The Wesley Journal: Community

This is a cross-post from the online version of The Wesley Journal, Wesley Theological Seminary's student publication. I'm proud of how this issue turned out and encourage you to give it a read, regardless of whether you go to Wesley or not-- it's a wonderful reflection on how we build community, even while dealing with conflicts in the church and the world.  

When we were drafting themes for issues of the Journal, I settled on community for the March issue mostly because it would be election season for the Student Council. I wanted to give students the space to voice both affirmations of and frustrations with community on campus, knowing that we're stronger when we can speak truthfully to each other, with genuine concern about our life together. We need that space and the Journal seemed like the ideal place to offer it. 

And then, General Conference happened. The Special Called Session of the General Conference of the United Methodist Church met in St. Louis on February 23rd through 26th to discuss the UMC's stance on human sexuality, a topic that has been dividing us for years. While some hoped that this General Conference would provide unity, unity was not what happened. In the wake of General Conference, for United Methodists at least, community has taken on new meaning and new urgency. You'll see some of that in this issue. 

There was a beautiful moment at General Conference. You'll see it in the background of some of the pages of this issue and you can watch it here. During the opening day of worship, after hours without any mention of the LGBTQIA+ community, those most impacted by the General Conference's decision, someone requested prayer, and a circle formed on the floor, holding hands and dancing with the rainbow flag while the band sang, "I need you to survive." Friends, we need one another to survive. My hope is that in this issue, you'll find stories and thoughtful reflection to help guide you as you consider what community, here at Wesley and anywhere else you may go, means to you.

In this issue:

From the Student Council: a message from the Student Council Executive Board about community in the wake of General Conference

So, What Do We Know?: A reflection on General Conference by Marcus Matthews, Bishop-in-Residence for Wesley and Executive Secretary for the Council of Bishops of the United Methodist Church

Justice Corner: A Conflagration of Community by Lenora Whitecotton

The Gift of Community by Duchanna Brown
Intentional Community by Ellie Crain
A Commuter's Perspective by Teer Hardy
Community/Comunidad by Alfredo Santiago
Mental Health in Community by Laurel Capesius and Jesse St. Clair
Community in Exile by Nate Choung

You can read the entire Journal in PDF form by clicking here.

We'd also like to recommend that if you haven't already read it that you spend some time with the New York Times' piece "We Are Not Going Anywhere: Progressive Methodists Vow to Fight Ban on Gay Clergy" which features Wesley's own Chet Jechura, who has written for the Journal in the past.

As we move forward, throughout this school year and throughout whatever lies ahead for the United Methodist Church and Christianity in the United States and the world, remember Paul's words of encouragement in Philippians 1:6: "I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ." Let's go do the work ahead of us, surrounded and cared for by the community we build.

Jo Schonewolf
Editor, Wesley Journal
March 21st, 2019

Reflections Upon Recovery from a Large Christian Conference Event

It’s just that I don’t believe like that anymore.

I’m sitting in a room with five thousand other adult leaders and youth. The lights are spinning, the music surrounds us, and the youth beside me leans over and shouts, “I can’t hear myself think!” I nod and shout back, “That’s the point!”

I mean that in the kindest way possible. Part of the point of the atmosphere that you find at these big Christian conferences is focus your attention on the stage, to make it difficult to be engaged with anything other than the worship being put up by the people in front of you. Now, my youth group doesn’t stand at events like this. They don’t clap or dance or sing along. Then again, they’re not on their phones, so that’s something. But are they engaged? Are they wrapped up in the atmosphere? Do they get caught up in the emotion of these songs, of the performers, of the speakers?

No. No, they don’t. From our conversations, they take away reasoned lessons from what they glean from the speakers and appreciate, on a music theory level, what the band is doing on stage. They choose their breakout sessions based on the things they don’t want to do (Christian yoga) and they sit awkwardly through the altar call as hundreds of other youth swarm forward.

And I don’t understand that.

When I was their age, I was caught up in this hook, line, and sinker. Worship music was were my soul felt alive. Didn’t matter if it was contemporary or choral or instrumental. If it was music for Jesus, it was music I liked, music that I wanted to make. If I had been a teenager at this conference, I would have been one of the ones in the first couple of rows, right up by the stage, singing along with every song whether I knew the words or not. I would have looked up and to the left to stop myself from crying when the songs or the message stirred up an excess of emotions in me and I certainly would have gone up for the altar call to rededicate my life to Christ.

