The Warehouse community praying for me on my final day there. Can't figure out how to rotate it.

Signing off

Friends,

It has been a month now since I returned from a summer in Cape Town. I am happy to report that my time there ended very well; I was able to offer some helpful comments to the Warehouse about their micro-economic development program, WorkSpring, and was also able to spend some great quality time with friends before getting on the plane for Memphis.

As I enter my final year at Covenant College, I am drawn to several memories from a summer in Cape Town, a place of incredible socio-economic inequality, physical beauty, and political history. These are things that  characterized my experience there and will, almost certainly, continue to inform the way in which I think about my own calling, my life of faith, and my work for the Kingdom. In short:

-A further shaping of my call to serve the poor in the political world. At present, I am pursuing job opportunities in D.C. for next year.

-The persistent, subtle nature of the enemy’s attack on those that follow Jesus. Learning to recognize the lies he whispers, and rebuking them, is of central importance to the life of faith.

-Living as a sign of the Kingdom, regardless of whether it alleviates poverty or raises awareness. We are called to anticipate future shalom by the way that we choose to live.

-Christian community as a place where people are constantly asking questions, not just trading answers.

-The value of disciplined reading.

-The working of righteousness in our hearts as a gift of the Spirit. When planted in our hearts, the Word which has been given to us is then, by His power, worked in us (to paraphrase Luther).

-Deep, deep joy as the witness of victory (recall that Paul tells us we are, in Christ, more than conquerors).

Still other ways in which I grew deeply this summer are not things which one can easily pen. However, both the spoken and unspoken gains from twelve weeks abroad serve as “ebenezers” to the faithfulness of our God. His ongoing work of salvation in my life is a story that I continue to receive in disbelief and in awe.

I thank you for your generosity in giving, in prayer, and in encouragement this summer. What an immense blessing you all are to me.

In the coming season, may the Lord visit you with His compassion, His acceptance, and His heart for Kingdom building here on earth.

Let’s stay in touch, all. I love you guys. Thanks again.

Christian

Au revoir, almost.

It’s hard to believe that seven days from now, I’ll be getting on a plane that’s memphis-bound (via amsterdam).

At some point in the near future I will offer some concluding reflections about my time here in Cape Town. For now, some prayer requests:

-Perseverance. I have a lot of paper-writing and thinking to do over the next week. Pray that I won’t check out or give 50%. I really want to give my final days here everything I’ve got.

-Closure. I’ve met some grand people here in cape town, and it won’t be easy to draw those relationships to a close-because I don’t know when I’ll see them again, and because it’s not easy to keep over email. Pray for the LORD’s blessing over this.

-Helpfulness. The last three months of my life have been focused around learning about the micro-financial landscape in what has turned out to be just one community. Pray for me as I think about my research and how I can analyze it to say a few helpful things to The Warehouse when I give a presentation next Tuesday morning.

-Time with the LORD. The enemy would love for me to justify not spending time in the Word simply because I’m busier than usual. Pray that my time in His presence would continue.

I recently realized this is the first time I’ve offered prayer requests to you guys. My apologies-it just did not occur to me until now. (I’ve been experimenting with various forms of syncretism, that’s probably why. Prayer requests just mean less when you’re trying to achieve total consciousness.)

Learning from the poor

In his 1999 essay, “The Poor and Their Money”, University of Manchester academic Stuart Rutherford challenged modern-day assumptions and paradigms about the financial lives of the poor by defending his thesis that “the poor can save and want to save”:

“…when they do not save it is because of lack of opportunity rather than lack of capacity. During their lives there are many occasions when they need sums of cash greater than they have to hand, and the only reliable way of getting hold of such sums is by finding some way to build them from their savings. They need these lump sums to meet life-cycle needs, to cope with emergencies, and to grasp opportunities to acquire assets or develop businesses…”

With this assumption- that the “microfinancial landscape” in poor communities is a vibrant and necessary one-I have approached my research. So what has it looked like thus far?

1 Survey

This 32-item questionnaire assessses respondents’ present participation in community savings groups. It asks about everything from the size of the group to the total amount saved to the reasons for which the money is saved in the first place.

