Our Common World

The depth and resonance of the Pope’s encyclical reminded me of a conversation I had with Regina, chair-woman of the Mapusha Weavers, about the way things were in her community during the Apartheid years. She said it was better in some ways because they had enough rain back then. They didn’t have money but they didn’t need money, they could feed themselves from the land. She wondered why, now, it is rare to have a rainy season with enough rain to bring their corn to harvest. 

What I remember most is the confused look in her eyes at the conclusion of my long winded explanation about carbon dioxide and rich countries eating oil.  I most certainly throw my hat in with the 97% of scientists who say global warming is real and our actions play a significant role in the process but I was speaking with a woman who walks everywhere she goes and prefers to cook over an open fire. Regina is a thinker, she likes to ponder things, consider them from various angles but what I was saying just didn’t make sense.   Our conversation impacted me more for it became a vivid, in-my -face view of our global connection, our common world. As Pope Francis points out, the actions of the rich countries do impact the lives of the poor. Regina can no longer feed her family from her gardens. 

Most of the women of Mapusha are devout Catholic and I know they have  heard about the Pope’s encyclical. I wonder if Regina remembers our talk back in January? My guess is she will focus on the way her Pope emphasized our moral obligation to be better stewards of the earth. She will increase her efforts in whatever way she can. I am the one who will remember the shriveled corn on the browned stalks in Regina’s garden and cringe as I drive my car to the grocery store.

The Power of Hope

I am both a great fan of hope and a dyed-in-the-wool idealist so you can imagine how I lit up when I read Nickolas Kristof’s column, “The Power of Hope, It Works.” His columns often assuage my thirst for either truly good news or a compassionate response to truly bad news but this column rested on a large-scale experiment which showed, with rigorous evidence what works to life people out of the most extreme poverty. “One of the lessons maybe so simple and human: the power of hope.” 

Reading this column, I imagined a veritable army of iridescent hope bubbles moving  into the monochrome density of a poverty stricken status quo. They moved relentlessly here, there and all about enlightening, enlivening. 

I deeply understand both the need for hope and its power after working with the rural community of Rooiboklaagte in South Africa where the unemployment rate for women is over 70% and the HIV infection rate over 30%. 

I watched carefully over the years but again, you see, I  have to be very careful for my idealistic tendencies can tend to glom on to even an illusory positive. Yet, I can still picture the way a light came on in very sick Anna’s eyes when she heard that many people from America were praying for her to get better. And I can still see the way Eulender, a teenager brimming with ambitions to become a doctor after having watched her auntie dye an inglorious death, began to glow when she heard Americans were going to pitch in to give her the chance to succeed at a top notch private school. Elena was simple, the cause of her sparkle was a new backpack which she could proudly  carry to her second grade classroom.

 Yes, these were  gifts from afar but what caught my attention was the way these generosities opened a door and the door became a pathway and the pathway became a river. Anna went out into the community as soon as she had the strength to walk again and talked to those who were both sick and hidden as she had been.  Her aim was to inspire them to go to the doctor, to know HIV was not a death sentence, to see you could hold your head high despite the HIV sickness.  She became an instrument of hope. Eulender, too, became one of those relentlessly light filled bubbles in her community as she worked each night till two in the morning to learn Afrikaans and English, to read her assignments and prepare for her tests. She is in college now and when she comes back to the village children mob her for tales and stories, inspiration and hope. In this world which I have watched so closely for twelve years, hope birthed more hope, the bubbles multiplied.  

I freely admit my need to hold high the torch of hope but this time, thankfully, I am backed by Kristof and The New York Times and data driven truth.

Enjoy!

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/21/opinion/nicholas-kristof-the-power-of-hope-is-real.html?_r=0

The Brightest Star

This morning I read of a mysteriously bright star, the brightest star ever recorded. It’s located twelve million light years from earth and pumps out as much energy as 10 million suns. Imagining this bright star, I was reminded of the African Bushmen’s belief that when you die you become a star.

Then, I read another news clip, this one about Ebola. For weeks I have been upset, bothered, chafed by the many stories in the news daily about the flourishing Ebola virus in West Africa. I am duly horrified by the lack of gloves in the hospitals of Sierra Leone, deeply saddened by the way fear has broken down cultural systems of community support and highly irritated by the disproportionate fear of contagion here in the USA. As my friend David Patient quips, here you are less likely to die of Ebola than you are to die choking on a wheat thin or at the hands of a duck with a gun. 