Because, see, worship was the only place that it was okay for me to have emotions when I was a teenager. I didn’t want to be branded as one of those moody teenage girls, or a dramatic teenage girl, or a hyper teenage girl, and so I sat on the edges of social life and read my books and did my school work. There were always more books to read and I enjoyed my time with them much more than I enjoyed my time with other people.

Part of that, too, was born out of fear. I was deeply afraid of being noticed by a man who wasn’t my future husband. I wore baggy t-shirts and loose-fitting jeans and my hair up in a bun always. I didn’t wear makeup or style my hair with any kind of regularity until I was in my late twenties. I avoided being alone with people of the opposite gender. I certainly didn’t laugh at boys’ jokes or smile or flirt or do anything to lead anyone on. God had a husband planned for me and that husband would see through the walls that I had put up to the beautiful person I truly was but until then, I needed to be a part of the background. Otherwise, bad things would happen.

But in worship, I could feel anything I wanted to feel with repercussions. I could bring my tears before the Lord. I could bring joy. I could bring my brain in and pick apart sermons and absorb scripture and ponder the hymn texts as I sang. It was the one place that I could bring my full self, was supposed to bring my full self. It was supposed to be safe. And I was usually in the choir, so that robe kept my chastity in place.

Now, I don’t want to paint too pure of a picture of myself. I wasn’t just the quiet book girl in oversized clothes. I had friends from the variety of organizations I was in and I was a leader and a force to be reckoned with when I needed to be. Somewhere along the way, female empowerment made its way to me, probably because I come from a line of strong women. I was busy filling up a resume that would easily get me into college, overachieving all over the place. And there were times that I was a bossy, petulant little shit and times that I was overly dramatic and times that my wanna-be goth self took over, flaking black polish coating fingernails kept short. Still, I never really knew what to do with my feelings, except when I was given permission to feel them.

So of course I went up for an altar call when I was in 6th grade. It was the first one I’d been around for, and I’m a people pleaser and a rule follower, so I went up to the front and I prayed that sinner’s prayer and I won my ticket to evangelical heaven. People acted like it was a big thing but I just felt like I was doing what I was supposed to. At the first big youth event I went to with an altar call, I went up again to rededicate my life to Jesus. No idea what any of that meant, but it seemed like the thing to do.

Because these people who were talking about salvation, they were so passionate about it. They had these testimonies that moved your heart. They told me stories and I loved stories. We sang songs that meant something and I loved songs. It was the one place I was allowed to feel emotion and I got swept up in it. And because I felt something, it had to mean something. It had to mean something.

Fast forward a decade and a half and I’m sitting with my arms crossed and my feet up on the railing of the bleachers in front of us, mimicking my youth, because I am actively trying not to feel what I used to feel. My forearms are a shield over my heart. “You’re not going to get me this time,” I tell the music and the passion and the emotionalism. “I know what I know and you can’t change that.” It’s so hard to be anchored in this moment, so hard to stop myself from being whirled around and caught up in a storm of emotional manipulation and theology and hermeneutics that I don’t believe in anymore. The teenager in me wants to be blown away again. I’m Dorothy. Take me to Oz.

But no. We’re not doing this. I haven’t worked through years of undoing what the purity movement did to me just to buy back into this shame. I haven’t studied and read and struggled with my Bible for someone else to force-feed me a questionable reading. I have not wrestled with God for someone to throw away my hard-won understanding.

Because, see, the kingdom of God is something we know already. We’ve seen it in Jesus. We have seen him live a redeemed life, a life that cared for the lost and the least, that challenged those who had more than they could ever need, that brought new life in every sense of the word, that ended because of the evils of empire and human hatred, but that refused to stay defeated. Jesus, in rising from the dead and breathing the Spirit on the disciples, spread this new and redeemed life throughout the world, giving us all the power to do as he did: to live life abundantly now and to free others to do the same. We do not have to wait until the next life for this, don’t have to pray a prayer and win a ticket. We know how to do this now.

