“Wanneer trou jy?” When are you getting married? A lady in Jet (a department store here) asked my friend Amber and I as we were shopping (I bought myself some rad Rastafarian slip slops; you’re jealous and you know it). I can’t get away from the pressure of marriage even when I get away from BYU :) . It was just really funny, and I thought I would share that with ya’ll.
So my good Coloured friends Amber and Alletta took me around today (I will explain what a Coloured is just now). They and I had to go to Mdantsane (the township outside East London). They make and sell posters to teachers such as ABC posters, vocabulary of the body posters, etc, etc for teachers to use in their classroom, and they had some teachers they were delivering to in Mdantsane, and I needed to drop something off at one of the schools I volunteered at last summer. It was a good time especially because Alletta had no idea where the schools were that she was delivering posters to, so after we dropped my stuff off we more or less just drove around the township with Alletta continually telling Amber to turn around and go back (we did more u-turns than anything else) and Amber telling Alletta that she should drive.
A little background: Alletta and Amber are mother and daughter respectively, and they are two of the craziest people I know! I love them to death! I was going to live with them this summer, but Alletta had to sell her house (the economy is really struggling here; we think we have problems in the states right now with rising gas and other prices, just come down here and you will see how we really don’t have much room to complain; but their housing market is not in as bad a spot as ours), but she still wants so much to help me out which I really appreciate. She told me that “We are not here for you 100% but 300 or 400%.” And oh how it is nice to know that there are people around me that are willing to help me out and look out for me. I have no doubt that if I needed a ride at 3 am they would come rushing to help me without hesitation (and hopefully that makes my mom sleep well at night).
Ok, so Alletta and Amber are, like I mentioned earlier, coloureds. Now the racial category of “coloured” was created, yes created if you can believe it, by the apartheid government (yes those ones are at it again) in the early 1950s (the term may have existed before this, but the apartheid government with the passing of the Population Registration Act and Group Areas Act really pushed this identity onto people) for everyone who was not black, white, Indian, or Chinese. So this includes people that are descendents of the Khoi San (the original inhabitants of South Africa), descendents of the Malay slaves that were brought over centuries ago, those coming from mixed backgrounds (e.g. white father, black mother, or even grandparents in that situation), and anyone else. So this group needed to be identified (thought the apartheid government) in order to properly place them because all races had to be separated. So to find out who belonged in what group they would stick a pencil in people’s hair and if it fell out immediately you were white, if is remained for a few seconds you were coloured, and if it stayed you were black (this is oversimplified but hopefully it gives you the jist; it really was quite arbitrary, in fact in many instances people were reclassifies from coloured to white and back again; if you can believe it: changing racial identities. In fact in some instances in Cape Town if a coloured person began to gain prominence then they were often times reclassified as white . . . think about that). So once the coloureds were identified they could be placed in coloured areas.
So coloureds have a very interesting cultural and racial identity which is the topic for a dissertation and not one I can tackle (or want to) here. I hate making generalizations but in my experience, coloureds are very energetic, exciting, and “colourful” people and Alletta is definitely all of that!
Alletta (much like my friend Deanna) will give you her left kidney if you simply asked. She will also tease you and give you a hard time till the day you die. Things are difficult for her because she has been cut back at work to only working three days a week, but she does not despair. She has her poster business, is doing project assessment (she works for and NGO and within it her focus is on CBOs (community based organizations) that, for example, teach people to plant gardens to sustain themselves and then turn around and sell in order to gain income, so she has experience in assessing how to make a project work) for people independently and can get some income from that. She is powerful, fun, resourceful and inspiring. I really do admire her a lot and wish that each of you could meet her and laugh till you hurt as I did today.
One interesting comment she made came when we passed a school that she worked at last year. She taught them how to plant a garden, provided seeds, helped them plant, and produce. We passed this school and the yard had become weeds and there was no garden anymore. Now this is really really disappointing because this school is in an area where many of its learners are only eating once a day and they could use a garden to feed the learners a descent and nutritious meal, but for some reason the garden has been abandoned. As we looked at the school, Alletta asked: “Is that (the garden) really what they wanted?” This blew me away and has been something I have been thinking about a lot lately. In terms of development, the world is trying to do so much for the developing world and those in poverty, but are the things that the US, Europe, the World Bank, the IMP, and the millions of NGOs actually doing things that the people what? This is huge and something that I continue to think about and wonder about. This is why I, like Alletta, love the idea of grass roots, bottom up, projects that people start themselves. There needs to be more listening to those in need rather than simply telling them what they need and how they will get it; maybe, just maybe, they know what they want and need but simply need some help (financial maybe) moving these wants and needs and these plans to achieve them from dreams and plans to actual reality.
I have simply rambled on far too long and I will be surprised if anyone (besides my parents) has even made it to this point, if so you are awesome!
Apartheid once again did something crazy, and my bleeding heart continues to bleed . . .
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