Day 63: There's a truth here you can't find at home

It smells like home today. This café has become my home away from home, the comfortable white walls and the cakes cooking in the kitchen. There is a familial feel, Shepherd my brother and the women in the back my mother and sister. Riaan, the owner and designer, is father today, baking carrot cake and cheesecake in the kitchen. I’m sitting in the den, in the back, with the smell of Something Delicious burning in the oven. Riaan asks if something’s burning, how long has it been in there, and I feel like I’m home. I’m here. I love this place. The sounds of coffee-making and the world at my fingertips because of the rare Wi-Fi.

I came early this morning because I had a date. Shepherd arrived at 7:57 to let me in, and I found a seat in the back, opened up my computer, plugged in my headphones and made the call. The picture was clear. That face I have seen only once before since my arrival. That face I love seeing more than any other. For more than two hours we talked, easy conversation from two separate worlds. Neither wavelengths of love nor of the wireless connection affected by the distance between us. It was good to hear that voice again. It’s always good to hear that voice again – whether I heard it yesterday, two minutes ago, or more than a month ago. His is my favorite voice, the one voice I want to hear every day for the rest of my life.

I woke up to clouds – the first experience I’ve had with them since I got here. The sky is gray today, a cloudy marble I live in. There’s even a chance of rain.

I’m in South Africa, in the coffee shop down the road, the smell of carrot cake cooking in the oven, the day begun with Reston’s voice and face, other familiar voices making up the background noise, Carmen here for company and a cool sheet of comfortable gray filtering out the yellow light. There are rarely better days than this.

I read an e-mail from my baby sister. Fourteen and cracking out of her incubated egg. My mother has done well to keep her warm, a warmth that has seeped through the pores and into my sister’s heart. What a good girl she is – the neat beginning of an incredible person. In the time I’ve been here, she has undergone an evolution; she has taken the first step across the threshold that links childhood and almost-adulthood. It’s both sad and invigorating; heartbreaking and thrilling; beautiful and exciting.

The days are dwindling quickly. Today there are 70, soon there will be ten.

It was one of the best decisions I have ever made to come to South Africa. I am one of the five percent of exchange students from America who went somewhere not in Europe. I’ll be bold and say that I am 95 percent better off because of it. It has not been a holiday (yes, school has been entirely too easy to call educational, but it hasn’t been some European resort). I am both eager to stay and ready to come home. There is both too much to learn and too much to deal with here. My time has not been frosted with the sweet negligence of how The Other Side lives. In the U.S. – in almost any Western nation – life is a great and pretty cake. And while many of the problems in the Global South are problems inherent in a capitalistic Global North, they are swept quietly under the mat like little dirty crumbs. Perhaps the problem (or the good fortune) is that there are few enough of them that they can be swept under the mat.

That isn’t the case here. Life in even a developing nation – one doing a lot better than the surrounding rest – isn’t caked in frosting; for many it’s caked in dirt. I confront, every day, the reality of homeless and begging people. A constant fear and paranoia walk with me no matter where I go. Black people have political equality but the white man still controls the wealth. Death and disease, rape and crime – these are the potent and abundant realities of the developing and non-developed world. The problems – inherent and growing – are baffling. I am not a Westerner and Superior Therefore, but we don’t face these problems in the same quantity, nor, I would venture to say, in the same quality. The problems in Africa (and I realize that they are to each country its own) are not the sole result of decolonization – if once I believed that, I don’t so much anymore. The problems are far more complex than that. The issue is not just race anymore. The issue is colorless corruption. It doesn’t matter who might have or who could have planted that seed. It’s a matter of finding a solution. Living here, in so much closer proximity to those countries historically and presently marred by genocide, terror, civil and international war, and political corruption, my vision of the end is tarnished by blood in the lenses. There is an anchor of hopelessness that prevents the rest of the world from making any decisive and consequential moves – because the fear is that it will be inconsequential after all. After living here on this continent and talking with the people, I am beginning to believe too that politically whatever can be done is useless, hopeless, ineffective.

But that’s only one dimension. There are people not inflicting but suffering from the evils of the few powerful and corrupt men. Though I have given up on those few men, I will never give up on the people. I have no faith in the state and little faith in the development of these nations. In too many places the state is the very source or at least the very fuel of conflict, oppression and genocide. Now that I know first-hand and second-hand what I once only knew third-hand, I am that much more willing to fight. I’m that much more willing to learn, to understand. And I am that much more willing to devote my life to it.