Author: Jeanne and Randy

After writing  the Road Ahead Part 1, The Washington Post published an article by Amanda Ripley, This element is critical to human flourishing — yet missing from the news (Opinion | Most news stories are grim. Here’s the first step toward fixing that. – The Washington Post).

The element she’s referring to is Hope, not hope as mere wishing, but as a formula: Hope = Goals + Road Map + Willpower. Hope is described not as an emotion, but a muscle that strengthens with exercise. Various people and organizations are teaching the formula and measuring increases in well-being that result from hope’s application.

All this sounds great until you read some of the comments associated with the article. The commentors are what Ms. Ripley describes in the article as people being resistant to hope and remaining skeptical. Perhaps it’s the voice of daring to experience hope, but rarely seeing projects delivered as expected.

What’s only mentioned once in the article, and not in the comments is agency — that realization that your actions, singularly or with others, can have an effect on the world.

Look at how hope and agency mesh: What do you want to change (goals)? How are you going to go about it (road map)? Are you going to do it or not (willpower)? Who can you get to help you with this change (agency)?

The medieval cathedral builders started with hope and acted with agency. (Fun Fact: in one 100-year period, the medieval church builders in Europe quarried more stone than all of Ancient Egypt. That’s agency!)

Whatever the circumstances, you can always decide to improve them. There can always be hope = goals + road map + willpower. And hope plus agency makes for a better world.

South Africa has all these good things and more:

Drinkable water;

Shakespeare in the Park (it was really good!);

A sense of humor in home names;

Clever designs for fire hydrants (but what do the dogs do?);

The Big Hole in Kimberley (truly a case of lemonade from lemons);

A tree blessed by the Archbishop is still growing;

A high Human Development Index (a summary measure of achievement in key dimensions of human development: a long and healthy life, being knowledgeable and having a decent standard of living), as reported by the United Nations;

The 39^th largest economy in the world;

The most UNESCO world heritage sites;

And plenty of potential.

There are lots of people who care a lot about each other and the environment. South Africa sits on 2 oceans and is acutely aware of plastics pollution of global waters and the impacts of climate change.

South Africa has all these good things and more. The also have the world’s highest inequality (as measured by the GINI coefficient), the world’s highest reported unemployment rate, gender-based violence, government corruption, and more (or less, depending on how you define it).

How do you take all the good you see and apply it to address the not-as-good-as-we-need? Planners and community development projects would say that you:

• Collaborate on a vision of the future;
• Get buy-in from as many stakeholders as possible;
• Design a plan to implement that vision;
• Create the means to fulfill the plan; and
• Work the plan.

This looks so easy and logical on paper, but each step is an enormous effort. Imagine the endless debates over every detail. Imagine the staggering cost estimates in time, labor, and money needed. Imagine the national consensus needed. It may be more likely that you’ll get wear out, burn out, and for some, get out, creating a brain drain just when brains are most needed.

Is the alternative to muddle through hoping someone else will fix things for you? Is it hunkering down in survival mode until conditions improve? Or is one answer to treat the vision and plan like building the great gothic cathedrals in medieval times? Those who started the construction knew they wouldn’t live long enough to see the completed building. Yet they began, bearing all the costs with no expectation of receiving any benefits from a structure they would never use.

When building a gothic cathedral, the first thing you do is dig deep into the ground to establish a foundation strong enough to support the huge edifice. Maybe that’s the way for South Africa. What foundation is needed so that future generations can carry on the work?  How can you incorporate inspiration and motivation into each phase of the plan so that every generation keeps moving forward? It’s the work of more than a lifetime — but what better way to spend a life?

Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there!
He wasn’t there again today,
Oh how I wish he’d go away!

(From Antigonish, a poem by the American educator and poet, William Hughes Mearns)

We went to visit something that wasn’t there.

