School, beach and sangoma’s

Posted by Janine

To keep up with the expectations raised by the name of our blog, I’ll write about three real ‘South African experiences’ from the last couple of weeks, all giving very different impressions of life here. Firstly ‘dancing’ in a room full of traditional healers, then learning Afrikaanse songs by young, smart girls in Manenberg and last but not least… enjoying summer on the beach.

A few weeks ago, we visited a man in the township Nyanga who Mikkel knew through one of the diversity workshops at his work/research. After a cup of tea and a “small” meal we went to the house of the neighbours, who had a special thing happening: a gathering of sangoma’s, traditional healers of South Africa. The gathering lasted the whole weekend and they seemed to be pleased and even honoured to have us around. Straight away we were encouraged to join the circle where 4 other people were singing and dancing with sticks -- a kind of honouring of the ancestors. After having thanked us for being the first white persons ever to have attended their ceremony, they started the initiation of a new sangoma. It was quite something to be 40 people squeezed in a tiny living room of four by four, especially when they started burning a fire (producing more smoke than the oxygen-level could deal with) and washed the new sangoma woman with a special foamy looking substance. I felt as if we had entered another world --in a way it seemed like being in the Africa as you would imagine it ‘in the old days’. Instead of trying to explain it, the pictures may give a better impression of this amazing experience.

Then something totally different. For the ‘social research’ course I did here at Uni, me and an American guy went to a primary school in Manenberg. Manenberg is a poor coloured township where people speak a slang version of Afrikaans (= around 70% similar to Dutch). The goal of our project was to find out what the issues are for the children and how to improve the ‘Life Skills programme’ at their school; this is the class where things like sexual education, health, sports and personal development are being taught. The HIV rate seems to be growing scarily fast in this area and one of our purposes was to make recommendations on how the Life Skills programmes could be used for HIV prevention. One of the big problems in Manenberg is the high use of ‘tik’ (=metamphitamine, for the drugs experts among you). This drug makes people among others so eager for sex, that they would almost do it with their dog –obviously not the ideal context for thinking about a condom…

I am quite sure that this research has made it into the most exciting course I’ve ever taken. We held interviews with eight kids between 9 and 12 which was heavy stuff. They told us about family life, happiness, Aids and about growing up among drugs and gangsters as if it were apples and trees. It is amazing how much these children are aware of and how much they tell you. The first girl(9)’s brother was shot, the second boy (10) was using drugs, another boy (12) ‘s mom died of ‘too much beer’…

Only a week before, I had seen a documentary film about a coloured girl growing up with her HIV positive mom who fights with her granny all the time. At the beginning she seems like she can handle the world, but as she grows older she starts hurting herself and taking ‘tik’ The film actually made me cry, but being at this school in Manenberg, I realized that every single one of these kids in front of me has this kind of life. Poverty, violence, alcoholism and drugs affect these children enormously but it is the story of Manenberg and everybody is part of it and must deal with it.

And although the boys were fighting a lot and all the kids need loads of attention, it was great to be there. Many girls were very much into singing and dancing, some boys want to become soccer players. They loved it when I sang a Dutch song for them – although Marco Borsato was the only thing I could think of (!?). They wanted to do my hair, taught me their local township songs and showed us how to play netball (instead of the other way round).

The final experience is just for making you a little bit jealous and to prove that not everything we are doing here is all that serious. Summer has finally started to kick in and we have been highly appreciating and exploiting this –each weekend! The first pieces of our skin are peeled off and the first icy waves have been challenged… armed by a surfboard (we found the most beautiful beach, 20 minutes drive from where we live, where the water is so cold that the sharks don’t even want to go there...You do unfortunately get your feet frozen off under your wetsuit).

Gone are the days where I sat inside with two sweaters on, instead it now is flip-flops and summer skirts – some of the days that is. Viva the invention of (almost) summer in November!

X Janine

PS Next week we will be testing if our good old Fox car will be able to bring us through the rough red desert of Namibia… 2.000 km is what it will have to traverse in a week!