Johannesburg Debrief: A Prelude

We returned from Johannesburg on Sunday. The goal of the trip was exposure: show these students things they’ve never seen but will inevitably encounter on their way to university.

That city was the chaotic center of Apartheid. Now it’s one of the most dangerous cities in the world. It’s not that crime is so much more common in Jo’burg than, say, slum cities in South America; it’s the violence of the crime that sets Jo’burg apart: gun-to-the-head car jackings rapes, murders. Excluding war zones, it’s the most violent city in the world. But it’s also vibrant and full of galleries, museums, restaurants and all the rest, and it blew the students away.

Thursday we visited the University of Pretoria. It has 76,000 students. We spent the afternoon with a first-year biology professor and researcher in entomology. He challenged the students heavily. It was an exposure to science that these students have never had.

Friday morning we were in Jo’burg’s rotting core—full of garbage, street hawkers, and 20-storey slum apartments—to visit the national art gallery. In a reversal of our own culture, the boys pondered the art deeply and made insightful comments while the girls shrugged their shoulders and dragged their feet through the gallery.

In the afternoon, a local church guided us through their projects in a city squatter camp. To me, except for its lack of electricity, this camp looked identical to much of Masoyi. But the students considered it much worse than their own village. That evening the students hung out with students their age (white, affluent students their age) at that church’s youth service. It was like attending a rock concert.

On Saturday we made our way through the famous Apartheid Museum. It was incredible. The location, the architecture and the content of this place together convey the brutality and fear of apartheid so well. It was a heavy place. Then that afternoon we piled all 8 of us plus luggage back into our lumbering Toyota Venture, merged onto a chaotic freeway, and headed for home. But home wasn’t the Divine’s destination for us that night.

Comments

[Jim]

I started to have you on my mind a few days ago, can't give a reasion why, now I know why.