Why Does the 1st World Want to Study the 3rd World?

"You will see it is far safer in the townships than in the white areas," Lunga says to Anthony and I as we drive in his SUV past the Ford car factory that marks the barrier between the white South Africa and the black South Africa. Lunga is driving precariously, coming within inches of teenage girls on the side of the roads, constantly talking on his cell phone. The cars in PE come so close to each other it makes me think there is no notion of personal or physical boundaries.

The black people on the side of the road stare at me. Some of them give me a thumbs up, others wave at me. I am novel, foreign bizzare. For one of the first times in my life, I'm in the racial minority.

Lunga stops the car in front of a stukko house and opens the door. "There's someone I want you to meet," he says to me. I open the door and he introduces me to an older man wearing a light green polo shirt. "This is Mbekeli. He is a teacher in a nearby township," Lunga says to me. I shake hands with the man, consciously making a fist with his hand the way I was taught to do it.

"I'm Steven, I'm on an American study abroad program and I'm here to learn about South African culture, " I say.

"Why?" the teacher responds. His question catches me off guard. "Why does the 1st world want to study the 3rd world? What is there to learn?"

Anthony quickly interjects. "The students are here to learn about themselves, through studying another culture. We also want this program to be sustainable, though. We know a lot of study abroad students come to South Africa and they only stay for a couple of weeks. We're trying to set up a partnership so that we can continue to send Americans here...so it's not just a one time thing."

"Yeah," I say, "I'm a writer so I would like to come and work with students on their writing, one on one, sentence by sentence."

The man's face softens. "We have a newsletter at our school. It is small and we just started it. So far many students have taken pictures but noone has written about the pictures yet. You could help them write."

As he was talking, two drunk women started yelling at me and giving me a thumbs up. But I couldn't be distracted. This moment was important; I was finally finding a role for myself in South Africa. Here was someone literally saying to me "this is what I need help with, can you help me?" Of course I said yes.

Lunga, Anthony and I got back into the car and Anthony started talking to me. "You see, that is the friendliness I was telling you about Steven. This is why the Africans were conquered so quickly, just like Thomy was saying. They welcomed the whites into their homes and the whites slaughtered them. But that openness, that willingness to talk, remains. We could have stayed and talked to those men for hours and they would have invited us into their homes and made some tea and we would have talked some more."

"I think I'm getting over my fears of being viewed as the oppressor," I told Anthony.

"Thats the thing, Steven...that seed of fear, that seed of doubt, you can't even let it be planted. In those groundless situations, you need to have some kind of faith system, I feel."

Anthony is a Christian and he credits his faith with helping him to overcome the pain of growing up in a broken home, and helping him create the kind of family he never had. Oh and he's done much more than that. Lots more. Anthony deserves his own chapter in this South African memoir. He has one of the most incredible life stories I'd ever heard. He was born in Los Angeles. His father would cheat on his mother and then beat her up when she talked back to him. He lived on the streets and in a van for much of his childhood. He had to rescue his sisters after they were kidnapped by his father. He'd seen the fear in his mother's eyes after his father would beat her up and he vowed to never, ever, make a woman feel that fear. He was the first in his family to go to college. Now, at age 28, he's getting his masters in education. He was the one who came up with the whole idea of having a University of Washington study abroad program in Port Elizabeth, and he'd been the first one to meet Lunga and Thomy. He was the reason I was in South Africa, and yet for a long time I thought he strongly disliked me, because of the stoic expression he would make when I talked. Later I realized that was just his natural expression....but now he was engaging me in a conversation about faith and I felt like I was in uncharted territory. Didn't Christians prosletize, speak in tongues and ruin the lives of young gay men and women?

"I don't judge you for being gay, " Anthony said, as if reading my mind, "I don't feel it's my place to judge. That's the thing I hate about Christianity in America. It's not about having a personal connection with Jesus Christ, it's about excluding people. It's synonomous with mega churches and wealth. My Christian belief system is so much more personal. I get up in the morning and think, 'how can I redeem myself for the sins I have commited."

