A SOUTH AFRICAN IN VIRGINIA:

A SOUTH AFRICAN IN VIRGINIA: Emily Mnisi is an ethnic Sothu with a Master’s degree in special education from the University of Lancaster. These days, she’s on the management team of a farm-based therapeutic community for adults with mental disabilities, near Johannesburg. It’s called Cluny Farm.
Back at the beginning of the month, when my daughter Leila and I were in South Africa, Emily took us around a bit, including on a really interesting tour of Soweto. Last weekend, Emily and I were both in Philadelphia for a working reunion of the 14 folks who took part in last summer’s International Quaker Working Party on the Israel-Palestine Conflict. And since she had a couple of days free afterwards, I invited her to come back down to Virginia with me.
So I spent the past couple of days doing various things in and around my hometown, Charlottesville, with Emily. I knew in advance that hosting Emily here would be fun. But it was also very instructive.
Given her field of expertise, I thought she would find it interesting to visit a similar kind of farm-based therapeutic community that’s just half an hour away from here. It’s called Innisfree. And though I’d never visited it before, I’d heard a lot of good things about it, and was quite happy to arrange to take her there for a visit.
Innisfree Executive Director Lee Walters couldn’t have been kinder. She gave us two hours of her time yesterday morning, and she and Emily exchanged many ideas and impressions about their two remarkably similar projects.
In the afternoon, I’d arranged a visit to Work Source Enterprises, a C’ville-based non-profit that provides a wide range of employment/empowerment services for adults with mental disabilities. Again, I’d heard vaguely about their work beforehand, but never been there. There, Vice President John Santoski showed us around.
In a way, I was even more impressed with WSE, since it is community based, and it tries to serve the entire community (with some emphasis on the needs of low-income people).
Another thing that these two visits– and a couple of other ones that we made around town– brought home to me was the importance to people with disabilities of our area’s ‘JAUNT’ transportation system for people with disabilities. It is this system that allows people with disabilities to get to workplaces, doctors’ appointments, and generally around town…
Okay. I am sure that many of my readers have known all about such matters, and have understood them well, for many years already. Yes, I “knew” them, at an intellectual level beforehand, too. But somehow, seeing this wonderful array of services being provided to people with disabilities in our community– and seeing it alongside Emily, who’s deeply involved with South Africa’s efforts to empower its disabled population as much as possible– well, somehow it made me value what John and Lee and all their colleagues do in our community even more than I did before.
And it made me want to guard their really life-giving programs against all the budgetary depradations that are heading toward them from Washington like some massive tsunami.
And it made me want to take all the gazillions of dollars-worth of resources that the US federal government is pouring into weaponry and other means of coercion of non-American peoples around the globe– and pour it instead into starting just exactly THESE kinds of programs for other people around the world, instead.
(One early reaction Emily gave, after she rode down here with me on the train from DC, and then figured out that we’d traversed only one small part of one of the 50 states of the USA, was to say– “But, you Americans have such a big, beautiful country here! Why do you have to– ” I think it was politeness that prevented her from finishing the sentence. )
What the folks in South Africa are trying to do is so big, and so brave, and so inspiring! They are trying, I think, inside their one country, to do something that we all ought to be aiming to do at the GLOBAL level. Starting with a grossly inequitable system based on race– apartheid– they’ve been trying to transform it into one that provides at least a decent level of human services to everyone, regardless of race.
(Of course, Emily had many poignant stories of what it was like to grow up under apartheid. I don’t want to appropriate them and tell them here. I want HER to write her own stories for the rest of us! What I will just recount, quickly, is her tale of walking three miles to school each day, and three miles home at the end of the day– and seeing a small handful of white kids ride by her on a big, nearly-empty school bus… She noted, too, that while the girls from her community had to walk, some of the boys were given bikes to ride to school… Also, their school, locked in the “Bantu” education system, only went up to Standard Five. After that, to finish all the way through high school, she had to do the rest of it on her own, at home, by correspondence… But really, wait till she writes her own story, and that of the parents whom she describes in loving terms as, “incredibly resourceful.”)
So, anyway, instead of the communities and governments from the rich world just shoveling resources into building decent human-development systems for our sisters and brothers living in the poor world– we shovel them instead into weapons, and armies, and mechanisms of control?
What is our problem?? I think we are the ones with the most serious disability. Call it moral-attention deficit disorder. Call it mean-spiritedness. Call it blindness. Whatever it is, we need to deal with it.