Mutual Learning Precedes Service

The following is my attempt at answering my friend Chad Seagren’s article, “Service in a Free Society,” which offers a thoughtful and critical response to General Stanley McChrystal’s “Step Up For Your Country,” which appeared in Newsweek in January. While McChrystal calls for national service, which he believes will lead to a more ethically responsible society, Seagren counters that we serve one another every day in the open market.

I do not offer any perspectives as a former military member or economist, but the topics fascinate me professionally and personally: what constitute service? How do we define its purpose and measure its efficacy? How does it compare to other kinds of human interaction? As you can see at the end of my piece, I have not thoroughly reasoned out my own understanding. I am hoping that this will stir some conversation among the readers of this blog, particularly my friend Chad.

Chad Seagren’s article rightly argues against General Stanley McChrystal’s op-ed in Newsweek, which proposes a call for national service. Seagren’s essay also explains with convincing clarity the importance of the market in the lives of American citizens, especially in light of its complexity and our reliance on it for almost every material necessity for survival and a comfortable life. Its very complexity, argues Seagren, is the root of our tendency to overlook the ways that we “serve” one another in daily life, from ensuring the availability of fresh produce in stores to assuring the quality and safety of the airplane engines keeping a mobile society functioning. As such, the market is a construct that provides an environment in which “millions of individuals” serve those they know and strangers alike. Because people often serve one another without actually interacting, a call for compulsory service indeed can waste talent, time, and resources.

While the argument is compelling, particularly in its logic that, without the proper division of labor and the completion of that labor by individuals, the “vast majority of people [on] earth would soon die of starvation.” This language urges the reader to consider the nature and importance of the service rendered by “the server” to “the served.” Unfortunately, it does little to distinguish that from service activities in which participants gain mutual understanding—in which both serve and are served. Seagren’s logic is sound and, as phrased, the emergency is real. Indeed, we serve one another by performing tasks that best match our talents. Collectively, we all can gain from such division of labor. Even here, the focus is our survival only. If defined in this visceral way, then “serving another” does not need to go beyond an exchange of “service rendered” for an incentive, most often monetary.

Defining “service” in these terms re- and misdirects questions about “why” we serve. Only once we have properly defined the desired outcomes of service, as mutually learning and benefiting experiences, can we determine what kinds of service would most effectively render them. If quality service rendered is the only desired product of engaging in service activities, then the market champions it. But if the goal is mutual understanding and relationship among peoples of differing cultures and lifestyles, then we need to move beyond both General McChrystal’s call for national service and Seagren’s advocacy of a laissez-faire market as a foundation for service.

Before we redefine service according to more appropriate desired outcomes, let us note one crucial aspect of Seagren’s essay that lies at the foundation for his argument but is not justified by it. Seagren’s logic premises that the market is a living thing, capable of interacting with the human players in it. While the market can be organic in the sense that its nature and rules change with the actors, interacting with the market does not lead one to become more sympathetic and understanding of other human beings, except to sell them a product. The market is just an environment in which people interact, but the environment is independent of why we should serve, and therefore of what should constitute service to produce the desired outcomes.

If all we want is a system in which we can provide for one another but do not need to interact with one another, then the market provides that. If we want just enough sympathy and understanding to convince a buyer, then the market provides that. If we want more from human interaction, then not only is the market irrelevant, but so is any other construct or environment. Human interaction that leads to sympathy and mutual understanding does not rely on environment, although some are more conducive to such interactions.

In fact, Seagren’s anecdote about his father’s career best illustrates this detachment among the players when they interact only with the market and not directly with one another. It is true that the product built or inspected by a worker “serves” the consumer of that product, but the detached process necessitated by the market for maximum output precludes human interaction and understanding. To a great extent, the criticism directed at super-sized businesses waves this as its primary battle flag. Seagren’s argument that “outcomes should trump motives” would be useful defense for corporations like Walmart and Costco, which are putting out of business smaller competitors (and business models) but “serving” more people and on a grander scale. At this point, Seagren defers to Adam Smith for a definition of selfish service as the more effective kind; the more self-interest one has, the more one applies one’s talents and therefore serves others. Again, if service rendered is the only desired outcome, then selfish service easily trumps selfless service.

Seagren then argues that those who seek monetary gains, and therefore are selfish, also serve. And he criticizes those who claim that any activity seeking profit cannot be considered service because it is not a selfless act. The implied logic is that those who argue against personal gains would posit that “true service” is void of self-interest. That is far from reality, and thinking so can pose a real danger to any capacity to connect with and serve other human beings at all.

There is no such thing as selfless service. Even that which appears as such carries motives of personal satisfaction, a sense of rightness or righteousness, or moral obligation in the religious or political sense. I agree with Seagren (and Adam Smith) that “profits” should drive service as much as it drives human interaction in the market. Ironically, especially if one views the profits of service as personal moral gains, the argument against collective service, defined and mandated by the government, makes the most sense. Attempts to dictate or regulate a human endeavor stemming from self-interest and personal and cultural contexts cannot get far. One can look to any other attempt to legislate morality just in our country, which is rich in its cultural diversity, to see the futility of it. If the federal government defines what forms of service is worthwhile of its rewards, then collective service robs the individual of her ability to serve others when it does not match what might be politically convenient for the ruling party or when the prescribed service violates her personally held beliefs. The value of service exists more presciently on the individual level, and certain environments can more easily produce and preserve it than others.

