Isibindi
Christian theologian Frederick Beuchner says that the “the place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” But approximately 1000 years ago, in the weeks after Trump was elected, I was paralyzed thinking about how to respond to his election. Despite participation in a march here and there, and some money sent, I still feel that paralysis. The word petrified also seems apt, with its double meaning, a frozen fear. The quote from Beuchner felt useless. I didn’t know where my deep gladness was, or if it mattered in the big scheme of things.
At the Traverse conference this week, I was in conversation with some skilled facilitators. Listening to them reminded me about a best practice for when things are going sideways in a group. You do what it takes to ground yourself in that moment, and then you move toward it, rather than away. “Get real curious,” as my friend John says.
This month there have been a number of horrific stories about the concentration camps for migrant children on the border. I’ve been watching this crisis with my hand over my eyes since my own child was born. It is unbearable. Many people argue that this is not who we are, as Americans. But it is all over our history. We are Sandy Hook, we are Indian schools, we are child slave auctions. I still feel paralyzed by the facts and the images of this crisis. But I’ve had to learn how to find my feet as this whole country has moved sideways. It is time to get curious. I was struck by a venn diagram in adrienne maree brown’s instagram feed that frames it: where you are now being called into service sits at the intersection of your skills and talents and “what breaks your heart most about this world.” Maybe there are ways to act from a place of grief as well as gladness.
I’ve been spending a lot of time in the midst of childhood these days and the recent headlines about ‘children having to care for children’ made me think of the isibindi project I saw in South Africa in 2006. I had traveled to Ilinge, three hours drive on desolate rural roads from Grahamstown, a small college town in the Eastern Cape where I stayed. Here’s how people ended up in Ilinge, in the middle of mountainous nowhere: they were forcibly removed. Instead of moving one whole town to the ‘homelands’ or locations, as they are called by those who live there, the apartheid government chose Ilinge as a place where they would stick anyone who they found particularly troubling. So unlike other townships, the people in Ilinge don’t have a shared history, don’t have any historical relationship to each other, other than that they are all black, and the government displaced them. The neighborhoods of the township are called “Cape Town” or other names, based on where people came from.
Ilinge was where two women, Monica and Heidi, were working when I visited. Monica & Heidi are nuns in a non-canonical Catholic order called the Little Sisters of Jesus. Their best way to serve God is to live out Jesus’ call to serve the poor. They work in pairs and live in the community they serve. Monica and Heidi explained that their work in Ilinge was to ‘give children a childhood.’ At the time, I didn’t really understand what this meant, or why it was so important. Of all the relief work they could be doing, that seemed nice, but a little odd.
In 2006, Ilinge was streaming with children, many of whom are orphans due to AIDS. There is a whole generation of children in South Africa who were being raised by grannies or other relatives or by no one at all because their parents were dying or had died of AIDS. Even if there were access to ARVs (anti-retroviral drugs) for everyone in Ilinge, you have to be able to eat and have clean water to take them properly. Most of these folks use outhouses, share a single bed with the whole family, and live on one pension until that elderly person dies. There’s no industry in Ilinge. There is nothing except rows and rows of houses, and mountains. And graves.
Monica and Heidi worked to build real relationships with the children and families who lived there. The kids told them they wanted to have a place where they could dance, play games, and have a meal, in that order. They made a place to provide food but focused afterword on creating a space for the children to play. They sent food home with kids if they had it to send, so kids could eat at home with their families. They also helped to recruit and train staff for an isibindi — a now national project where childcare workers to go into homes, to support the ailing adult who lives with the children, and to make sure the kids are clean and fed and going to school. Most of all, to make sure that the children don’t have to care for other children. Isibindi means courage. Monica and Heidi were there to bring money and facilitation to the needs already identified by community leaders, to use their privilege as outsiders to make the projects happen.
In the interview that follows, Pepper talks about the ensorcellment of capitalism. The main illusion of this ensorcellment in my daily life is the Internet, the spell that we continue to cast again and again. Social media in particular gives the illusion of relationship. But in the end, all it is good at is transaction. I never feel empowered when I ‘connect’ that way. In adrienne maree brown’s book Emergent Strategy, a sense of awe and wonder is a signal of relationship and interconnectedness. Emergence, “the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of simple interactions,” emphasizes “critical connections over critical mass.” Depth over breadth. This is the problem with Facebook as a way to feed the hunger to connect and to take action. It is a thin glamour because it requires so little of us. As much as we may pretend otherwise, are simply spectators.
Living in relationship with my daughter has made me fiercely protective of her. I want the best for her, as a modern parent is told we should. But I have also discovered a deeper feeling, a yearning that keeps arising: a justicelove. Becoming a parent has closed me in, focused me laser-tight on my own life and on this single relationship. Yet it has also blown me open to realize that the power of this relationship is broader than just my family. Its fierce love can energize me to act for others. Call it isibindi.
