Getting introduced

Hello again. I first want to direct everyone's attention to the newly added favorite place "Tony's JL Zwane Blog", which is kept by Tony Zappa, a pharmacist from Minnesota who is working for a year with JL Zwane Centre and a health clinic in Brown Farm, one of the other townships in the area. Yet another perspective to enrich your understanding of the joys and challenges of the Cape Flats townships.

After doing a lot of sleeping on Thursday and Friday, I am more or less adjusted to the time change and over my jet lag. The quick adjustment is one advantage, perhaps, of taking nearly three days to get here. A highlight before I had even left the country was when Kristina took the Chinatown bus up from DC at an unpleasant hour of the night to spend last Monday with me at exciting Newark Airport. What an unexpected gift. True, I slept on the floor at Miami Airport during my eight hour layover when I went to visit her in Costa Rica last year, but she still "didn't have to do that". She is awesome.

I want to take an opportunity with this first post from South Africa to tell a little bit about the community and conditions here. The townships are tough places to live, and the residents are all black or other people of colour, with black townships being the poorest and least developed. Although elected government officials are now overwhelmingly black, and no one is formally excluded from the political process any more, reversing a long history of discrimination and oppression of one group by another still takes a long time. The state of race matters in the US attests to this. Several people at the chuch have taken time since I have been here to drive me around the townships and even invited me into their homes. The buildings range from modest concrete block houses to shacks made of corrugated metal and scaps of plywood. Yet, although nearly everyone is poor, the townships are not just vast shantytowns as they are sterotypically portrayed in the States. Even among the shacks there is variation, as some have electricity and plastered interior walls and floors to keep out the cold and wet. That is far from the norm however, and few have running water or plumbing. The government has, since apartheid ended, taken some steps to build better houses in the area, but these are tiny one room houses that cannot accomodate families of any size. People frequently add on to these concrete buildings with the shack materials, and even these new houses are without water and electricity. They provide better shelter than a shanty, but are still inadequate for the needs of those who live here. People are moving in from the countryside everyday to find work, and the townships are growing rapidly, so government efforts to build decent housing are outpaced by the expanding population. There is even worse poverty in the countryside, especially the Eastern Cape where most of the Xhosa speaking people in the community hail from, so the chance to get a job is worth the poor living conditions they face here. Still, unemployment in the area is as high as 65%.

These problems are overwhelmingly caused by the legacy of apartheid, which forced 80% of the population onto less than 20% of the country's cultivatable land. The townships developed in the last century as black South Africans left their tribal villages in droves to seek work in the major urban centers, as the marginal land whites had coralled them onto during the 19th Century could not support the population. Giving a history of apartheid on this blog is a tall order. However, I will do my best in the posts that follow to tell the story of the people who live in Guguletu and similar townships; the history of apartheid and its continued impact on black, "coloured", and Indian South Africans; and the AIDS epidemic which affects a staggering number of people in these townships and in the country as a whole. South Africa has the largest number of people with HIV of any country in the world, and one of the highest rates of infection (neighboring Swaziland has the highest).

JL Zwane focuses the bulk of its social work in the community on facets of the AIDS problem that affect the people here. These include not only education and prevention, but hospice care, medical clinics, nutrition programmes, and work with child-headed households which are sadly very common in a country full of AIDS orphans. The church portion of the ministry here incorporates messages about AIDS in every service, providing stories of people suffering with the disease and education as part of the worship. There is no distinction between JL Zwane's work as a church and as a community centre and social assistance provider.

The church also has a lively music and dance team called Siyaya, which educates about HIV/AIDS through their performances. I have seen them practicing, and they are some very talented young people. The attached picture is not of Siyaya, but the group performing is doing some traditional native dances that Siyaya incorporates into their own performances.

Well, there is a lot more I could say, but I will stop here for now. Thanks for checking in with me, and I will continue trying to be very informative and consistent with my posts. I am very excited to be getting started here and looking forward to telling you more about it. Peace!