How we define “profits,” then, leads us to define what types of service can yield the best results. If monetary gains—an economic incentive—is not the point, and if no service is truly selfless, then what should one seek to profit from interacting with other human beings? We do not need to go much farther beyond mutual learning and understanding to answer the question and redirect the discussion of what activities and environments are the most conducive. So important is mutual learning and understanding to service that, without it, one can do more harm than good in an attempt to better another life. A business model that fails to account for the customer base and its idiosyncrasies probably would enjoy a short life. Likewise, an insistence on serving another human being without a real effort to understand that person’s culture and circumstances can bring disastrous results, such as small- and large-scale dependency. Furthermore, the damages are done not only on the one who “is served” but also on the one who “serves.” In international volunteering experiences, for example, recent research has pointed to the despondency and disillusionment of young and idealistic people feeling like they have made little difference or, worse, added to the problem by spending valuable resources of the host organizations.

In the balanced construct in which service benefits both parties, the relationship is not a “giver-receiver” one—or, to put it more accurately in terms of how one-sided “service” is perceived, “giver-given.” It is precisely this inability to see what the giver “gets” or the resistance to defining the relationship in such selfish terms that hinders true service, in which both sides benefit. Human interactions in proximity carry effects, benign or profound, on all involved. Service occurs when such interactions result in mutually understood gains, even if the gains seem unequal or one-sided for the moment. Seagren’s essay comes close to determining exactly what those who serve gain from the experience, but he mislabels it a “sense of responsibility to the State.” Such reasoning is predicated on the belief that service should be “selfless” to the server. Yet, it is precisely this shortcoming in our ability to define service in terms of real gains for the server that corners us into overlooking them. If the server sees herself bound as a human to the one receiving the benefits of the act of service, then the gains are selfish indeed. Acts of service must account for this selfish gain by the server. To remove it is to create a hole filled up all too conveniently by lofty ideals such as “civic duty” and “national service.”

In a mutual-service model, we can focus on the individual’s understanding of her interactions with others, act by act and moment by moment. Cultivating such mindsets and approaches cannot be the government’s task. It lies at the community level, beyond the family but not at the national policy level. The ways that we encourage and allow for relationships that serve are as diverse as the individuals forming those relationships. They define the activity and the terms of the exchange. One might ask, how does this service-based interaction differ from any other type of human interaction? It is different once the participants define it as such.

This is where I am in understanding and grasping the idea of service, and this is something that sits at the front of my mind in my job at the school as director of service learning. I have far to go in defining what such a comprehensive and complicated concept can mean in terms of human interactions. Thanks, Chad, for your thoughtful article, and I hope that others will join in the discussion.

Humbert Humbert, Jay Gatsby, and Africa

My AP English class started reading Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita this week.  I was excited that we finally arrived here in our journey through the course.  The year began with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and, as it is integrated with a history course on post-colonial Africa, traveled to South Africa and the Congo before returning to the United States.

On our way back to New England, this time with Humbert Humbert’s European perspective, we traversed the townships of Cape Town and Johannesburg, along the Western Cape’s coastlines, and deep into the Karoo.  Our guides were journalists and their nonfictional depictions of the final years of apartheid rule and the months after.  We also traveled back in time with Joseph Conrad and into the deepest and darkest corners of man’s soul.  Coming out of the Congo alive but jarred by a maniac’s murderous crimes, we encountered Humbert Humbert’s peculiar malady with a sense of relief.

If The Great Gatsby is a good friend, which is how I receive it each time, then Lolita is that favorite professor who always enthralls me and accosts my confidence in my own knowledge only to release me from my own inability to understand.  I have the privilege of teaching two of my favorite books in the same class and hope to be able to do this for many more years.

To introduce the novel, we met Humbert Humbert together as a class, reading out loud the short first chapter, skipping for the moment the “Foreword.”  I wanted the first voice that the students heard to be that of the artist and madman himself.  Pausing and reconsidering the first paragraph, each of our tongues took the prescribed trip to the tapping of the teeth, as I instructed my students to give sound to the name Lo-Lee-Ta.  When asked for their reaction to the exercise, students laughed and squirmed uncomfortably, and one said that she felt “creepy.”  That initial sense of relief did not last long.

In the following class meeting, after the first out-of-class reading, students returned with surprisingly much enthusiasm.  Unlike last year’s class, in which many students found the novel disturbing and the narrator monstrous, this year’s group embraces both.  I attribute that difference to the fact that the AP veterans have shared their holistic reactions to the novel with these newbies.  Having heard about the taboo relationship between the 37-year-old man and his 12-year-old victim, the current students are able to suspend their judgment and sense of propriety to comprehend the character who has been the subject of many of their conversations outside of class.

During faculty orientation in August, when we mapped out the integration plans for the year and paid particular attention to the new pairings, including this English-history pair, someone asked me to explain a potential connection between post-colonial Africa and Lolita.  (Last year’s pairing was with a course on Middle Eastern policy and diplomacy, and the same question was asked then.)  The history teacher and I had discussed beforehand the thematic connection that we would echo throughout the English class’s reading of the novel: the desire of one human to possess completely another human being, and the impact that it has on both.  Humbert Humbert calls it “solipsism.”  In every way, his narrative is an attempt to “solipsize” the object of his demented fantasies.

In the course, H.H. has a precedent in Jay Gatsby, although the earlier character spent only five years idealizing and idolizing a real woman, who aged along with him, living and breathing never far away.  Humbert Humbert spent 23 years metamorphosing a dead Annabel Leigh and a teenage sexual frustration into an unjustifiable pursuit to own every aspect of another human being, including her name and thoughts.  What she is, as she exists to the reader’s cognizance, can be seen only through and in terms of H.H.’s character.  Like H.H. himself, we see and know Lolita as a manifestation of his fantasy.  She does not exist otherwise, and she does not speak her own thoughts.  We can argue about one or two instances when we might be hearing the girl’s actual voice, but even then it comes out as quiet sobbing and not spoken words.