It’s a place known for its absence — The Big Hole, the site of the Kimberley diamond mines in South Africa. Once diamonds were discovered here, tens of thousands of treasure-seekers flooded into this remote place in a remote continent in the late 1800s. The Big Hole has the distinction (if you can call it that) of being the largest man-made hole in the world dug with manual labor — picks and shovels, with dirt removed one bucketful at a time for each 30-foot by 30-foot claim. Over 49.5 million tons of earth were removed, and over 14.5 million carats of diamonds were pulled from the ground. This is the land of Cecil John Rhodes, who consolidated all the claims and founded the De Beers Group.

Diamonds are not rare, but diamonds are valuable. They are valuable because people say they are. Buyers are willing to pay for clarity, cut, colour, and carat size. And mined diamonds are much more expensive than lab grown diamonds, even though the lab diamonds are chemically and structurally identical to mined diamonds. Why is that? Because people believe they are more valuable, despite their being indistinguishable from lab diamonds without specialized analytical equipment.

That got us to thinking:  How do you decide what’s valuable? Do you take other people’s word for it? Is Bitcoin, something with no physical existence valuable? How valuable?

And it’s not just about money – it’s also about time.  How we “spend” our time is a reflection of what we value.  An economist will say something’s value is what someone else is willing to pay for it, either in time or money – it’s the demand part of supply and demand.

But demand is a state of mind. You decide if you’re hungry enough to pay $10 for a bad hamburger. You decide if driving that fancy car will give you so much joy that it’s worth $$$$$$. You decide to spend your time doing X instead of Y, because X somehow has more value to you.

The real question is: how do we decide what’s valuable to us, as individuals, as families, as communities, and as civic society. How do we find the diamonds in our lives, rather than just the holes?

The Bottom of the Economy

Not only does South Africa have a high unemployment rate among its citizens, but it also has a large immigrant population.  In the Western Cape (Cape Town area), many of these are economic refugees from Zimbabwe, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi, and some of the other sub-Saharan countries that have a lot of conflict and social unrest.  Also, the Western Cape attracts migrants from the Eastern Cape (the area around Durbin).  Many of these migrants and immigrants find themselves unemployed – and often unemployable.

And many of these are reduced to begging, which can be divided into four categories.

First, are the “unionized” beggars who collaborate to stake out individual territories in the city. Walk unsuspectingly across the invisible boundary, and someone (usually female) rushes over to plead for a handout. Their routine is very polished, with all the anticipated “no” answers rebutted. On occasion they have a rent-a-baby to elicit more sympathy (or pity). The nagging is incessant because it works — sometimes. However, as soon as you leave their fief, they stop, and head back to find their next mark.

Next are the men (they’re always men, gender-based violence is widespread) standing at traffic lights with cardboard signs and cups for any coins that might come their way. This is usually where the White beggars are seen (White unemployment is around 8% in South Africa).

Third, there are those huddled beneath an old cloth that once might have been a blanket.  Often they are next to a shop’s doorway. They may not even have a cup for coins or cash. All of them look in pretty bad shape.

The last group are the transients. Every night, they search all the trash cans for

anything to eat, or drink, or sell, or wear. These are the ones with 2 pair of pants on so the holes in one pair are offset by the holes in the other.  One 2-pants fellow was also wearing one shoe and one flip-flop. Many have a dazed look as they scrounge through the trash.

The issues facing these four groups are complex and solutions are similarly complex. Stable countries with strong economies tend not to have much emigration, so helping countries stabilize and grow would be a win-win for both people and countries. But that’s a heavy lift over a longer term.  Providing social services – health care, housing assistance, feeding programs, job training – is resource-intensive, in terms of both people and money.

The word we haven’t mentioned yet is corruption. In the government, the state-owned utilities, and political parties, the C-word is the expected response when you interact with them. Eskom has been accused of having organized gangs inside the company siphon off vast sums. Bloated payrolls, ‘lost’ money, and huge cost overruns contribute to the nation’s ineffectiveness in dealing with the self-reinforcing problems of unemployment, poverty, and crime. I don’t know how the society keeps itself together with the magnitudes of these problems. That’s one reason the church is trying to set up an employment agency, something you’d think was a natural government function.

