Growth

My Cape Town learning experience is best reflected using the metaphor of growth—but not growth in the sense of clear forward progress and improvement. Working in the garden, Abalimi, has allowed me plenty of material to work with and time to develop a metaphor based on a plant’s life processes. The reason why my idea of growth doesn’t refer to some linear process towards “perfection” is because, in my work, I’ve witnessed differences in the ways that plants are nurtured and to what end between here and at home. I gathered the same idea of varying paths and goals of growth in my work with children at the day care centre, and the same could be said for my own personal growth. The plants we grew in our garden were by no means “perfect” in the sense of being manicured, in dark, moist soil without weeds. Neither were the children in an environment that was perfectly suited for “optimal growth” as defined by perhaps certain American standards and nor was my own personal growth anything that turned into a perfectly developed product of knowledge. In my time here in Cape Town, I have experienced the process of growth—of rootedness and of transplantation, explosions of growth, weeding, and pruning—but without any “perfect” product of knowledge at the end.

The literal growth of the plants I cultivated at Abalimi epitomizes my use of growth in describing my experience. Though, early on in my placement, I focused on eliminating the weeds that crowded out the growth, I eventually learned about the alternate uses of these weeds and their potential benefits in holding moisture and preventing erosion. I came to realize that the grandmothers’ priorities were more focused on building relationships among themselves than my obsession over weeding, watering, and manicuring the plants. The experience made me confront models of growth that differed from those in my gardening experience in the past, an experience similar to that at Khumbulani, where I grappled with questions about the needs of structuring and pruning a child’s upbringing, if you will. From a perspective informed by psychological models of cognitive development, I had trouble taking a relativist standpoint on the ways in which children were nurtured, inclined as I was to think that a certain level of physical and mental stimulation was healthy for a child’s growth. The way that the context and goals shaped children’s growth at Khumbulani, however still fits into my metaphor of growth, which struggles to strike a balance between desired structure and the contingencies of reality. This is also how I view my final reflection on my personal growth: a mixture of striving for certain ideals of knowledge, ethical service, etc., while recognizing the effects that transplantation and environmental factors have on the direction of my growth. Though the word growth implies movement towards fulfillment, and I have been filled with new experiences, friendships, and perspectives, it does not, to me, mean a clear end goal of concrete knowledge. It instead signifies a concept of fluidity, of constant freedom paired with cultivation that fosters outwards expression and inner contemplation.

Below is a more complete version of my presentation: 

My Cape Town learning experience is best reflected using the metaphor of growth—but not growth in the sense of clear forward progress and improvement. Working in a garden has allowed me plenty of material to work with and time to develop a metaphor based on a plant’s life processes.  The reason I pointed out that my idea of growth doesn’t refer to some linear process towards perfection is because in my work I’ve witnessed the differences in the ways that plants are nurtured here and at home, and towards different end goals. I gathered the same idea of varying paths and goals of growth in my work with children at the day care centre, and the same could be said for my own personal growth. The plants we grew in our garden were by no means “perfect” in the sense of being manicured, in dark, moist soil without weeds. Neither were the children in an environment that was perfectly suited for “optimal growth” as defined by perhaps certain American standards and nor was my own personal growth anything that turned into a perfectly developed product of knowledge. In this presentation, I would like to talk about the process of growth—of rootedness and of transplantation, of fertilizer, explosions of growth, weeding, and pruning. At the end I will show how the “imperfect” product emerged from this process.

I will begin by describing growth in the most literal, tangible sense, in the growth of plants at my service placement in Gugulethu, Abalimi Bezekhaya. The name means farmers of the home, a name which means a lot considering our program’s emphasis on displacement and belonging. The fact that the ladies working at Abalimi are grandmothers, old enough to remember the displacement of apartheid, is significant in my effort to understand the nature of rootedness and displacement. Though I don’t have a sense of clarity on the subject, it is interesting to contemplate whether Gugulethu has become the new home of these farmers or whether they envision themselves as farmers of the greater SA. Or, perhaps, since the work of the farmers goes to support the family income, “of the home” is meant to refer to this supportive household role. Whatever the use of the word, these farmers reside in  Philippi and have a 100 square meter garden in Gugulethu, which they farm intensively, selling the majority of the produce to Cape Town residents through the Harvest of Hope CSA (community supported agriculture) program and using their own plots to produce food for themselves and their households. In the garden they grow spinach, beetroot, onions, chilies, tomatoes, squash, eggplant, carrots, lettuce, cabbage, gooseberries and basil. When I first came, they put me to work weeding by the chili peppers, which were fairly overgrown. The plants were already bearing these beautiful looking peppers, but I thought I’d clear the ground so it would look nice. For the rest of the week I weeded as many rows as possible, many of which had become extremely overgrown. The mamas have a lot of area to take care of, and since there are only 4 of them regularly working there from 8 to 1, with their age and physical ailments that accompany it, it’s hard to be incredibly meticulous about the weeding. As young and fit as I am, I found it exhausting! So the garden, though well worked, sometimes has a few weeds, and the grandma’s aren’t always able to keep it completely manicured. There were a few times when I despaired upon seeing an entire section of potatoes buried in weeds. I remember Rob pointing to these weeds on our tour, however, and saying how they were edible and some specialty chefs had begun using them. I thought that was kind of an interesting way of thinking about unseen potential.

