At The Open Space

     I worked at Etafeni, which in Xhosa means “at the open space.”  Etafeni is a community resource center for people with HIV/AIDS in Nyanga.  People come to Etafeni from Nyanga, Gugulethu, and Phillipi.  Something that has been repeated to me throughout my placement is the story of Etafeni.  An old mother at a park started taking care of children who had nowhere else to go underneath a tree in an abandoned lot. She started the children classes, but really she started letting them play and gave them a place to go. The children’s parents started telling them, “uya Etafeni, Etafeni”—go to the open space. It might be corny, but I am going to use ‘open space’ as a metaphor for my journey here in Cape Town.  Being here has made me consider the have opportunities that I have been given, whether it be in different communities at Stanford or even in classes, to fill open spaces with my own narrative.

      I’ve been lucky enough to have opportunities to both construct and share my own narrative.

I want to talk about how a blank page, or any medium for that matter, is a place in which self-expression and empowerment can happen. Working at Etafeni and in a completely new environment has showed me how the act of telling my story in and of itself is empowering.  The City of Cape Town eventually sold Etafeni Trust the land where the older woman had been watching children.  Unemployed men and women were trained as builders, and today the center stands as a beautiful, inexpensively built haven in which twelve different programs that shelter and take care of the community are run. 

            I mainly worked at the Fit for Life, Fit for Work program at Etafeni. Eight times a year, it takes in groups of 15-20 adults who spend six weeks all day every day.  The students look at themselves, their life stories, their goals and values. They articulate what they want for themselves, and are given an open space to say, often for the first time, what they want in life.  The program gives students a safe space for self reflection.  Eventually they move on to skills training including English enrichment, computer skills, and driving lessons. In the past three years, the program has had an 80% success rate in placing graduates in paid employment, stipend internships, or tertiary studies with a bursary.

    Within the Fit For Life, Fit For Work program I did about three poetry workshops.  I was given an open space for creativity, within which I fostered an environment where students felt that it was okay to be vulnerable in their writing. Today I am going to share what the students came up with, what I came up with, and how these to things relate to my future plans this summer.  The word poetry comes from the Greek word “making”.  It is writing that stimulates the imagination and creates an emotional response. My class was the first forum for some of the students to experience formalized, normalized self-expression. If we are talking about empowerment, having your writing read by other people is one of the most empowering feelings I know.  This is coming from an aspiring writer. In my presentation to Stanford students, I had them read some of the Etafeni students' poems about love. I think it a beautiful thing to have their voices heard among peers who live across the world.  Something I’ve thought a lot about is how we can make other people a part of our own realities, and I think this was a good exercise in doing just that.  

      Finally, working at Etafeni wanted me to create more spaces and opportunities such as the workshop.  This summer I am doing Community Based Participatory Research.  I am creating a survey that will be a re-imagination of the current evaluation system at Etafeni.  I will conduct qualitative interviews with employers, graduates of the program, and facilitators to bring life to young peoples’ experiences with unemployment. Nyanga has a 70% unemployment rate, and this is an incredible problem of many South African townships.  I will also conduct a Photovoice project amongst the Fit for Life, Fit for Work group.  I will record and reflect on personal and community concerns through taking photographs.  Photovoice projects place cameras in the hands of community people for them to visually represent and communicate to others their lived experience.  Photovoice projects reflect on topics that are shrouded in silence, and then facilitates group discussions in which community members comparatively examine worldviews and communicate insights.  I hope to use this work to integrate it an interdisciplinary honors project. This will be a project incorporating arts: themes, discourse, learning from my International Relations Major.  During my time at Etafeni I have had a wonderful time filling open spaces with stories, poems, and other forms of empowering self-expression.  I look forward to continuing this project in June.