But, as Franklin Roosevelt said, “One thing is sure. We have to do something. We have to do the best we know how at the moment… If it doesn’t turn out right, we can modify it as we go along.”

Two cities begin with the letter C – Cape Town and Chattanooga.  In February, it’s summer in Cape Town and winter in Chattanooga.  But look at the weather forecasts for February 23.  Here’s the forecast for Cape Town:

And here’s the forecast for Chattanooga – remember it’s winter there:

Your eyes are not deceiving you – it is warmer in Chattanooga in the winter than it is in Cape Town in the summer.  Climate incidents like this make us wonder what normal means anymore.

The Washington Post published an article about where warming temperatures will result in more or fewer deaths. (Where more people will die — and live — because of hotter temperatures – Washington Post) The northern part of the Northern Hemisphere will have fewer deaths,  while the Southern Hemisphere gets hit hard, especially in Africa and Australia. In Third World nations without air conditioning, the effects are particularly severe. Already some overheated cities perform outside work at night when it’s a little cooler and try to sleep in the stifling heat by day.

We once visited the ancient Roman city of Bulla Regia. It was so hot in the summer that the Romans built houses 16 feet underground, with a large central atrium for light. Will overheated cities have to result to tunneling to get away from the increasing heat?

A 2016 report states that only 6% of South African households have air conditioning, compared to the 90% in the U.S. (Global AC penetration rate by country 2016 | Statista) A study from Harvard University states that billions more people will require air conditioning to continue to live in nations with hot climates. (In a hotter world, air conditioning isn’t a luxury, it’s a lifesaver (harvard.edu)) And where is the increased electricity supply going to come from in a nation with 10-hour-a-day load shedding right now? Most of South Africa’s electricity comes from (you guessed it) coal.

Animals also suffer from increased heat. South Africa has colonies of the African Penguin living on its shores. Climate change means that penguin parents have to swim much farther from shore to reach their food and make it back before their chick starves on the beach. That doesn’t always happen. Further, when the chicks enter the water for the first time, they swim to areas with few fish. (fact_sheet_african_penguin_climate_change.pdf (cms.int))

Even if you’re not a penguin climate change can get you. In Africa, an increasing frequency and severity of droughts results in fewer plants, herbivores, and carnivores. When a forest becomes a grassland, there goes a big carbon sink. Severe environmental changes threaten African wildlife habitats – CSMonitor.com

James Gustave Speth, an advisor to President Bill Clinton, once said that he thought that the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and climate change. Now he understands that the top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy. Science alone cannot solve this problem. A spiritual response is required to face the destructiveness of climate change.

Climate change is an existential threat right now and more ‘right now’ in the poorer parts of the world.  When we say we care for creation, we have to mean all of creation, not just our little corner of the world.  Where will the spiritual response come from to stop the catastrophic effects of these human-caused heat waves? It has to come from us, all of us.

The national unemployment rate in the USA is at 3.4%. Depending on who you ask and what population you’re talking about, South Africa’s unemployment rate varies between 33% and 60% — most agree the unemployment rate is higher than the employment rate.  More South Africans are not working than working, giving South Africa the highest unemployment rate in the world. That’s quite an achievement when you consider the nearby workers’ paradises of Angola, Sudan, and Ethiopia.

When Covid-19 hit, the government ordered a lockdown — only trips for food and medicine; not even dog walking was allowed. To offset the income loss, legal residents are eligible for Social Grants, payments of 350 Rands (almost $21) per month. This amount is less than a living wage for an individual. So, what do the unemployed South Africans do? They join the informal economy to survive.

The most enterprising South Africans become self-employed. We go to local markets to support these craftspeople. There’s pottery, beaded birds, beaded jewelry, self-standing food protection nets, screen-printed T-shirts, straw mats, wire baskets, and more.

