...it's almost like i live here...

this week has been awesome. it's finally officially summer (though a windstorm could pop up at any moment, you never know), and i'm starting to feel like i actually live in cape town. billy's been in the states for the past 2 weeks, so it's been interesting to be on my own and to move more independently here in the southern hemisphere. i had a short-term babysitting gig for a little american babe named ollie (at right), and had just enough time to get attached to him before he headed back to the states. having to go thru the security gate of his apartment complex almost daily for 3 weeks, i started to have really entertaining and amicable exchanges with the security staff there. most of them knew me by name and we'd banter about the terrible weather and about how absurdly long and boring their 12 hours shifts are. it must be so strange to work security for the world's wealthiest while living a pretty low-income existence oneself.



i've started hanging out with a great south african woman named noncedo. billy met her husband floyd at a jazz concert many months back but they didn't ever hang out until a few weeks ago, and we've all hit it off quite well. in particular one of the highlights of spending time with floyd and noncedo is their awesome 2 year old son, Osun, who is so bright and will undoubtedly grow up to be a musical phenomenon. he'll stop in the middle of throwing plastic balls when a cool jazz riff comes over the speakers to exclaim "daddy! check the bass!" (the house is always alive with free jazz flowing through the kitchen and out onto the patio and grassy yard, which looks up to a beautiful view of lion's head peak) floyd and noncedo are really attentive and enthusiastic parents and it's cool to see how much osun thrives from their supportive environment. plus, he's just plain cute. he was calling me 'billy' for a while, much to all of our amusement, but hey - it's an honest mistake that even our adult friends sometimes make; our consonants are just swapped around!
(above, osun rocks the drums - he looks just like his papa
in that pic - and below right he works on salutations and looking cute [effortless])


in having so much time to myself, it's been fun to rediscover some of the things i enjoy but forget to dedicate time to when i'm spending a lot of time balancing schoolwork with relationship time, etc. in particular i've been hiking with friends, getting back into a regular yoga practice, having impromptu art parties, and doing more intentional thinking about what i hope to gain out of my remaining time in this country (it's going so fast!), and what i think i might have to offer. i've been cleared to start volunteering at a maternity hospital but have been a bit sick the past 3 weeks, so have steered clear. i've been getting more linked-in with the birth community here, but still want to connect more with midwives and get some solid homebirth experience.

at the same time as i feel like i've cleared some adjustment hump and am settling in more here, i'm more and more aware of the contradictions of living in the most unequal society in the world. i find myself 'defending' south africa, or at least cape town, as "not as bad [read:violent] as the reputation" of the tourist guide books for those who might be planning to come see me. but in truth, my existence in cape town (and that of most affluent people here) is something of a sheltered bubble from the absolutely horrific levels of daily crime and violence experienced by the bulk of this nation's poor in the townships. closest to home has been the violent mugging of our good friend paul, who narrowly escaped his attackers one recent friday evening when going to visit his cousin in the township of phillipi. noncedo & i met this week with the leaders of a new political movement growing out of a rastafarian community working council here who hope to govern on behalf of the poor majority. "there's not a day goes by dat i don' see da dead bodies in my neighborhood," ras benjamin tells us. so, i can reassure all my friends and family that if they come here, i'll do my best to help ensure their safety, and really, the risks of violent crime against them are pretty low in most of the places we're likely to spend time. it's the already downtrodden folks with a dollar fifty in their pocket who are getting stabbed for that dollar fifty, in shantytowns with no sidewalks, where police get council orders to tear down community centers the people have tried to build for themselves on land they don't officially own. i think i've not wanted to talk much about crime in south africa, not wanted to reinforce the public perceptions ... but i think that continuing that kind of silence would make me complicit with a system which fundamentally is failing to meet the basic needs of many (arguably the majority) of its citizens.

so as i feel more comfortable here, feel like i've begun to know the little side streets of my neighborhood like the veins on the backside of my hand, feel tickled to run into people i know in different parts of town, i simultaneously feel less comfortable, feel the tremendous magnitude of inequity getting more and more under my skin, feel the weight of what this country is really up against to succeed at what the anti-apartheid freedom fighters said they intended to do, which was far more than to simply end overt legal racism.

