I’ve had an amazing weekend away! It’s been a wonderful weekend connecting with dear friends that I know, and celebrating God’s diversity together! Friday night was spent with some wonderful friends, Wayne and Suzi who work for OAM Sports Academy, and are originally from Northern Ireland (where I am visiting in just 2 short weeks!!). Together, we relaxed, we connected, we laughed, and we celebrated. Then I went to stay with my friend Desire and her Afrikaans family for the rest of the weekend. Together, Des and I had a great time seeing the sights of George, learning and laughing at my Afrikaans and just enjoying each others company.
I’m still trying to wrap my head around somethings here though. I think one of the things I am still really struggling to understand is diversity and reconciliation. See, South Africa is a country FULL of both diversity and reconciliation, but it goes so much deeper than what people think. It’s not just about whites and blacks and coloureds and everything in between. Not many see the Enligh and Boer frustrations. Few are aware of the Khoi people and their alienation from their lands by the Xhosa and the Zulu. Diversity is built into the very fabric of this country, and with that diversity comes bitterness, anger, love, reconciliation, peace, justice and every emotion in between. I’m having a hard time packaging it all together. But I am not sure that I am supposed to yet.
For school while I am here, I need to complete an ethnography. An ethnography is a specific description of a people or culture. But what do I do with the rainbow nation?! There are so many cultures and people groups. And I feel like even though this is my 5th or 6th time here, I am still struggling to wrap my brain around even one. But like so many other things – everything and everyone is so interconnected. This country is no longer just about the whites and the blacks, and what was done and what wasn’t done. Apartheid isn’t so simple anymore. The ANC isn’t so simple. The understanding of democracy isn’t so simple. Afrikaaners aren’t so simple, nor are the English, the Boers, the Zulus, the Xhosas, the Khois, the Coloureds, the Indians, and everyone else in between – the people like Wayne and Suzi who’ve given up their life back in NI to come here and work.
There’s a term in anthropology and sociology called “participant observation”. It means when you are no longer just observing a culture from the outside, but you are actually participating in the culture, as part of it, in order to understand it from within. My time here is supposed to be as a participant observer, but I’m struggling to wrap my brain around what I am observing. I am seeing a mix of people and culture and food and smells and first world and third world. I am seeing hurt, and anger, and love, and confusion, and frustration, and different colored skin. And in all of these things, I really am seeing God. I am seeing the faces of him in Desire, my Afrikaaner friend who wants to understand and appreciate her country of South Africa while trying to grasp what God’s plan for her is. I see him in the face of the black man who came to my car window asking for money to buy food. I see him in the home of Wayne and Suzi and their desire to serve the children of the townships and their need to help the students see their own value. I see it in the Life Academy students who are here and are so excited to do simple things like sweeping for their friends and family who are coming on a team of 33 any second now to stay and work for 2 weeks.
This country is most definitely one of diversity and beauty and people. I’m stretching my cultural muscles here to try and understand things. To grasp what God is doing on the macro level of South Africa, as well as where is moving in the lives of individual people. I’m being challenged in so many ways to look at what I know to be true…or what I thought to be true, and reimagine it. I’m being asked to look at things from a different perspective. But no matter what perspective I see from – I see God. I have to remember that God is in the diversity…and that’s a good place to be.