And the glory of God is not something that we have to wait until we die to see. It’s here. It’s here in this good creation (God, I have to believe that creation was good, is good), in all the beauty and wonder that surround us. It’s here in the joy of our good relationships with each other, in the peace that we find in our lives, in the sustaining we receive when we think that it would be better to just be done. You have to train your eyes to see it, sometimes, but the glory of God radiates all around us. We live in such a beautiful world with such beautiful people. We don’t have to wait for the next one.

The pain of this world, though, the evils of this world, they can’t just be blamed on my personal sin. It’s not enough for me to turn away from hurting others and myself, though that is something that I have to do, daily. It’s not enough for me to achieve personal salvation. Jesus wasn’t nailed to the cross because I wore a low-cut shirt and he didn’t rise from the dead so I could learn to be more modest. It is so much bigger than all of that. There is so much more to do. We Christians are the hands and feet of Christ. We are part of how God is working in the world. I don’t want to stop the growth of God’s freedom in this world because I’m too busy worrying about sexual purity to love my neighbor or feed the hungry or give clean water to the thirsty or welcome the stranger or give clothes and shelter to those who need it or visit those who are sick or in prison. And the evils of this world, the things that cause hatred and hunger and poverty, these things are systemic and insidious and it will take all of us to deal with them, no matter what prayers you’ve prayed or what you believe.

So no, I’m not going to believe like this. I’m not going to sing only songs that are about me and God. I’m not going to pray prayers that don’t go beyond myself. I’m not going to participate in spectacle that’s only designed to save souls. I’m not going to let myself get swept up in praise if praise only stays in this auditorium. I know why I did before. I know now how the deep parts of me, the compounded trauma and shame, gravitated to the safe place they saw, the place of belonging they imagined. I get it. But I don’t believe like this anymore.

On the way out of the auditorium, ears still ringing, I explained to my youth why the music was so loud. “They want you to be swept up in the moment, to really be present here,” I explained. “It’s too much,” he said. I nodded and thought about it. “We can get you earplugs for tomorrow, if you want,” I offered. “Nah,” he said. “I’ll be okay.”

And somehow, I think he will.

Because he’s not me. He isn’t where I was. He doesn’t find his deepest longings met in worship that doesn’t, that can’t, extend beyond the sanctuary. He’s not going to buy the house built on sand.

That’s good.

God knows there’ll be floods. 

A Love Letter

Mostly, I just want you to know that you are loved and capable of loving.

You are loved and capable of loving.

I want you to be able to rest in that, to know that no matter what you do or don't do, you are loved. You didn't have to earn it, you don't have to maintain it, you won't have to struggle to keep it. You are loved not because someone else is insecure or because someone else is seeking to make you the answer to a problem they need to solve for themselves or because someone without a center has made you the most valuable thing in their life. You are loved because you are you. You are good. You are worthy. You are dear. You matter so much. You are loved.

I know it's hard to accept that. All the wisdom in the world says that nothing comes from nothing, that nothing is truly free, that there is always some give and take, and I guess that might be true most of the time. We all do things that frustrate other people, things that push other people away or at least keep them at a distance, things that hurt other people, and maybe we feel like that disqualifies us from just being loved. Or maybe we're aware of the brokenness in other people and the holes in their hearts that they're trying to fill and we know that it's not us who should meet those needs. We're pretty sure that love of every kind comes with strings attached, preconditions, expectations. We're just being prudent by being dubious about accepting love.

But you are loved, truly, deeply, and unshakably, and I pray that you can see that, and trust it. Feel it. Let it be your security, your resting place. Let it be the foundation on which you build your life, the wellspring from which everything you do flows. You are loved and capable of loving. Love isn't desperate or grasping. Love doesn't take away from you. Love adds. Love is secure and giving. And you have that. You can do that.

I want love to surround you, to show up in your life in a million different ways. I want the love woven into the good world around us to make itself obvious to you, to carry you along day by day. I want the love that grows in all your relationships of every kind to be vibrant and true, despite the brokenness in yourself and in others, and I want it to bring you life. I want you to have work that enables you to love, work that either gives back into the world or gives you the funds you need to do that on your own, in your own way. God, I want you to be happy. I want things to go well. I want time to slip by without any new tragedies or horrors. I want it to be abundantly clear that love is above us and below us and in front of us and behind us and around us and in us. I want love to buoy you up, to give you the strength and the hope and the courage to heal and to grow and to give. I want you to know that you are loved and capable of loving.