(some of the major problems with the transition from apartheid to this 'democratic' south africa are highlighted in the essay "from racial to class apartheid: south africa's frustrating decade of freedom" by patrick bond, for those who are interested in a more in-depth analysis. i'd be interested in y'alls thoughts about 'good governance)

i'm looking forward to welcoming billy back to south africa, and especially to getting to spend some time with his sweet momma, jean, who'll be visiting us for a week. and then finally, as soon as i finish my coursework, i'm off at the beginning of december for a 4-6 week travel adventure with one of my lifelong best friends, erin l-c, through kenya, tanzania, malawi, mozambique, and who knows where else! am excited for that but also feeling like a bit of a homebody now that i'm feeling more connected with cape town. i don't want to miss out on seeing more of this continent in the time i have, though. stay tuned for the inevitable travelogues :)

health, hugs, & hilarity...
libby
(this time, the whole fantastic family: noncedo, osun, and floyd)

Chin Up, Global Health...

***From a post I wrote on my international health weekly dialogue a few weeks back...****

When I was a wee 20-year-old volunteering at a children’s hospital in Ecuador for several months, I was forced to confront the socio-economic determinants of health for the first time. One of the major problems identified by the social workers and doctors was that the kids they were treating (most commonly for acute respiratory infections, malnutrition, diarrhea etc – all the things we read about) was that they were often re-hospitalized because they returned to the same conditions of squalor that had contributed to their illness in the first place. As we read about the tension between vertical and horizontal approaches to public health, I find myself repeatedly thinking of those kids with whom I forged relationships, and asking myself what approach I would advocate for them. Repeated oral rehydration therapy, or addressing sanitation and water supply for the communities? It’s obvious that horizontal approaches are more concerned with quality of life, in the long-term, than with statistical outcomes of acute vertical interventions to impress donors. As one of the articles we read pointed out, it’s great to save children from death… but only if they will be able to live lives of dignity. In a global political climate still unwilling to adopt public health policies based on true empowerment of the marginalised, so-called "diagonal approaches" seem like a possible vanguard for a transition toward more horizontal-leaning approaches.

Most of the articulations of the differences between horizontal and vertical have already been made on the discussion board, so I’d like to contribute to a couple new things to the conversation, a bit on the philosophical side, but hopefully not too tangential.

1 – "Human nature." I’ve noticed some of our dialogue slipping into these murky waters and I thought I’d share a quote from a white South African professor, Dr. Ric Turner, who was banned and eventually assassinated by the Apartheid state for his radical anti-racist writing and mobilising. He doesn’t write explicitly about health, but I’ve found his work to be useful to my thinking about the tremendous challenges of global health, which seem to be provoking some degree of overwhelmedness in some of us, myself included.

“The concept ‘human nature’ plays a very important role in our ‘commonsense’ thinking. We often explain difficult phenomena, such as war, corruption, jealousy, as being products of ‘human nature.’ And the idea that there is a fixed human nature is reinforced by a glance at the other people in our social milieu. They all seem to want much the same thing, to behave in the same way, to expect the same sorts of things out of life and out of their relations with other people. But a slightly wider glance shows that from society to society what people want and do varies enormously. Perhaps the only uniformity is that each group believes that the way it behaves is normal ‘human nature’…”^

In the public health field (and more generally), what we miss by labeling the decisions of rich nations to act selfishly in the interests of their powerful elites as “human nature” is the wide range of other possible alternatives – choices – that could be made. It’s not fair to say that the farmers of a small Malawian community who come together to form a cooperative structure in which everyone benefits equitably are somehow “going against” human nature. They, as any others, are making a choice. (Of course, people don’t always get what they choose, but that’s a separate question).