To a degree (greater than one might think initially), the western colonizing powers that entered Africa, one after another, took the same approach and wanted the same results as does H.H.  Africa is a resource.  Africa is regret and guilt.  Africa is a dream or a nightmare, or both.  Africa’s landscapes are extensions of the outsiders’ imagination, while its voices are manic projections of the possessors on the possessed.

Humbert Humbert explains that 12 percent of American adult males (an actual figure in contemporary psychological studies) are inflicted with the same sickness as he, which he coins “nympholeptic,” but only “the artist and the madman” would act on it with such self-awareness and control.

Many more of us, all over the world, exhibit the very same symptoms.  We just suffer from different illnesses and seek other objects.

A Story in Pictures

For the past year or so our family dining table at my mom’s house has been covered with boxes and piles of photographs.  Many are black and white, and almost all were developed from film, as my mom transitioned to digital only a few months ago.  Near the table stands a medium-sized bookcase that contains our family’s collective photo library.  The pictures cover some 60-70 years, although those that survived the burning are few compared to the rest.

The photo-littered table has been my mom’s on-going project of organizing our family’s visual story.  When our family gathered over the holidays, she presented to each of her three children an album that tells our individual story.  The earliest pictures have us as newborns in our home in then Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), and Mom has carefully noted the date on almost every one of them.  The last pages of the albums show graduations, weddings, and eventually pictures taken only at what looks like family gatherings.  By then, we were no longer in the same house on a casual basis, and each photo was an occasion.

My older brother and sister each received two albums to my one.  My brother quickly observed that, while that was the case, his second album chronicles the lives of his two sons, who also are now our mom’s biggest joy in her retirement.  Somehow, my sister seems to have had the most photographic moments.

My one album is not quite full.  Aside from my tendency to shy from photographs (although I like taking them), my mom explained that there simply were not that many taken in the first few years of my life.  Sure enough, the black-and-white pages in my volume were many fewer than those in my siblings’.

The first six faded photographs are digital copies of the originals; they depict Mom and the three of us kids, and in them I look like a newborn.  She had made copies to put in each of our collections.  My dad must have taken those pictures, as he was not in them and they were all taken on one occasion.  That was March or April, 1975, although the marginal note gives only the year: “SG 75.”  The only other three pictures from 1975 are actually in color and dated “7-5-75” (May 7, ’75).  In them, my mom is holding a napping baby outside of our house.  These photographs are smaller in size and have a white border, and the colors have a slight yellow tinge.

I have seen elsewhere a picture taken in 1975 with my dad and me in it, but somehow it did not make its way into this small collection.  The time window was small.  He left for an advertised “ten-day re-education course” in September of that year and did not return to us until 1981, almost six years later.  In my album, the first photograph of all five of us together bares the date “9/81” and shows me and my brother in matching silk shirts in what looks like a formal family portrait.  My dad had on a tie and his signature smile, looking untouched by the six years of hard labor and brainwashing.

Two pages earlier is another formal family portrait without Dad and with “28-3-76” at the bottom.  That was taken a week after my first birthday; my brother was seven and my sister almost six.  My brother and I could pass for his two sons, who are exactly five years apart.  Everyone is looking at the camera except my sister, who seems distracted.  My mom is the only one of us truly smiling, and the look on her face tells me that she probably did not foresee being a single parent for the next five years.  She was 35 in that picture—my age now.

Our family went to the zoo often.  At least those were the occasions that warranted group photos.  Before 1981, it was just Mom and the three of us; after that, Dad was also in them, including one dated my seventh birthday, in 1982.  In that one, our family was joined by eight other kids and a woman whom I do not recognize.  My album contains only two photographs taken in Ho Chi Minh City from 1983, our last year in Vietnam.

The demarcation was not just chronological but also chromatic, as the photographs dated the latter half of 1983 were full-sized and in full color, taken with an SLR in France, where our family lived for over two years before moving to the United States.  There are many more from this period than in Vietnam, and they capture my first time on skis, family outings, holiday performances (my brother and sister are both musicians), and the obligatory birthday shots.  Strangely, the sharpest picture is a black-and-white one taken on a sunny day in the middle of Paris.  My dad snapped the shot of my grandmother and me marching in a demonstration to draw the French government’s attention to the plight of Vietnamese still living in concentration camps in the old country and of the hundreds of thousands of refugees trying to escape by boat.

Overall, these photographs are more cheerful and show more variety than the earlier ones.  One shows me sleeping and leaning on a train window while my grandmother watches.  Another has my mom and me on our knees praying in a Buddhist temple.  And the one dated “6-5-84” frames my brother and me reading a book together on a mattress in a room that was about ten square feet.  For about nine months in Paris, we lived in a community home founded by a Vietnamese refugee for other Vietnamese refugees.  The mattress covered half of the room, and we propped it against the wall during the day to make a living space of the room.  Our family of six lived in two of those rooms, with my parents sleeping in one and my grandmother sleeping with us kids in the other.  The picture of me and my brother reminds me of one I have seen of my nephews reading together on the floor of my mom’s house a couple of years ago.

Each of these pictures is a full story, and the ones missing tell even fuller stories.  Before we left Vietnam on a plane, sponsored by the French government in return for my grandfather’s military service in the French occupation army before France’s eviction from Vietnam in 1954, my parents burned most of the pictures that depicted anything related to America, the former South Vietnamese government during the war against North Vietnam, and any kind of activism.  My mother attended college in the United States for four years and my father was a political activist even in his early twenties, so there were many to burn.

These are the surviving stories in pictures.  The rest we have to rely on the photographs taken by our memory, which can be unreliable and less truthful.

The Value of an Education

I’m following a dialogue between two friends about education in the United States.  Both believe that the current system can improve but think that to do so we should go in different directions.

