Ubuntu

I have just returned from a short trip to Port Elizabeth to visit the headquarters of the Ubuntu Education Fund, a non-governmental non-profit organization devoted to enriching the lives of the citizens of townships in PE. As you will soon read, it was easily the most wonderful, humanizing and deeply moving experience I have had in South Africa.
But what is ubuntu, you ask? Ubuntu is a not a concept, or a catchphrase, or even a way of life. It is, simply, life. It is an abiding belief in the idea the communities are strongest when they are united in helping each other. But words do not fully explain ubuntu. They cannot. One must experience it for oneself. You cannot know ubuntu until you know traditional life in South Africa. I encourage all of you to experience it at some point in our life. Here is a slice of that life, some stories from my journey yesterday, which I hope will deepen your understanding of ubuntu.

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As the plane lands, I am met by Qonongile (the Q is a click, by the way), a project manager is the case management department at Ubuntu. On the ride in from the airport, through the interwoven neighbourhoods of PE, "Q" (for the sake of both pronunciation and spelling) explains what Ubuntu does, which are various programs ranging from educational development to HIV/AIDS prevention, treatment and counseling as well as dealing with the growing problems of orphans and victims of child rape in the townships. As we get closer to the Ubuntu office and enter the townships, I start seeing funeral parlors. Everywhere. Q explains that "business is booming." The death trade is growing because the HIV infection rate is above 40%. He further explains that it is the only business which is booming, as PE employment rates are 10%. That's EMPLOYMENT rates. In Port Elizabeth, they are experiencing 90% unemployment. No one has a job. No one can get a job. Political apartheid is over, but economic apartheid is real and it is having serious and damaging consequences to the community.
We arrive at the office and I meet Jana, an American who has worked at Ubuntu for 3 years now. She is one of the project managers, working across portfolio but mainly focused on education initiatives and working to provide resources to the 21 Ubuntu partner schools. She introduces me to Thembagazi and Phezi who are heading up the new Orphan and Vulnerable Children initiative, working both in schools and the community to counteract the destructive effects of children left without support systems, usually related to HIV/AIDS. They have five targeted schools, in which each has a main counselor who mentors classes on life skills and HIV prevention, while also acting in a rehabilitative and case management capacity, working with victims of orphanage, child rape and other similarly vulnerable problems. When we arrive at the B.J. Mnyanda school, the school day is over, at 12:30 in the afternoon, one of the many half days which are a growing problem in the South African school system, as teachers lack the funding, resources or will power necessary to teach primary school classes of 60 for an entire day. The children are still hanging around school, they have just received lunch, but they still stay. Many of them have no parents, live alone or with other children in the informal settlements and squatter camps near the school. For them, school is a refuge, a place where they can be safe, where they will be fed and cared for, not raped or brutalized or alone. These children want to be in school. We then move on to the Jarvis school, where another Ubuntu program has taken root. Here I meet the principal of the school who is so fiercely proud of what he has to offer the children. Literally brimming, he pulls me into the library, half-full with books, which Ubuntu has worked hard to secure for the children. He explains how he and other members of the community built the school by themselves after the original school and library was destroyed by the National Police during the 1976 Uprising, and how the library laid dormant, bereft of books until Ubuntu came along. He then whisks me into a computer lab where they have 20 working computers that children can learn computer skills on, and also integrate classroom learning into the information age. A class of 1st or 2nd graders was currently inside working on math problems and isiXhosa grammar and vocabulary. But this is not the proudest achievement for the principal. He then takes me to the small kitchen where lunch is being wrapped up. He says "I can feed all my students now." Until August of this year, the school only had enough funding from the federal government to feed grades Kindergarten through 4th grade every day of the week, with 5th through 8th grades being fed on alternate days. Ubuntu helped him and his students plant and cultivate a garden, and now all children are fed with a hot meal every day. For many of them, it is the only meal they will eat all day. Our final stop on the tour was an Ubuntu mentoring session, for which today's topic was gender identity. The words 'SEXUAL HEALTH" were writ large on the blackboard, and I watched as a class of 7th graders engaged with rapt attention their mentor who was asking them question about what they liked about being a boy or girl. The lecture was in Xhosa, so I only picked up a few things. Then suddenly, the entire class jumped up and broke into a song and dance that had something to do with loving their bodies, themselves and respecting each other. I leaned over to Jana and said, "If I go back and tell people that I witnessed 7th graders spontaneously dancing and singing in the middle of Sex Ed class, much less simply engaging so well with the topic, I am going to be laughed out of the room." Nevertheless, it happened. As the busy principal waves goodbye and we get in the car to leave, young children see me and surround the car shouting "Lungu! Lungu!" with bright smiles on all their faces. Lungu is Xhosa for white person. I give them all a smile and wave and they smile back, as Jana explains that not only am I a rarity in their lives, they are always so happy just to get a smile from someone, because so few adults care for these children. As we leave, they scurry back into the schoolhouse to learn and play and stave off the desperation around them for a few more hours.
