Week 4: Week of Firsts

By: Caroline Pratt

Reflecting back on this week has brought up a lot of emotions. This week we had so many firsts. We had our first exploration of Windhoek, our new home for the next three months, our first day at our internships, our first day of classes, and the first time I have ever been in the same room as a President of a country.  It was truly a week to remember,

 

Some of us took a trip to some local markets and the art gallery
on Saturday in downtown Windhoek

We started the week going on a ‘quest’ through Katutura, a township of Windhoek where Blacks were forced to move to during the years of Apartheid. Much like Soweto, and other townships we visited in South Africa, Katurura is much more than what meets the eye. While there is extreme poverty, there is also a rich culture. On our quest, we were split up into groups of 3 and were assigned a local guide. My group went to Base FM, a non-profit radio station that focuses on bringing the Katutura community news, sports updates, and entertainment. We learned a lot about how a radio station works and while in the United States radio may be becoming less relevant with other sources such as television, and podcasts, in Namibia, radio is still one of the leading sources for news and entertainment. After the radio station visit, we went to a local store in Katutura and went to the meat market. This market was unlike anything I have ever seen. Vendors are butchering and cooking meat freshly on site. While health codes may not be in existence, it might have been the greatest lunch I have ever had.

 

Tuesday was “community day”. After passing springbok, an ostrich, and a wildebeest on our drive in, the students and staff found our way to a beautiful lodge. We started the day with some get to know you games and after that we dove into some self reflection. We broke into small groups to discuss identity with topics such as: race, gender, sexual orientation, and religion. I enjoyed this part of the day because we got to hear from our Namibian staff on their perspective and how their backgrounds have shaped their identity while being able to compare our own experiences, being from the United States.

Michele and I's first day at our internship in Namibia

After community day, the firsts really began. Wednesday was our first day of internships. My internship is at Sister Namibia, a Namibian non-profit that empowers woman and girls through putting out a magazine, workshops, and providing resources in their library on topics such as women's health, gender based violence, and legal rights, to name just a few. Some other internships are: Friendly Haven, the Hope Initiative, and the Namibian Women's Health Network. I am so excited to start my work at Sister Namibia and see how I can help impact women’s life in this area and be able to bring back what I have learned here to my work in the United States.

 

Still exhausted from a full day of work, we had the opportunity to go listen to PLO Lumumba. This talk was one of the most powerful talks I have ever heard. Topics included globalization, a unified Africa, government corruption, poor wealth distribution, and growing inequality. This talk really put into words everything that I have seen on the trip so far. For example, seeing Sandton, the richest suburb of South Africa, just minutes away from Alexandria, the poorest area was sickening. While I am unsure of the Afro, a common African currency similar to the Euro, that PLO Lumumba would work, clearly a more unified Africa is needed. At the end of the event the most surprising thing happened, the President of Namibia walked into the back and heard what the speaker had to say.  It was really amazing that a president could walk into a room, without tons of security, and without making a big scene. He listened to what Professor Lumumba had to say even if some of it went against current politics.

Classes started on Thursday, and while I just had history, I am excited to apply what I learned from the speaker to the classroom and continue to make connections. It was a week of firsts and I am going to take advantage of every moment in Namibia before our lasts begin.

Week Thirteen: Finding an Antidote to Hopelessness

By: Emily Campbell

Three months ago, we sat in a large Methodist Church in the center of Cape Town, transfixed by the words of Reverend Alan Storey. The insights he shared have stuck with our group throughout our time in Southern Africa and this week, his idea that we are “addicted to hope,” ran through my head again and again. Right now, I feel pretty hopeless. Every time I read a headline, I seem to lose faith in the world we live in. Terrorist attacks in Paris, civilians taken hostage at a hotel in Mali, dozens of American governors refusing to accept Syrian refugees, people denying the existence of racism on college campuses, and close to home for many of us, the shooting of Jamar Clark in Minneapolis. The world didn’t give me much to be hopeful about this week.

