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Southafrica
Disaster Shakti - Botswana, South Africa - Team Journals
June 18th 2007, Cape Town, South Africa
Gargi Roysircar
We began to prepare ourselves for our South African outreach by first personally experiencing the beauty and historical challenges of South Africa. A breathtaking, state-of-the-art cable ride that rotated, while simultaneously lifting steeply and vertically, took us to Table Mountain. I was ready to press the easy button! The symmetrical cutting and flattening of rocks though centuries of erosion made me imagine thousands of artisans and masons chiseling rectangles and squares to some classical design. I imagined thousands of gardeners planting in crevices low-growing shrubby vegetation with bright yellow, red, and fuchia flowers and berries. I was viewing an extraordinary natural wonder of rock and foliage diversity as I looked down to the brilliantly sun-lit coastal line of Table Bay and Cape of Storms. Colleen, our guide, pointed to us Robben Island, whose crashing white waves and green foliage hid its housing of the dark, cruel history of apartheid.
The fun of Table Mountain was completely wiped out by Robben Island’s history of prison camps and forced, non-productive limestone mining labor. Here Nelson Mandela and other freedom fighters, which included high school children, were classified and separated by the shades of their skin color. For example, Black South Africans were not allowed to have bread or jam with their breakfast, while Indians and other “Asiatics” were given a minimum ration of these delicacies.
Photo Caption: Tim Gillespie, Gargi Roysircar, and Amanda Blanchard of Disaster Shakti with Mr. Sparks, our tour guide who was an African Nationalist and imprisoned in Robben Island along with Nelson Mandela. Our sociopolitical education in the history of apartheid inspired our advocacy for community outreach in South Africa.
My heart filled with national pride when I read the enlarged prison pass of Billy Nair, an Indian, Hindu by religion, who served time twice in Robben Island. Indians fought side-by-side with Black South African Nationalists. Indians were banished from the cities into Bantutowns along with Blacks. With the development of Bantutowns, husbands and wives and families were separated. Children were abandoned. Biracial children were considered illegitimate. In fact, 60% of South African children were considered illegitimate. All this happened so recently in the history of South Africa and of the world-in the 1970’s and 1980’s-when in the U.S.A, we were beginning to enjoy the successes of the Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Movement.
Nelson Mandela has lived a free life for only 16 years, after being imprisoned for 27 in corrugated tin-roofed huts. As an outsider and who heard stories of the British colonization of her country of origin, India, all her growing-up years, I am confused by the talk of forgiveness and reconciliation. To me forgiveness and reconciliation are the issues of individual relationships rather than addressing through community activism and education the large-scale oppression and eradication of minorities. Will the history of apartheid be forgotten by the generations to come and how will they learn to prepare and protect themselves from another potential Nazi-like assault on their humanity. But I am speaking from the limitations of my worldview and cultural encapsulation and what I am saying may be truer of yesterday than of tomorrow.
June 19th 2007, Cape Town Day 2
Gargi Roysircar
Philani
School teachers are on strike for higher wages; so we did not go the school we had planned on visiting. We went instead to a crèche, which turned out to be an even better trip. The crèche is part of a women’s empowerment program, called Philani Nutrition Project. Philani’s coordinator, a 20-something Black South African, in whom I had my first glimpses of the future socially progressive leadership of South Africa, got her master’s degree in social work from the University of Albany, She told us that today poverty, unemployment (40%), instability, and violence are central to the life experience of township and squatter communities in South Africa.
When references are made to townships and squatter shacks, one means where Black South Africans live. There are large numbers of malnourished children and destitute mothers who are the most vulnerable within these townships. The townships consist of rows of tin-roofed shacks and outhouses, very cold in the winter and very hot in the summer, with no city-distributed electricity. Here Black South Africans were moved to from Cape Town during apartheid and where they continue to live. The township dwellers have ingeniously pulled into their homes pirated electric lines. However, when one of these unauthorized lines catches fire, fifty or so shacks are burned down immediately. The townships are located in the city’s outskirts and some touch the borders of lush golf courses of private golf clubs. The third world meets the first world in improbable ways. The government has planned the removal of the townships to be replaced with concrete buildings. To get into these residential buildings, people need to get on a list. I saw a few scatted buildings and single homes in these townships, whose demolition, it appeared to me, might take another two decades. And perhaps more.
At the Philani cooperative, women, young and old, were weaving carpets and making arts and crafts, while toddlers played around and watched their mothers and grandmothers weave. A front-store sold the women’s handcrafts. Our outreach team members immersed themselves in layers of carpets, handicrafts, and jewelry; we could not buy enough of the exquisite ware. Children of the crèche, 2- to four-years old, sang and danced to show us what they had learned. Some were African songs and some were nursery rhymes that we were familiar with and in which we joined. Watching the children joyously perform and our joining in and clapping with them was most heartwarming for me. There is life, hope, learning, and employment in the slums. Philani services include nutrition intervention, education provision, skills training, and HIV/AIDS education. Philani outreach workers go house to house seeking out malnourished and at-risk children, with the goal of teaching mothers to use the resources that they do have to raise healthy children at home.
