1) Please describe how you expect the content, theme, and location of this SIT program to contribute to the achievement of your academic, career, and personal goals.
The community arts work happening in urban areas across South Africa inspires my work as a community artist in inner city Baltimore, where reconciliation and development are also still in progress. It is my current and future goal to aid in that progress, especially through the arts. SIT’s program will give me the knowledge of politics and economics necessary to make significant change within my city, nation, and world. Additionally, the structure of SIT’s practicum-based independent study project opens up possibilities of interning with local community arts organizations, artist residencies, and even painters like Esther Mulangu, whose Ndebele style currently influences my own studio work. Through these opportunities I desire to better understand the arts' role in development and reconciliation in order to pursue these goals in Baltimore.
2) How will your participation in our program contribute to the creation of a diverse SIT Study Abroad group of individuals with a variety of experiences, opinions, backgrounds, and cultural perspectives?
As a minority at my middle school, high school, and now in Baltimore City, I know racism and racial discrimination well. However, I have also been a part of Baltimore’s diverse community that comes together to collaborate on sculpture gardens and murals, highway clean ups and tree planting. I’ve seen multiple churches organizing to clean a local playground and pray for the kids of the neighborhood. By collaborating with and befriending people from a range of ages, genders, races, cultures and classes, I am able to understand diverse perspectives and offer them as part of my own vernacular in response to the social problems I encounter. As an artist, it is my nature to bring disparate things together, a skill that is crucial to SIT’s program and to social and political reconciliation in South Africa.
3) Please describe your involvement in any campus-based activity and/or community-based service and the insight you have derived from these experiences.
For the past two years I have taught art at the Crispus Attucks Recreation Center as part of MICA’s Community Arts Partnership. Through this valuable internship I have formed relationships with the elementary school students of Baltimore City public schools, where only 34% of students who make it to high school graduate. I have gained insight into this epidemic through conversations with students and art projects that allow them to speak about their school and home experiences. When I understand where my students are academically, I am able to incorporate the areas they need extra help on (especially reading and writing) into art lessons. Being a part of this Rec Center has also led to my involvement in political activism, as we are currently in our second fight to dissuade the city from shutting us down.
4) Please describe a cross-cultural experience you have had and the insight you have derived from it.
The Save Middle East (Baltimore) Action Committee fought against gentrification in East Baltimore for nine years until disbanding only months ago. Kflu was the committee’s community organizer. When Kflu and I recently collaborated on a photo project for the committee, he shared much of East Baltimore’s history as well as his own. His family is from Eritrea and lives around D.C.'s large population of Eritrean refugees. We went to a local Eritrean restaurant where I admired a beautiful culture and people.
Kflu and I are continuing to work on a photography project documenting his community organizing experience here in the states. While exploring the buildings and culture of East Baltimore, I am also learning about Eritrea and grassroots organizing. Most importantly, however, I am learning how to step outside of myself and look at my world through the eyes of another.
The Sally Bragg Baker Scholarship aims to support those making a contribution to world peace.
A. What does “peace” mean to you?
To me, peace is accomplished by actively loving your neighbors, including your enemies.
This, paired with loving God, is the most important teaching of Jesus. In the book "Tea with Hezbollah," two Americans take Jesus' commandment of loving one's enemies literally, and go to the middle east to share conversations with some of the most notorious figures of the arab world, including leaders of Hezbollah and Hamas and even Osama Bin Ladan's brothers. These candid discussions reveal these men to be real people with emotions, fears, and hopes of their own. This is a powerful modern example of what peace is to me: the pursuit of truly knowing and understanding our brothers in humanity. Not just negotiating or resolving conflict, but making their sorrows, history and future our own. When we pursue this unity, two disparate identities can create one new identity that completely eliminates the concept of the "other."
B. Provide examples in which you have contributed to peacemaking—in your family, school, community, workplace?
Two months ago I heard a white man scream derogatory ethnic slurs and death threats at my black neighbor, Wayne, during an argument outside of my apartment. I called the police, and was subpoenaed to court as a witness. Wayne and I spent his court day in meaningful conversation, sharing life experiences and many laughs. He won his case, and mediation was offered between Wayne and his harasser. I encouraged him to do it, but Wayne was severely opposed.
My words, however, were not lost. Wayne recently sat down with a different enemy of his - the church that meets above his shop. Wayne didn't know it when he and I met, but I am part of that church. Wayne had been hostile towards the church since we moved in about a year ago, but he recently reconciled with a church leader, expressing that he had assumed wrong about his neighbors, and now calls many of us friends.
C. How do you see yourself using your study abroad experience to build on your strengths and create a more peaceful world?
I am going to South Africa as an artist, a believer, and a light skinned, middle class, twenty year old American. In my studies of social and political reconciliation, I will interact with people who identify very dissimilarly. I will create a more peaceful world by genuinely attempting to know, understand, and love these people. One way I am able to to do this is through community arts. I am especially interested in the role of the arts in racial reconciliation. I will also contribute to a more peaceful world by bringing what I learn back to the states and my home of Baltimore city. Knowledge of the history of apartheid, the developments leading to the dismantling of that system, the visions for post-apartheid South Africa, and the political, economic and social structure of the future South Africa are internationally relevant in today's efforts towards peace.
