Gwenny and Nikki

So Gwenny is probably the coolest kid I know.  She is also the best friend I have made since I got here.  Most of the stereotypes that I assumed were true about 14 year old girls I developed as a PE aid in my senior year at high school are fading faster than the Royals in mid-season.  And that’s saying something.

I haven’t posted anything in a while and I have been encouraged to write about her so I will.  I think I have wrote about her a little before but just some background..  I was nervous when I got here and expectations for me among the kids were raised when they found out that I was an American.  They expected that since I was from there that I had met Eminem, Lil Wayne, Beyonce, Kanye, Jay-Z etc.  To be honest at first I thought she was a boy.  Even after I saw that she had pink socks on I was asking myself why a boy that age would succumb himself to the inevitable teasing that came with wearing pink socks.  It made much more sense when I found out “he” was a girl.  That leads me to the next reason that I like her, she doesn’t act like a boy.  If you look tomboy up in the dictionary then there should be a picture of her face. 

Gwenny

Nikki

I think I have written about the media impact that America has on South Africa, specifically and regretfully, wrestling.  Of all the things that could make it over here, the WWE has.  Of my three TV channels one of them shows wrestling so I am guilty of watching Monday Night Raw and Wednesday Night Smackdown.  I know, I know.  But all these kids all want to wrestle, a task I am happy to oblige. 

So back to Gwenny, she is a phenomenal dancer.  Street dancing, of course.  The kind you see in the Step-Up movies.  I will admit that for their birthdays I brought Gwenny and Nikki to my place, took them out to eat, and then survived through Step-Up 3.  My movie pals will know that not even they could get me to sit through something like that; these kids are making me soft. 

You don’t have to know me to realize that this friendship is unusual.  She’s a tomboy; I made fun of tomboys in school.  She likes to watch wrestling; I think wrestlers should be included in the Oscar nominations.  She dances; I can’t dance.  As unusual as it is we have become pretty close.  She introduces me to the other kids as her best “big” friend and big brother; there’s a definite family resemblance!

She is not black, she is Coloured – which is an important difference in the political history of South Africa.  Next to being classified as white, it is the best social classification that one could hope for during apartheid.  As far as township standards go, she is about as well off as a kid can be, but that isn’t really saying much.  She lives in a house with 2 bedrooms and her family owns a car.  I know that over 6 people share that house and she is given the couch to sleep on every night.  Her dad is a painter and her mom works in a private white family’s kitchen.

I had a pretty lengthy talk from Gwenny the other day in the back of Kevin’s bakke on the way home from a try-out at the sports school.  Not because I don’t trust anyone reading this but because she made me promise not to tell anyone and out of respect for her and that promise, I won’t share what she told me.  Basically let’s just say these kids battle more things in one day than maybe I have in my entire life.  Besides being economically and socially disadvantaged, these kids are succumbed to pressure from the spiritual realm.  In other words, witchcraft.  The natural response from everyone reading this will to be skeptical.  It’s exactly how I felt.  I listened politely to her at first as she talked about various things that she had seen and brushed them off as kids’ tales.  But it got to where I wasn’t able to rationally explain away any of the things she was talking about.  Then it dawned at me that my rational explanations don’t do her any good.  If a collective society (the township) believes in it as a whole, then who is going to tell them that they are all wrong?  Whether it is “real” or not to me is irrelevant.  I think something only becomes real when you experience it.  I guess I’m saying that our experiences make our world real to us, if that makes any sense.  At any rate they experience it, so it is real to them and that’s all that matters.  Of course that opens them up to a world of supernatural and abnormal things.  “Muti” is something that one person uses on another person in the form of a curse.  You go to the sangoma, or witch doctor, and based on how much money you can pay they make you a concoction of various things that you use to curse someone.  This is where it gets nasty.  The most popular muti is the limb of a child.  It is believed to have the most power.  It isn’t as bad here as it is in the Eastern Cape, but there is still danger at night for these kids.  I’m not sure how often it is but every few weekends there are some from the township who go out into the woods, dress up in white gowns and pray to the spirits for the whole weekend.  They stand there for two days, not eating, not drinking.  Just performing whatever rites they do around a fire.  If you are a kid I’m told that you stay clear of them.  Gwenny told me that she has to be home by 8 every night and by 7 if she is somewhere far away from home.  If she breaks that curfew she gets a pretty good spank when she gets home.  I’d say she has pretty good parents from what I’ve seen in the township.

The Coloured people as a whole have a strange place in South Africa.  The history is lengthy and complex but pretty much they are an old mix of Dutch, French, Huguenot, Malay, Indian, African and whoever else might have been in South Africa for the past few centuries.  However, their rich diversity is also their curse.  They have no real culture for themselves.  The whites during apartheid wouldn’t accept them because they weren’t completely white.  Blacks wouldn’t accept them because the Coloureds wanted to be white.  If the whites had accepted the Coloureds into their society, we would definitely be looking at a much different South Africa today.  Gwenny remarked how they have no culture of their own.  In a township where living in close proximity is the biggest link between them and the Xhosa and other black immigrants, they pale in comparison to the rich histories of their neighbors.  The Xhosa people have many rituals and rites that their ancestors performed that have survived to present day.  The Coloureds have nothing of the sort and I believe that because they were never completely accepted by anyone that they have no identity as a race.  They speak Afrikaans (the language of white South Africa) but if you looked at them you could easily mistake them for being Xhosa.  As a kid growing up, who do you commit yourself to?  No one has really accepted your identity anywhere and you mostly feel like a nomad among the nations.  As Americans we have plenty of history and culture to feel proud of.  The same cannot be said of the Coloured people, what do you do when you feel like throughout history that the world has never really accepted your people?