The next tier of entrepreneurs are resellers. Often these take on the atmosphere of a flea market where vendors sell tourist kitsch. The goods look to be mass-produced in factories — Africa-themed clothing, wood bowls, straw baskets – and haggling is expected. We’ve seen the same vendors selling the same items in the same places for several years.

Then there’s another tier of sellers who stake out an area in front of a shop or a street corner. We’ve bought London-cloth aprons from a craftswoman in front of shop we visit and we’ve bought hand-made wire-and-bead cards from a craftsman on the corner near and a couple of busy restaurants.

Some vendors walk the streets carrying something they hope to profit from. One fellow tried to sell us packs of toothpicks (?). We ran across an artist selling

linoleum-block prints in “vibrant” magenta and orange colours (hey, that’s how they spell it here!). Perfect for tourists or the décor-challenged.

Not to be outdone, there are sellers in the streets at traffic lights. By necessity, these are goods that must be carried. These life-riskers walk between cars and sell grapes, avocados, paper towels, rolls of plastic bags — whatever they can get their hands on. We rarely see anyone anywhere buy any of those things.

But what if you don’t have a craft or can’t afford to buy and resell stock? Why, you help people park. These “parking wardens” often have an official-looking reflective vest, and they guide drivers into and out of the spaces they claim to manage. There’s a social compact that although the spaces are public and the wardens are just people who happen to hover over them, a small payment is made when you pull away.

These are resilient folks, but resiliency only goes so far. And they are only a small segment of the unemployed. At the height of the Great Depression, U.S. unemployment was 25%. Here, it’s one-third higher, with no end in sight. An economist would be staggered by the loss of productivity with more than half the nation’s workforce idle.

The local Methodists are trying to start a pilot program in a rural area for the locals to raise chickens for eggs to eat and sell. The Anglicans in False Bay are putting together an employment database to link employers and job-seekers. These efforts are small first steps in a long journey for South Africa.

One of our projects here is South Africa is a fundraiser to provide matric students in low-income school districts with rechargeable reading lights to use during load shedding. 

Let me unpack that sentence a bit for you.  A matric student is a high school senior .  In South Africa, seniors sign up to take the matric exam – pass it, and you get to graduate.  Don’t pass it, and you end up with no high school diploma.   In 2022, more than 920,000 students signed up to take the matric exam – and about 81% passed.  One cleric here told us that you can’t even bag groceries at the Pick ‘n’ Pay without a matric.  So, it’s a really big thing (no pressure!).

We wrote earlier about load shedding (aka rolling blackouts).  These are generally 2 to 2 ½  hours at a time, 2 to 3 times a day.  They disrupt daily life and businesses (a restaurant we planned to eat at doesn’t have a generator, so no dinner there when load shedding hits at 6 – 8 PM!).  For people in the townships, who only may have a single overhead light in their shack, load-shedding is more than just disruptive — things come to a full stop.  The impact is particularly harsh for school children and their studies.  Imagine how difficult it is to read or study in the evenings when the lights are out.  This is especially true for matric students whose future rests on their success on the exam. And it’s unsafe to go out at night with no lights.

This project is a partnership between HOPE Africa (a social development program of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa) and the Green Anglicans (a movement started by the Anglican Church of Southern Africa focusing caring for the earth).  The lights must meet certain criteria:

1. They need to be affordable.
2. They need to be rechargeable with solar cells (remember, one of the partners is the Green Anglicans!).
3. They need to work for 3 to 4 hours at a time.

Then there are the “nice to haves” – they can light up a larger area so more than one person can be working/studying; they can be recharged with a wall-charger in addition to sunlight; and they’re sturdy enough that they can be manhandled by a teenager in the townships.