My college roommate, Chad, a product of public education, calls for as little government regulation as possible and proposes a free market of education, wherein a school functions like a corporation.  It can hire and fire as it pleases and offer salaries that it sees fit.  However it measures the “bottom line” determines the salary scale.  Ryan, a roommate after college and product of private education, thinks that education needs governmental oversight.  He is mainly suspicious of applying the free-market “solution” to any problem.

Although I’ve been a teacher for some time, I feel uninformed when it comes to policy regarding education.  The thing is, I kind of started this conversation, which was primarily about teacher pay.  Personally, at times I feel underpaid for the amount of work and time that I put into my job, and other times I feel undeserving of what I receive.

Thinking further, I know that there are occupations whose worth (and the effectiveness of those who perform them) cannot be measured in terms of dollars.  There’s no profit margin or even real (economics term) losses.  Education in a single life is cumulative, but only the individual can fairly, if accurately, do the math and only able to do so in the end.  To whom should the dollars go when measured against one’s knowledge gained through education and wisdom gained through experience and inspiration?  Who the hell can determine that?

Growing up in American schools, I always heard that the good teachers do it not for the money but as a passion, or in response to a calling, to put it in religious terms.  The absence of personal gains, or even the potential of getting them, is what makes them good.  I believed that saying then and saw it in my own teachers who inspired me as a student.

Now, I wonder if the philosophy has guided the practice, or if the opposite is true.  Do those who go into teaching do so because they see little value in monetary gains and are pursuing a loftier satisfaction?  Or, is it the absence of those gains what led to the proverb about good teachers?  The capable teacher who measures his effectiveness by how much he makes would be too frustrated, and thus he repeats to himself the adage until it becomes truth.

I suppose it’s a mixture of the two for most people who teach.  It is for me.  I do know that, like a parent would, I hope that my students will someday make more than I do as a result of attending my classes.  I doubt that I will ever be able to determine that with any objectivity.

The 30-30 Rule

The rule of 30-30, the brainchild of legendary Dartmouth professor Vijay Govindarajan, states that a corporation should have 30 percent of the people responsible for its strategic thinking be under the age of 30.  This troubles me because I belong to the other, more stagnant 70 percent.  The younger 30 percent, claims the professor, would ensure that the corporation stay forward-looking enough to adapt to changes and remain relevant.  Not that these individuals’ ideas are more brilliant or even more practical, as those traits often require experience; it is precisely the lack of brilliance and, even more so, of practicality that makes the younger-than-30 ideas more valuable.

When I was in college, one of my mentors in the English Department used to tell us in our senior honors seminar: “You should not forget that, as 20-somethings, you are reading materials written by people who were not much older than you when they wrote them.”  He meant to urge us into becoming actors and not only students of profound acts.  You would think that such advice would be heeded readily by driven men and women being shaped into military leaders at the Naval Academy.  To what extent that got each of us to act, I’m not sure.

The professor was right, of course.  Fitzgerald was in his mid-20s when he wrote The Great Gatsby.  Bill Gates founded Microsoft when he was barely old enough to buy a beer, and Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook while still struggling with post-adolescent acne and not yet old enough to drink.  Mary Shelley was 18 when she completed Frankenstein, a novel that we English majors, even at an engineering school, studied closely in two different courses: British Lit and Literary Criticism.

Why is 30 the threshold to truly creative thinking?  We spend the first decade of life soaking up the world like a sponge, learning any and all languages we encounter, including cultural ones.  Then, in our teens we define our self through trial and error (I mistyped “eros” just now, which is equally true).  Do we then get just one decade to pull it all together and produce some world-changing shit?  Of course, some later bloomers, like Plato, do not get started until their thirties.  His mentor, Socrates, turned 40 before he started walking around challenging others to be more ignorant than he.  Still, do we cross some kind of Styx at the end of our third decade?  Do we lose some capacity to be innovative?

What do we gain in its place?

The answer is wisdom.  Not the kind, I hope, that Socrates accused the Sophists of possessing, but the kind with which he rebuked them.  It is the wisdom to measure our experiences and observations against critical questions.  Only a fully developed frontal lobe would be capable of that, although such brain science would undermine the romanticism of philosophy.

How we define that wisdom, then, is important, because the definition can lead to the practice of obtaining it.  Wisdom is not the quality of or ability to act rightly or righteously in a given situation, but it is the ability to question one’s actions during the act.  The 30-something mind is more able to do this than its younger version.  At some point, I suspect, the mind crosses another threshold and begins to lose the ability to act at all, but I’m planning on enjoying these years of being in between.

Why Go?

The following was submitted to South Africa: The Good News in September.  The first published draft contained errors in the first two paragraphs, mostly relating to the number of students who took and passed the matriculation exams.  The errors have since been corrected.

The numbers were staggering. Of the 43,953 learners who wrote the National Senior Certificate exams in the Western Cape province in 2008, only 3,801 passed both mathematics and science at the 50 percent-plus level. When John Gilmour, the LEAP Science & Maths School founder, listed this statistic my pen stopped moving.

Encouraging was the fact that 19 of those students came from LEAP. Since 2004, LEAP has served as a private school for black students from townships. It now has three campuses in Cape Town and Johannesburg, with more schools on the way. LEAP has graduated 142 students in the last 3 years—126 of whom are currently enrolled in university or other tertiary study programs.

The students, teachers, and administrators of the LEAP Schools have begun a movement, and their monumental efforts have produced impressive results, but the work that remains seems improbable. What difference can an outsider make when he is on the LEAP campus for only eight weeks? What could any outsider do to augment the work of locals? That I came from the United States with a nonprofit, Teach with Africa, both benefited and complicated my interactions with the people I met in Cape Town.