Anyways, I was able to plant some seeds and seedlings as the weeks went along and was happy to be able to see them grow as I was there. I spent as much time nurturing these as possible, because it was in these early stages that they were most vulnerable, needing water and fertilizer and soil. Though the ladies seemed to have a system—putting manure and water in the soil as we were planting—there were also elements that I never understood : sometimes putting compost on top and sometimes inside, sometimes watering by bucket, other times letting the sprinklers water (or miss) the young plants. Oftentimes I was baffled by the way we cared for the plants: the peppers that were ready when I got there were still on the plants when I left 7 weeks later. In my confusion, I did what I would have done at home—weeding in every spare moment, watering the ones that seemed unkempt, asking again and again when we would be able to harvest the chilies. After weeks, however, Rob came and asked how things had been going and whether I had been spending time with the grandmas having tea. I said that yes, I had, but then I began to realize what an important time this was for the ladies. Although they were speaking in Xhosa and I never understood what they were saying, I was amazed by how much they always had to talk about—they were almost constantly in conversation. It seemed that while I had been dedicating so much time to the care of the plants, they had been fostering their own relationships with each other.

Mostly, I wanted to describe my experience growing the plants in the garden to describe the sporadic and unexpected nature of growth. Despite the near-universal experience of gardening plants like tomatoes, spinach, lettuce, basil, and onion, the environment was completely different, the needs varied, and the methods and goals completely different from what I had expected. Due to a pretty strong indoctrination into relativism, I refuse to accept that my way of doing things, rooted in an Iowan context, is any better or any worse than the way that these grandmothers were doing their gardening here. They had a number of different environmental and social factors affecting the growth of their plants. Though I may have had in mind my American ideal of the fat, round tomato (probably genetically engineered to look that way) it did not include the teatime in the container, the limb of the plant perhaps with no visible fruit but a growth nonetheless that should be valued in itself.

My time at the Khumbulani day care centre is similarly reflective of this idea of growth being not unilinear and upward but outwards even sideways, even down. In this instance, however, it is even harder to withhold judgment about the ways in which the children’s growth are being aided or stunted through the work of the center. The kids in Khumbulani’s day care program range from ages 0 to 6 and are rambunctious. Coming to CT straight out of a psychology class touching on early childhood development, I entered the context with a “scientifically informed” view of childrens’ growth—in a very much straightforward, unidirectional sense. This language of cognitive development prescribes certain practices for the various stages, to further the child’s advancement along this path, from sensorimotor to preoperational, to concrete operational, etc.,At this point, I don’t know if I could take a relativist standpoint and refuse to acknowledge the importance of physical and mental stimulation throughout childrens’ development and, by association,  their schooling. I do, however, think that the metaphor for growth still applies. The children at the centre are getting bigger, regardless, and their environment and upbringing will largely shape the ways in which they grow and the kind of people they turn out to be when they grow up. It only takes a simple comparison between my upbringing in my environment and that of those my age in Khayelitsha to see clearly just how much these factors influence one’s growth. Surely, there are aspects of township life that it wouldn’t pain a relativist to try to change, like the weeds of gangsterism, drug use, and alcoholism. Other aspects of a child’s environment, like the classes and care offered by Khumbulani, are less easy to prescribe. One thing I struggle to decide—because I haven’t spent too much time thinking about it yet—is how whether a child’s growth really requires a rigorous straightening and pruning, and if so, should it be in the way that I experienced in the U.S.? Should classes offer more free play time or more structured activities, more freedom or more discipline, constant stimulation or more nap time? If one is more desireable, the role of Khumbulani must be to refine the seedlings’ environments to grow the kids in a particular way, but I am still in no position to say that one route is more desireable—or realistic given the context—than another.

So while neither Abalimi nor Khumbulani offer a perfect picture of upward growth in the way it may be envisioned in different settings, they both show growth nonetheless. Though the term is fraught with prescriptions of the way things “should grow” in order to mature, I am mostly able to avoid using the term in this way because I also use it to describe my own personal growth as a part of this program. Though the definition says that growth may mean process towards fulfillment, it could also mean a perpetual journey which is how my personal growth seems to me. Through the course of this program, I have been transplanted and fertilized with thought only to be uprooted again and again as soon as my assumptions about a certain topic were changed. Obviously, my direction of growth while here has been shifted. My environment has changed—I am no longer trodding on Iowan or Californian soil. Not only have my surroundings changed from the US, the change from day to day, hour to hour, from the house in Obz to the afternoon on the waterfront to the weekend in the city to the days in the townships. My mind and body don’t know in what direction to grow?

I know that I have grown in the sense that I have gotten fuller: of information, of friends, of new foods, of experiences….but I don’t know in what direction this filling is taking me. I now have a number of experiences from doing service that should really help me grow as a person, but I don’t know if these will aid me in conducting more service abroad or at home. I wrote about this in my paper, but the service learning class gave me a number of things to think about without many firm conclusions about the type of service I want to do, be it charity, project based, or social change. I learned a number of different perspectives on community, but don’t know one to go off of, different stories of south Africa, without just one to operate off of. I still very much see this growth as moving outwards, in various directions, with various environmental constraints, or weeds, which could be limiting or helpful: my American citizenship, my ideology, certain skills that I have. Just as I cannot call the different type of growth at Abalimi something in need of straightening or correction, neither can I prescribe any procedures to make sure that my growth is going straight. Yet there is still ambiguity, as my time at Khumbulani shows—there are certain things that I may want to strive for, I just need to search for more information to determine what direction that must be in.