I know it's hard, in this time and in every time, to believe this about ourselves and others. I know. I know we have more work in front of us than we will ever be able to complete. I know the reality of the suffering and sorrow all around us, the damage that's been done to the good world. I know the damage that we've sustained. But it's important to me that we try to believe this, that we hold this as true, that we embrace it and allow it to make us more than what we've been so that we can do the work and heal the damage. You are loved and capable of loving, always and everywhere. You are loved and capable of loving. You are loved and capable of loving.

I just wanted you to know that.

Baptism

These are the questions that were asked at my baptism:

These are not easy questions.

Do you renounce the spiritual forces of wickedness, reject the evil powers of this world, and repent of your sin? 

Have you looked at your heart and considered the darkness there? Have you spent time with your spirit and seen the parts of it that you'd rather no one else saw? Have you thought back through your history and reckoned with the pain that you have brought to others, intentionally and unintentionally? Because that's the work that you need to do in order to say that you're renouncing the spiritual forces of wickedness and rejecting the evil powers of this world and repenting of your sin. You have to know and acknowledge that racism exists and that you are racist and you have to decide that you don't want to be that way anymore. You have to know and acknowledge that sexism exists and that you've been effected by it and you have to reject it. You have to know and acknowledge that homophobia exists and that you've participated in it and you have to choose to fight against it. You have to know and acknowledge all the ways that you fear people who are different from you in mind, body, and spirit, and you have to investigate all the ways that fear has harmed others and you have to put it away from yourself. You have to recognize that we have idolized money and comfort and that we have welcomed the evil, dehumanizing powers of this world into our hearts in order to obtain and maintain our money and our comfort.

Greed. Hate. Apathy. Fear. Grasping desire. Do you renounce them?

Racism. Sexism. Homophobia. Transphobia. Ableism. Ageism. Colorism. Xenophobia. Nationalism. Consumerism. Do you reject them?

And do you repent?

That's the hard one, the one that requires work from you. You probably know much of the personal pain you've caused in your life, how deep it goes, how much you meant it. Have you acknowledged it? Have you apologized for it? Have you endeavored to become someone who would never do something like that again? Have you tried to understand those who you've hurt? Have you tried to make amends? Have you done the most that you can to heal what you've broken?

And as you've done your soul-searching, you've probably become aware that the evil powers of this world have had a hold on you and that you need to turn away from them. Are you grieved by the times that you made a black joke, or a Mexican joke, or a Jewish joke? Do you mourn the times someone said something horrible and you stayed silent? Is your heart broken by the wrongs you overlooked? Are you deeply troubled by the way you've used and misused the world around you, the people, the environment? Do you actively choose to live life differently, to speak kindly and to speak out, to consume carefully and gently?

Do you, in fact, repent of your sins?

Because until you've done these things, until you have looked at the evil in your heart and the evil in the world and the evil in your history and said, "This should not be," and reject it from your heart and guard against it in your world and mourn it in your history, you carry evil with you and big or small, it will break us all into pieces. Before you claim to follow Christ, you have to hear in your spirit and enact in your life the first sermon he ever preached: Repent.

Otherwise, you will find yourself standing on stolen land, blocking the way of a peacemaker with all of the evil in your heart on your face for everyone to see. Or worse, your children will.

Do you accept the freedom and power God gives you to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves? 

Do you think we can do this? Do you think that we can actually fight this? Do you think that we can make society better for everyone who lives in it, not just for the wealthy or those in power? Do you think that we can learn to undo the damage we've done to the planet? Do you think that we can make our homes, schools, places of worship, community spaces, workspaces safe for everyone? Do you think that goodness and kindness and gentleness and love will change anything?

Or do you think that the best thing we can do is look out for us and ours just try to survive this?

I will admit that I have found the continual process of renouncing, rejecting, and repenting to be exhausting and heartbreaking. I have spent so much time and energy digging out the evil in my life that the idea of resisting it in the world around me is more than I can bear. There's too much poverty, too much pain, and too many systems set up to keep people in poverty and pain that resistance seems laughable. We are drowning under the weight of our disregard for our fellow human and our shared world. How can you resist when you can barely breathe?

