By hfirlein
"Everytime you smile at someone, it is an action of love, a gift to that person, a beautiful thing." -Mother Teresa
In South Africa, Nelson Mandela is more than just a politician- he is a national hero. And every year his birthday is celebrated through service; people take time to honor Madiba by helping others. For Mandela Day, CIEE, along with a local organization, took us to a township about 20 minutes outside of Cape Town. This was my first trip to a township, and while I understood poverty in theory, I don’t think I was entirely prepared for the state in which people lived. There is very limited access to electricity and water, none have indoor plumbing. Unemployment in the townships surrounding Cape Town is an average of 50%, schools are overcrowded, and residents have little hope for a brighter future. Faced with such daunting conditions, I wasn’t sure how a group of fairly privileged American students could possibly empathize with and in some way help these people.
We had several options for our day’s activities: house-painting, tree-planting, face-painting, and soccer. I ended up with the face-painting group. We went to a small park in the center of the township where family portraits were being taken, a band was playing, and residents had gathered. The little ones were shy at first, but once they saw the face-paint and our smiles, they warmed right up. Especially once they realized how much fun it was to paint OUR faces instead of the other way around. J I ended up with paint all over me. Which they found very entertaining and insisted on using my camera to take pictures of their creations. Once the paint ran out, we danced with the kiddos for a while until it was time to leave. Making silly faces and dancing like crazy - working at summer camp prepared me well for that one.
It wasn’t until we were walking back to the bus that I really started to process the intense poverty of my surroundings. The homes of the township residents were tiny shacks- just pieces of tin nailed together with dirt floors and maybe a fence. I felt so much guilt. It didn’t seem like enough to come into these people’s lives for a few hours just to leave again. We didn’t improve their standard of living or make their lives any easier. We didn’t provide jobs or an education. We danced around and painted faces, and that doesn’t seem like much when you’re faced with a community that struggles just to sustain itself. But we did make people smile. We gave children a day that I hope they will remember with happiness. It sounds so painfully cliché, but I realized how truly universal a smile is. And maybe for the day, that was enough.