Photo Caption: Philani Nutrition Project crèche for infants 2 - 4 years of age.
Late that evening, I was finishing up in my laptop a keynote speech that I was to deliver the following morning at a conference. I did not want to disturb my roommate, so I was writing in the hotel lobby. A waitress brought me from the hotel’s restaurant a tray complete with coffee, cream, sugar, cloth napkin, spoons, cup and saucer, none of which I had ordered. I was taken aback with this hospitality. I was even embarrassed. I fished out some coins from my purse, apologizing to the waitress that I did not have the “right” denomination of paper currency in Rand. The young woman told me that the coins amounted to more than what she gets paid per hour (about 2.00 U.S. dollars) and that she had enough money for transportation that night to her township. Somehow, this young woman knew I needed coffee to keep me awake.
Earlier that evening, we dined at Africa Café, the finest restaurant in Cape Town, that serves about 30 dishes from different parts of Africa. Our outreach team of about 21 members was joined by the Philani staff and their friends. We were truly a multiracial multicultural group seated at two long wooden tables. The table dishes consisted of bright handmade pottery. Waves of food arrived at out tables and empty bowls were whisked away gracefully. Basumati rice and lamb curry were also considered African food, which delighted me because I realized that the spice and silk trade started by Vasco de Gama linked India with South Africa in food and cuisine several hundreds of years ago. The dinner banquet ended to the sound of African drumbeats and songs, and we went back to our hotel having purchased a variety of African pottery.
June 27th Disaster Shakti Outreach in Johannesburg Days 1, 2, 3, and 4
Gargi Roysircar
The four days we worked in Johannesburg, I connected with South Africans in many different ways and at different levels. We visited the Parents and Children’s Counseling Centre in Soweto. Soweto stands for Southwestern Townships, where Black South Africans were resettled in “homelands” away from Johannesburg. In local colloquialism, Soweta stands for “so where to?” At the Centre, a social worker presented a written case report of a 14-year-old girl who is HIV positive. This girl was raped prior to her HIV diagnosis. The girl lives with her brothers, only few years older than she. The case presentation was of high professional quality.
The three social workers and our outreach team members had enriching conversations on the interface of care for HIV/AIDS, trauma, adolescent stress responses, an adolescent client’s social and emotional needs outside of HIV treatment, child-headed households, and parent-training with heads of households who are barely out of adolescence themselves. I felt connected professionally in a dusty shanty town half-way across the world from New Hampshire. The community counselors, who are volunteers from the township and paid a stipend, spoke off the challenges of going into the hostels for male laborers in their township as well as visiting with prostitutes who have moved into environs of the male hostels. Here the community counselors do home-based HIV/AIDS education.
Photo Caption: HIV/AIDS public health announcement on a wall in Soweto township served by community counselors from the Parents and Children’s Counseling Center.
The community counselors liked being able to reflect at our case conference on their own hurts and pains arising out of the extensive service they provide women and child clients. Unlike the social workers, they receive limited supervision and support because large numbers of community counselors are doing outreach in townships. By listening to the testimonials of the community counselors, we were their witness and social support for one brief morning. The community counselors were talking about their need to debrief just as we the U.S. outreach team members meet for group processing for at least an hour and a half every evening after our day’s work. Here again was a professional meeting of minds between South African and U.S. outreach workers.
From the Centre, we walked through the dusty, unpaved, paper- and glass-strewn paths of the township hostels to reach Project Accept, where HIV/AIDS testing and education are conducted. The person-in-charge of Project Accept is an actor-performer who manages the project as a part-time job. I am extremely impressed with how HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment programming is widespread, openly talked about, and announced in public billboards and building walls in urban slums. I have not seen such public acknowledgment of HIV/AIDS in the United States. While the South African government offers some financial support, most of the HIV/AIDS work is being conducted by non-profit or religious organizations, including Catholic as well as Jewish charities. The community counselors told me that they need sturdy shoes to do their door-to-door counseling services in the townships. On paper they mapped with pen and ink their foot sizes, which I am taking back to Antioch. I will do fund-raising to send sneakers to the counselors and, hopefully, also a check to the Centre, so that shoes can be bought for the township children that the Centre serves.
