July 6th - Exploring South Africa

July 6th, 2008.

The conference doesn’t officially begin until tomorrow, though some elements were initiated today. First, we had to register for the conference (and we each received an adorable pair of hand knit booties/socks from the South African Girl Guides in our conference bags) and second, we could attend an orientation in the afternoon to get better acquainted with the proceedings of the conference.

So….we had the morning free! This gave us a chance to see a little bit of the country we were going to be living in for the week. Deborah, Susie, Chris, Enidd and myself, with a pair of delegates from Brazil, took the opportunity to visit a township on the outskirts for Johannesburg called Soweto.

Soweto is an acronym for South Western Township. Our driver and tour guide shared with us that Soweto is one of the densest areas around the city – 3.5 million people live in an area of 100 kilometers squared. To give you another way of looking at it, this means that each square kilometer has about 350 people living in it.

The experience was very eye opening and humbling. For the most part, we don’t often get the chance to see how drastic the differences are between peoples’ living situations in this world first hand. For this reason, comparing the homes and amenities available to the various groups of residents in Soweto (there are 11 squatter camps/slums, various social housing projects provided by the government over the years as well as more well-to-do areas) to what I know in Canada was at times shocking.

For example, many homes still do not have electricity. For this reason, given that it is the winter (and has been quite cold these past couple of days) you will find many people standing outside of their homes against the sunny side of their homes because this is where they can absorb the most heat. Also, there is no refrigeration without electricity, so there are open meat markets/butchers in some of the neighbourhoods.

Next, the homes do not have running water either so people must share wells/water pumps located at select location within their areas to get their water. They get their water by carrying large jugs to transport what they need back to their household. Also, without running water, there are no toilets in the homes. For this reason, when you get a bird’s eye view of a community, you will immediately notice that the landscape is sparsely littered with either blue or green portable toilets. However, the number of portable toilets is not what we would consider proportional for the number of users. There are far less than we would think was adequate.

On this tour we also had the chance to visit the street where Nelson Mandela lived and Desmond Tutu currently lives, as well as learn about the injustice of the apartheid era at the Hector Pieterson Museum of Soweto.

For all you young ladies and girls, I think it is important to say a couple of words about Hector Pieterson and my experience at the museum. Hector was a 13-year old student who was shot by police in a student protest on June 16, 1976. This event initiated what I learned to be called the Soweto Uprising. Hector and his peers from one of the many secondary schools in Soweto were marching against the use of Afrikaans (a language imposed on them by the Afrikaaner government) in their school system. Afrikaans is derived from Dutch and was very different than the native spoken languages and the English that students were already expected to know. It also represented the societal minority that was oppressing the black people, who are the strong majority in South Africa.

What strikes me most was how recent the history of South Africa is. Apartheid was only abolished in 1994. For me, there is something that is much more dramatic about history that exists within our living memories than a history that occurred in an era to which we can no longer relate. Many of the girls in our organization were born in the 1990s. We are not too far away from the struggles the South African people had to overcome.

I would like to thank Susie for sharing her pictures with us so that you will be able to see a little of what we are experiencing in South Africa.