Improvise.

We have finally arrived at the place that will be our home for the next 5 & ½ weeks. We are staying in the flat up top LEAP 3 in Linbro Park right outside Alexandra. Our plane got in around 2:00pm, and a whole fleet of LEAP students and LEAPSAs came to fetch us. They gave us a little tour around the school, and at last, I started to feel like home.

I told Piladi I hadn’t felt that way since arriving a week and a half ago. The school sits on probably an acre of land (I do not know what an acre is… but it’s a big lot) and there’s a soccer field, a barn, and a few stables in the back. The trees and plants are all things I know the names for, like Jacaranda and Eucalyptus and Ivy and Hydrangea.

Tumelo picked us up around 5:30 to get a few essentials, but everything at the mall was closed. We did manage to find some hot water bottles to heat up our beds, because it is very freezing here. We made dinner out of what we had – omelettes with tomatoes, individually wrapped cheese slices, and lunch meat – and then we set up an entertainment system in Kristin’s and my room with pieces of a futon, a comforter, lots of pillows, and Mike’s laptop. We watched two episodes of True Blood before curling up with our hot water bottle babies and getting to sleep.

Rest.

Today my goal was to sleep as much as I could, because I have not felt like I have woken up rested since I arrived here last Saturday. I finally got up at 9:42 this morning, then showered, made myself a cup of instant Joe, and then wrote the rest of my comments for my students. It has been hard to get caught up with that, but I did a good job spreading out the task throughout the week so that today I only had 12 or so more to do before emailing them to Angie to print and file.

I made some lunch, and read a bit, and wrote, and emailed, and sat around. I didn’t set foot outside of the house until 7:00PM. It was good to have a lazy day full of quiet and whatever struck my fancy in the moment.

Tour.

"I was assigned a cell at the head of the corridor. It overlooked the courtyard and had a small eye-level window. I could walk the length of my cell in three paces. When I lay down, I could feel the wall with my feet and my head grazed the concrete on the other side. The width was about six feet, and the walls were at least two feet thick. Each cell had a white card posted outside of it with our name and our prison service number. Mine read, "N Mandela 466/64," which meant I was the 466th prisoner admitted to the island in 1964. I was forty-six years old, a political prisoner with a life sentence, and that small cramped space was to be my home for I knew not how long."


"One morning, instead of walking to the quarry, we were ordered into the back of a truck. It rumbled off in a new direction, and fifteen minutes later we were ordered to jump out. There in front of us, glinting in the morning light, we saw the ocean, the rocky shore, and in the distance, winking in the sunshine, the glass towers of Cape Town. Although it was surely an illusion, the city, with Table Mountain looming behind it, looked agonizingly close, as if one could almost reach out and grasp it."

Excerpts from Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela.

Today Kristin, Mike and I went to the waterfront in Cape Town and took the Robben Island historical tour. The pier was piercingly beautiful, and the water sparkled like diamonds. It was hard to imagine this being a place of imprisonment and despair, because today, it looked like a treasure. The contrast was haunting.

The tour felt long and drawn out, I confess. We piled into a tour bus when we arrived and drove a few feet at a time before pausing and our tour guide would tell us different stories about the history of the island, all the way back from the 1653. It has long been a place of banishment, and later in the 1800s, was the home to a leper colony. More than 1500 graves are scattered about the island, which is 5 by 2 kilometers in length.

I appreciated seeing the places that became so significant to Nelson Mandela, and which I already knew a lot about from reading his autobiography. The prison grounds were bleak, and the sky felt like a ceiling to the tall grey towers instead of a glorious expanse. I cannot imagine what life must have felt like, how excruciating it must have been, to have been imprisoned there indefinitely merely for pursuing justice.

Tour.

At last, I have left the Beulah Lodge! Since the Summit is over and we are not scheduled to begin our workshops until the week after next, Mike & Kristin & I got to take a little day trip to downtown Cape Town today.

We took the train, and then walked around the little market places. The African woman's market had so many beautiful handcrafted goods, like scarves and necklaces and sandals and dresses and rings and I wanted to buy everything, but I only got two things and mostly looked.

Afterwards, we went to an Ethiopian food restaurant, which was very posh, and enjoyed a platter of incredibly delicious foods, and coffee & popcorn afterwards. It felt like we were actually in South Africa, even though I know there is so much more to see that is South Africa. It felt new, and that felt exciting.

We accidentally confused our return train station, and had to walk 30 minutes back to our lodge, but fortunately, a German missionary girl on her gap year saw our peril and helped walked us through Pinelands. She gets my nomination for best person of the day! For whatever it's worth.

