Transitioning to Hoërskool Bellville

                We spent our first day at Hoërskool Bellville today. So many elements converged in our students to ramp up nerves and preconceptions. This includes how tightly and how quickly they bonded with Isilimela students and Langa mamas and a culture of song and dance and sharing, openness not replicated as unreservedly elsewhere. It also includes a progressive Seattleite’s suspicion of privilege while extending our curiosity and trust to the marginalized—commendable when so much voice and power is going the other way. Students also had a whole week to grow close with Langa, coming to these comfortable beds and warm showers with both an emptiness and sharp guilt.

              During the testing period this morning, we gathered to check in, and there were so many fears. Some missed the warmth and swapping of stories with their Langa mamas. And there was that guilt around the welcome comforts surrounding them.
              Ms. Plesha gave out students a clear warning: Your feelings are all valid but you are magnifying each other’s anxiety and bias as you’re taking. Some of the things you’re saying might be true and some might not be. But you’re not going to find out if you close yourself off before you’ve even begun. Some of you aren’t in this spiral. The rest of you should lean on them. Give each other all that energy and balance. And when you present at the assembly today, bring all that joy. Bring it!
              And they did. They were spirited and the audience was respectful and above all warm, enthusiastic, and welcoming.
              After school, Bellville HFB student Anzél explained to Luke and a few of us teachers that people didn’t bring up race because they want everyone to be comfortable and don’t want anyone to be offended. She also said teaching about apartheid was very limited here: it’s taught by grade nine (after which, no history is taught at all in Bellville while it’s elective in Isilimela), but what happened after apartheid is not taught at all—nothing about what it took to get past apartheid and what it now takes for the nation to heal. But, Anzél says—and I would love our students to hear this—if someone has a real curiosity, then we know it’s okay to talk.
              When students compare communities in binary ways, I want them to consider what a privilege it is to travel to a place where as outsiders we can see history and all of its legacies so nakedly. It’s hard to do when you’re in it. And if you’re living in a place of vast income inequality, what kind of blinders and fear must one wear if you have so much and others have so little. In Seattle, this is also the case, yet you’re not likely to see it clearly: how often do you think and really feel with the full of your soul the way you do here about what it is to live on appropriated land, about the untended poverty, mental illness, addiction, sexual abuse, and other compounding violences in Seattle’s unhoused and walk between those who have and those who don’t until you feel so wrenchingly the wrongness and strangeness of so much culture aloof to it?
              The stinging guilt many of them feel about enjoying their Bellville comforts is a good sign: it’s a pathway to humbling, to becoming more considerate and grateful, to being mindful, to actively organize to improve our world and the plants and animals that inhabit it. But honest seeing and big-hearted feeling is the tool, not the guilt that is that first stop on the way. You have to get on the other side of guilt—to honesty and humility, the catalysts through which the world can be both heard and transformed.