Many Sides to the Story

Happy Thanksgiving!!! Better late than never, right? Sorry, with our volunteer retreat I haven’t had much access to internet recently. Hopefully you all enjoyed your holiday with family and lots of pie! (lots and lots of pie)

For Thanksgiving all of the volunteers and I met up in Pietermaritzburg to make our own turkey dinner and process what we’ve learned so far. But of course, it’s South Africa and not everything’s available that you’d normally expect at the table. We improvised with Brazilian turkeys and butternut squash pie but it all turned out AMAZING.

Even better was the chance to catch up with all the other volunteers. As we’re spread out all over the country each of us has the privilege of witnessing a completely unique side of South Africa. In a country so diverse in its backgrounds, languages, and cultures there’s no end to what can be learned. Between the lot of us we’re learning Afrikaans, Sesotho, Tswana, Xhosa, and Zulu—enough to start our own language school when we get back haha. And that’s not even half of the languages here!

Hearing stories from the rural areas, crèches (preschools), homeless shelters, urban cities, black communities, rich, AIDS home visit nurses, white farmers, after school programs, mosques, poor, coloured neighborhoods, Indian communities, and traditional songs has been an incredible reminder that no story has only one side. It’s too easy to generalize about people and places based on the basic information we hear. But it’s never just as easy as that. The generalizations and labels rob complexities in identity and oftentimes hide the truth beneath the surface.

There’s power in the other sides to the story. It’s a celebration of diversity, of the many ways to be express our humanity through culture. To me, it’s a testament also to how much there is to learn in the world. When we ignore other ways of life we miss out on the beauty and wisdom they have to offer.

Coming into the retreat, I was most excited about getting a chance to relax a bit and eat a fantastic Thanksgiving dinner. But hearing the many other sides to the story that is South Africa from other volunteers proved far more interesting and worthwhile than any amount of pie. )

)

If you’re interested in TED Talks, there’s an especially interesting one from a Nigerian female author title something along the lines of “The Other Story.” It’s definitely worth checking out (along with all the other fantastic TED talks out there).