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What No One Tells You About Trying To Do Good
By Darby Guinn
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“Why are you drawn to service learning?” That was a question they asked in the interview. It didn’t stump me. I figured that they’d ask something along those lines. I stuck to the truth because it’s easier.
There are plenty of definitions out there for what service learning entails, but, at its core, it’s supposed to be the application of your education for a community in need while you are immersed in that community, gaining lessons from the experience and the people. In other words: you teach, you learn, you just do it abroad and for a community that could really use what you’ve got. That is, in essence, what it’s supposed to be and that sounded like an awesome thing to me. The interview went well, and off I was to South Africa for the summer after my junior year. Now, as a senior with only a few months and therapy sessions away from the project, I’m finally able to articulate a few of my thoughts about my time abroad as a service learner.
Our experience: a guy with sunglasses dropping four girls off in the middle of a new country, giving them one solid contact and saying ‘Do something good.’ It sounds fun, in a way. A vague but open-ended mission where we were forced to survive on wit and charm. I was excited to see how things would play out.
However, that assignment was significantly larger than it seemed, and what I came to learn was the whole nature of service is messy. As an international volunteer, I took the opportunity to travel the country as much as I could. During the week, I was based in the township of Kayamandi with four other girls—we picked up a German along the way who helped us immensely—and a rotating group of other volunteers for 10 weeks. It was winter on that side of the world, and in the 94 percent black and 4 percent ‘coloured’—another race identification in South Africa that includes people of mixed race—township we stuck out. It was a dense community packed into a few square miles on the edge of Stellenbosch, the hometown of many Apartheid architects and a rich community that profited off the prolific vineyards. The Xhosa people of Kayamandi were brilliant humans, amazing dancers, hilarious storytellers and even with so little, they were so giving. Ubuntu was their way of life, their unique spirits of compassion for their neighbors and family that has to be experienced in order to be understood. One South African woman even traveled across the country without a dollar in her pocket, relying on the Ubuntu value of taking care of your neighbor. She got stabbed once or twice along the way, but she made it and made valuable friends in the process.
That was my community in spirit, and I loved it. But there are good and bad. The poverty in Kayamandi was brutal. People lived in shacks crammed so close together that fires could and would rapidly take out hundreds of homes at a time. The people could barely find jobs that could keep them and their families afloat, and we’d hear white girls, who went to university in Stellenbosch, complain they couldn’t get any work experience for their resumes because “black people take all the entry level jobs.” The disconnect was astounding and upsetting, and we were only temporarily there. We could be angry and work 24/7 to end the injustices, but the locals had established lives to live and things to do. The difficulty of coming in as a stranger to a community was getting people who didn’t care to care or see why things were wrong. The Xhosa people were incredibly articulate about their lot in life, but many—not all—of the white Afrikaners remained ignorant of the pains of their neighbors. I got more and more furious every day.
That’s the thing about service I never heard about. I was completely unprepared for how upsetting seeing pain and injustice could be. There were the cringe-worthy and the outright terrifying. Kids kicking and throwing rocks at dogs; a man lying in the street, his fingers the only thing moving after getting hit by a car; locking eyes with a man right after he gut-punched a girl, still holding her as she was bent over sobbing; knowing that the township next door had an active gang in which raping a white girl was a means of rising in rank. Since I got back and started trying to adapt to being on American soil again, things became difficult. My mom keeps using the term “loss of innocence.” A good friend who had been abroad a few times to do mission work said coming back was sometimes harder than adapting to being in a completely new culture.
The work was difficult. Trying to organize events in a place where you don’t know anyone or anything, it was a huge task, and I was set on doing right by the people I’d met. The community apparently had a history of bad volunteers, including artists in need of a “typical African kid” for their portfolios who came promising laptops alongside so-called philanthropists taking tours and promising funding for community projects. A lot of people made a lot of empty promises to this desperately poor community living on the edge of utter luxury in Stellenbosch. But we were there as service learners, ready to not be those dastardly “voluntourists” who would travel all the way to the tip of the world to paint a house in a township only to have it get rained on that afternoon. I wanted my work to be meaningful and legitimately useful.
If everything operated on intention alone, then I like to think the world would make a lot more sense and people would be a lot happier. But it doesn’t and they aren’t. It was a difficult day when I realized that, as hard as I worked, 10 weeks could never be enough. I went to South Africa with that naïve kind of altruistic zeal, thinking I had the power to affect so much change.
My organization, like other service non-profits, acted as a great networking contact. The rest was up to us, and for four girls with no international experience doing this kind of from-the-ground-up project, it was frustrating and overwhelmingly stressful while at the same time insightful and exciting. I had my mission to complete, and I think I thrived even as my project fell apart during week five. I was heartbroken and angry. I was flailing and, to me, the loss of my project meant that I was just another voluntourist who made promises to kids that I couldn’t keep. I found a new project with the township’s high school, cataloguing books for the library without a librarian. It needed to be done. I felt useful.
Now, it’s through this complicated, emotional lens that I look at the state of service around the world. I talk to others who have volunteered for long periods of time and their stories don’t sound too far from mine. We go with good intentions, but fall short too often to be all that effective. But it’s a business. An article published in October highlighted the efforts of the Clinton Foundation in Colombia. Even though the foundation had focused most of its funding on Colombia, its programs were far from helpful. Environmental harm, displaced indigenous people and shady investments in the area, and the foundation calls Colombia a ‘success story.’
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Sammy Patterson cuddles one of the youngest kids on one of the students’ last days in South Africa. The little girl has cream on her face from a burn she received from falling into a hot stove.
Courtesy of Darby Guinn
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Darby Guinn and Sammy Patterson stand for a class picture with the older class at the Lithalethu Creche alongside their teacher, Bousey, and the principal, Mama Rosa.
Courtesy of Darby Guinn
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This is the reality. It stems from this genteel idea to “help the needy,” but instead of trying to help underprivileged or struggling communities in a strategic way, instead of taking the time to meet the people and understand what they actually need and want before taking action, the whole system of volunteering has become a business of sending affluent, squirrelly high schoolers and college students, fresh from the classroom, who worked at some bake sales for free. Volunteering, right now, is a free-for-all; anyone can do it. But this rhetoric is harmful. We’re dealing with people’s lives, and the power of a dollar in places like South Africa is absurd in regards to everything it can accomplish. It’s the responsibility of these organizations to do right by the communities they tout that they’re aiding, but instead, they send kids to paint a school when the community could really use an HIV and AIDS clinic. They would’ve known that if they had sent someone there to figure that out first.
The toll of bad volunteers is vast. Research poverty porn, voluntourism or the Clinton Foundation and the Haiti earthquake. Or go follow white savior Barbie on Instagram. This conversation is too big for one article in one magazine. It has to be a discussion everywhere. There’s work to be done, but we owe it to the people who need it most to do that work well.
When I walked into that interview, I was so excited to go out into the world and help develop a community. On the other side, having run that gamut, I recognize that I was the wrong person to be put in that position. I had all the intention—goodness knows I still spit fire at the blatant systemic racism people whom I came to love suffered under on the daily—but what Kayamandi needed were professionals to give classes and career advice. It needed infrastructure, funding for their schools, community services and people who knew how to train citizens to run them. It needed someone to come and empower locals to bolster their own communities.
I’m not sure what a successful future of service looks like, but I can say where it stands now is not good enough. But that change begins here. So let’s do something.
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Sammy Patterson, Paulina Moya and Ellie Freeman cover books for the Kayamandi High School library as a part of the students’ work cataloging a donation of books.
Courtesy of Darby Guinn
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