Process.

I debated whether or not to make "process" the word of the day. I know that emotionally and mentally processing information is definitely a verb. It takes energy. It is hard. But it doesn't seem to have the same weight as other verbs. There is no way to show tangible evidence of processing, unless you're processing milk to make cheese.

But at the end of the day, there isn't a better verb to describe what I did.

Today was a long and hard day of processing.

I have read a lot about South Africa, and I thought that I understood the history, but there was no way to mentally prepare myself for being a white American in post-apartheid South Africa. I feel the violence in my mindset. I feel that I am an oppressor in my blood, despite my best intentions.

During the morning session at the summit, they discussed power strategies, and I looked at the list of power strategies from positive feedback to name dropping or positioning yourself, and I was sure that I'd used at least 15 of the 25 and was unsure but pretty sure that I'd used 9 of the other 10. The only one I had never used was physical force. I knew that if any of the power strategies were used against me, I would feel upset, and probably appropriately so. It was a sobering thought.

This afternoon, the Teach With Africa fellows confronted one another. What we are trying to do is not easy, and the pain here is so apparent, so real, and we had to just be open with our insecurities, with our baggage, and it's like. I don't know. It's hard. I don't know this country. I don't know these people. But we have to come together. We don't have time not to.

I am struggling with a lot of things, and have to reach out to the people who are here. I know that I do. There is no other choice.

I read Nelson Mandela's book tonight, and it hit me different. I understand it different. I haven't seen very much of this country, but I feel that I have explored it deeper than any other country. Hopefully, this long and tired explanation is evidence of my processing.

Present.

Today is Day 3 of the LEAP Summit, and the team from HTH (Mike, Kristin, and myself) were asked to present a workshop on project-based learning. I confess to being wicked nervous to do this. I knew that I would be walking into a completely different culture, with different histories and ideas, and I am not PBL's biggest fan or anything. I have probably never felt least prepared to do a presentation, even though it was about something that I know very well.

The day was full of workshops, each one being repeated three times.
For the first session, the room began to fill up, and the LEAP director and visionary John Gilmour was in our session. We did an introduction, and then a journal on meaningful learning experiences, and through our sharing, I realized that we have so much in common, despite everything that is different.

Mike, Kristin and I each shared a project that we'd done, and I showed Oscar's poem and talked about the Word on the Street project. When we concluded, people were legitimately excited. Not to just take what we'd done, but to try to find ways to bring it into what they were already doing.

The day was exhausting, as teaching often is, but I felt so happy to be a part of their energetic conversations and their dreaming for something different in their classrooms and their community.

Learning is Doing: An introduction to project-based learning (A PowerPoint by Mike, Kristin & Kay)

Participate.

The second day of the LEAP Summit felt better than the first. Today I felt like I actually got the opportunity to meet people, and it is easy to appreciate their stories and their lives.

After the opening session, I made a fortuitous mistake and ended up in the wrong LEAP Unpacked session -- the one full of parents, students, LEAPSAs, and new teachers to LEAP. I immediately began connecting with students, albeit feeling a little odd since I figured I was in the wrong place.

Turns out I was in the right place, but the wrong time.
I wrote down so many things that John Gilmour talked about, as he and a LEAP student led the session. He talked about fear in education, and the need for students to claim their space. It made me wonder about my own students. What spaces did they need to claim?

In the afternoon, they offered the LEAP Unpacked session again, and this time I realized my error. I ended up crashing an interesting session, another place I was not supposed to be. The session was entitled, "Consciousness and Personal Voice Development" and we began by centering ourselves, placing our feet on the ground, and breathing together with our eyes closed.

Immediately, I began to cry.
As soon as I slowed down, I felt the deep sadness that I have carried. That I fear to talk about. It is uncomfortable to share my grief with people here. How could they understand?

But in this session, we talked so much about how people may not able to understand a circumstance, but they can understand a feeling. We talked of many things, each issue reflecting our situations in the world, white, black, colored, single, married, parent, teacher. I felt so grateful to accidentally be here, where I could share my feelings, and where that not only encouraged, but demanded.

After the day's activities, we all loaded up into buses and went into Langa, one of the townships that LEAP primarily serves. It was beautiful, and tragic, and beautiful, and full of life and the stuff of living. I met a couple teachers from LEAP 3, where I will be stationed, and I felt excited to know them, to meet them, to feel like this actually might work.

It actually might work with all of me. The broken and the strong parts together.