Naturally, this disease brings back memories of watching the AIDS epidemic tear through South Africa. I have seen the painful shunning and shaming infectious disease can breed, seen the way fear isolates and creates dark secrets but, I have seen the other side of the picture as well. I’ve watched women adopt sick babies, feed dying neighbors and give scarce food to orphaned children. I have watched courage and compassion blossom in the face of a killer epidemic. 

Today’s news clip told of a newborn infant, the premature offspring of an Ebola victim who lay isolated in a small box until the happy moment when her test results came back negative. Happily, the nurses rushed to pick up this sad baby. However, the test for newborns is primitive and in this case, it was wrong.  Twelve of these kind nurses were infected and have died.  This news dissolved any remaining barriers to the pain and my heart broke wide with grief for all the sick people and caregivers who are fighting Ebola in the trenches of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Nigeria.

Then, I decided to adopt the ideas of the Bushmen. I chose to believe that  the oh- so-bright star must be a composite being,  a composite of all those, like the caregivers in West Africa, who pick up orphaned infants, feed the sick and care for the dying. It seems the only worthy response to these wretchedly unfair situations is to honor those who rise to meet them with both great courage and deep compassion. 

This helped my poor cracked heart.

May I remember each time I look up at a star drenched sky to honor the thousands upon thousands of people who have preformed one of the small acts of courageous compassion which occur each day.  This is where I will rest my besieged sense of hope for this oh so troubled world of ours. 

The Mapusha Weavers, a Cooperative

I have learned many things in my decade plus with the women of Mapusha but one teaching came slowly as I watched the graceful ways in which these women work and play together year after year. They have offered a new experience of the word cooperative which is miles from the earnest Philadelphia food coops of long ago. Their teaching is beginning to sink in and I’m coming to understand what it looks like when ‘one for all and all for one‘  is put into action.

The other day I saw a picture of the five weavers standing on scaffolding high off the ground finishing a large and complex rug and, while still shaking my head with appreciation of their ability to join forces, happened upon an Ann Coulter’s quotation in which she disparages soccer. It seems her preference is for sports where individual glory reigns. She finds fault with this sport where blame is dispersed and there are no heroes, no losers. In my african world there are neither heroes nor losers and the collective takes the blame precisely to disperse it. 

Early on in my time in the studio I heard stories from their past that should have shown me the ways of their world. It was explained to me, when I first met them, that any money they earned in those very lean years went to the most needy members.  I heard about their attempts to start a grocery store which failed repeatedly due to their inability to charge hungry, destitute neighbors. But, I was a slow to digest the truth of this matter.  

Many times I have watched when a visitor brings a box of cookies to the studio how  carefully one of the women will divide the cookies into equal piles, three and two thirds cookies per person or some such impossible task of division.  I should have remembered these little piles of cookies when I made a serious attempt to come up with an accurate price per square meter of woven tapestry.  This inquiry involved understanding just exactly how much raw wool  each spinner could turn into spun wool per week and how fast the weavers could weave a square meter of tapestry. When the calculations were complete it was obvious to all that the spinners were not working fast enough. Either they had to speed up or their salaries had to shrink to make our price per square meter reasonable. This was explained to all, adjustments were made and I returned to the states satisfied that we finally had neatly ordered salaries, production and pricing. 

When I returned to the studio seven months later and saw the accounts I realized that all my work was for naught. The spinners salaries had magically risen once again. They were a coop after all, Regina reminded me, and little piles of cookies danced through my head. I didn’t protest that it was unfair that Anna, who peaceably dozes while she spins, should have a salary very similar to master tapestry weaver Linda. I said nothing for, finally, I understood. Mapusha is at root not a business but a cooperative and in a cooperative wealth, blame and cookies are equally dispersed. There are neither winners nor losers, villains nor heroes and I am wiser for understanding this, the reality of Mapusha’s cooperative. 

"Madiba, he knew."

I remember years ago when Regina wove a tapestry for Nelson Mandela, the man who delivered freedom. 

All the women at the Mapusha cooperative agreed this was a good idea and Regina began to weave a tapestry of many colors. There was a central zigzag motif moving up the center of the weaving and when I asked , she told me, “It is our long, long walk to freedom.” Shaking her head, she continued,  “It was not a straight line.”  We were proud to send off the finished weaving with a thank you note signed by each woman and happy to think of Mapusha represented in his gallery of gifts. 

Regina was born in 1948 just as the Nationalist party was gaining political majority power in her country. She grew up, married and raised five children through those jagged, oppressive years of Apartheid and her husband left the family to work in Johannesburg, as so many did.  He never returned to their home in rural Limpopo so she bore a very real scar from the system of separation.

