Brett's journey to finding an activist project

The journey of settling on an activist project was far more difficult and time consuming than the activist project on which I settled. I would have to say that my current activist project is a bit of a compromise, due to my naivety of the time restraints of the trip and the speed with which emails and communication with people occurred. Any program that is to sustain itself takes a very long time to implement, and while I had high expectations in the beginning of the trip, along with a multitude of ideas, time passed so fast, faster than I kept up with. None the less, there are still three weeks left that I look to take advantage of, and I hope that my project can sustain for a while after I leave. 

My activist project is a series of small changes that I am implementing at my internship. My internship, understaffed, and over occupied with clients, tends to be a depersonalized place for the clients. In fact, many of the long-term employees, having to deal with the stress of seeing so many people every day, and juggling far more than they should , tend to treat the clients a bit like problems, which either can be fixed, avoided, or pushed off for the time being. The center could use a bigger office and a bigger staff, but even without such large changes, there are small changes that can help.

At the end of the day, our center gives out money. In different forms, from food stamps to rent to business supplies, but at the core of it, we are a welfare center. Because of this, there exists a sort of dynamic where people come to us with the interest of getting this money. This leads to further depersonalization. For a population as fragile as refugees, the last thing they need from a center established to assist them is depersonalization.

And so I hope with my activist project to find several small ways to counteract this. The first thing that I am implementing is that I am purchasing a large number of journals, writing journals, and pens. I am going to give new refugees the journals to record their stories, and reflect on their troubles and hardships. I expect that the refugees will surprised at this request. I think that the interest in their personal struggles will seem foreign to them, and will be a bit empowering. I emailed the book lounge to see if we could possibly schedule an evening where some of the refugees could read their stories. I will see if that plays out. Another alternative is that I could have them meet on Monday afternoons at the center to chat and read their stories. The only problem with doing this every week is that transport money will prove to be a drawback.

Another aspect of my activist project is related to refugee health. Refugees are given food stamps, vouchers that they can use at Shoprite to buy food with, but there is no foresight into what kind of food they buy. So, I wrote up a list of healthy affordable foods with little descriptions of the benefits of the food products, information about carbohydrates proteins and fats, healthy and unhealthy. I hope to be able to have this distributed to the refugees with the food stamps for a long time after I am gone. The list includes things like potatoes, rice, eggs, vegetables, milk, sardines, canned beans and others. It then tells refugees to avoid things like sweets and white bread and heavily processed food. It is possible to eat healthy on a meager paycheck, although certainly not as easy to buy things like olive oil and nuts and fish. I think that a list of healthy foods like this shows an interest in their health, that hopefully some of them will take advantage of.

My failed activist projects include a garden in Blikkiesdorp, ‘tin town’, an informal settlement in Delft that houses a large population of Somalian refugees. I set up an appointment with the Cape Town department of social department in Bellville, and met with them about a month ago to discuss my idea to set up a community garden. They seemed receptive to it, and gave me the information of several people to call and contact. The project would have taken several months to complete, at least, as I would have to get approval from higher levels of government to start a program in an informal settlement, which is supposed to be less permanent than a township. The project was contingent on me staying the winter in Cape Town. Because I am no longer staying until august, I had to let that activist project loose. I had also planned a meeting with Soil For Life to work with them, but then called it off when I learned I couldn’t go through with it. My next activist project initiative was to help the Mamela music project to make a new documentary for their initiative. I emailed them on two separate occasions and waited for a response which I never got. I wasted at least two weeks emailing and waiting for them.  In the meantime, I put in extra hours at the refugee center, going in on several Fridays to meet clients and do extra work. So, I hope that my initiatives at the refugee center will sustain for at least a little while. Also, I am working with another of the interns at the refugee center to put together an intern handbook, which we would have liked to get at the beginning of our time to explain what we were doing and how to do it. We are going to put it together so that future interns have a good base of where to start, can continue our improvements, and build on it themselves.