KwaZulubalooza

I’m now three weeks into the Monash-Oxfam internship program in the South African province of Kwa-Zulu Natal, with another three weeks to go. I’m based in the city of Pietermaritzburg, and working with Oxfam’s partner organisation Justice and Women (JAW), a small NGO that works to transform power relations and gender injustice in rural and urban settings here, through HIV/AIDS support groups, an Access to Justice program, particularly for victims of abuse, and a youth program.

I’ve been assigned to the youth team, who work in local schools in the rural community of Yanguye to try and encourage dialogue about gender, power and HIV/AIDS. I’ll be training the team in basic filmmaking skills and making a short movie with them and the youth of the high school to encourage debate about schoolyard violence (which is quite severe at this school) and its sources. That’s exciting for me, because the more I think about it, the more I want to shift from my pursuit of a career in straight aid work, to a career in film. So I think this might be right up my alley.

A big part of JAW’s work is raising up leaders from the community – most of its staff are from the Yanguye community and JAW invests a lot in their development. Many of them don’t speak fantastic English yet, and of course I don’t speak Zulu, so it’s sometimes a challenge to convey meaning. Last week we helped to facilitate a three-day workshop for staff to reflect on their own growth over the last two years – there was also a considerable amount of tai chi, which was something I wouldn’t have expected in most larger NGOs.

In Pietermaritzburg I live in a nice guesthouse with four Monash girls, all older, also doing the internship – I got the single room being the only guy, but they use it as the communal pantry as well. We cook in turns, but I don’t really cook, I just help, because I don’t really know how to cook creatively. But I’m learning. It’s a pleasant life, and nice to be able to share our intern experiences with each other – so different from doing it alone in much rougher conditions back in Mozambique. Working hours have been short, so it’s almost like a holiday sometimes – good food, a nice house, nice housemates and a film project.

I’ll talk now about some of the issues going on here that make it hard to have a positive outlook when I stop thinking about my own life and start thinking of the community we work with. First there’s a thing called lobola – it is a payment from a man to his bride’s family, to marry her. If a man is too poor to afford it, he can’t get married, and is seen by the community as a child, no matter how old he is. If a wife is beaten and abused by her husband, her parents often won’t let her divorce him because they don’t want to have to pay back the lobola. Men often feel they own women because they’ve paid for them – this seems to be a likely contributing factor to the high amount of abuse within marriage. Children not born under the lobola agreement are cast out, but women are forced to have children before the lobola is paid to prove their fertility.

There are many outcast children, and so many AIDS orphans. And even worse, children who can’t show their parents’ ID cards to the Department of Home Affairs can’t get an ID card of their own, and can’t access any government support. These kids are stuck in limbo, and many kill themselves because of the injustice of the system.

Next let’s talk about teachers – they are often drunk, often they don’t rock up to class, often they beat students or sleep with them. Add to this the fact that schools pay parents blackmail money to keep quiet about teachers’ crimes against students; this gives parents an incentive to get their kids beaten up by their teachers.

The issue of violence is seen as a wider, endemic problem here in South Africa so closely tied to poverty. In the school, and in the community more generally, people get jealous if someone has something better – better clothes, or they can speak English better, or those who got to participate as ‘change agents’ in last year’s JAW youth program. And when something has something good – better than everyone else – it must be destroyed. There’s awful violence in this community – stabbing, stoning, rape - the kids have guns. I haven’t seen any of this – I’ve just been told by community members and JAW staff, but it makes me feel like the problem is too big and too tied into culture and circumstances for anything to ever change.

Hanging over this all is HIV/AIDS. And I’m not even going to go into it in any detail, because I fear I’ll get too depressed talking about all this mess at once.

In summary, I’m doing great, but this community isn’t.