One day I asked what she remembered most of those Apartheid times and she was quiet, thoughtful before replying, “We would sit with our weavings at the fair at Swadini. There were many, many white people there but they never looked at us.  We were not there.  We were invisible. That is what I remember. “

And so today, when I spoke with Regina to express my sorrow at the loss of Madiba, again, I asked what she would like to say to her friends in America about him. She said “He knew.” I puzzled, what did she mean, he knew?

“He knew what our lives were with Apartheid. His work changed our lives. He knew.”

Listening to her rich voice over the Skype line I remember the Native American greeting, “I see you” and suddenly, viscerally I understood what she meant. Mandela had the capacity to walk in the shoes of another and for each of us, to be seen, to be understood is to be honored.  Regina believes he knew how it burned and ached to be a poor black woman in rural South Africa during the Apartheid era, to be invisible, without the power to hold your husband or educate your children. And, because he knew, he acted and because he acted she was free in a way she had never known before. 

Maybe Regina is right, maybe the truly great are those who know how others feel and take that knowledge,  whole heartedly into right action. Madiba, the old man, our father, showed us all what it looks like to heal a nation and inspire the world with right understanding and courageous, heart centered action. 

Mistakes are Made, Forgiveness Happens

I hesitate to consider the hundreds of mistakes I’ve made over my years in rural South Africa. I envision them like a multitude of colored sprinkles on a frosted cupcake; the red ones are the mistakes I know about, the pink are the ones I suspect and the blue, green, yellow, orange and purple are all the hues I can’t even begin to decipher. Often, I mess up the very simple ritualized gesture of greeting, forgetting the appropriate rhythm with the check out person at the grocery store. It should be, “hello,” pause, and “how are you,” pause, before getting down to the check-out business and again and again I catch myself  skipping that second pause.  Whether it is the small ignorances or the big ones, they have happened often over the years and I smile not at the mistakes I’ve made but at the generous response of my community in Rooiboklaagte. 

This year, as I stressed and struggled over the building project, there was an incident that gave me a first hand glimpse of the peculiarly rich vein of forgiveness that runs through the rural world in which I work.  It was a hot afternoon in March, the walls of the studio were reaching higher, higher towards the sky and the new borehole was filling the tank, the tap obediently turning a flow of water on and off. Yet, as I stood within the walls of the studio talking with the foreman about cement and building sand, I could see out the window  a crowd of high school kids gathered around our new water tap. 

“What are they doing?” I asked Desmond with all my sensors on high alert. He replied something about no water at the high school but before the end of his answer, I was out the door, moving around the building towards the kids like a tightly wound rubber-band, snapping.  They were just being teenagers, throwing water, slouching, goofing around but the tap wasn’t yet securely cemented in and I feared they would break our brand new system. 

The kids knew me, knew my car with the Obama sticker on the back bumper, remembered me painting their hands to decorate the walls of their grade school and teaching art classes to them in the mission yard.  They knew I was mad and, even if their English wasn’t up to a conversation, they knew I was threatening their water source. I tried ineffectively to get them to form an orderly line and then, in frustration, clapped the lock on the tap and marched over to the high-school to demand that the administration provide adult supervision at our precious new tap. 

The principal was courteous and listened to me. He wished he had someone to supervise the kids and worried that I was not going to be a good new neighbor. It was all very civil and I congratulated myself on my behavior, neither angry nor impulsive but when I told Desmond about the confrontation the tilt of his head and his silence gave the first hint that a mistake had been made. Over the weekend I knew for sure, though my request for supervision seemed reasonable, something about my entitled attitude was off. So, first thing Monday morning I walked over to the office and knocked gently on the principal’s open door. He was stilted in his greeting and so I just simply said, “I came to apologize for my behavior on Friday. I made a mistake, I was scared that the kids would break our tap but, please forgive me. I was wrong.”

His response was immediate and complete, full-bodied and genuine. He reached out to clasp my hand between his own and his smile was warmth itself as he replied that he understood. I was forgiven for my slip into American flavored imperialism and in that that instant I understood something about forgiveness and something about my adopted world.

Few countries can top South Africa in modeling forgiveness.  There are numerous books on the miraculous capacity of black South Africans to forgive the many, grievous indignities of the Apartheid years. There is the universally revered Nelson Mandela forgiving all and inviting his jailers to his inauguration and there is the noble effort of the Truth and Reconciliation committee chaired by Desmond Tutu.  Seared into my brain is the image of Tutu putting his head on the desk and sobbing after listening to certain gruesome confessions. So, it makes sense to me that he gave this response when asked what kind of people he wanted to see on the commission: “People who were once victims.  The most forgiving people I have ever come across are people who have suffered — it is as if suffering has ripped them open into empathy.”