As all of these events continue to fill my newsfeed and consume my time as I read about them. I have felt stagnant. I’ve spent the semester learning about social change, about development, racism, and resistance. And yet I couldn’t seem to find any way that what I’ve learned here could create meaningful change in a world that seems so broken.  Maybe Alan Storey was right. I am addicted to hope, and without it, I struggle to see any path to progress. 

On Tuesday, we had our final development class in which we read “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” a speech Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave in April, 1967. The speech seemed incredibly relevant to our present day situation. And instead of giving me hope, the speech only seemed to further push me into the spiral of hopelessness. Why, nearly 50 years after Dr. King so poignantly warned us about “being on the wrong side of a revolution,” do we continue to make the same mistakes? King wrote, “this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges.” When I read this, I wasn’t thinking of Vietnam. I was thinking of each of the headlines I’d read that morning and asking myself why we aren’t moving forward. 

As my knowledge of South African and Namibian history has grown, I’ve learned about two countries that have made a lot of progress in only a few decades. Both countries have grown significantly since freeing themselves of apartheid rule in the early nineties. But as we’ve learned how much things have changed, we’ve also learned how little things have actually changed. Both nations exist in a state of “economic apartheid.” While racially biased laws are no longer in place, little has been done to change the economic situation of formally oppressed people. As such, I could probably replace the term “formally oppressed people” with the phrase “historically and presently oppressed people.” I want to take the title “Rainbow Nation” at face value, but my time in Southern Africa has shown me how similar Namibia, South Africa, and the United States are in their inability to truly establish racial and economic equality.  

Annie and I attempt to overcome hopelessness by working with
a coalition that seeks an end to gender-based violence.
[Designs by Annie Dierberger]

In my search to rediscover hope, I sought out local activists. Annie and I began volunteering with Women’s Solidarity Namibia, an organization that we visited for class a few weeks earlier. They’re currently preparing for 16 Days of Activism, a worldwide event that draws attention to gender-based and sexual violence. We designed promotional materials and prepared a newsletter for the organization. As I did research for their newsletter, I read statistic after statistic that told me that gender-based violence both in Southern Africa and worldwide is not dissipating, but rather growing in its prevalence. Despite the hard work of people the world over, this devastating problem continues to worsen. Reading these statistics slowly chipped away at the hope I held in a system of grassroots activism. 

And so as we sat in development, discussing Dr. King’s speech, current events, and the inevitable reality that soon we’ll be boarding a plane back to the United States, I reflected on my inabilities to see the positive in a world that seems to continually highlight the negative. But, as they have every other time I’ve dramatically claimed the world is falling apart, my classmates reminded me that this world is not hopeless. For every heartbreaking headline I read and every racist post I saw on Facebook, there was a headline about activists promoting justice and change, a classmate who had chosen to take action where they saw injustice in our world. Women’s Solidarity Namibia may not have ended gender-based violence, but through a staff of two people, they have managed to provide shelter to survivors of violence, to educate men and women alike about preventing violence, and to lobby in parliament for legal change. Small things like these began to pour some light into the darkness that had consumed my worldview. Maybe these people are clinging to the hope I seem to have lost or maybe they too feel a little hopeless, but have refused to let their hopeless justify inaction. Ultimately, I don’t think being addicted to hope is a bad thing. Without hope, we may all end up in that spiral of hopelessness and inaction in which I have felt trapped. 

We attempt to overcome hopelessness by standing with
protesters back home, even when we’re 12,000 miles away. 

I had intended to end this blog post with a hopeful and somewhat cheesy story of finding hope in a broken world. But instead, I’d like to end it with a call to action. If you’re feeling hopeless, do not succumb to the darkness in the world around you, but find hope through action, through surrounding yourself with people who truly seek to address the problems they see. March with Black Lives Matter. Write your representatives about taking in Syrian refugees. Design promotional material for an NGO about which you feel passionate. Allow yourself to occasionally wallow in hopelessness, but do not let it trap you. As Gertrude Stein once said “the artist's job is not to succumb to despair, but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence.” Whatever your antidote may be, it’s time to start pursuing it.

