when I get home from Cape Town this will have all blown over, and we can go back to school.

in the line of duty.

When the end of a month approaches, I often find myself feeling a bit down.  I don't know where the feeling comes from, but I do know that unfortunately, I'm not the only one in my community who gets the end-of-the-month blues.  And July was no different.  With the World Cup over, the weather much chillier, and work back in full swing again, we were all feeling a bit blue as July came to an end.
And then August arrived, but instead of perking up, the weather took a turn for the colder and my mood didn't improve much.  There are the usual frustrations that accompany work, and anyone who has volunteered in a program like mine (or who has lived with a group of people he or she cares about) knows that living in community isn't always a walk in the park.  But something about the past two weeks has really made me feel exasperated, and after a tear-filled conversation with Mum on Saturday night, I decided that something needed to be done about it.  I'm not the type to count down the days until this year is over, though when December comes, I think I'll be ready to hand the job over to someone else.  I scribbled down a list of things that make me really happy here, and thought I'd share a few thoughts.

Things Worth Smiling About

1.  Walking through the schoolyard at St. Leo's and hearing children of all ages call out, "Hi Miss Sinead!" when I'd expected having to change my name when I started teaching.  Even if I sometimes get called Shanela, which means "to sweep" in Zulu, I'm okay with that.

2.  Seeing the sun rise in the morning-- yes this does remind me that my wakeup is very early here, but the colors in the sky over the valley at 6:30 in the morning are just breathtaking.

3.  Moments at St. Theresa's like on Tuesday, when Philane was in charge of cooking dinner. I peeked my head in the kitchen every few minutes to see if he was okay, and not long before I left for the evening, he presented me with the finished product: a small dish of rice, tomatoes, potatoes, onions, and pilchards (with a little dab of mayo on the side; it's all about the presentation) to try.  I can't even remember what it tasted like, but the look on his face when I broached the topic of culinary school was something worth remembering ("You mean a kitchen?  A big one?  Of my own?")

4.  When teaching grammar and sentence structure seems to be futile, and then Mary-Kate and I are standing in the classroom, teaching nouns.  We divide them into people, places, and things, and ask the class to give examples of each.  When trying to get the kids to say "learners" two weeks ago, the following happened:

Teacher: Okay, so what are you guys?

Thabiso: People!

Teacher:  Good, that's right.  Now, what kind of people?

Thabiso: Black people!

5.  Seeing Visa/Vie and Altiplano at the Durban International Film Festival (we also saw My Hunter's Heart but it was absolutely atrocious).  Getting to participate in the film festival was really unexpected and a pleasant surprise for the most part.  If you have Netflix, I recommend adding Altiplano to it immediately.  Amazing film.

And last but not least, Becky, my best friend from college and former roommate extraordinaire, is coming to visit... and arrives tomorrow!  She's en route from LA to Atlanta right now, and then flies to Johannesburg.  She'll meet me in Cape Town tomorrow night, and we'll be spending the weekend there, before coming back to Durban for ten days.  It'll be so nice to have a familiar face around for the next two weeks.  Becky was a Jesuit Volunteer in San Francisco until the end of last week, so having someone here who has an idea of the volunteer lifestyle will be great.  I went to visit her in SF in November of last year; I can't wait to show her my life here in South Africa!
The past couple of weeks have been really draining, especially because there was a massive strike brewing for all public workers, including teachers, at the beginning of the week.  It looks as though things are operating as normal now, but police officers visited St. Leo's on Tuesday to make sure we were safe-- as the only school remaining open in the Molweni area, we were at risk when the wrath of other teachers threatened us.  Hopefully settlements will be agreed upon soon, and schools and hospitals won't suffer too much.
That being said, I still feel as if there's nowhere else I'm supposed to be.  The above are just a few of the reasons I get up in the morning, and though it's easy to get bogged down by the rough patches, making an effort to stand in the winter sunshine every once in a while is really worth it.