Teach with Africa is a San Francisco-based nonprofit that seeks to partner with schools in Africa by sending a team of teachers to those schools, and by bringing students and teachers from those schools to the United States. In addition to exchanging learning and teaching approaches at the schools, TWA fellows participate in outreach projects in the surrounding underserved communities. In its third year, TWA is working with three LEAP School campuses and intends on developing partnerships in other countries in Africa. I joined the 2010 TWA Team as a middle- and high-school English teacher from Pacific Ridge School in Carlsbad, California.

Aside from teaching, I also co-direct the U.S.-based nonprofit Omprakash, which connects education, health, and environmental projects in developing countries to volunteers and resources and then brings those connections into the classroom as curricular resources. In talking to many volunteers in the Omprakash network, I have learned that for Americans Africa holds a kind of power. “I just know that I have to go to Africa,” they would say. Many are naïve enough to think that all of Africa looks the same, perhaps misled by the satellite picture of the world at night showing Africa as a continent with the fewest lights. The “dark continent” stirs sympathy. Some feel compelled by guilt associated with America’s history of slavery, for which they feel that serving the less fortunate in Africa would give relief. Others recognize Africa’s abject poverty and know that a found solution there could solve problems elsewhere. Still others see Africa’s poverty as an incubator of terrorism in which young men without jobs and money turn to religious zealousness for pay and pride.

Whatever the reason, Americans seek passage to Africa. I did. I can’t say that my reasons for going were original or exceptional. In reflection, my reasons were murkier than all of the above. I have seen that satellite map, but I also figured that some cultures value darkness just as much as electrical lighting. I share no guilty feelings, as I was born in developing-world Vietnam, yet I do think that poverty and a lack of government infrastructure can lead to the last resort of a violent way of life. For example, reports have indicated that many coastal dwellers in Somalia picked up arms and became pirates because they had no other way of earning an income.

But I went not to resolve any of these issues. After all, I was going to the Republic of South Africa, a first-world nation by many measurements and one that has seen unprecedented development in a short amount of time. I also went as an educator, not a policy maker or diplomat.

I came to build relationships with other human beings, hoping that I could bring those back to my own classrooms and share them with students and teachers in my own community. Reading about the South African government’s identifying education as one of the top three priorities for policy reform fueled my interest. After a few weeks at LEAP and learning from John Gilmour’s Bridge Social Network, which seeks to create a virtual global community of change-makers, I felt with shivers that South Africa’s education system will change significantly in the next ten years. LEAP and similar efforts, and the conversations about them, will lead to permanent and systemic change. The relationships that I sought to form will allow me to learn about and from these developments, and maybe to experience them by returning to visit my friends and colleagues.

Teach with Africa places the most value in the least important word in its name. The word “with” signifies that we, the American visitors, were not simply “in” Africa or teaching “for” Africans; and, ideally, we were not there to “teach Africans.” We were collaborators. We were mutual learners and, therefore, mutual teachers.

TWA was careful to build into the fellowship a two-week home-stay in the township for its teachers. To understand the students we met each day in the classroom, we needed to gain a sense of how they lived, ate, slept, and came and went to school. We got to ride the school bus, help cook meals at home, and meet curious family and neighbors in Langa. That I am a southeast Asian provided learning opportunities for both sides, once the disbelieving stares turned into questions about why I was walking with students.

Now that a new academic year has started back in the United States, I am introducing some of the people I met over the summer to my students and larger school community. My students are eager to begin conversations with their peers about their course readings on post-apartheid South Africa. They get to augment their book reading with personal narratives and insights.

I hope to work with TWA and my school to bring teachers and student-teachers from LEAP Schools to my own, so that they can sit in our active classrooms during their summer holiday. Then, I hope to take students from my class to Cape Town at the end of our academic year, so that my students may complete the circle and begin their own.

Pictures from Table Mountain

26 July

On Sunday, 18 July, Kevin, Vernon, and I trekked up Platteklip Gorge to reach the top of Table Mountain.  After weeks of looking at the mountain from all angles, we finally climbed it and saw the magnificent views.  I will let the pictures speak for themselves.

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I’m “part of the problem, and not the solution”

25 July

John Gilmour met with all of the TWA fellows on Thursday, the first of what will be a weekly affair. Although he had met each of us individually and had taken part in some of our workshops, this was the first time we had gathered for casual conversation about the big and small pictures. He opened the discussion by providing the context for intervention work in education, such as the type that LEAP means to achieve.

“I need to see myself as part of the problem,” he began, “and not the solution.”

South Africa had been one of the most successful modern social engineering projects, in which the white minority was able to subjugate a much larger non-white majority. Depending on when one dates the beginning, 1994 could mark the undoing of some 350 years of racial oppression. Since the first landing of Dutch settlers, the native blacks had struggled to keep their land and ways of life. When the English arrived, the hierarchy became more complex. That they brought slaves and laborers from their colony in India further complicated the racial lines. By the time the engineers of apartheid constructed their laws, they defined five official categories of race: white, colored (mixed black and white), Indian, Asian, and black—in descending order. The designation on one’s identification card determined where one could live, work, and travel.

Among the whites, the English and Dutch saw themselves as foes, at least culturally. As a young child growing up, John was taught to hate the Dutch and to think that the English were entitled to ownership of resources and people. He learned and embraced the “oppressor’s perspective.” The education system that shaped his character was one that was (and for the most part still is) “patriarchal in its blood.” At the country’s top private schools, the colonial model still breathes. “Free thinking” is not commonplace, said John, and still only the rich can afford the privileged education.

The statistics that John listed in the meeting provided some sense of the disparity in the educations that whites receive and that which blacks and coloreds do. Two-thirds of all black children drop out before graduating high school. Of the 800,000 total black students that took the maths and science matric exams in 2008, 242 passed. One in four black men is a rapist. Seventy-five percent of blacks know domestic violence as a regular feature of daily life.

