My First Experience with Service Learning and South African Student Leaders

It is Sunday night, and I just came back from a weekend trip to Pretoria --the capital of South Africa. I had been invited by the US Embassy to do a workshop on service learning for 10 South African college students who had been participants on a 3-week embassy sponsored tour of the US. the students came from all over South Africa, and represented the diversity of this country --a couple of Zulu students from Kwa-Zulu Natal; a couple of Xhosa students from the Western and Eatern Cape; two Venda students from the very north (near Zimbabwe); a coloured (their term) student from the Cape Town; and a white student from Pretoria.

One of the goals of the emabassy with the "Youth Ambassadors" program, was to help the students learn about voluntarism and community service and to hope to bring those practices back to their universities. They had all lived with families in Ames, Iowa for a week, and had commented on how Americans were all into service and volunteerism and community work. the embassy wnated to encourage them to develop communit yservice projecs on their own campuses, and when they found out that I was in the area, and knew something about this work, they invited me up to do some sessions on "service learning and civic engagement."

Diverse Perspectives on Service and Civic Engagement
The students were amazing. Incredibly outspoken, articulate, committed, and able to engage with each other's different opinions and perspectives. Those with limited exposure speak two or three languages, those with more considerable exposure speak five or six languages (English, Afrikaans, Xhosa, Zulu, Venda, Shangan, Suthu, etc.) It was really inspiring. I was hesitant to try and further their indoctrination into the American concept of "volunteerism." They were very eager to see the U.S. as a place full of the spirit of volunteerism and community service, and were quick to talk about the lazyness, and sense of entitlement that seems to be common in South African society today. (These themes of "lazyness" and "entitlement" are themes that I will sure to come back to as the year progresses. It is a very common complaint, as people struggle to make sense of the current economic and political context. So, rather than teaching about the great U.S.ofA., I started by trying to tap into their own cultural understanding of issues of "service and civic engagement." After a great opening conversation sparked by their reading the article by Remen on "helping, fixing or serving," (which they totally loved), I asked them to tap into their own cultural backgrounds, and come up with words or phrases that express the concepts that we call "service" or "civic engagement." One by one, they came up and wrote words or phrases from their cultures that communicate these concepts, such as (forgive the mis-spellings):
-Umntu ngumntu ngabuntu (a person is a person through other people -Xhosa)
-Batho pele (people first -Zulu)
-Howe nehela (giving your all, wholeheartedly to something -Suthu)
-Umnsinsi wokluzimilela (the sense that you belong here; citizenship -Zulu)
-Vhudifhinduleli (responsibility -Venda)
-Diens (service -Afrikaans).

It was so cool! For one thing, they all were embarrassed that their spelling was not as good as it could have been. One Venda woman said, "My mother would scream 'shame' if she saw this poor spelling." They realized that their cultures weren't as void of "responsibility" as they had made them out to be, and that there was a rich history related to issues of service and social responsibility. HOWEVER, one student made this powerful observation. He said: "while each of our ethnic groups have these concepts, they really relate to folks within that ethnic group only. 'Umnsinsi wokluzimilela' only relates to those Zulus; 'diens' is for Afrikaners to be of service to the Afrikaans community. We don't have a concept that reaches across the ethnicities, and that brings us together. That's what we need to focus on: multicultural citizenship."

Well, I nearly jumpted out of my skin. This was exactly what I was hoping to get to, and it just emerged at the heart of the conversation. The students went on to say that even though the universities are now integrated, there is really very little interaction. Students hang with their cultural communities, and there is really no discussion about the long-standing and still powerful prejudices that people hold about each other. On the other hand, with 30% unemployment nationally, the highest HIV/AIDS infection rate in the world (25% of folks in the state of KwaZulu Natal are HIV positive!), and slums housing millions of people in deepest despair, and the sense that with the end of apartheid, they are now living in a "post-racial society," its easy to see why spending time on the seemingly soft concept of "multicultural civic literacy" seems less important.

Well, with this beginning, we had a great framework for the rest of the workshop. I gave them a simple way to think about designing a service learning project, introduced the idea of reflection, and helped them to focus on one "BIG ISSUE" related to social justice in their community. I even handed out copies of "The Prism" (our CSUMB model for social justice-oriented service learning curriculum development," and they really got into it.

So, considering this was my first time working with South African students, and the first time trying to work with our CSUMB curiculum development concepts, I felt it was really successful. I did realize that the concepts of experiential learning, reflection, and "student-centered learning" were new to the students. They get a strong dose of rote learning and memorization, so the idea of tapping into their own experiences as valid learning, is a new concept for them.

How Many Cows is Your Future Bride Worth?
In the van on the way back to the airport, we all got a great education on the intricacies of the dowery payment in Zulu culture. Our Xhosa teacher had given us a homework assignment to find out about the role of the "clan" for Xhosa and Zulu people, so I asked the Zulu kids in the van to tell me about the significance of their clan names (not their "last name," but their clan affiliation). They said that it was most significant with regard to the rituals around marriage, and started to explain that in the Zulu culture, when you wanted to get married, the man had to buy 11 cows for the family of the bride! Not 10 (unless she happens to NOT be a virgin --then you get a 1 cow discount), nor 12 (unless she happens to have a master's degree, in which case the price goes up!). But the magic number is 11. And at around $1,000 per cow, that is quite the expenditure, especially when a good salary for a South African is around $20,000/year. So, you've got to save your pennies, and make sure that you find some nice plump cows! And, oh yes, if the family of the bride can't acommodate the cattle in their 2nd floor apartment, then they will always accept cash!

Blog ya later.
Seth./.