Week Ten: On Remembering the Dead

By: J. D. Mechelke

Out-Right Namibia's Trans Day of Remembrance 2015

I’m glad I had Annie and Amanda with me. Do you know that feeling right before walking into a room of people who, because you are so different, could judge you so easily? Well, think of that coupled with a little bloating and you’ll know how I felt before we walked up to the gate of Out-Right Namibia during a Saturday night where we were going to memorialize the trans individuals that had died that year in Namibia.

Between the three of us, no one had planned, when we woke up today, to taxi to Windhoek North to be part of this event. At least Amanda and I had planned on going to see the new Hunger Games movie with the rest of the gang. But, as my mother would say, “You got a hair up your butt son! You’re just like your father.” My dad and I have a reputation for getting these big ideas that we follow at all costs. Although an idea to attend a Trans Day of Remembrance event shouldn’t seem like a “big idea,” I’d been struggling a lot recently with my mental health. Lately taking a shower seemed like a “big idea.” Maybe that was also a part of why I felt so intimidated by the group that evening (though I don’t think that can help explain the bloated part). Somehow, even in the heat of this country, my spirits had gone cold. My depression was keeping me in bed during the day while my anxiety was keeping me up at night.

As I stood intimidated before pushing the gate aside, I grabbed Annie and Amanda’s hands. Their palms warmed my cold fingers. We signed a check-in sheet. In addition to our name was our gender/sex and sexual orientation: mine as gay intersex male. We were the only white people in the complex. A situation that was surprisingly uncommon even in a capital city in an African state. I had introduced my two friends to some of the people in this community that had made me feel loved. Some of the bravest people I have ever met were all in eyeshot.

We stood, we sat. We sang, we cried. We ate, we drank. We talked, we observed in silence. We named the dead, and we dared to tell why the dead are dead. The time we spent together prompted my memories of a particular service in the liturgical calendar: All Saints Day. All Saints is a service, speaking from a Lutheran perspective, where we honor those who have died during the past year, and those in the more distant past who we had loved, naming them all as saints. In the services liturgy we hear, “Loved ones now resting in you, who guided us, nurtured and cared for us; ancestors who worked and traveled, lived and died that we might be who we are, where we are—your precious children in this community of believers.”¹ How wonderful and how scandalous to remember trans people of color in Namibia who have died not just by name but by the title of saint.

Later that night I was crying on the porch of the CGEE house. I was overwhelmed by a lot of things, but mostly by the courage of the saints that we had named a few hours ago. Too often when we talk about social change and promoting social justice we’re really concerned about immediate action. Even if it’s social analysis, we feel we got to get to work now. While there are probably good reasons for this feeling, I think we sometimes miss something in pure secular work for social change that the religious world can help us with. That is, remembering the dead, and remembering why the dead are dead.

This statement of remembering “why the dead are dead,” is something that has still been ruminating in my mind since I heard it from Pastor Alan Storey a few months back in Cape Town. Storey talked about how we are so many times “addicted to hope!” We forget how important it is to mourn and memorialize. I agree with the Pastor’s thoughts. However, I’m not sure that much can happen when we are devoid of all hope.

Harvey Milk, a gay rights activist in the U.S. that was eventually assassinated, once said, “I know that you cannot live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living.” Yes, mourning the dead and allowing ourselves to feel complete despair against the answers to why they are dead is required. But if we stay eloping in that state of mourning forever, life will no longer be worth living. We have to let ourselves stand and sit, sing and cry, eat and drink, speak and be silent. Though we can’t live on hope, we have to keep its flames alive if we are ever going to avenge the injustices that killed our friends. Never forget the dead. But even more important, never forget why you are living.

¹ http://www.crivoice.org/allsaints.html