To intimidate people as little as possible, I walk around the community (two different ones, at present) with a community member I pay to help me gain community access. This person (for one of my communities, the guy in my previous posting) also translates the survey as it is administered verbally.

The survey usually takes about 20 minutes, depending on how shy the respondent is, the number of groups they are participating in (1.5, I would say, on the average), and how busy they are at the time we come upon them.

2 Database

My Excel database records the quantitative aspects of the survey. Meticulous data-entry matters because I will be analyzing it at the end of my time here to sketch the microfinancial landscape of my two target communities in a way that is accurate, insightful, and accessible.

Whoever wrote the Excel program deserves a Nobel Peace Prize or knighthood or something. For amateurs such as myself, it is an easy way to make yourself feel legitimate.

3 Field Notes

The third step of my research process is a qualitative one. While numbers and exact answers help one to compare, make generalizations, and think systematically about the nature of one’s research, each respondent’s feelings, attitude, and experiences concerning savings helps to add nuance and insight to my research-and that is not an un-important thing. As such, I regularly write notes about my time in the field, and then analyze them through both reflection and color-coding, where colors represent different labels, such as “generalizations”, “user’s feeling about savings”, “effects of participation in savings groups”, etc.

If that makes no sense just click on the image below.

4 Mapping

Finally, each survey is numbered. These numbers are pin-pointed on aerial maps I have of each community, so we can see how the “savers” and “non-savers” are distributed throughout the community. In short, this is mainly for fun, since I’ll essentially only be able to talk to a handful of people (relative to the entire population of the communities). In other words, a cluster of “savers” in one area doesn’t mean anything more than that-we can’t assume that that is the community’s hot-spot in general for saving money. We can only assume that those households are themselves homes of people who save money.

(Map 1: Sweet Home Farm, an informal settlement. Map 2: Mannenburg, a so-called “coloured” township. Because of the scaling differences (1:1,000 and 1:3,500, respectively), it is hard to tell how much smaller the dwellings in SHF are-they are shacks, where the dwellings in Mannenburg are largely formal, permanent structures.)

5 The Caveat

As I mentioned in the paragraph above, the size of my surveying sample (ie the number of people I talk to) will not be big enough to reliably represent the nature of the community as a whole. For example: even if it is the case that 85% of the people I talk to (say, 80 people in one of the communities) save money in 2 or more groups, this doesn’t mean that 85% of the community’s population save money in two or more groups. So, while my research will be hopefully yield some insight into the nature of group savings in these communities, it will not be information from which it is possible or “safe” to infer things about the communities as a whole. Needless to say, my conclusions and analyses will need to clearly reflect this reality

6 And then what?

That’s a good question. For now, I’m sticking to the above three steps, working hard to spend as much time in my two communities as possible, talking to locals about their participation in savings groups. That is my only goal in the coming 2-3 weeks.

So you want to learn Xhosa?*

*One of South Africa’s official languages that is spoken by several Warehouse employees, as well as in the informal settlement in which I am conducting research. Prepare to feel ashamed of your mother tongue’s technical simplicity.

Taxi Rides

In Ancient Rome, transportation was largely limited to one’s own two feet. Thousands of years later, in the Western world, cars became popular after the Industrial Revolution, and today many households own at least one sedan or SUV. In many of today’s developing countries, however, technology and per capita income limit the transportation of common folk to something that is neither pre-modern nor post-Industrial Revolution, but somewhere in between. Behold, the taxi microbus.

Holding anywhere from 15 to 20 people and fitted with wheels that, almost always, have spun more kilometers than the vehicle’s original maker would ever have guessed it might, the taxi microbus is the city’s modus operandi for low-income residents commuting to and from work, the grocery store, and other business. It is loud, dirty, and cheap.