To see oneself as the problem and not the solution, for John, means that he needs to ignite systemic change in education. Founding one school to intervene in one community is a start, but it cannot be enough. Altering the entire education system is near impossible, so change is more likely going to come up from the ground. The LEAP model can help other initiatives to start by exporting its pedagogy, methods, and even curricula.

In 2008, of the 242 students who passed the maths and science matric exams, 19 came from LEAP School.

Change on the ground level can be more expedient than that in national policy but, paradoxically, it can also be invisible in one’s lifetime because of its slowness. Toward the end of the meeting, John asked a question to which he did not know the answer and seemingly wanted us outsiders to provide a perspective: “What is the point of entry for real change?”

In thinking about that question since the meeting, I cannot help but think of an individual that I have met and who lives in Langa. He is in his early thirties, which means that as a teenager he witnessed the tumultuous years leading up to Mandela’s election. Because of his intelligence and athletic skills, he was able to attend a good high school and to go on to university and graduate school. Now, he is the sole earner in his family, who still lives in a shanty in Langa. They rely on him and tell him so. He has come to resent them, not because he does not love them, but because he knows that their reliance has immobilized their own ambitions. He no longer relates to his childhood friends; they almost speak different languages. In his mind, he needs to leave his family, the township, and the past, even if it means causing pain and tearing apart the fabric of his family. His success depends on his ability to escape, to move beyond.

If there is one of him, then there must be others. The Pinelands neighborhood surrounding Beullah Lodge, TWA’s home base, is a middle-class one and where black and colored families live alongside white ones. One by one, people will move out of the townships and move into the social and business structures that hold increasingly less room for the apartheid or colonial model. Education, especially early education, provides the vehicle for social change, but the individual actors must decide and act. The answer to John’s question is that the agents of change are moving about in his schools’ hallways, but they are moving at a pace that is comfortable to them and can be visible only to an historian’s eye, which has the privilege of reflection.

Moving from one’s past, especially when one’s family chooses to remain there, carries great risks and even greater consequences. The alienation, often self-imposed, can be insufferable, and the temptation to turn back always nags at the heel. Anton Lembede, an early mentor to Mandela, taught him that the “black inferiority complex” was what prevented blacks from seeing their enslavement to western ideas. He believed that self-image must improve before blacks can initiate successful mass action. Although blacks and colored now live in a different South Africa, that observation is still valid. When the young man from Langa speaks, there is turmoil in his voice, but there is also hope and determination. He knows his role and what he needs to do; I hope that he has the courage to take the next steps.

In his biography, Mandela recounts that while at Fort Hare college, he joined a drama group and performed the role of John Wilkes Booth in a play about Abraham Lincoln. He then notes that he was “the engine of the play’s moral, which was that men who take great risks often suffer great consequences.” He played the part of an assassin and a traitor, but only if one looks at Booth from the perspective of the victors of the American Civil War. The irony is not that Mandela saw a murderer as the agent of change, but that, unlike the character, in his own life he became successful at tearing apart what he saw was an oppressive government.

What’s In a Book?

21 July

Part I: Books for the World

LEAP’s Learning Center employs immigrants from all over Africa, offering them a chance to develop their English skills and to train for job interviews. Most of these immigrants were engineers, teachers, and scientists in their home country, but without the language skills they cannot get a job in South Africa. (For more on the LC, please see my blog from 25 June, “Changes from the Ground Up.”) One of the LC’s employees, “Papa” Chris, an energetic and neatly-dressed man from Burundi, manages a program called Books for the World, under the Rotary International umbrella, which works to bring books into township schools in the Cape Town area. The goal of Books for the World and its partners is to build a library in each township school, reaching especially K-6 students to develop their English language skills.

Chris invited me to a distribution event, where representatives from township schools and other organizations come to the “warehouse” and gather their treasures. This morning, seven primary schools, a church, and a non-profit that works with even more schools all came to receive books. The festive nature of the event had to do with the opening of a container of books that just arrived from Texas, where Rotary gathers, sorts, and ships the books to Cape Town, Johannesburg, and other cities in South Africa.  At LEAP, Books for the World is housed in three side-by-side metal freight containers, and Chris’s office is in one of them. He humorously, but rightfully, boasts the largest office on campus.

By the time I arrived, the unloading of the container was already well underway. Chris’s policy is that, for every box of books that a recipient gets, she must help organize and stack two boxes for future recipients. It is an efficient way for the one-man operation to organize the thousands of books shipped to him once a month or so. Fifteen or so men, women, and children busily sidestepped one another in and out of the container to gather the books that they wanted to keep and to stack those that needed to go into the storage container. Although it is hard for the by-stander to see, the representatives from each school knew exactly what kinds of books they were searching for; and there was some competition for certain boxes, especially for books that teach language at the primary-school levels.

Even though township kids are getting more and more opportunities to attend good secondary schools, like LEAP, where most of their tuition is subsidized, students entering ninth grade often lack English language skills necessary to prepare for the matric exam and to succeed in university. The four years in high school simply are not enough for many township students. It is imperative that the school system reaches students at the primary and elementary levels, where kids are more likely to develop fluency in multiple languages. To this end, programs such as Books for the World and Equal Education seek to bring textbooks, early readers, and teaching resources to township schools.

When it was all said and done, the visitors signed for and drove away with the content of 50-60 boxes, each with 40-50 books. The entire event took less than two hours, minus the clean up afterward.

