First Impressions

Everyone will always tell you that you have to make a good first impression, that you can never make a second first impression. ‘You must wear your good shirt to the Johnson’s dinner tonight Hun, we have to make a good first impression!’ Landing in Johannesburg on our first night here we were inundated with a million first impressions. The city lights stretched out forever, World Cup banners still waving proudly from skyscraper windows. The noise and hustle of speeding cars on the highway was shocking. The fast passed Zulu language hitting you from all directions. And we three newer comers swept up in it all.

We awoke our first morning to a chilly African sunrise and a multi-course breakfast at the guest house that would be our base for exploring Joburg. But wait, I thought this was supposed to be a year of hard work, not a walk in the park! Joan and James, our spectacular supervisors for the year, ensured us that the work would come, but first we had to get a handle on what this country is all about. With minds full of questions we had a world wind first week getting use to life here. We visited the Apartheid Museum to start to unpack the intensely violent and oppressive history of this nation. Both depressing and uplifting, it was a base from which to start understanding the people here. We saw the Voortrecker monument, worshiped in a Zulu church, had a walking tour of Soweto, visited the beach in Durban and, most importantly, tried the famous ‘bunny chow’, a half loaf of hollowed out bread filled with curry (actually devoid of bunnies, thankfully).

Our first day in Pietermaritzburg, my home-to-be for the next year, was when it hit me: I’m … in … AFRICA. The five of us took a kombi first thing in the morning from Joan and James’ home to the city centre. The kombi experience goes like this. You stand at a seemingly random and unmarked taxi stand on the side of the road and soon enough a huge white van loaded to the brim with people will come honking to a stop in front of you. Quickly you pile in and try to find a seat while the driver takes off again before the door is even closed. You pass up your Rand to the conductor who decides how much your ride will cost depending on far you’re headed and whether he woke up on the wrong side of the bed or not. The kombi speeds ahead honking excessively to try and get more passengers, stopping in the middle of traffic to drop people off and pick up more. This is how most people get to and from work each day. There are no determined routes, no rules, and no other form of public transportation.

We headed straight to Church Street, the infinite market place selling everything from jeans to jellybeans, bananas to boxing gloves. The words to a very popular Paul Simon song back home flooded my mind. They are cheesily fitting but fitting none the less.

‘A man walks down the street
It’s a street in a strange world
Maybe it’s the Third World
Maybe it’s his first time around
He doesn’t speak the language
He holds no currency
He is a foreign man
He is surrounded by the soOoOound, soOoOound
Cattle in the marketplace
Scatterlings and orphanages
He looks around, around
He sees angels in the architecture
Spinning in infinity
He says Amen! and Hallelujah!’

Since that crazy revelation I’ve settled into a great schedule. My host family have been terrific from the start. Mark and Anne Pennels live in a comfortable neighborhood about a 20 minute walk from my work (check out the garden updates tab for more on the job!). Mark is an electrician and sells honey at the market and Anne is a kindergarten teacher. They live with their son Andrew who is just finishing up University here in town. I could not ask for a more welcoming and happy family. They’ve taken it upon themselves to immerse me in the lifestyle and culture here and really take care of me. Sometimes too well! Some days I wake up with my lunch made for the day! They’ve shown me the coast and some of the nature reserves close by, taught me all about rugby, and answer all my stupid North American questions about life here with grace and hilarity. I couldn’t ask for more!

The Danger of a Single Story

The week-long orientation in Akron, Pennsylvania back in August proved to be exceedingly valuable and very much prepared me for the year ahead. Not only was it informative of the ins and outs of adjusting to a new culture it was also a great week just to chill out, meet some new people and have a lot of fun! One particularly useful session that struck me was on the danger of a single story.

At home we have this incredibly distorted image of what Africa is like. How can you blame us when the only stories we receive of Africa on the six o’clock news are those of suffering, hunger and violence? Of course there are many places in Africa that are desperate and unsafe but our folly comes when we apply those images to the entire continent. We paint all the nations of Africa with the same brush and fail to see their differences.

I have to admit that I fell into this exact trap myself. Even though I knew before coming here that Pietermaritzburg is a developed, modern city I still secretly held the belief that I’d be experiencing a third world nation through and through. I imagined barefoot children running the streets and seeing women carrying jugs of water on their heads on their way to the local well. Instead, on my walk to work I pass luxury Mercedes Benz (alongside many kombis of course) and well dressed business people headed to the office. Most people are busy talking on their cellphones, sometimes with one in each hand! And the only kids I see barefoot are the well-to-do white Afrikaners on their way to play cricket. On the sidewalk I’m the one out of place, filthy and sweating from a long day’s work in the sun. Where is the suffering? Where are the women with the water jugs on their heads? Many people I’ve met don’t even consider themselves to be African. All the time you hear, “oh, the problems they have up in Africa … next month we’re going to help the needy up in Africa.” It’s like people suffer from identity crisis daily, I thought this was Africa!?!

It’s true that in many ways life here is much the same as at home. Nearly all of the city has electricity and drinkable running water, my host family watch their favorite TV shows in the evening, and on weekends people love to do normal things like go fishing, catch a movie or visit the beach. But here again I run the risk of the single story. My host family falls in the small, middle class snack bracket. It’s easy to forget that not everyone has three nutritious meals a day and a swimming pool at home to enjoy. In fact, nearly 50% of the citizens in Pietermaritzburg live in grinding poverty, jobless after the worldwide recession and angry at a useless government. Their hardships are just difficult to see or even imagine when you yourself are immersed in a single story.

I’ve been living here under South African skies for just over a month now and I have to tell you I’m more confused about it then when the three of us first landed. There are so many layers to this country’s history, so many dimensions of its reality, so many uncertainties for its future. I’m reminded of that scene in Shrek when Donkey figures out that ogres are like onions because “they have LAYERS!” I’m not saying that South Africa is like an onion, nor is it like an ogre for that matter. It’s just that right when I think I’ve figured out a piece of the puzzle I learn of a new layer. A new fact comes to light and makes the people that more dynamic, that more resilient. I guess all I can do is try to learn as many stories as I possibly can and keep pulling back that onion.