This is why we need to be given freedom. This is why we need to be given power.

And honestly, at this point, I don't really care where you find freedom and power, as long as it's not in evil, injustice, or oppression. Does being in nature renew your spirit, give you life, make you feel connected to those around you, create a tenderness in your heart that fuels the fire in your protest? That's beautiful. Come join us.

Have you found deep meaning in your encounters with the people around you and the people who life has given the least to? Does joy shared between people bring light to your darkness and energy to your work against injustice? God, I'm so glad. Let's do this.

Do you gather in community with other people who understand the spiritual world the same way you do and do your prayers bring peace to your heart and enliven your soul? Do you sing songs together, or share meaningful words, or remind yourselves of who you are with rituals, and do those things renew you and prepare you for the fight ahead of us? Amen amen, my friend. May we journey together?

Have you realized how bad it's gotten? Are you tired of watching people get hurt? That's more than enough. Be free. Be strong. Come on.

As a Christian, I believe that the God of the Universe came down to Earth and lived and died so that we can be free from the evil that surrounds us. I believe that God is with us still, empowering us to fight for ourselves and to free others. I believe that we have not been abandoned, though it looks like that sometimes. Evil is great, but a light shone into the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it. And so I am free from the things that have bound me, and I will be sustained in this fight, and good will endure while evil exhausts itself.

Professing that is one thing. Accepting it, believing it, bringing it into your heart and allowing it to do the work it needs to do, is another.

Do you confess Jesus Christ as your Savior, put your whole trust in his grace, and promise to serve him as your Lord, in union with the church which Christ has opened to people of all ages, nations, and races? 

Here's the thing: I couldn't care less about the church right now. It is a human organization that has failed us again and again and baptized evil and welcomed it onto the membership roles. For a group of people whose first step together should be repentance, the church is horrible at it. It is awful at accountability. The church allows us to be comfortable and cowardly, to create theological justifications for slavery and sexism and homophobia and war and the prosperity that grows out of them. The church has disgusted me and I'm perpetually one step away from walking out the door and never looking back. The church hurts people and the church is apathetic about that.

The church needs to remember its baptism.

The church needs to answer these questions again.

Because if Jesus is our savior, no one else is.

If Jesus is our Lord, no one else is.

If we put our whole trust in his grace, we cannot put our trust in anything else.

No president, no party, no slogan, is worthy of our trust and our service. Jesus is. Jesus, who told us to love our neighbors and our enemies and ourselves. Jesus, who told us to care for the least of these like our lives depended on it. Jesus, who'd rather be nailed to a cross than take a human life. Jesus, who cared for the poor and the widow and the orphan and the stranger. Jesus is the one we should be following. Jesus is the one who will change us and empower us and through us change and empower others so that the world may know peace. God, it's hard to trust that.

These are not easy questions. Reject, accept, promise. We are asked to do astounding, impossible things in these questions.

But that doesn't mean we should stop answering them.

Showers: Back in America

Cape Town just came out of a drought, but is still very much at risk of running out of water. Signs are everywhere (though not as prevalent at the V&A Waterfront or at the airport) telling people at the sink to use hand sanitizer instead of washing their hands and people in the toilets to let it mellow.

The shower where we stayed instructed us on how to do the 5 minute "Power Shower": you use the water for two minutes to rinse the dirt off, then you shut it off and lather up for a minute, then you use the water for two minutes to rinse soap off. Despite being someone who takes 15 minute showers minimum, I found it surprisingly effective.

I did the Power Shower the whole time we were in Cape Town, though it might have been 6 minutes after I took a swim in the ocean. After we left Cape Town, we spent more than a day in transport, in airplanes and airports, and most of us joked about how what we wanted most of all was to be in our own houses taking an hour-long shower in our own baths. It's a delight to "wash the people off of you," as a friend of mine puts it. A long shower is usually what's in order after having to rinse off in airport bathrooms and layer on the deodorant in order to be amenable to the abundance of humans that surround you during air travel. All that stress and recirculated air washes down the drain when you shower.