2 – Don’t give up! … also known as “Utopian Thinking”
In the face of really daunting social circumstances in Apartheid South Africa, Ric Turner wrote a chapter called “The Necessity of Utopian Thinking”, which we global health folks might be inspired to consider. Here’s a little excerpt^:

“There are two kinds of ‘impossibility’: the absolute impossibility, and the ‘other things being equal’ impossibility. It is absolutely impossible to teach a lion to become a vegetarian. ‘Other things being equal’ it is impossible for a black person to become Prime Minister of South Africa… To understand a society, to understand what it is, where it is going, and where it could go, we cannot just describe it. We need also to theorise about it. We need continually to refer back and forth between what we see in the society and what is essential to any society…It is probable that many of our social institutions and personal ways of behaving will chance. The fact that something exists is no guarantee that it will continue to exist. A glance at some of the institutions which other societies have taken unquestioningly for granted: cannibalism, slavery, polygamy, communal property ownership, non-competitiveness, nudity, vegetarianism, male supremacy, matriarchy, promiscuity, Puritanism, the rule of divine emperors or the rule of hereditary aristocracies, and even, on occasion, democracy – should make us a little more hesitant in taking absolutely for granted such institutions as social inequality, the school system, ‘national growth’, war, and racial oligarchy in South Africa.”

I like this as a way of thinking about the different approaches to public health, measuring each against what we see as essential in society, and keeping in mind that (slowly, often so painfully slowly) societies change. Instead of resigning ourselves to global health disparities as the inevitable consequence of ‘human nature’, we need to be asking ourselves questions like “what changes to the current system would be necessary to create a context in which the choices to strengthen health systems and empower historically oppressed communities would be the socially accepted and desirable choice?” --- culture change takes a long time, but can begin with folks like us initiating dialogue.

And one last thing regarding resources – we are *constantly * talking about the shortage of resources to be able to implement the health systems of our dreams. True, the *current allocation * of resources prohibits the realization of the comprehensive, horizontal approaches. But as the diagonal article pointed out, the wealthiest nations would need only contribute 0.7% of their GDP to foreign assistance, and of that, 15% would be spent on health, in order to meet the proposed needs of the Global Health Fund. How much money are we, globally, spending on war and major arms deals? South Africa has followed the American example and scandalously spent a huge chunk of its budget in the 1990s on the most expensive model of fighter jets, undermining the possibilities of investing in quite necessary human development measures like housing, health, and education. We are living in an age of tremendous abundance – it’s a matter of how those abundant resources are prioritized.
^Turner, Richard. The Eye of the Needle. Johannesburg: Christian Institute of South Africa, 1972.

Public Health -- (nerd alert)

“The realities of apartheid are not to be found in segregated parks and separate lavatories, but in infant mortality rates, cholera epidemics and TB statistics.” ~Cedric de Beer

In September, I started a UW Public Health distance course on the internet thru the extended degree program, moving forward toward my eventual goal of a Masters in Public Health. I absolutely love chewing on the questions that arise out of the intersection of socio-political-economic issues with health and thinking about how we can use health as a point of leverage for creating a more equitable society. The class I'm taking is on International Health, and we've each had to select a country we've focused on for the course assignments. Obviously, South Africa was a pretty logical choice for me. For my final project, I'm looking at the disparity in infant mortality in South Africa - black babies still are 4 times more likely to die in the first year of life than their white baby counterparts, and largely due to the legacy of economic disparity left by apartheid, and the new government's inefficient response, cowtowing to the dominant global macroeconomic doctrines of fiscal restraint on public & social services while emphasizing foreign investment and privatisation. [Of course, fiscal restraint is very loosely interpreted by the government, which spent over 40 billion Rand (about 4 billion USD) on an arms deal in the late 1990s that was never approved by the Parliament, and which would have funded the building of houses for all but 300,000 of the millions waiting for homes to be built - more on this in my next post].

Below is a concept diagram I made of the influences on infant mortality here in South Africa. Above the blue dotted line are the social/structural influences on mortality, while below are individual behavioral choices, etc.

