"Out of Nothingness, Comes Possibilities"

Aaron, this is my second In-Country writing assignment. :)

After spending only six days and five night in the township of Guguletu, the overall takeaway has been extremely valuable and life changing.  This experience like each one before it will continue to mean different things as I reflect further and try to make sense of everything.  Before I left to go to Gugs, I was trying to hide my nerves.  I was nervous to be the minority and unaware of how I would deal with the living conditions.  More than anything, most of the locals in Cape Town would look puzzled when I told them we were staying in Guguletu for a week.  For those who go to Guguletu to do volunteer work or to try to experience the culture, it is rare for them to immerse themselves completely and stay in the homes in Guguletu.  Therefore, I knew we were getting a slice more of the real experience by becoming a part of the Guguletu community by living in their homes, eating our meals with them and spending our entire day absorbed in their community.

My expectations were blurry before we arrived to Guguletu, but soon whichever expectations I had were exceeded, by the instant feeling of community that was represented and offered to us.  The feeling of community became deeper as the week went on; the people of Gugs were really set on having us see how their community works.

One of my biggest struggles throughout my time in Guguletu was trying to understand the difference in how their community processes things.  For example, one of the most emotional days for me was the day of hospice visits.  It was hard for me to understand that in their culture, it was not intrusive to show hospice patients dying from HIV and AIDS.  They viewed it as an educational experience so we could really view what the face of HIV and AIDS looks like.  My first instinct was to view it as intrusive and taking advantage of the hospice patients.  When I returned to the car crying hysterically, it was hard for the people of Guguletu who were with us to understand.  They have already experienced losing loved ones from HIV and AIDS and seeing a person that is sick from HIV and AIDS; something that I have never seen.  While death is still a very sad experience for the community, it is much more common.  I had to become understanding of their culture and take off my preconceived lens of hospice patients, death and the HIV and AIDS pandemic.

The amount that I learned from others during my time in Guguletu was invaluable.  I could go on for day about things that I learned from each individual that I developed a relationship with.  The most significant thing that I learned from my home stay family of Akhona and Noxie was the value of family and friends.  Akhona and Noxie both dealt with struggles in tragically losing loved ones in their family but stayed so strong from inner strength and strength given by those loved friends and families that supported them.  I have always had a strong value on friends and family, but during my home stay experience it just reinstalled how important those relationships are for the major times of hardship in ones life.

The forms of leadership in the townships were inspiring to observe.  There is leadership in the youth group at church that uses their free time to volunteer in their community and talk about the hard issues that their community faces.  By opening up those difficult discussions and leading by example, the youth group is making a difference by trying to rewrite the stereotypes of teen pregnancy and youth gang activity that plague the community.  There is also leadership in the children of Guguletu that attend school everyday in hopes of a better education and life for the future.  I viewed things such as starting difficult conversations and attending school as forms of leadership because any positive difference being made in the township was a glimmer of hope for a better tomorrow.

On the last day of our stay, Reverend Spiwo had a closing conversation with us to ask questions and reflect on our time in Guguletu.  He identified the largest problem of the community as mindset.  For so long black and coloured Africans were treated horribly and viewed as not equal due to apartheid.  They were forced out of their homes and adopted this township way of life in order to survive and since then it has become born and bred into their family lines.  This mindset of not being equal and or having less worth infects the community of Guguletu and other townships.  Reverend Spiwo stated that, “The biggest challenge in leadership is getting people to believe”.  He needs to have the community of Guguletu believe that they can live a better life and receive a better education.  But without having a firm set of believers that can pass on this vision, the vision moves much slower and gets tangled up in different sections of the community.

I have personally experienced this in my own leadership roles throughout my lifetime.  When others do not believe in your vision or do not see it as their own, you find yourself at a standstill.  The hard part is figuring out how to overcome the standstill and move forward.  I become very discouraged in leadership roles during standstills because it makes me question my own ability to lead and frustrates me when I cannot find a way to make others believe.  I did learn and observe some methods that work to create the belief such as: breaking the problems into smaller categories and focusing efforts in that region.  Also, utilizing resources was a major method of leadership that the community used on a regular basis.  I hope to exercise some of these methods within my own context of leadership positions.

Reverend Spiwo also said something that I found to apply to many things in life.  He explained, “Out of nothingness, comes possibilities”, while referring to the possibilities for the citizens of Guguletu to grow and better their community.  It made me realize that sometimes in life when you are not handed all of the tools to create or move forward to your destination it is not a hindrance, instead it is an opportunity: an opportunity to grow, to build, to learn, to question, to analyze and to make your own way through.  I sometimes find that I easily procrastinate or give up when I am not given all of the right tools in life to complete something because the idea of reinventing a way to accomplish a task can lead to failure.  But by fearing failure, you will never realize your potential or the opportunities that can come out of what you once saw as ‘nothingness’.  Overall, this experience just really refreshed my outlook on life and how I want to live mine.  I know that this experience will continue to have lasting effects in my journey in leadership and life.