"But isn't that a lot of guilt to live with? And who dictates what is a sin and what isn't a sin? According to the bible, homosexuality is a sin. I shouldn't exist, let alone be allowed to fall in love with another man. You do realize how many young gay men and women have been traumatized by Christianity..."

"But again, when you talk about Christianity, you're talking about the church, or someone's family. I'm talking about having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. I don't impose that relationship on anyone. It's personal."

I wanted to be able to contribute to a conversation on faith, but my interactions with the Jewish synagogue had been so negative that I sometimes felt it had soured my relationship with religion altogether. My spirituality came from meditation (sorry mom), and for me meditation was more about connecting with an inner power source than an external one.

"That's the thing, " Anthony said, " It's gotta be personal. But if you're going to be a journalist, and we've talked about this, you're going to be writing about all these people critically. You might need some kind of faith system or you may risk detaching yourself from your subjects."

I knew what Anthony was talking about. I'd recently completed a writing internship at a local
alternative newspaper called "The Stranger" which was proud of it's candor. I was strongly encouraged to write down the truth of my interactions with people, without fearing whether they would be hurt in the process. The point of writing the articles was to connect with the authenticity of the moment, not to sugar coat it. And I'd had two experiences where the people I'd written about had called me out and said "what you wrote was unfair. You were rude. What you said hurt my feelings." I felt terribly guilty about that response, and even though I knew in the back of my mind that the subjects I wrote about had signed on to the article knowing full well about the candid reputation of the Stranger, I still felt guilty. I'd publicly humiliated people! HOW TERRIBLE! Who does that?

"At the same time, " I said to Anthony, "there is something noble about exposing the truth." My philosophy was that by revealing the truth, I was ultimately brining healing. I was able to connect with my audience authentically, I was opening the shudders and shedding light on the awkward and uncomfortable moments of our existence. I took my job very seriously. I really wanted to be taken seriously as a writer and I didn't want the Stranger to think I was too timid to write honestly about my experiences.

Anthony was distracted. "What are we doing now Lunga?" Lunga was busy talking on on his cell phone. I looked out the window. Soon it would rain and the shantytowns would fill with mud. The plywood floors would sink into the ground.

"We're picking up Gene," Lunga finally said. Gene was thew other program director, a 60 year old white Buddhist man who'd met Anthony and agreed to do most of the logistic work to get the funding and schedules set up for the trip.

Right now Gene was stressed out because the exchange rate between the Dollar and the Rand had fallen from 6.7% to 6.4%. He was also stressed out because our group had gone to a game park today, expecting to go on a jeep safari but instead only a few caged animals on display. It was a disapointing trip for our group, as we searched the trees with binoculars, hoping to glimpse the spotted leopards.

"I don't know what we're going to do," Gene confided in me after we picked him up from the hotel. "I want to break the monotony of you guys going clubbing, then to the internet cafe, then to the beach. I want to show you the all of South Afrika, but my budget is limited and the exchange rate is down."

Gene had picked up on the fact that our group was firmly entrenched in the white South Africa, and we weren't really experiencing township life.

"This is good though, Gene. We're going to see the dichotomy more fully when we start working in the townships. We're going to have a full picture of the South African narrative, both black and white."

Really, though, I was anxious to get away from the area where our hotel was located. We were in a nondescript neighborhood of high rise hotels, facing the beach on one side and some kind of coal factory on the other side. At night, cars would speed down the street and screech and honk their horns. Every hour or so a plane flew directly over our building and the sound was so loud that the windows rattled and conversations had to be stopped. It was a stressful, ugly, white, industrial area of PE and I didn't always feel safe there. I felt like our building was a big fat American target and every time we had a party in our room we were just bringing more attention to us as "wealthy" Americans, furthering the likelihood that we would be robbed.