We spent
our first day at Hoërskool Bellville today. So many elements converged in our
students to ramp up nerves and preconceptions. This includes how tightly and
how quickly they bonded with Isilimela students and Langa mamas and a culture
of song and dance and sharing, openness not replicated as unreservedly
elsewhere. It also includes a progressive Seattleite’s suspicion of privilege
while extending our curiosity and trust to the marginalized—commendable when so
much voice and power is going the other way. Students also had a whole week to
grow close with Langa, coming to these comfortable beds and warm showers with
both an emptiness and sharp guilt.
During the testing period this morning, we gathered to check in, and there were so many fears. During the retreat, HFB friends from Bellville pumped them full of negative expectation. Then some families made off-hand comments about township life that disturbed their guests. Some of our students missed the warmth and swapping of stories with their Langa mamas and found conversation with host families in Bellville superficial in comparison. And there was that guilt around the welcome comforts surrounding them.
After school, Bellville HFB student Anzél explained that people didn’t bring up race because they wanted everyone to be comfortable and didn’t want anyone to be offended. She also said teaching about apartheid was very limited here: it’s taught by grade nine (after which, no history is taught at all in Bellville while it’s elective in Isilimela), but what happened after apartheid is not taught at all—nothing about what it took to get past apartheid and what it now takes for the nation to heal. But, Anzél says—and I would love our students to hear this—if someone has a real curiosity, then we know it’s okay to talk.
When students compare communities in binary ways, I want them to consider what a privilege it is to travel to a place where as outsiders we can see history and all of its legacies so nakedly. It’s hard to do when you’re in it. And if you’re living in a place of vast income inequality, what kind of blinders and fear must one wear if you have so much and others have so little. In Seattle, this is also the case, yet you’re not likely to see it clearly: how often do you think and really feel with the full of your soul the way you do here about what it is to live on appropriated land, about the untended poverty, mental illness, addiction, sexual abuse, and other compounding violences in Seattle’s unhoused and walk between those who have and those who don’t until you feel so wrenchingly the wrongness and strangeness of so much culture aloof to it?
The stinging guilt many of our students feel about enjoying their Bellville comforts is a good sign: it’s a pathway to humbling—to becoming more considerate and grateful, to being mindful, to actively organize to improve our world and the plants and animals that inhabit it. But honest seeing and big-hearted feeling is the tool, not the guilt that is that first stop on the way. You have to get on the other side of that guilt—to honesty and humility, the catalysts through which the world can be both heard and transformed.
During the testing period this morning, we gathered to check in, and there were so many fears. During the retreat, HFB friends from Bellville pumped them full of negative expectation. Then some families made off-hand comments about township life that disturbed their guests. Some of our students missed the warmth and swapping of stories with their Langa mamas and found conversation with host families in Bellville superficial in comparison. And there was that guilt around the welcome comforts surrounding them.
After school, Bellville HFB student Anzél explained that people didn’t bring up race because they wanted everyone to be comfortable and didn’t want anyone to be offended. She also said teaching about apartheid was very limited here: it’s taught by grade nine (after which, no history is taught at all in Bellville while it’s elective in Isilimela), but what happened after apartheid is not taught at all—nothing about what it took to get past apartheid and what it now takes for the nation to heal. But, Anzél says—and I would love our students to hear this—if someone has a real curiosity, then we know it’s okay to talk.
When students compare communities in binary ways, I want them to consider what a privilege it is to travel to a place where as outsiders we can see history and all of its legacies so nakedly. It’s hard to do when you’re in it. And if you’re living in a place of vast income inequality, what kind of blinders and fear must one wear if you have so much and others have so little. In Seattle, this is also the case, yet you’re not likely to see it clearly: how often do you think and really feel with the full of your soul the way you do here about what it is to live on appropriated land, about the untended poverty, mental illness, addiction, sexual abuse, and other compounding violences in Seattle’s unhoused and walk between those who have and those who don’t until you feel so wrenchingly the wrongness and strangeness of so much culture aloof to it?
The stinging guilt many of our students feel about enjoying their Bellville comforts is a good sign: it’s a pathway to humbling—to becoming more considerate and grateful, to being mindful, to actively organize to improve our world and the plants and animals that inhabit it. But honest seeing and big-hearted feeling is the tool, not the guilt that is that first stop on the way. You have to get on the other side of that guilt—to honesty and humility, the catalysts through which the world can be both heard and transformed.
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