So Nikki is in the title and I haven’t talked about her yet.  She is the same age as Gwenny, Coloured as well, with a similar living situation.  The only difference is that she is much more moody, hence why I don’t like her as much as Gwenny.  She is definitely more like a girl.  But she’s still a cool kid.

One of the coolest things that Volunteers Direct does is facilitate a relationship that you have with a kid.  Just like I have bonded with Gwenny, lots of previous volunteers have found a specific kid and attached themselves to that kid.  If they have the resources, or can get sponsorships then they will pay the school fees for a kid to go to school.  I have gone over education here is ZA at length but I’ll do a quick review.  To get an education similar to the one I received it cost R 25 000 total.  That includes books, transportation, tuition, meals etc.  About R 8 to every $1 means that you are looking at over $3,000 to send a kid to a decent high school for only one year.  Well of course I wanted to help Gwenny out, but I wasn’t sure she could handle a rigorous academic life let alone whether I could afford $3000/year for Grades 8-12.  At that point I gave up any thought of being able to help her in any tangible way. 

I put pictures up of a beach volleyball tournament that we went to in Muizenberg.  The people who put it on play and coach for the men’s national volleyball team.  The coach told us that Gwenny had some solid skills and that we should see about getting her into the sport.  The township schools have no sports of course as they can’t even afford decent buildings, so we were referred to the Western Cape Sports School.  This is a special school.  Literally.  According to the Western Cape Education Department it is a special school in the sense that it receives unprecedented financial aid from the government and can at any time they choose transfer an underachieving student from their school into public education.  The school clearly puts sports above education.  The principal told us that their main goal is to make these kids national and international players in their sport.  This school is the only one of its kind in the country.  By 2018, every one of ZA’s nine provinces will have at least one.  Right now the only other institution that offers a similar experience is in Johannesburg and has a meager fee of R20 000/MONTH, NBD.  So pretty much the chance these kids are getting is truly, for them, once in a lifetime.  The government clearly wants to make ZA a force on the international sports scene and this is how they are going to do it.  It is a boarding school of course, which means they are there from Monday-Friday.  Sometimes even on the weekends since that is when most of the matches in sport are played.  So the kids won’t get to see their family, but they’ll be out of the township.  It’s bittersweet but in the long run it will save them I think. 

Side note: I talked to the valedictorian of Hout Bay High School and she said that she got up at 3am every morning during school because “it was the only time during the whole day that it was quiet enough for me to study.”  She also shares a bed with three other kids.  She has yet to take me to her shack because she is embarrassed.  That is how serious you have to take education if you want to get out of the township, who among us could do that? 

So I added up the cost, the sports school spends over R60 000 on these kids over a course of the year.  The final amount of school fees that these kids have to pay is R3 500 for the whole year.  That includes school uniform and a meager portion of the tuition fees.  Given that this is a huge bargain at an excellent value and also because Gwenny and Nikki’s families are so well off, Kevin believes that their families should put up half of the fees.  I agree, it keeps them involved.  So, R1 750 for someone who wants to pay for her to go to school.  That’s just a little over $200 for a whole year or $400 if someone wanted to pay for them both.  That’s not bad at all.  Considering the chance these kids have to get out it is truly awesome. 

So for me personally, it has been amazing to see God work in this.  The thought that a good kid like Gwenny could end up like the bums I see on the side of the street just because of the life she was born into didn’t sit well with me.  Obviously I had wanted to make a real difference when I came here and was starting to question whether I could do anything that really mattered.  Now this opportunity has come up and it looks like she has a chance.  There is a lady visiting here who previously volunteered for 8 months.  She is an ex-international player who started this whole volleyball project that I’m doing and she is considering about moving here permanently.  She has some funding herself from various people and also holds Gwenny and Nikki in a high regard.  It looks like she will be involved in this process too, which is great.  These kids getting into that school are the first priority, not me doing something to feel good about myself.  So we will see how it plays out, I just need more God and less Seth.  More humility, less pride. 

Well that’s Gwenny and Nikki.  I am finishing writing this just after I got back from the Garden Route.  I have some pretty good Sony headphones that I brought over here and you can really tell the difference verses some regular iPod headphones.  Gwenny listened with them and loved them.  She convinced me to let her have them while I went on my trip.  “Yo Seth you gotta let me have them.  Plllleeeeeeeassssse!”  How could I say no?  Of course I wasn’t going to let her have them that easy.  We bargained for a week’s worth of coming to the homework club to study for them.  Hey, you gotta do whatever you can to get these kids open a book.