HOPE Africa had been approached by a company with a small, single LED, solar-only recharging lamp. We got a sample to evaluate. With a little research, we also identified a larger solar light that could also be recharged with a USB and wall electricity light that was much brighter.   Randy — the electrical engineer! – measured how long each took to charge and how long each lasted.  The larger dual-charging light was clearly better – AND less expensive.  What’s not to love?

The next step is to negotiate a deal with the distributors to get the best price on the lights.  Then, you need to factor in the costs of bank fees (about 12%!) and distribution costs (South Africa is about 471,000 square miles – bigger than Texas, smaller than Alaska – a lot of territory for distribution). While they’re at it, HOPE Africa and Green Anglicans are going to include information on health and wellness topics with the lamp. The total cost for the program is about R200 per light (around $15 in the US).

And then there’s the fund-raising.  The goal is to provide about 3600 lights (note that this is just a fraction of low-income matric students!).  Just like in the U.S., individuals and corporations can deduct charitable contributions – and the South African tax year ends on February 28.  So, we only have a few weeks to raise R1,080,000 (about $63,000 US dollars). No pressure!

That we are working on a project like this speaks volumes about the issues facing South Africans.  Hunger, employment, health, delivery of even basic services (like reliable electricity) – all are problems that can seem overwhelming at times.  But we could say the same about the U.S. – there are always unmet needs.  But for some matric students, we are helping to make a world of difference, and that’s worth shining a light on.

P.S.  If you feel called to pay for a light or two or ten (!),  you can use the Global Giving portal for a donation from the US that is tax deductible: https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/lights-on-for-learners-education-beats-poverty/

We attend a local church service where we hear of their upcoming Potjiekos Competition Fundraiser. A potjiekos (paht – GEE – kos) is a 3-legged iron pot under which you build a fire and in which you cook a stew. The stew can be anything, but vegetables with a bit of meat is the usual fare. This is too good to pass up, and we decided to attend.

The big day comes and it’s cool and windy – perfect for a bowl of hot stew. The power is off (again), so wood-based cooking is the way to go. For 50 Rands (just under $3) we each buy tickets for the 12 contest entrants, 6 of which don’t show up. Not deterred, we commence with the tasting.

The recipes were all over the place. The fish stew was full of bones and the seafood stew was full of crayfish and mussel shells. The traditional vegetable and mutton dish was oh so bland, and the mutton was only chunks of fat. The Tripe & Trotters (tripe being the edible lining of a sheep’s stomach, and a trotter is a pig’s foot) was described to us as an “acquired taste,” an acquisition we didn’t make.

Then there was the pasta in cream sauce with pancetta-like bacon; it was so good, but so creamy you could actually hear some of your smaller arteries snap shut. Best of show was the chicken curry, sublimely seasoned with melt-in-your-mouth tender chicken pieces. With potjiekos, you never know what you’re going to get.

Potjiekos competitions are like what we do when coming to South Africa. We bring Whitman’s Sampler chocolates to our friends (easily packable and half-price after Christmas!). The South Africans have never seen a Whitman’s and they’re unsure what it is before opening. That’s when we say a Whitman’s sampler is like America, there are both darks and lights, and you’re not going to like some of them. And, like potjiekos, Whitman’s chocolates aren’t labeled. There’s no hint of what’s inside, like identifying solid milk chocolate with an “M,” or orange cream with an “OC,” or nougat with a Skull and Crossbones.

It was good to go the Potjiekos Competition Fundraiser. We hung out with a church congregation that would be called “colored” here. We watched the kids play and compete in a hula hoop (!) contest. We were blessed when the load shedding cut off the stereo system whose volume was set to “Everyone hears this Everywhere.” And we got to experience what they think good potjiekos food tastes like. The interesting things happen at the edges of your experience, not in the middle of a bubble of sameness and predictability. Who knows, maybe someday Tripe & Trotters will be worth a try – in the far, far, future!

We take so many of the benefits of civilization for granted  – until they’re gone. One of those benefits is electricity. An occasional storm-caused power outage aside, access to electricity is so normal that we don’t even think about it.

