Hello from Cape Town !
This is our first update from A Telling Collective (we now write ATC). Forgive the lack of editing, we’re working quickly out of an internet café. We’ve been here now a little over a week. It took us a while to learn the ropes of this city.
We’ll start with driving… We have little old school red VW bug that we call “Buggy”. And we do actually call it this because we often need to talk to it out loud to try to get it to work… the reverse needs to be held, the locks won’t turn, it can’t go above 80 km, etc. etc. It’s an experience. We haven’t gotten stuck anywhere and Deon, from whom we’re renting, has a truck full of VW spare parts which he drives to the scene within the first few minutes (so we hear from our friend whose experiences filled us in). Navigating crazy city driving with people running across the street, horse buggies with old box spring trailers behind, ostriches and rock climbing baboons, etc. etc. (and we must add, four different confusing maps that Katelin somehow has worked with and is teaching Nicole the old family philosophy that getting lost is not possible but is in fact called bumbling and means that you learn more about the place than you ever wanted to know and get there eventually).
Anyway, more important things. This morning was our second set of many meetings at the Hoops4Hope offices. You can find them online if you’re curious. They service five townships in the area, thousands and thousands of kids, with a principle called FUNdamentals (fun to teach the fundamentals) that has kept their organization alive and flourishing for nearly twenty years whereas many other means of HIV and life skills education has suffered. They use basketball, soccer, chess, and other means to keep learning about HIV fun – but it is so so much more than that! We are now fitting body mapping into their curriculum (quite a challenge they have posed to us immediately). Body mapping fills a gap of knowing “how their youth are doing”, working with youth who don’t like sports but want to participate because of the programs incredible popularity, and using expression as a form of ‘fun’ learning. They have had resources persons in the past working with creative means but we’re excited that they can take charge of the body mapping after we leave so that it doesn’t need to be that temporary which is exactly what we wanted. They shape the project and we support. In other words, we start body mapping with the “all star” team of 15 community leaders who each work with 15-20 MVP’s, leaders within each community. The MVPs we will map with in the coming days also before jumping into mapping with basically thousands of kids- trying to find ways of scraping from the budget enough money to buy gallons of paint and huge rolls of brown paper since we never foresaw SO much interest and such a massive quantity of children! And we’ve discovered there’s no time for such a thing called processing. Wow!
We’re also probably going to map with… rural women in Stellenbosch, children’s home for HIV positive youth, the office staff at a partner organization to H4H, and a community program that serves women. We’re reaching out to other like minded people and projects such as the suitcase stories (check it out online or look for the book… suitcases done just like body mapping with refugee children and their journey’s), photographer of TB patients who exhibits their stories alongside portrait pictures, play wrights and storytellers who are doing cultural activism, etc.
We spent hours and hours in the book store last week and left with no less than six books each. We’ve already worked our way through several… the reading feeds our need to know more about the area, intellectual life here, and projects similar to ours. We went to a book fair where we met some of the authors we’ve been reading and were able to ask them questions which was incredibly stimulating albeit overwhelming. We both are designing separate projects but we may have to write most of them once we arrive in Pretoria since Cape Town is exploding!
All the best,
Katelin & Nicole
AND....
We’ll both add personal messages from time to time to these emails.
Here’s Nicole’s:
I can hardly believe that we have only been here a week. It seems like years ago that I was home, finding new ways of pushing things into my bag so that I could fit the paintbrushes I had forgotten to pack! There has been many times when I have longed for home, and the many people at home I love so much…
At the same time I find myself walking along the top-side of the mountain behind our house, facing the ocean with the setting sun behind me, digging my feet into the earth as I step carefully to avoid breaking too many spiders webs or disturbing the many little creatures among the bushes. Something about being here, smelling the lavender that grows here as a weed (and is in every one of Katelin’s pockets, hung all around our room, in our tea, even on my latest body map), gives me an inexplicable feeling that I am home.
I am in the place that draws out in me a deep sadness, for so many oppressed and so many hurt by the pain of being the oppressor. A place where I see capitalism gone very very wrong (does it ever go right?) with huge townships and massive homes, so so many starving people and people drinking fine wine or tea with scones and quiche… After I met one of my most beloved authors, Antjie Krog, a woman who wrote an incredible reflexive book about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that literally changed my life, I had to leave the book fare in tears… there is an incredible emotion, an exhaustion of struggle here.
At the same time I am sitting at the edge of my seat, riveted by the hawks, the spiders, the smell of the ocean, and the people I cannot give justice describing. The work that is happening here to rebuild the ruins of the old South Africa positively is more incredible than I could have dreamed! I am among mentors now in a place in which I am reminded, every second, of why my heart is beating. The passion I feel here makes me jump up early in the morning to get outside and roll my sleeves up, so to speak.
There is a lot of work we will be writing about. Many many experiences I won’t be able to even try to put into emails or letters, but we’ll definitely document as much as we can in multi media forms!
I look forward to hearing from all of you!
From Katelin:
More from me next email (Nicole prepared hers last night but I couldn’t put my book down to write). I am so excited about how many people are using “oral history” of all forms here, and am trying to set up interviews and create some kind of multimedia project as a final product (writing, video, photo etc.), and all along we will be having these amazing experiences sharing bodymapping with people and learning about memory and oral history through our own method of bodymapping. Continued next time…