Late that day with a smaller group from our outreach team, I visited with the faculty and graduate students of St. Augustine’s College, a masters and doctoral granting institution, similar to Antioch, and which, also like Antioch, has a values-based, social justice orientation to teaching, research, and scholarship. We had an energetic, powerful dialogue on the ethics, competencies, and empowerment features of activism and how we can achieve peace and reconciliation by embracing biculturalism, biracial collaboration, and respect for human dignity. The St. Augustine doctoral students’ dissertations are along such philosophical lines, be they Black or White South African or Afrikaner. I find this to be an amazing ideological shift within a decade, after having noted and personally sobbed over the history of apartheid as depicted in the Apartheid Museum, Hector Peterson’s Museum, and the Regina Munde Church.
Hector Peterson was the first Black high school boy, about age 12, to be shot down by the police in Black student protests and uprising on June 16, 1976. The students were protesting against the imposition of Afrikaans as the language of instruction, which would replace the English language that was reserved for the better quality education for White students. The high school students were protesting such Bantu Education policies. Anywhere between 300 to 1000 Black and Indian school students as well children, some who were as young as six years of age and who were playing in the streets of Soweto, were killed on June 16th.
Photo Caption: Museum for Hector Peterson, age 12, first Black high school student to be shot on June 16, 1976. More sociopolitical education to strengthen our motivation for community outreach to children and adolescents.
At Regina Munde Church, where school students had gathered to pray, the police opened fire. Bullet holes and other signs of physical assault can be seen in the walls, stained glass windows, and the church pulpit. The high school students gave momentum to the African Consciousness Movement, which was different from the mission of the African National Congress’ (ANC) fight for civil rights. It was the school children’s revolt that brought forth the South Africa that Nelson Mandela and the earlier generation of freedom fighters had envisioned, and for which they were either killed or tortured and imprisoned. Winnie Mandela, in and out of prison, brutalized by the police and prison guards, and banished to townships, embraced the school students’ fight for African Consciousness. She joined the students’ ranks as a leader, while still keeping alive in the 70’s and 80’s people’s memory of Nelson Mandela and the much reduced ANC party and its declining influence.
What a political change in South Africa within two decades, so well represented by the multiracial ideology of the faculty and doctoral students of St. Augustine. Here at St. Augustine’s, which was founded in 1999, I made intellectual, pedagogical, and multicultural connections. I would love to teach in this institution one day. I would not have said that I would love to teach in a South African university 10 to 15 years ago. However, I need to remind myself that even though we do not have color apartheid, we still have in South Africa economic apartheid, neighborhood apartheid, city versus rural apartheid, etc.
The first day in Johannesburg, we had a day of learning through a conference that our team leader and sponsoring association, AMCD, had organized. The purpose of the conference was for us to learn from our team members who were making presentations on their respective local, regional, national, and international outreach projects, which were also accompanied with some basic evaluation research. We learned about Palestinian-Israeli peace dialogs among friends and neighbors; college students doing clean-ups of a toxic waste site in a village in Mexico; doctoral students consulting with school counselors and doing parent-training in a southern city in the U.S.A.; a doctoral student studying the racial climate of a school and making suggestions for a culturally competent school system in the U.S. A.; training graduate students to do Hurricane Katrina relief work by using Paulo Friere’s social justice model, and many other fine presentations. Some student team members gave poster presentations.
A South African educational psychologist spoke of her psychological and assessment work with poor children in townships around Johannesburg. I gave the keynote on psychology professionals and students’ purpose of doing social justice work in communities, how we get started on such work that is not included in our professional curriculum, and the professional competencies of advocacy work. I was given one directive by our outreach team leader-that I needed to be inspirational to set us off on our South Africa-Botswana outreach project. I think I did exactly that because I wrote and spoke from my heart and deep convictions. My listeners gave me a standing ovation.
July 4, 2007, Gabarone, Botswana, Southern Africa, Days 1, 2, 3, and 4
Gargi Roysircar
Johannesburg saw its first snowfall in 26 years. Gabarone, the capital of Botswana, dry for two years, experienced a few sprinkles. I like my comings and goings in Southern Africa being associated with weather developments. In Southern Africa, where it’s winter now, days are bright, sunny, and crisp under clear blue skies. The nights are cold under star-lit brilliance. The night before I left Keene, I got myself an EMS fleece and climbing shoes, both protecting me well from winter Harmattan winds and the dust picked up pedestrians and traffic.
Like political refugees of past apartheid South Africa and economic refugees of current Zimbabwe, you can walk from Johannesburg to Botswana and find yourself in a Southern African country different from South Africa and Zimbabwe. Gabarone is laidback, stable, and safe. The University of Botswana is well funded, showcasing fine buildings and infrastructure, the best library in sub Sahara (all glass-walled), an Olympic-size swimming pool, and parking lots filled with Mercedes Benz, which belong to faculty members. The public relations Dept. at the University is very similar to Antioch’s public relations dept., except that in Botswana there is a provost for public relations. The provost told us that the University’s public relations’ most pressing need is to maintain the school’s current “big university” image and 25-year-old-history in order to offset the challenge of a competing public university that will be developing soon in Gabarone and appropriating federal allocations and student enrollment.
