This month is going to turn me into an unwilling morning person. Yesterday was a full day, from the usual 7 am wake-up to the usual 3 am bedtime. One of my roommates and I have decided that sleep is something we're willing to sacrifice in order to get in everything in that we want to experience, from hanging out with locals we've met to hiking Table Mountain. Even the locals say the weather's been exceptionally bad for the winter, but there's sun in the forecast in the upcoming days! I'm crossing my fingers and toes for good hiking weather this weekend. There's countless other things I need, so my my next post is going to be an organized Grand Ol' Bucket List that the Facebook world can help me develop. No naps for Larisa.
Study abroad lessons: Sacrifice sleep for experience, make the time for reflection and talk to as many people as you can (beyond a simple greeting).
SERVICE LEARNING SITE VISIT
I'm working in Egoli, a township set up in 1996 after the people were kicked off of their farmland. The informal settlement lacks basic utilities like electricity, running water, and a sewage system. I expected the conditions because we were given a blog with photos about Egoli from a past student, but feeling the cold and darkness inside the shack homes solidified the reality (if only for an hour and a half). If you're curious to see photographs of what townships look like, feel free to take advantage of Google. I didn't like the idea of bringing my camera during orientation and shooting poverty porn. I'm glad that our community organizer Abe walked us through the muddy, puddled streets and we got to greet people in the community, instead of having our first impression of the place and the people's first impression of us be through the lens of a camera.
We met "Mama," who we knew was the woman in charge of selling and renting a device called a "Juz Box" to the township's residents. Think of the concept of a rechargeable battery pack, but in a 5 L plastic jug powered by solar panels on the roof of her home (isn't that awesome?). But there are only a few of the boxes, and so about one fourth of the community gets electricity through that way. Those without electricity resort to light from candles, open fires and paraffin stoves in the homes. When we visited, a couple of guys were chopping wood in preparation to rebuild some houses that a fire claimed. The smoke from the paraffin also poses a public health hazard for the families.
Our focus for the project is offering a model for a cheap form of light that can hopefully turn into a viable business for a social entrepreneur to pick up. We only have five days, so we've kept our idea practical: Successfully install one
Liter of Light bottle on a volunteer's roof and produce a simple reproducible manual that highlights important information like cost and installation instructions.
Sometimes, people participating in service learning projects set high expectations and get such tunnel vision with their project plans that they forget to have a genuine experience by abandoning the savior mindset and just speaking to the people they're trying to help. Remember: You're "adding another drop to the bucket" (an analogy from Errol, our papa bear from IES Abroad who's always there with good advice) by any little good that you do.
Irrelevant but awesome tangent:
I held my first baby in years, when a woman named Nicky handed a chubby-faced girl to me with a stern "Take her!" and I fumbled awkwardly to concentrate on not being a complete klutz while having a little human in my arms. Also, Nicky told me that I looked 16 and that if she was a bouncer at a club, she wouldn't let me in, so there's that.
MY HUMBLE APPRECIATION
The study abroad group knew our experience would be something else when we were told that there's a psychologist available for the entire hostel if need be, but I can't overstate how much I appreciate the people on this trip. They're curious, genuine, trustworthy and smart, but I suppose I shouldn't have expected any less from those who decided to chose a social work study abroad program. We have regular group debriefing sessions with our professor and a couple of the IES staff members, and it's always so powerful to hear my friends speak openly about their feelings on an incident, a conversation or just a feeling they felt. I'm in my happy place with all the empathy being channeled.
