day 1 - 8/27/10

In a small prayer room, the mother Mary statue reminds me of one in the old St. Wyslecan Center in East Baltimore. I am at a Catholic retreat center in Joburg, South Africa, where students in the SIT program are staying for the weekend. All of the keys are old fashioned and the owner's seven year old grandson, Matthew runs around the halls. His skin looks like it could belong to any nationality in the world.

8/28

As Fred, our minibus driver, and I walked down the steps into the Apartheid Museum in Joburg, I asked him if he'd been before. He said, "Many times," but this was the first time he'd been in it. He usually drove around the city while the students visited the museum. When I asked him why, he said "Everything in here, I already know."

I was impressed with how the museum's architecture embodied the sadness, anger and seriousness of apartheid. The most memorable part for me was seeing footage of bodies being flung over barbed wire fences and shot into during the police raids of the eighties.

All of the American SIT students are brilliant. Last night a group of us had a conversation that began around economy and ended around God (as late night conversations usually go). Whitney thinks that everything is interconnected and leads to one central thing. She thinks the central thing has something to do with the golden rule - treat others as you would want to be treated. I think it's our nature to be "self-interested," Rachel's word, which is better, I think, than selfish. Kathryn brought up that Jesus is a great man to model a life after because he teaches how to be self-sacrificing over self-interested. We all agreed that a self-interested mentality is the root problem in failing economic and political systems. We also talked about Truth, a word plastered across a shirt sold at the Apartheid Museum. Questioning is imperative to truth. Maybe questions are more important than answers, in the same way that the process of painting a mural is more important than the final piece. Yet, we always thirst for answers and completion. Maybe there's a well of truth that everyone can walk to by asking questions. We all want to know who we really are and what is best to do with our lives. Are we capable of having that answer for ourselves? Would we lead ourselves astray? Is it our nature to follow the golden rule? I was glad that Josh did at one point lay down a bottom line - we can talk all night and never convince each other anything - we just have to live.

8/29

Annie and I started making up a song to memorize our zulu greeting to the tune of Taio Cruz's song "Dynamite."

At the Soweto Museum, a photo of a boy holding a dead Hector Pieterson reminded me of a series of works I made for two years on people holding each other. Cried in public. Hector's death and his sister's account helped make the struggle personal - what if my younger brother had been shot and killed?

Late night convo round two: "We're not a capitalist society, we are a corporatist society" -Rachel.

8/30

Drove for 8 hours from joburg to durban.

Arrived at another mission where the German nuns are really kind.

8/31

I go running in the mornings, and the sunrise this morning was so orange it was almost red. It popped through trees with fuscia flowers. An old man has been staying at this mission for 25 years, and when a nun asked him why, he motioned to the porch facing the sunrise and said, "Where else in the world can you see this?". That nun told me that yesterday morning a monkey jumped up onto the porch in attempt to get food. He picked a little white petunia, put in in his mouth, and stared straight at her with his grey face.