Part II: Talfalah Primary School

Located on the outskirt of Manenberg Township, Talfalah Primary is the largest in the area, providing instruction to 1036 students this academic year. Currently, Manenberg, a colored township, is suffering a gang war for turf, which made it too dangerous for us to drive through the township even in broad daylight. Instead, the deputy principal, Shahida, drove us around the perimeter and pointed out the highway along which many of Talfalah’s students walk to and from school every day. Many students from schools inside the township have relocated to Talfalah because of the spreading and on-going violence.

We pulled up to a one-story, unassuming building with the small sign bearing the school’s name. On the other side of the main administrative building, the only point of entry for normal foot traffic, laid a huge campus divided into two square courtyards with classrooms surrounding each. In the background, looming above the courtyards and buildings is Table Mountain. Today’s clear and sunny sky allowed for a goose-bumpy view of the mountain.

Talfalah Primary will celebrate its 100^th anniversary in two years, but it had moved from the original location in Claremont to Manenberg about 30 years ago, when apartheid laws dictated that colored people and Muslims had to live in that particular township. In South African parlance, a “colored” is a black and white mix. The school teaches in Afrikaans and English, but students also greet guests with a traditional Arabic blessing. All students are Muslim, although it would be difficult to tell that many of the students are not fully black. I have been confused on many occasions about how anyone these days can designate a skin color with certainty, nevermind why one should do it at all.

On its old campus, Talfalah had a functioning library, but the lack of funding precluded such luxuries when it had to move. The Education Department does not fund school libraries in South Africa. The school hopes to open the doors to its library, with a full-time librarian, in February of next year, although the space already looks like a library and just lacks enough shelving. The current deputy principal, Shahida, is completing a two-year library studies course at the University of Western Cape; she attends class two nights a week in addition to running a school and teaching a full load. When I asked her how she was able to do so much work while also tending to a family, she said, “I have a very compassionate husband who lets me spend time with my books.”

Shahida and the school’s principal, Mogamat (who was present at this morning’s book distribution), walked us to the library’s heavy wooden door, which was in turn protected by a metal gate. The security guard gave us access to a well-lit and clean room with neatly arranged tables in the middle and bookcases along most of its walls. The paint looked as new as some of the polished tables, although most of the furniture was second-hand. Mogamat explained that most of the books in the room were donated by Rotary’s Books for the World program, and the school is expecting to get more before the library opens. Currently, Shahida and Mogamat are looking for ways to procure more bookcases to make aisles in the middle of the room.

Taking a couple of spiraled volumes from a shelf, Shahida excitedly pointed to the teacher’s resources that were sorely lacking before the books arrived. Teachers here often graduate with few resources with which to enter a classroom. They are told what to teach, but not how to teach it; nor are they provided with ideas and the how-tos of developing a lesson plan, managing a class, and writing an assignment. The two volumes of Texas Teacher’s Edition, for math and literature, contain a treasure trove of materials. “We only learn about ways to teach reading now, in the books,” said Shahida, pointing to a illustrated lesson in the literature edition. “Before, we had to figure out on our own.” The book to which she pointed (pictured) would cost 1000 Rand to purchase in Cape Town, and it came from LEAP’s Books for the World via Rotary at no cost to the school.

Talfalah’s 26 teachers are not the only ones who benefit from the teacher’s resources currently at the library, even before it opens. Some 20 teachers from other township schools also use the library’s volumes. Once opened, the library will serve as a learning resources center for all schools in the area that need one, and Talfalah will hold monthly educational workshops for teachers. The idea is to share the treasures in the books.

Service learning idea:

Any American school can join in this effort to bring learning and teaching resources to schools like Talfalah. The dots are already there; they simply need to be connected. I have contacted two branches of Rotary that have sent books to LEAP and will propose a partnership with the Omprakash in the Classroom program. Schools can conduct book drives, raise funds under Omprakash’s non-profit status to ship the books to Texas, and Rotary can send more precisely targeted texts to book distribution centers such as the LEAP School.

To find out more or contribute your own ideas, please contact me at Steve@omprakash.org.

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“Marriage is a problem that is needed.”

19 July

Standing at about five-feet-ten, Nombulela walks with a slight limp and a side-to-side sway. Her broad smile highlights the remaining four upper front teeth and bare gums, and causes her eyes to squint behind a pair of thin glasses. In her sixty years of life, she saw almost the entirety of the apartheid era in South Africa and has seen the country move out of it, especially those living in the townships. A mother to four children, one of whom lost his life in a shooting, and grandmother of six; a former and divorced housewife; a business woman; and an entrepreneur: Nombulela embodies the tenacity and ingenuity of the disenfranchised.

She owns and operates the bed-and-breakfast that Jamie, another TWA fellow, and I are staying in for our home-stay in Langa, the oldest township in Cape Town. The word “township” carries quite a few stigmas and causes a range of reactions, depending on listener’s skin color. For most foreigners, the township is a place of interest, where one might sneak a snapshot or two without looking intrusive or impolite. The poverty, captured in iconic shanties and garbage-laden streets, can be hypnotic. For white South Africans, the entrance to townships can be a demarcation one crosses only to visit a specific site or to attend an event—such as to have a meal and watch a soccer match at the wildly popular Mzoli’s Restaurant in Gugulethu (not far from Mzoli’s was where Amy Biehl was murdered in 1993)—but not a place that one would simply drive through or stop in. Especially after dark, townships become dangerous to those who do not live there.