Or I thought it would, anyway. I had thought that a shower would wash away whatever stress and frustration remained from this trip and leave me ready for a new semester and the resumption of my life in DC, but standing in the shower, all I could do was look at the water spiraling down the drain and think, "Do I really need this?"

I don't intentionally walk into experiences thinking that they'll change me anymore. I had enough of that with retreats and weekends away which all left me the same, just more tired. I walked into this trip already exhausted with low expectations. I've travelled abroad before. I'm aware of how to suck the marrow out of life. I know what it's like to encounter another culture and listen instead of talk. I know how to process what I'm seeing, how to be challenged and enlivened at the same time. I've done this all enough to be something close to efficient at it. I've been on newness overload and so even profound new encounters have become a bit blasé. I feel like my friends who went to Hawaii on their honeymoon. By the end of the first week, their emotional reaction to the beauty around them was, "Oh great. Another gorgeous waterfall."

I learned so much in South Africa. There will be future posts about the scientific work that's being done at Sterkfontein and the surrounding sites, as well as with the shipwrecks off the coast of Cape Town. I'll likely reference what I've learned about nationwide forgiveness and the continued struggle against systems of oppression for the next few years of my life. I can already see the broad strokes outline of my experience taking shape as my brain does the background processing that it needs to do. I had the immersion experience I was expected by others to have.

But I didn't expect to come back much changed at all. I didn't expect to have any new discomfort at my privileges. I saw giraffes and stayed on the beach, for Pete's sake. How was this trip supposed to challenge me, except through the lens of history, with a dash of poverty tourism? Apartheid may have fallen in the 90s, but there are still large numbers of black and colored South Africans are living in unacceptable conditions in the townships apartheid created and impoverished. The question that faces the country today, especially as it aims to move itself out of the corrupt presidency of Jacob Zuma, is how to rightly govern while combating the continuing economic and land-based apartheid, without going the way of Zimbabwe. There is much to learn from all of this, of course, but I can't for the life of me understand how it impacted me so much.

I love showers and my part of the US isn't in drought. Why am I begrudging myself a shower? I need my space away from other people from time to time, otherwise I'm miserable. Why does my bedroom, my house suddenly feel much too big? I can get in my car and go anywhere I like, eat anything I like, and yet I've stayed home, away from the grocery store, because I am not ready for the overwhelming experience of the cereal aisle. Despite all my efforts in this life, I have not done enough to earn the luxury that I live in, the luxury that is, of course, slowly killing the planet and more quickly killing some of the people on it.

I wasn't prepared to come back to normal. I wasn't prepared to begin making the decisions about how I want to live again. After two weeks of going where I'm told and having the luxury of throwing around critical remarks when we made a stop I thought was unnecessary, I'm now faced with all the unnecessary things I have chosen for myself. The urge to sell everything I've ever owned and make a simple living on a farm somewhere in order to make as little environmental impact as possible is palpable. That and the urge to take a deep dive into political activism.

We have a beautiful world full of beautiful people who think up such beautiful things.

We have a dying world full of miserable people who think up deeply hurtful things.

These are both true.

The challenge of life, then, knowing that beauty and pain are laid out before us and that we do not get to choose the beauty and the pain we are born with, is to always seek beauty wherever it lives and always resist misery wherever it grows. The challenge of travel is, of course, that it makes us more aware of the misery in our own lives that we have grown comfortable with, the wells that we have drawn dry without a chance of replenishment.

So, the question that comes next, I guess, is what we should do about that.

White Guilt: Cape Town

Cape Town is beautiful. Cape Town is vibrant. Cape Town is by the ocean and gives me life.

Cape Town was built by slaves. 

Cape Town was built by enslaved people who were imported into the cape by people who looked like me. They didn't enslave the local population because they needed them for trade and local knowledge. They instead shipped human beings like so much cargo in to do their hard labor for them. Then, as the city established itself as a refueling hub, they became a part of the global economy that begat the Transatlantic Slave Trade. And as the years passed on and legalized slavery fell out of vogue, governments made of people who looked like me made laws that didn't pay people for their labor and subjected them to poor housing in segregated parts of town and forced them into the most difficult jobs as if they weren't human beings with human needs. Human trafficking today, modern-day slavery, happens under our noses and fuels our global economy and we white people turn our eyes away just as people who look like us always have.