Waiting on the roadside, you need only to flick your eyes in the general direction of its careening trajectory to earn a “Hey, my bru, you want taxi? Come, my bru, taxi ride!” from the in-cab fare salesman. You nod slightly, gather your bags and jacket into your chest and squeeze into your allotted portion of seat somewhere, inevitably, in the back of the taxi. Once aboard, you find yourself a participant in the enigmatic, unspoken rules of the taxi ride. Rule #1: no one talks on the taxi, unless someone calls you on your phone. Talking is neither strange nor rude nor peculiar; it is simply and entirely inconceivable. Rule #2: you take up as little square meterage as possible. Pinching your shoulders together is not a good idea; it’s an ethic. Rule #3: you pay your fare of 80 cents or so at an exact moment that is neither specified nor agreed upon. In Pamplona, when the bull turns the corner and, panting with anger and madness, streaks down the dirty street, the bull-runners do not question the bull’s timing. They simply run. So with the taxi fare. You do not know when the paying begins. But when it does, you do not question it. You simply pay. (Note: the bull analogy is also fitting, as the average taxi driver seeks to maintain a cruising speed of 90 km/h. Again, this isn’t daring or defiant or because he’s in a hurry; it is status quo; it is thoughtless; it just is.)

When you are within 300 meters of your destination, you awkwardly yell “driver” from the recesses of the back seat. He does not hear you the first two times, so by the third time you say it you are yelling and from the corner of your eyes you can see the stares of the audience you’ve gained (they are only centimeters from your face, anyways). If you’ve timed it correctly, the driver stops within 50 meters of your drop-off spot, and again you gather your belongings, say excuse me to the overweight woman sitting in front of you with her three children and four grocery bags, and, ducking, trip your way to the sliding door in front. By this time, the entire taxi has seen your behind, and you feel, in a way, violated. Stumbling into the light of day, you feel like Tim Robbins in The Shawshank Redemption or Noah from the Flood. You make an altar to commemorate God’s faithfulness to His people and, straightening up, carry on with your day.

Real life, abroad

Last Friday was a crappy day, for a number of reasons; progress in my research continued to be slow (more on that soon!), it was raining, and I was unable to accomplish several things I had meant to that day. Then, I was caught in the middle of a not easy Skype conversation with Rachel, and was unable to finish it because my ride home was leaving. So, when I got home, I took a crowded taxi to a flashy mall that is nearby to find a place I could use the internet, and to my surprise, found one. The waiter assured me it was free, which was surprising. So, I found a secluded part of the quasi-coffee shop and logged onto Skype, to call Rachel back, and to call my sister, Lily (with whom I’ve been trying to talk for literally 5 weeks). My internet browser then informed me that the free internet was free for a grand total of 10 minutes. I stared blankly at the screen for a moment, attempted said communication (to little avail), shut the lid, and went to this little place I had heard about that is, ostensibily, rich in culture, frequented by locals, and quite obscure. It’s called McDonald’s.

I bought a medium Coke, a medium french fry, and found a seat by the windows, watching the rush hour foot traffic and dim winter drizzle of rain from a place of sterility and convenience.

Note: The above pictures are from The Warehouse. The lady in the orange vest is Gilly, my supervisor.
Today marks the end of about five weeks here. I suppose time flying is an indicator of good things. Here are some stories from my life over the past few weeks.

XENOPHOBIA

As many of you know, xenophobic violence broke out in South Africa near the end of May. While such acts were and are reprehensible, the impetus for it is, in a way, understandable: low-income nationals, who, for decades, have struggled against not only poverty, but racial discrimination, relocation, and oppression (under apartheid), have suffered even more with the influx of foreign nationals, who have made the low-skill job market even more competitive by their presence. Yet their emigration makes sense, too; places like the DRC and Zimbabwe are even tougher places in which to work and raise a family. So it was that injustice around the continent eventually engendered injustice here.

When the attacks hit Cape Town, the Warehouse (my host organization) responded quickly, first by housing about 40 of those displaced for a few nights, then by becoming a key distribution center for canned goods, blankets, and medical supplies. Where I could, I pitched in, cleaning, packing, sorting, phone-calling, and staying overnight at the WH a few times.