After eating lunch provided by the Ubuntu garden (which grows some pretty tasty tomatoes, I must say), Chris and Tsepo, who were outreach coordinators, informed me that they were taking me to a workshop in the township. I envisioned a small community centre, with people seated in chairs around someone talking about empowerment opportunities or life skills. Not exactly. I found myself about 10 minutes later, after rather a harrowing minibus ride on the Uitenhage (WEE-ten-haig) line, sitting with 15 women and 5 men in the 8 x 10 living room of a tin-roof shack in the Chris Hani informal settlement, Sira removed a, shall we say, "anatomically correct" sex toy from a plastic bag and proceeded to make a demonstration on how to use a condom, then pointing to a chart made by Ubuntu volunteers with graphic depictions of different sexually transmitted infections. Again, the session was given in Xhosa, so I understood very little, but what I did understand was the reactions of the people. They were all interested, Sira and his female companion (whose name I unfortunately do not remember) were connecting with them on an individual level. Even the men, who I am told are usually very standoffish during such discussions were engaging and asking questions and taking note of the important nature of the discussion. This presentation is indicative of the mood of the community. They all know the danger that this fragile community is experiencing and they all know that the only way to start stemming the tide of these societal ills is to engage with the problems and work together, in the spirit of Ubuntu, to solve them.
From there, Tclabane, one of the directors, took me on a formal township tour. We started on Mendi Road, where he grew up, and moved toward Njoli, the centre of township life in PE. It was there that I ate a Smiley. That's shaved, boiled sheep's head by the way. I mostly ate the tasty part, the tongue. Tony Bourdain would be proud. From there we visited a monument to fallen activists in the struggle against Apartheid, and as we approached another major square near Mendi Road, Tclabane relayed his story of resistance. When he was 14, he attended an anti-apartheid rally there, as he arrived the Police came with their armored personnel carriers and machine guns and helicopter gunships and gave the crowd, literally armed with their voices, sticks and stones, 5 minutes to disperse. They started shooting in three minutes. Tclabane, luckily, escaped with his life, though many others were not so lucky. Everywhere you go, you hear stories like that. Of Steve Biko, the architect of black consciousness, who was brutally beaten to death in the Police Room 619 in PE in 1977. Of the Craddock Four (one of whom was Tclabane's brother-in-law), all political activists who were captured by the police and braaied alive on the beach while the police had a picnic. The senselessness, the brutality, the desperation of a policy designed to exterminate an entire race of people becomes very real and very pronounced when you walk through the streets of Njoli.
From there, Tclabane took me to where Ubuntu was born, a small shebeen (township bar) where Jacob Lief met "Banks" his co-founder. I sat and drank a cold beer in the small shack, sitting with men from the township and groaned along with them as the Proteas (the South African national cricket team) went down to defeat at the hands of the West Indies. I couldn't help but think, sitting in the same seat that Jacob did when he first came up with the idea of Ubuntu, that I was here for a reason, that I need to contribute something, that I want to be a part of something for more than just being able to say "I was there then." That I can make a difference in the lives of a community like Jana and Tclabane and "Q" and Chris and Tsepo and Sira and everyone else who makes Ubuntu what it is, who have built it from the grassroots and made it a beacon of hope for people who live in a place that hope left generations ago.
So, how was your Thursday?