Life this week

EXAMS
At South African universities (which they call 'varsity' instead of 'college') all your big papers and tests are graded by an external examiner from outside the university along with your professor. It seems unfair to me, because usually your professor will know what you have not covered in the class and won't mark you down if you don't include that info, but a stranger won't know what has and hasn't been covered.

Anyway, the point is that as I turned in my take-home exam essays yesterday I noticed that Pierre de Vos, a prof from another university who I cited extensively in my essays, was actually my external examiner. Awkward.


MOVIES
Brown Sugar has got to be one of the absolute dopest movies ever. Besides Sanaa Lathan being my favorite actress, that movie has an infinite number of hilarious line and a perfect story. Plus, how can you go wrong with Mos Def?


MUSIC
How come everything Wyclef does is just so good? I'm not exactly down with him being all "I'm from Haiti, so I've automatically got street cred" and all that. But apart from anything about reputation or cockiness, his songs consistently rock...in a hip hop sort of way, of course.


REFUGEES
The church has decided to limit the capacity of the shelter at 81 people. But there are still 10,000 people on the streets in Cape Town alone. The Anglican church leaders for South Africa have decided to follow the government's lead in saying that no more more non-government shelters should be set up, because reintegration should be the strategy now. But reintegration is a goal not a strategy. How are you going to magically reintegrate people back into communities when the whole reason that they had to leave their homes in the first place is because their lives were threatened by their neighbors??? People need homes, jobs, paperwork to return to their home countries, etc. The only way to help them get that is to allow them a safe place to stay at night and during the day to actively offer them tools to get jobs, homes, paperwork etc so that they can reintegrate....or relocate. Shelters are a stepping stone, and cutting them out of the process will not help.

I felt so bad last night because there was a torrential downpour that lasted for hours. It was harder than any rain that Seattle has ever seen. The refugees who are still sleeping on the streets and in the government's tent city must have been miserable. And this morning the refugees who were waiting in line outside Home Affairs so that they could get paperwork were attacked by locals. Knowledge, a man who has been staying at our shelter, along with several other guys were beat up. One was stabbed. And all this right in front of a government building.

What is also scary is the prevalence of the hatred towards the immigrants. My mother volunteers at a low-income school during the week and one of the little boys there, who is usually sweet and well-behaved, was walking around talking about how all the "dirty immigrants need to get out of South Africa." The boy is probably from Khayelitsha or one of the townships close by, and that is probably what everyone around him has been saying. How do you deal with that though? How do you convince people that the immigrants are not taking their jobs, and that they shouldn't hate them? There doesn't seem to be any answers. If I were an immigrant and I couldn't afford to live anywhere but in the townships, I would leave the country. I don't want them to have to do that, because often they are in South Africa because their home country is impoverished, war-torn, or run by an oppressive dictator. But I also don't think that their neighborhoods are going to be safe any time this year. Maybe life under Mugabe in Zimbabwe will be better than risking being murdered in South Africa.

Interestingly, I suddenly don't count as an immigrant any more. My SA citizenship was just confirmed. Of course I'm not the type of immigrant that anyone has animosity to anyway. It's all about the Africans.




"So what's the difference between rap and hip hop? It's simple. It's like saying you love somebody and being in love with somebody. Rap is only a word."
-Brown Sugar