Not so in South Africa. Load shedding – their name for rolling blackouts — occurs every day; sometimes multiple times per day. The electric company Eskom even has an app that lists your location’s shedding times for the week. You can learn when your power will be off and for how long – assuming your phone is charged!

Power outages change everything. Your cooking, washing, TV, office work, internet access, even funeral homes all depend on when electric power will be available. Businesses, shops, and restaurants have to invest in generators to keep open – both inefficient and expensive. Homeowners buy inverters with battery back-ups to keep a lamp, TV, or the Internet on. We know a potter who can’t keep her kiln going enough to fire her works. People have lost jobs and livelihoods.  Kids can’t do homework. Load shedding is a huge drain on the economy and psyche of the nation; and the forecast is for at least 2 more years of it.

The other local feature that causes you to think about electricity is that you pay for it in advance. Our accommodations have a little meter in the panel box next to the circuit breakers. There’s a display showing how many kilowatt-hours of energy you have left. If it gets to zero, everything shuts off.

How do you buy electricity in advance? Why, you go to the grocery store! Bring your account number to the service desk and buy say, 1000 Rands of energy (about $58) Back home, you key in your 20-digit PIN from the receipt into the keypad of the meter, and a few seconds later, your display of remaining energy is updated. We’re intrigued that a 20-digit PIN represents well over 12 Billion combinations for every person on the planet. Maybe Eskom is planning a major expansion!

Pay-in-advance electricity makes you think about how you use power much more than paying in arrears (paying after the service has been provided). How much do you really want to run your high-power AC? How hot should we wash the clothes or the dishes? Do these lights need to be on? From an energy conservation/climate change perspective, this is probably a good thing.  But psychologically, it can trigger a mindset of scarcity rather than abundance.

Dealing with South African electricity makes us think about what else is scarce or abundant, and how do we deal with it. In the Tennessee Valley, water is super abundant and very cheap – although we know that’s not true elsewhere. We rarely give a second thought to our water use and still pay the minimum amount (in arrears) each month.

However, time is a truly scarce resource, and we pay for it by not having time for other things. It is the great equalizer – everyone has 24 hours in a day. Science fiction writers imagined worlds where “time is money,” and you have to pay in advance, or else(!). How you spend your time is likely the most important decision you can make. But how many of us actually think about time as a scarce commodity, and prioritize how we use it? Now that’s a shocking concept!

What makes you feel secure?  Our rental in Cape Town (South Africa) has multiple security systems.  First, there’s the button on the key fob to open the gate to the property.  Then there’s the wall and an electric fence

above it. Another button opens the security door; then you unlock the front door. All the doors here have security grills that unlock in 2 places; then the door itself unlocks – and remember this is inside the electrified wall/fence perimeter. All of the windows have bars – stylish, but bars nonetheless.  Other buttons are for the security system. If you don’t remember to deactivate it before you enter, you and everyone else on the block will get a reminder to do so. Don’t push the red button because you will receive an “armed response.”

Property crime is a problem in South Africa, but not so bad that you have to cower inside a fortress. What we heard was that once someone puts up an electric fence, the insurance companies want everyone else on the block to do the same – or else their rates go up.  Now it’s a race and everybody is running.

Mechanical and electrical security features may make you feel safer. But as long as “Us and Them” is the dominant mind set, how safe can any of us feel? The challenge is to build a community of “we” that works to keep all of us safe. After all, We can be stronger than Us and Them.

But security isn’t the only thing that makes life worthwhile.  Step outside and look. There’s Table Mountain and Devil’s Peak leaping 1000 meters up from the coastal plain. What a sight!  Cape Town is about as far south as Los Angeles is north, so the clement weather is appreciated. And it’s summer here.

To travel here. We were up at 5 AM, and got on the first of 3 airplanes at 10:40 AM. At 11:00 PM (local time) the next day, we arrived in Cape Town.  Was it worth it?  Totally!