For those who are interested, I'm also including the situational analysis I wrote of the historical context of current health issues in South Africa, below the image.

[click on image to enlarge... but it's still pretty convoluted. MTCT = Maternal to Child Transmission, and refers to HIV]

Historical Context of Health in South Africa

In 1994, the world widely celebrated the end of Apartheid rule in South Africa. While genocide raged in Rwanda, the global public image of Africa focused on Nelson Mandela and the ascension to power of the long-exiled African National Congress (ANC) – the first black party to rule after decades of harsh oppression by the white minority. And with due cause; the depth to which “race” -based discrimination and violence permeated South African society is horrific, astonishing, and worthy of close attention and analysis. More than any single other contextual factor, the legacy of Apartheid unavoidably informs any analysis - whether contemporary or historical - of South and Southern African health.

Though the official system of apartheid (“apartness” in Afrikaans) wasn’t formalized until the Afrikaner National Party took power in 1948, discrimination and violence against the indigenous African population has characterized the region’s history since Europeans first arrived on the African continent. Afrikaners – settlers of primarily Dutch descent – dominated the area until the British arrived in the 19th century and began competing for control of the economic and human resources of the regions. In 1910, after years of bitter conflict, the two white settler groups agreed to unite to form the Union of South Africa, and racial discrimination was swiftly institutionalized by legislation in 1913 and 1936 that effectively prohibited Africans from owning 86 percent of the country’s land. The remaining 14 percent was established as “native reserves.”

The reality of separate and unequal health services is well documented and broadly characteristic not only of South Africa, but also of the entire Southern Africa region that had been colonized by European nations. A few highlighted health decisions illuminate the general dynamics of the political economy of health in South Africa during the apartheid era:
• 1938 – Department of Public Health decides “to establish a completely segregated health
service for Africans” to be “jointly administer[ed] with the department of Native Affairs.”
• 1963 – Bantu Administration Department takes over provision of health services in the
"Bantustans", or Bantu Homelands.
• 1970s and 80s – ten separate health authority and service delivery structures are erected
in the Bantustans. During this same period, greater degrees of social engineering to control
black South African labor yield the (forced) removal of as many as 3.5 million Africans from
the urban areas to the Bantustans, where “their health was no longer the concern of the
apartheid state.”
• 1986 – “Pass laws” repealed. Squatter camps proliferate on urban peripheries,
characterized by make-shift housing, unsafe water, lack of sanitation.

Statistics from the apartheid era, though poorly kept and often racially biased , point to major differences in life expectancy for blacks versus whites, as well as in maternal and infant mortality. Africans “suffered the brunt of malnutrition, tuberculosis, and venereal diseases.” So when the ANC ascended to power in 1994, what did they inherit? In the words of their National Health Plan, “a [health] system which is highly fragmented, biased towards curative care and the private sector, inefficient and inequitable. [...] There has been little or no emphasis on health and its achievement and maintenance, but there has been great emphasis on medical care.”
The infrastructural inadequacies not just of the health system, but also of other indicators of human development such as education, housing, sanitation, etc, have significant repercussions on the ability to effectively combat South Africa’s most significant health problems. Many of the deeply entrenched health inequities that existed during apartheid across different populations prevail today. Particularly with respect to infectious disease (HIV/AIDS being the most infamous, as well as the number one cause of death in South Africa ) the disease burden still falls most heavily by the poor, non-white majority.

