The transition from Tanzania to South Africa is a a remarkable one. The lack of infrastructure throughout the nation in Tanzania is shocking, and these were highlighted as I entered South Africa, experiencing a modern airport, let alone reliable electricity, drinkable water, and God-send of God-sends, my first hot water in three weeks!
Rich and Mary Nodar met me at the Cape Town airport to pick me up, and we headed toward Masiphumalele. I felt like I had clearly left a 3rd world developing nation and entered a 1st world country where typical infrastructure and development reaches all parts of the country, and is fully accessible, or so I had thought.
This is country where certain portions of the country has experienced 1st world development for sometime, largely the white population, but the fall of apartheid and the arrival of a free country and democracy for all is still only 15 years old. In some ways, this made entering the township even more striking. While the laws for equal protection and access for all regardless of race have changed, the reality on the ground is that there are still many vestiges leftover from the apartheid system, and the most clear example of this is the townships.
The are three general descriptions of races here in South Africa: white, colored, and black. The colored population describes all the non-white races of any kind other than the white and the tribal black population. Both the colored and the black population are the people who were forcibly evicted from their homes and moved into camps called “townships”, and then apartheid laws were passed limiting their movement, rights and humanity. The black population was restricted even more than the colored populations
While the laws have been changed, and some reparations given, the reality is that the colored and black population don’t have the jobs and opportunities to move back to the homes and neighborhoods the once lived.
The reality of township living in Masiphumalele is awful and ins some ways beyond belief that they even exist. The extreme poverty is similar to the worst I saw in Tanzania, but in some ways even more troubling as it is surrounded by development, wealth and opportunity all around it. It just seems to make even less sense than what I saw in Tanzania.
The township is an enclave on makeshift, dirt floor shacks, built with whatever throw away trash an buildings materials people can find. Some have electricity, very few having running water. As many shacks as possible are crammed into each small lot and those people pay some small rental fee to the plot owner. Masiphumalele is walled in and has one entrance, which is one way Apartheid tried to control the people living with the township. No one knows for sure, but the population is estimated somewhere between 20-40,000! The living conditions are unbelievably bad.
It’s a moving experience to drive through the township with Mary and Rich, who have spent so much time here over the last five years working in the library tutoring children, going to the school to test hearing and fit children with hearing aids, working in the medical clinic and HIV/AIDS orphanage, and worshiping at St. Matthew’s Anglican Chapel. Their time here clearly means so much to the children and adults of the township, the result of which is, no matter what back alley we are driving through, in areas where I feel a little unsafe, you hear jubilant cries of “Dr Rich! Mary! You are here!”
I feel like, yet again, I am the beneficiary of traveling a path that has been blazed so widely by those who have come before me. Rich and Mary have created a web of trust and love that I think is able to support a lot of work that can help not only improve the life and on-the-ground reality of the people of Masiphumalele, but also can improve the spiritual life and outlook of myself and others they will bring, through being allowed deep inside the lives of those living in this poverty and unjust situation.
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