The white guilt is strong on this trip, in case that wasn't apparent.

But you, fellow white person, can walk with me through the Slave Lodge and stand in front of story after story of what it's like to be an enslaved person, to give birth to children who will never know anything but slavery, to live a life of torture without the hope of freedom. And you can hear the stories of those whose hearts were broken when their homes were bulldozed by the apartheid government because their multicultural and multiracial neighborhood was too successful. And you can walk through Soweto or the Apartheid Museum and hear the stories of the children who died because they weren't going to stay silent in the face of the oppression they faced. You can sit and listen to the stories of those who lived through the struggle and the extraordinary lengths that people went through to gain basic equality. You can do all of these things and feel a sense of sorrow sinking into your bones for wrongs that you yourself will never be able to fix, never be able to make reparations for, even though the trauma and economic impact echo through the generations.

But let me tell you that your white guilt is not enough. My white guilt is not enough. If we let it paralyze us, we only hurt the situation more.

Because we are not powerless. We cannot change the past, this is true, but we can work to uncover it and to tell it better. This is the work that the team uncovering the São José Paquete Africa wreck is doing, so that we might better understand what those who were enslaved went through, and more fully mourn their loses. We can remember the pain that was brought to people and vow to never let it happen again. We can learn from the past to imagine a brighter future, as the District 6 Museum does. And most of all, we can put our money where our guilt is. We can invest in black businesses. We can support every educational opportunity that gives black children an advantage. We can speak out against latent racism. We can celebrate black culture. And while we're at it, we can look at the other wrongs in our history and see what responses they require from us. Better schools, better scholarships, better opportunities should around for the descendants of those who suffered because of the greed of others. 

Others who looked like me.

God, there is so much work to do.

Sometimes, Tourism is Okay: South Africa Days 6 and 7

My overarching rule for travel, under which all the previous rules fall, is: Don't be a tourist. Don't go where the tourists go, don't act like tourists act, don't buy what the tourists buy. Do your research and find local places you can eat at and buy from and support. Sure, when in Paris, go to the Champs de Mars, see the Eiffel Tower, take a picture or two. But don't let that be your only experience of Paris, hopping on and off a tour bus and buying kitsch souvenirs from vendors who set themselves up in places so that they can take advantage of loud rich lost Americans. I have found that if you travel as the tourists do, you miss everything important about being in another country.

But sometimes, it's good to be a tourist.

The Kwalata Game Lodge is on a Big 5 (elephant, lion, buffalo, rhino, leopard) game reserve where you stay in thatched roof cabins, participate in group activities, and go on game drives, which are basically what you think of when you think of a safari. We went on three of them, including one that left around 6:15 in the morning, so that we could see with our own eyes (and binoculars and cameras) free-ranging animals that in America you can only see in the zoo.

We saw cheetahs and ostrich and wildebeest and giraffes and hippos and a turtle and got caught in wicked beautiful storm, but the question is, why are we doing this astoundingly touristy things?

Well, Kwalata lodge was founded by a local teacher who took his kids out into the bush to give them a new experience and then grew from there. Kwalata helps support the local artist who owns this shop:

It supports this preschool:

They call traffic lights robots here. It's one of my favorite things. 

It supports a greenhouse and pottery shop:

It supports this dance troupe, which we saw before we ate lunch at this local restaurant, also supported by the game lodge:

And it marries together tourism with preservation, so that we can see all of these animals:

Ostrich: bigger than you think.

Giraffe: bigger than you think.

Zebra: bigger than you think.

Wildebeest: bigger than you think, but also definitely big enough to kill Mufasa.

Impala: not a car. 

Hippo: not what you want for Christmas. This one was angry at us. 

Find the Pumbaa and her babies! 

No animals, because there was a wicked storm.

There is a complicated relationship between the tourism industry and the local economy, always. If you've never thought about that connection in the US, I recommend The Florida Project for a wonderful story well told focusing around the children living in extended stay hotels outside of Disney. But South Africa has the infrastructure to bring in tourists and here at Kwalata, at least, that's feeding back into the local economy and also enabling students to imagine a different future than what they might imagine in the townships. And if they can go away and be successful, they might come back and help where they came from live better.

If tourism helps that, I guess I can be a tourist.