Two nights into the operation, I went with my friend, Rene, to deliver a truck-full of mattresses-slices of foam about 1/2 inch thick-to the city’s largest and most impoverished informal settlement (slum), Khayelitsha. As we walked into the community center around 9:00 PM, I found a group of about seventy refugees sitting in neat rows of chairs, eagerly awaiting a share of the massive pile of clothes that lay before them all. They were tired, and quiet; there was not conversation or competition, like you might expect of people in need. They only sat facing forward, their necks craning to see when it would be their turn to take an extra sweater, blanket, or button-down.

In retrospect I realized that what I saw that night was a picture of the world. Figuratively speaking, there is no question that there is enough material in the world to clothe the backs of all six billion of us. Neoclassical economics works on the basis that resources are scarce, but they are scarce partly because that pile of clothes belongs to a very small percentage of wealthy people, such as Americans and Europeans. In turn, this lack of possession of and access to things like clothing trap people in a cycle of poverty from which a precious few are able to escape. It is a vicious and devastating thing.

For more on how the blood of many of the world’s poor is on the hands of the West, Google-research the U.S. Farm Bill with the words “agricultural subsidies” in the search field.

RESEARCH

It may go without saying, but getting things done in Africa takes longer. This isn’t a bad thing, but it’s un-American. Being an American, these first few weeks have been challenging in the sense that I’ve had to curb my task-oriented enthusiasm, as it were. On the day to day grind, this has meant spending time just visiting the communities I’ll be studying without pen and paper in hand and ten different objectives in mind. Since I am a “mulungu” (white boy, more or less), it’s not safe for me to do so alone, so it’s been necessary for me to tag along with WH employees who have business in these places. So, in short, the past few weeks have been about laying a foundation of familiarity and relationality (for my sake and for the locals’ sake). This is an important part of doing research ethically; think about what it would feel like for them if some American (white=rich) just sauntered in and started asking in-depth questions about their financial activity. I have to constantly remind myself that because people are people, they need to be treated like people-and not just pieces of data. My uncle, more profoundly, urged me to “be incarnate.” Thanks, Uncle Jeff.

This would be a good time to explain what I am here to do. WorkSpring, a project of The Warehouse, is a business development initiative that seeks to come alongside either small-time or would-be entrepreneurs and offer support, training, and advice. They also want to begin offering finance to these people, since it takes money to make money. Community development theory says that the best way to go about this is to take an “asset-based” approach and find out how these respective communities are already offering finance- particularly savings groups- since many poor people cannot afford institutional banks. My objective is to make a “landscape assessment” of three different communities, seeking to learn the nature of group savings in each. Hopefully what I learn will offer some valuable insights and comparisons.

So what are these communities like? Mannenburg is an so-called “coloured” township that is composed of formal structures (houses), with informal additions added on. (Typically, the composition and structure of housing is a good indicator of the socio-economic state of the community.) People there speak Afrikaans (ahff-rih-kahns), which is a derivative of Dutch. A week and a half ago, I visited there one afternoon with Jonathan and Grant, two WH employees that work with gang members who live in Mann. For about an hour, we walked through the community, making small talk when it was natural, but otherwise just seeing and being seen. The houses there are simple, two-story, and made of cinder-block. Children play freely in the street, and thought three mulungus walking together were comical (I suppose I would, too). I was surprised at the amount of people standing around talking. While this is partly because of unemployment, it’s also because South Africans don’t derive meaning in life from tasks, but from conversation and relationship. What an admirable quality for me to learn from, this intentional lingering about.

Sweet Home Farm, the 2nd community I am studying, is a slum. My first experience here about a week and a half ago was strangely numbing. Maybe that is a sinful defense mechanism of mine-not knowing how to cope with the dire poverty, I close up emotionally and perceptively. As I stepped through the muddy alley-ways, between small and tidy shacks, I was overwhelmed to remember that this type of life throughout the world is much closer to being a norm than it is an exception. After a 45-minute tour, I ducked into a pool-house of sorts and lost a round to my friend, Goodman, with whom I had come. We payed our 2 Rand (25 cents), thanked the owner, and left.