I learned later, from Desmond, that upon hearing of my action on that Friday, the women of Mapusha immediately went over to the principal to apologize. They never mentioned it to me but it did give me pause to wonder how many times they have apologized for my behavior. In truth, I think the principal will remember my apology more than my misdemeanor and I will remember the warmth of his forgiveness more than anything else. The longer I work in Rooiboklaagte the more I understand how very little I understand about this other world but I do understand that forgiveness reigns. So, I will happily continue to learn and grow, accepting my mistakes and moving forward, trusting in the great heart of those who have suffered.

Hardware Stores and a Set of Swings

Hardware stores were a central tangle in my days as a project manager. I knew from day one that if I was unable to make peace with them, I was in for a rough time.  And, still, sometimes when I look at the splendid new building I see it as one thousand trips to the hardware store. Sitting on the porch I might casually glance at  those shiny, little metal things at the base of the poles and  remember standing in the back aisle of Acornhoek’s Cashbuild, pulling the same sharp angled joints from a dusty bin onto the floor, crouching as I painstakingly counted out 50 left, 50 right.   Or, I might gaze at the whitewashed wall and remember sitting in my hot, little car waiting for some old man in overalls to shuffle up with a 20k bag of the dusty white powder and then, the puff that filled the car as he placed it in my hatch.

Walking through the front door of a hardware stores has never filled me with the same anticipatory shiver of delight which I invariably feel when I walk into a fabric shop, a book, art supply or thrift store. No, instead, as I approach the entrance to a hardware store I pull myself tall and mentally try to toughen myself in preparation for whatever is to follow.  There is almost nothing in this metal, plastic, concrete jungle which appeals to my senses and my nose crinkles like a real girl as I prowl the aisles in search of whatever.   And, then, there is the exasperation of never having quite enough information or the pitch perfect, correct information. Invariably, I know the size of the grinding disc for the baby grinder but I don’t know if we are to cut steel or concrete. Maybe, I know the exact length of the nail needed at the site but not the diameter.  If you join my inherent hardware store distaste with my impatient nature and then couple this package with repeated trips to rural South African hardware stores, it just plain looks bad.

 It was obvious that something needed to change. Things got worse as the building progressed and sometimes I came home with 5 or more receipts bulging out from my wallet. I needed to find a way to manage this and I needed it fast. Did I discover the answer, the stance, the magic potion to make hardware stores something other than a trial for me?
I did.

It certainly was not that I finally found patience in a country that models that quality all too well. No, as I stood in line, surrounded by all shapes and sizes of patient people with soft smiles and listened to a young builder using the cash register as his job cost estimator my internal agitation rose. He was speaking in Tsonga but I could guess what the words were, “Try taking just 1/2 that many nails......... Now make sure you use the cheapest cement and forget about that wire....what’s the total like then?”  

I certainly did not become an expert on building supplies and techniques, did not get curious about how things fit together or intrigued with how things work. All that information like the mechanics of a motor, still just slips right through my head, whoosh. There are no hooks for hanging such things in my brain. It was choice that saved me and saved me almost by mistake.

It was a bad day at the hardware store. The trucks were going out with orders which meant that all my most trustworthy helpers were too busy to assist me in the electrical supply aisles. There was  a good chance that half the things in my basket were wrong and  I saw that it was Desiree, the very slowest of the check out women, at the till. It was early in the morning and many had building projects underway that day. The line was long, the going slow. I sighed as I took my place in line and tried for a gentle smile. It was then that it happened, it was then that I saw a vivid image in my head of 7 year old Elena, swinging, back and forth, up and down with a big so happy smile on her face. Somehow when I saw her swinging I was instantly back at the New Dawn Center watching the children on the new play structure. If I let myself rest in that pocket of pure joy, a child swinging for the first time in her life, a nursery school gaggle climbing the ladders, sliding down the slides, everything changes within me. All that is crinkled, crabby, crumpled becomes suddenly smooth, like the dusk smooth stillness of a small lake after a rainstorm.  
It is the play structure bursting with children which became my solution to hardware stores. It was from these dark aisles that the bolts, nails, wood and cement came. It was Nick and Mike who built it and it is all the children of the community who delight in it but it began in a hardware store. This is the image I call forth as I reach for the front door of the Acornhoek hardware store for the 1,001st time.