South Africa 2011-2012

I figure now that I've been here for six months and have decided to stay where I am for another six months, it's probably about time I explain a little more about how and why I got to be here in the first place.

I had been interested in South Africa for a long time, even before I decided to study abroad there in January 2010. Certain books I'd read, news stories I'd heard, and what little I knew about South Africa's history made me want to learn more. I was especially fascinated by the country's history of racism and segregation, to which I could see so many obvious parallels in my own country. Studying in South Africa in January 2010 was such a fascinating and life-changing experience for me, almost an emotional overload, that I knew I had to go back at some point, and I hoped it would be sooner rather than later.

I was hoping to do a year of volunteer work abroad after graduating from St. Olaf. It was a dream I'd had a for a long time, and I figured it would never again be this easy to travel and see the world. I really wanted the volunteer work to be to South Africa, though in retrospect I realize I probably made an effort to seem open to never-before-visited countries also. Through a number of friends at St. Olaf I had heard many good things about a Lutheran global service progam called YAGM (Young Adults in Global Missions), and I knew they sent young people to South Africa, so I decided long before the beginning of my senior year at St. Olaf that I would apply to that program. After an interminable application process, during which time they sent me someone else's rejection letter before sending me my own, then changed their minds and decided I was accepted, I finally went to their four-day interviewing event knowing that I was interviewing for two country programs: Slovakia and South Africa. The interviews went well enough at the time. Afterwards, though, I started to feel vaguely uncomfortable in response to many things about the program's attitudes towards global service. Over time, those feelings of discomfort turned into outright revulsion.

But now I'm getting ahead of myself. Though I was still more interested in the South Africa program, and expressed my feelings to them, I got assigned to Slovakia instead. As immature as it may sound, I felt angry and gipped: I went through the whole process only to get assigned someplace I didn't want to go? I had been telling myself that I'd be open to going somewhere else besides South Africa, but the reality of having to choose between doing this program in Slovakia and looking at other options in South Africa made the choice very clear. I turned down YAGM without a clear idea of what I would do instead, while feeling very much like I was not winning at life.

In early June, after graduating from St. Olaf, I made contact with Marjorie Jobson, the woman who led the second half of our trip to South Africa in January 2010. I told her about my desire to volunteer in South Africa for a year or so. She told me about many of the initiatives her organization (Khulumani Support Group) would soon be soon starting, and how I could spend ~six months with Give a Child a Family and Siyavuna Dvelopment Centre to learn their ways, so to speak, in order to be of use to Khulumani during my second six months. I applied to Give a Child a Family, got accepted, and was suddenly faced with the reality of how I would pay for all that time here. (There had been a misunderstanding between Marje and I regarding the financial help she could offer me.) I was fortunate to receive money from, ironically enough, the Orthodox church I had attended as a St. Olaf student (whose priest is South African) and an Orthodox organization that's published a lot of my Dad's church music. Without those two grants (and the money raised from a smattering of summer jobs) it wouldn't have been possible, but I was blessed and I'm deeply grateful for the help I received to make this possible.

Now that it's been almost a year since I was struggling to lay out my plans for the year following graduation, I have a much better sense of why I intuitively didn't feel like I could, in good conscience, accept my offer to do YAGM. During both interviews, the program coordinators kept emphasizing that the point of being a YAGM volunteer was to "walk with" people, to be with them in their lives (which were almost certainly less comfortable than ours), and that we shouldn't really come in with high hopes of changing any of these people's lives. We were to be ambassadors of our country, and we were there to serve those we came to know in many different circumstances and organizations (apparently volunteers have a wide open range of options when it comes to the work they actually do) but the point was decidedly not to enact lasting change for the people we came in contact with. I found that I simply couldn't accept that. I didn't think then, and I still don't think now, that it's morally justifiable to go halfway around the world for a year, become a part of a community, use their resources, let them expend the considerable amount of energy necessary required to orient you, and only figure out what you're doing there after you get there. I decided that if I was going to go all the way to South Africa for as long as a year, I needed to know what I would be doing there long before I left. I also needed to know that I would truly be needed in a project that was truly making people's lives better. I never could have dreamed the degree to which my hopes and prayers would be answered. Not only am I getting great experience in so many workplace skills, and making a real difference in poor people's lives, I also, if I may say so, have no idea how SDC got all the work done that needed to get done before I got here. :)