Langa, named after the Xhosa chief Langalibalele, was established in 1923 to separate black South Africans from the whites by isolating them in designated areas outside of the city centers. Movement between Langa and Pinelands, its closest white urban area, is restricted by a complicated system of intertwining streets, railways, and the seemingly endless fences. (On a recent run, Heather and I lost ourselves in conversation, failed to make a turn to stay inside Pinelands limits, and started to head toward Langa. By the time we realized where we were, we had to retrace every step to get back inside city limits even though the street we need to be on was on the other side of a barbed-wire fence.) When the apartheid laws took their effect in 1948, passage in and out of townships became more difficult, and within the townships were disputes between various ethnic groups and types of migrant workers. Toward the end of apartheid, when the white government feared that it would soon lose power to the rising African National Congress (ANC) party, led by Nelson Mandela, it helped to fuel violent battles inside the townships between different political and ethnic groups vying for control. The township war of the early 1990s served as a justification for the government that blacks cannot be trusted with political powers, as they would simply resort to killing one another and taking revenge on the whites. Because of much suppression of information by the police and government at the time, a lot of history was lost or reshaped, and the parts of the truth surfaced only years later in the 1998 report released by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. All sides were justifiably blamed for atrocities of various kinds.

Today, townships still hold much of the black African population that lives around the major cities. Like any overcrowded housing projects, townships have gang and petty crime problems. “Outsiders” need escorts after dark and, in some areas, in daylight. Before sending the fellows into Langa, TWA and LEAP administrators took the precautions of finding the right homes for each visitor, and meeting the needs of those who opted not to stay in the township. When Jamie and I took the school bus home with the LEAP students, two of them escorted us to our new home because we had arrived after dark on Sunday night and were not certain where the bed-and-breakfast was located from the bus stop. Even though we have been treated only kindly by our neighbors, who probably could not help but look at the tall caucasian and his short Asian friend walking around with high school-aged students, we use common sense and keep on the alert when traveling on foot.

I had read in U.S. newspapers about bed-and-breakfasts in townships, especially the ones on Soweto that were to host many of the Dutch World Cup fans, but the articles gave no images of what these places looked like. Nombulela’s property has a shoe-box design: rectangular, much deeper and than wide, and reflects various stages of adding-on. When she first arrived with her family, the six of them lived in what is now the dining room and a small part of the kitchen, a space of about 12 feet by 12 feet, the size of a bedroom in the United States. (In the picture with Jamie in the doorway, the end of the couch in the foreground and where Jamie is standing mark the old house.) Now the old room has extended forward toward the street by twice the original size, including a living room and covered car patio. Going back from the dining room is the widened kitchen, another bedroom, and a door leading to the outdoor back, where laundry is hung and there is an unused outhouse. Adjacent to the living and dining rooms and kitchen are three more bedrooms, in addition to the master in the far back. The four-bedroom complex takes up surprisingly little space. Nombulela occupies one room and rents out two of the others.

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On our second night at the home, after a long Monday at work, Jamie and I were treated to a home-cooked dinner. We were staying at a bed-and-breakfast-and-dinner. As hoped for, Nombulela made a traditional African meal of pap (similar to grits) with chicken and gravy. She patiently slowed down each step of the recipe so that I could take mental measurements of the ingredients, as she only measured by her eyes and the feel of her hands. We sat and ate dinner together and got past the small talk quickly. She was shocked to hear that in the United States there are poor white people who do not have their own homes, that there are homeless shelters and soup kitchens, and that there is a wealth gap that is growing even as we spoke.

She told us about growing up in a family of eleven kids, whose parents could not afford schooling for all of them. As a result, Nombulela completed sixth grade and stopped attending school to help around the house. As a black woman without an education, her options were limited, and she fell into a marriage at 20 and became a housewife. Eleven years later her husband divorced her and left her and the children with almost nothing. After she appealed to the magistrate in Cape Town, the judgment dictated that he would pay 20 Rand per child each month for child support. The letter also spelled out many other requirements as his responsibilities, which he eventually ignored, except he did pay the child support. Nombulela has kept the letter and shown it to her children once they were old enough to understand. She promised to show it to us during our stay as well.

While paying child support, the former husband also showered the four children with gifts to provoke Nombulela, and the plan worked. Although without a formal education, Nombulela was street smart and had good business instincts. She started her own home-grown ginger beer (a non-alcoholic soft drink) business and devised the best available business plan. She told her kids that they had to use the money their father gave them to purchase the ginger beer and resell it. On a given day, she assigned each child a strategic spot in the neighborhood and allotted to each a case of ginger root beer. Their task was to enjoy each bottle slowly and to entice walkers-by on a warm day. When asked by the thirsty strangers, they were to direct them to the source. Within two years she earned enough money to deem the laborious process of producing ginger beer not worth the profit.

She closed down the ginger beer factory and opened a coat shop. Through some arrangement, she was able to purchase a package of 100 coats at a time, in which were a few that she could sell at high enough prices to make an outright profit on the whole batch. The rest she would augment and try to sell from her home, at other shops, or anywhere else that would allow them. After a few years and with all of her children graduated from school, Nombulela “retired” in 2005. She instructed that her children, who were then adults, had to make their own living. They could be her neighbors and eat as many meals at her table as they would like, but they must get their own homes. Her three children and their families all live in their own homes across the street.

In 2007, two years into retirement, she felt the bug bite and opened the bed-and-breakfast, her third entrepreneurial venture. Although she does not need a substantial income, she appreciates cooking for people in her home and talking with them. In telling her story, she said, she heals. In hearing other people’s story, she also heals through sympathy. While we were cooking dinner together, she kept interrupting her story by asking about my family’s. At one point, she looked at me with understanding eyes and said of my mother: “She’s strong. She’s suffered a lot.”

Nombulela is a strong woman. She has willed her success and has endured life’s hardships as a single mother. She never remarried, even though her former husband is struggling with his fourth wife. I did not need to ask her reasons why before she leaned back and offered, “My marriage was a problem that is needed.”

“Without family, what have you got?” she went on. “I have beautiful kids, adult children, and I have beautiful grandchildren. I have my family.”