The counseling and educational psychology curricula are similar to those in U.S. universities. The University faculty and staff are encouraged to seek professional development and higher education degrees in Western countries, with tuition and expenses all paid for by the University. A master’s level counselor of Career and Counseling Services of the University expressed an interest in applying to Antioch’s clinical psychology program this coming fall. He loved our ANE website, and after spending a day or two with me, he was even more convinced that he would like to come to our school. He obtained his master’s degree in England. We spoke of his taking the GRE and TOEFEL, and he said that the Univ of Botswana would fund his education in Antioch. I have learned that the benefits for Botswana from its diamond trade will last another 35 years. I have also learned that the unemployment rate is 50% and that 1 in 5 persons has been diagnosed with HIV/AIDS.
Gabarone is in the midst of modernism and traditionalism in mental health services. We experienced this in our visits to the academic department of counseling/social work as well as the Career and Counseling Services in the University, Lifeline Botswana community mental health agency, Kgolagano College of Theological Education--a community college that teaches pastoral and evangelical counseling, Botswana’s only Women’s Shelter in Gabarone, and guidance services in govt-run elementary, middle, and secondary schools. Our outreach team broke up in small groups and for two days we did outreach in these community organizations. The counseling and educational psychology curricula are similar to those in U.S. universities. The services provided by Career and Counseling Services are similar to U.S. college counseling centers, serving the developmental needs of undergraduate students. However, unique to university services in Botswana is its HIV/AIDS counseling and educational services and working with students who serve as surrogate parents to their younger siblings because their parents have died.
On the other hand, the College of Theological Education stresses on evangelical counseling that is contextualized in Southern African cultural and religious traditions. The faculty and students said that they were not able to locate pastoral counseling books with a multicultural focus, and that they did not have the expertise to produce scholarship in counseling that is based on South African spirituality. We had an energetic conversation on multicultural spirituality, with significant ideas articulated by the African American faculty and professional staff members of our U.S. outreach team. I am familiar with some recent books on spirituality in counseling, and if these are relevant to the discussion we had with members of the Theological college, I will mail these to this school. The chief reverend/pastor of the school is an American from Los Angeles, and he was wearing an Oregon t-shirt!
Two students from the University of Florida and I spent two days at Lifeline Botswana. Lifeline has an excellent model for training community members and youth as paraprofessionals, who take counseling outreach services into homes, schools, and the community. This training is fee-based, quite extensive with a major focus on micro-skills, and it includes a large component on personal growth and self-awareness, the latter materials reminding me of the self-reflection methods I use in training students to gain multicultural self-awareness. I am bringing with me Lifeline’s training materials to learn how I can adapt these to train my students in community outreach. I have also learned about the improvisation of street theatre, which community counselors use in working with adolescents to educate them on alcohol and drug abuse. Street theatre and liberation theatre were also used in Black townships in South Africa in the 60’s and 70’s to inspire the common person to fight apartheid’s oppression. Lifeline appointed me as a community counselor for one day to meet walk-in clients. I felt so enriched to be with individuals and their day-to-day difficulties that I am feeling a strong urge to get back to counseling in my own professional work.
I lugged a huge bag of book donations from Atlanta, through Johannesburg, to Gabarone, and paid excess baggage charge as we departed from Johannesburg to Gabarone. Most of our team members carried one such bag and paid overage. The hassle was worth it. The University of Botswana library had a beautiful exhibit of our book donations. The books were new and the most recent publications in counseling, psychology, statistics, measurement, design, and evaluation. The exhibit was accompanied with a reception held by the Director of Libraries, the Dean of Education, and various library and faculty members. The ceremony for the acceptance of the books was most gracious. When speaking to the Dean, library officials, and the chair of the counseling dept., I learned that I could send by UPS new books that I receive, and that the University of Botswana will pay for the transportation. As the editor of the Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development, I am sent many recently published multicultural and research books. I wish to donate these because books in Botswana are very expensive, which most graduate students here cannot afford.
I feel overwhelmed by the hospitality, warmth, and gracious modesty of the people we met at Gabarone. Wherever we went, we were offered tea, coffee, and snacks. We received many friendly hugs and embraces. Professionals, students, and staff are very polite and soft-spoken. An Indian librarian at the University of Botswana and her husband, a professor of physics, took me over to their home to share their home-cooked Indian food with them and their children. This invitation was extemporaneous-with no advance notice or prior acquaintanceship. As I return home to the United States, I will miss the humanity and spontaneous friendliness of people of Southern Africa. I am reflecting on difficult issues of re-entry and reverse acculturation for me. I will also miss seeing early in the morning monkeys running on the grounds of our hotel, which will be replaced with running squirrels in my yard in Keene.
© 2007 Antioch University New England, 40 Avon Street, Keene, NH 03431-3516 800.553.8920