However, the so-called “democratic transition” has brought significant changes in health policy which have greater potential to tackle the biggest health issues. The ANC, inspired by the ideals of Alma Ata, named Primary Health Care as “the underlying philosophy for restructuring the health system.” The Department of Health’s 1996 “White Paper for the Transformation of the Health System” further takes up the call to forge ahead with PHC, and openly acknowledges that it anticipates such a policy “will require continuous defence in the political arena” as resource redistribution “begins to bite.” The South African Constitution is arguably the most progressive in the world as far as human rights are concerned, and gives all citizens “the right to have access to health care services, including reproductive health care”. And though the South African government has been widely criticized for its grossly inadequate and ‘denialist’ response to the HIV/AIDS crisis, recent turnover of government in September 2008 brought the appointment of a new Minister of Health, and the government has finally issued a formal recognition of the causal link between HIV and AIDS. The political will to address South Africa’s health problems and inequities is certainly present, at least in the public rhetoric. It still remains to be seen whether the country will be able to mobilize the necessary resources to keep South Africa moving toward a comprehensive primary health care approach and to promote overall systems strengthening.

Afrika Burns Festival (Oct 17-19th)

my friend doerte and i decided to try our luck at life in a parallel universe by heading to the afrika burns festival in the desert (a variation of the american-born "burning man").
here's what they have to say about themselves on the webpage:

Afrika Burns is a creative arts and freedom of expression festival that aims to build temporary community through collaborative arts projects, in a completely non-commercial environment.

This is a place to collaborate, cooperate, and add to the public environment. To build community. We want you to make a conscious decision to inject artistic sensibility into every daily activity: to invent the world anew; to generate a culture, a connective environment to be idealistic and celebratory. We want you to think of this gathering as an “invent” rather than an “event”. See this as an opportunity to reinvent the world and to foster art-making.

So our objective with Afrika Burns, is simply to create a blank canvas on which participants can project any creative endeavour that they desire to create; project aspects of themselves, collectively or individually; all of this in an environment not mediated or controlled by commercial enterprise.

flat tire in the desert? no problem...

this old fella was tickled to be gifted one of the hula hoops doerte & i made

my favorite structure - this psychadelic circle sphere

doerte checks in her ego at the "ego booth"

disgruntled postal service workers: billy, billy, & billy.

a homemade postcard :)

hiding from the sun in our ramshackle shade structure

i kid you not, there's a live human on the other end of the line...

all in all, it was a crazy and fun experience. i don't think the project is yet succeeding at making it a space that's comfortable to all africans - it was very much a white hippy event. but as i half-jokingly pointed out to doerte, if you're already living in conditions where you have a hard time getting water and adequate shelter on a daily basis, what draw is there in spending a few days in the desert? still, it was interesting to see the ways people let down their walls. i think i appreciate it even more now that i've been back in cape town for a while and am noticing how closed people are here to making new friends. and i got some recharging energy for crafting my performance in everyday life...

Trip to Joburg

toward the end of september, billy and i had an interesting 5 day trip up to johannesburg to visit a friend of ours, mohammed, who is teaching at a new school called the african leadership academy. curious as usual to explore different parts of joburg, we ventured into downtown, which has basically been abandoned by white south africans since the transition from apartheid, so predictably, we stuck out as the only white people in square miles. and, while neither of us was naive or uninformed about the risks of being mugged in joburg, on account of some unusual circumstances i had some valuables in my purse that i normally wouldn't have ever taken into joburg with me, including my ipod. thus, after being mugged within 20 minutes of arriving downtown (but not before commenting to each other what a vibrant atmosphere the city has, and what a shame it is that all folks talk about is how violent joburg is and so forth), i am now sans passport, credit cards, ipod, house keys, and a comb (at least i can attribute my tangly hair to something other than split ends, right?). it was a bit of a disappointment to be really striving to let joburg show us its best side, giving it a chance, and to end up being targets of organised crime (as well as injurious to my pride, as i'd just given my mom a lecture the night before about how exaggerated the claims of danger are as regards cape town -- i still feel that way about cape town, which has is a relatively much safer space and has lots of public security measures).


johannesburg is well known for being one of the strongest epicenters of organized crime in the world. south african middle & upper class neighborhoods are characterized by intense 'keep out' strategies, ranging from the relatively mild tall wall/fence approach, to the just as common major spikes and barbed/razor wire and electric fencing. above is a triple-threat!