Guguletu is the third community I’ll be studying. Two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to spend five nights in this place, with a precious elderly family with whom The Warehouse is friends. Tata Dom and Mama Mavis, both older than 65, are gentle and happy people. My room was small and comfortable, and the meals we ate were excellent. We spent the night-time hours drinking tea and talking about the country’s history. One night, Tata Dom explained with broken but eloquent English that apartheid was “a heavy burden,” then, motioning but maintaining eye contact, “a yoke on my neck.” Sitting there in his kitchen, I was ashamed of my easy life, and humbled by the deepness of his laugh and his joy.

On a lighter note, Mama Mavis seemed to enjoy listening to what sounded like riotous African gospel music at an inconceivably high volume. Sitting there one afternoon in the dim living room while she read the newspaper and I a book, I felt as if this surely must be a joke. But every time I snuck a glance over at Mama Mavis, the soft tapping of her foot and the smile on her face as she hummed and swayed to the music -obliviously- indicated otherwise. I smiled and returned to my book.
___

I’ll update again this week and talk about my living situation and a few other things. The Lord’s peace and boundless grace until then.

Learning from steinbeck

As I passed through or near the great hives of production—Youngstown, Cleveland, Akron, Toledo, Pontiac, Flint, and later South Bend and Gary—my eyes and mind were battered by the fantastic hugeness and energy of production, a complication that resembles chaos and cannot be. So might one look down on an ant hill and see no method or direction or purpose in the darting hurrying inhabitants. What was so wonderful was that I could come again to a quiet country road, tree-bordered, with fenced fields and cows, could pull up Rocinante beside a lake of clear, clean water and see high overhead the arrows of southing ducks and geese. There Charley could with his delicate exploring nose read his own particular literature on bushes and tree trunks and leave his message there, perhaps as important in endless time as these pen scratches I put down on perishable paper. There in the quiet, with the wind flicking tree branches and distorting the water’s mirror, I cooked improbable dinners in my disposable aluminum pans, made coffee so rich and sturdy it would float a nail, and, sitting on my own back doorsteps, could finally come to think about what I had seen and try to arrange some pattern of thought to accommodate the teeming crowds of my seeing and hearing.
I’ll tell you what it was like. Go to the Ufizzi on Florence, the Louvre in Paris, and you are so crushed with numbers, once the might of greatness, that you go away distressed, with a feeling like constipation. And then when you are alone and remembering, the canvases sort themselves out; some are eliminated by your taste or your limitations, but others stand up clear and clean. Then you can go back to look at one thing untroubled by the shouts of the multitude. After confusion I can go into the Prado in Madrid and pass unseeing the thousand pictures shouting for my attention and I can visit a friend—a not large Greco, San Pablo con un Libro. St. Paul has just closed the book. His finger marks the last page read and on his face are the wonder and will to understand after the book is closed. Maybe understanding is possible only after.

-John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley (pp.108-9)

If we are not careful, I think the conversations and experiences of our lives —even the meekest—crowd together in meaningless traffic. When we do not take ourselves into solitude, these things become like boxes of unsorted family photographs, present in one sense but forgotten in the dusty attic space of the mind.

Entering the quietness of a sanctuary inspires thought about the holy artifacts that fill it.
So with ourselves, entering into solitude consecrates the words and images that live there.
In turn, these small conversations and experiences teach us, and build within us an ever-deeper desire to learn from the grace of the humdrum and the ordinary.

In the madness of the modern world, we need solitude, because pictures do not frame themselves.

TIA

1) Today is my second day at an economic development conference in Pietermaritzburg, SA, about an hour from the coastal city of Durban.

The conference center where we’re, uh, conferencing is a beautiful location. It’s also quite rural.

Today after lunch, we reconvened in our, uh, conference room for another session. Food in our bellies and a mild breeze drafting through open window and door, I struggled to stay awake for the speaker’s message on kingdom business-that is, until a white-coated monkey with a small black face sauntered in the back door behind the speaker (who took no notice) and sat up on his haunches. Chewing on his fingers innocently, he craned his neck outside to his hidden comrades for approval (maybe he lost a bet?)

The speaker droned on about the kingdom. The monkey, who had apparently heard it all before, calmly exited the room. He might as well have had a button down and chinos on.

2) A song that we sang in worship of the Lord, one of the most beautiful I have heard. Click here: Hosanna

This is Africa.