water privatisation is a major human rights issue facing not only south african communities, but also others around the world. this great wall mural in soweto that we drove past celebrates a community victory in the Constitutional Court over a privatisation scheme. the court ruling upheld the constitution, which declares that no party may obstruct access to another's right to basic needs when the access was already there. in this case, previously public-access water sources were being removed and pre-paid water meters installed for families by Johannesburg Water. unfortunately, the struggle against water privatisation is far from over... you can read more here if interested: Coalition Against Water Privatisation.



mohamed was his classic, charming self when we went out for dinner. it got quite cold in the open-air restaurant, and he didn't have a hat, so decided his servillete would have to suffice...

these cooling towers in soweto are much more beautiful than the plain grey concrete ones in pinelands (cape town)...

Public Art

always interested to see the ways people use public space to express themselves.

billy and i like capturing interesting graffiti...

some anti-american sentiments in a middle income, mixed neighborhood:

the same day, on the same bike adventure, we came across this creepy but fascinating house in a neighborhood called athlone, with tons of threatening "do not set a single foot on this property" type signs, as well as lots of commentary over the 'murder' of a man name isaac volkwyn. i've kind of let it slip to the back of my mind, but looked up who he was just now as i was posting, and he was a very elderly man who suffered a stroke and then his doctors recommended his nourishment thru a feeding tube and hydration be ceased. his children agreed but then later questioned the decision and eventually felt he'd been murdered by the medical system.



this always cracks me up when i'm on the short walk or bike ride over to a posh "square" (it's actually a mall) near our house where i go to use free wireless. the arrow points to the window, instructing normal crack customers to approach, but the SAP (South African Police) to kindly use the front door.


this statue of Jan Smuts, in the Company Gardens, was hit on Heritage Day, among others like statues of Cecil Rhodes, by some artist. "Reject this Heritage" - it says. I do think South Africa, and the world as a whole, will benefit by condemning the colonizer mentality.

Here's also an interesting letter to the editor I saw online about the graffiti:

Most public holidays, my sons and I have a tradition of going to the Company Gardens to feed the squirrels and watch the chattering parrotlings. This Heritage Day would have been like any other, except that as we approached the aviary in the Garden, we noticed bright red graffiti covering the Cecil J. Rhodes statue nearby. "REJECT THIS HERITAGE." My sons, ages 7 & 10, both turned to me. "Look, Mommy! Bad people painted the cool statue." Each looked at me intently, waiting to hear my condemnation.

Perhaps another parent would have simply responded that it was wrong and moved on to the birds. But something about those words struck me deeply, made me think about our British heritage. "Remember that you are an Englishman, and have consequently won first prize in the lottery of life," Rhodes said. When I was my sons' age, I was taught that this man was a hero. And how are my sons to think any differently when statues honoring him all over our city? "Do you know how this man is part of our heritage?" I asked them. Neither really knew who Rhodes was, nor what "hinterland" could possibly mean.

The birds took a backseat. We've spent the afternoon at home together, researching Rhodes and colonial ideology on the internet. I want them to understand how severely this element of our heritage devastated the African continent and our own country. And although we discussed the legal wrong in defacing public space, it's no longer so clear to the boys that the people who graffiti-ed the Rhodes Statue are the lone "bad guys." For us white South Africans, we must celebrate our heritage not by continuing to laud our imperialist ancestors, but by learning from its mistakes and creating a new heritage our children and grandchildren will be proud of.

Daily Life at 97 Hope Street

billy's dad has been sending weekly letters, along with some marvelous art masterpieces based on the avant-garde principles of what they call "coloring in the lines". while 'pops' kenny claims to be colorblind, nonetheless his pieces bring delight to viewers of all ages. here billy has tried to recreate the pixie masterpiece in vivo, adorning my chest with a tulip not unlike that of the refrigerator sprite...

bernard, a 73 year old french chef, is one of my favorite cape town characters. he's a vegetarian anti-racist who's been living in africa for several decades now. lived in the french countryside with his aunt & uncle during WWII, was sent to england for a few months with other children of the war, and then returned to france to begin training as a pastry chef at age 14. he's the closest thing i have to a grandpa figure in my life at the moment, and has been a real gem to both billy and i. bernard's most recent enterprising idea has been operating a from-home pizza delviery service with the catchy slogan "u ring, we bring"... i laughed so hard the morning that i found the blue flyer for "chef bernard's pizza" in the mailslot and knew it had to be none other than my favorite frenchman!


paul, a malawian friend billy met through chess, lived with him for several months before i arrived and stayed with us on and off while he was sorting out his employment situation in september. life is brutally harsh for immigrants here. the cost of living is often so much higher than wages, and employment in the formal sector is hard to come by. billy and paul co-created this bangin' meal of pap (kind of like fluffy polenta or grits; a typical southern african delight made from corn meal - also called mealey-meal!), with chicken in a tomato sauce for paul, and some vegetarian culinary delight for billy and i. pap sits in your stomach like a brick and you don't have to eat anything for the rest of the day, basically!


here's our bed! sleepytime bear and dog and i pose in the sleeping loft.


ok, it's a bit messy, but here's an attempt to capture the layout of our studio apartment. the kitchen in the back left, bathroon door onthe right. outside the bounds of the image are, to the left, a cozy sitting area we created, and to the right, our guestbed/couch, and dining table. behind me (the picture taker) are french doors out onto our little balcony, where we've attempted to start growing a garden. (as of mid november, despite being spring, it's really struggling!) billy's written about our gardening exploits on his own blog, so i'll just link to it.

Exploring Cape Town

billy's made some extensive photo-uploading efforts to portray this on his blog, so i'm lazily going to include a link here, and then have put a couple of my own favorites below...

HIKING AND BIKING PHOTOS

... i love this windblown tree down at kalk bay, a 40 minute train ride from home...

billy looks out over 'false bay', close to where the indian and atlantic oceans meet

...a change in perspective...

Student Society for Law & Social Justice Retreat - Sep 4-7th, 2008

Arrival to South Africa - August 29th

...it's funny how you can forget about even the most obvious differences between places... as i boarded the south african airways plane, i heard lots of folks talking around me with not-american accents, and laughed to myself upon suddenly remembering that even native-english speakers from south africa speak with a distinctly different accent.  i'd been moving toward for south africa for months, and yet still couldn't believe that the plane was actually carrying me to see billy and to live in cape town ...

...coming soon...

almost 4 months ago, i sat upon lion's head in cape town, glowing in the sunset, and unsure what the next year would have in store for me. tomorrow, (well, today, really), i'm hopping a plane from new york back to the so-called "rainbow nation," south africa, to embark on a 10 month adventure of living in cape town with my dear friend & partner, billy. i'll be taking some public health coursework and hopefully continuing to volunteer as a doula, which i've been blessed to do for the past year in seattle, while thinking about my present & future roles in as a healthCarer for individuals and society.

a significant influence on the evolution of my thinking has been the concept of cybernetics. cybernetics involves looking at the interactions and connectedness of the different components of a system. how do the dynamics of the components contribute to the overall system? how does a given system interact with other systems? i hope to be a keen, if not humble, observer of many different systems while in south africa - life in cape town and the surrounding area, south african maternity & health care, the international midwifery community, etc.

AND i also hope i'll use this space to engage in some "second order cybernetics" - that is, looking at myself as unable to be fully detached from the systems i'm observing; looking the particular dynamics of the systems which birthed me, a young white female 'american' observer, and acknowledging how my own context impacts the observations i make of my experiences in south africa.

so, i invite you to join me, as matches your interest and desire. i'll periodically post photos and stories as things unfold, hopefully not too pretentious or overly-cliche.

i'm pretty in love with life these days and excited about growing in lots of directions, especially the ones i'm not able to yet anticipate. may each of our daily journeys challenge and deepen our understandings of ourselves and each other...

with love,
libby

one of the most unique perspectives, literally, i've experienced...