Humane Education in Cape Town

It’s coming up on my last week here, which is so bizarre to me. It’s become my home, my place, my life to be here. I looked up the other day and saw Devil’s Peak and realized how acclimated I’ve become to seeing that mountain; it, even more so than the famed Table Mountain, has been the backdrop against which my life for the past seven months has carried on. I fondly, perhaps egotistically, think of it as “my mountain.” I will miss it.

Yesterday we did another presentation at a school in Phillipi. The problem is that we’re at the mercy of the principals who typically want us to present to as many kids at one time as can physically fit in one room. I don’t know if it’s a time-saving thing or if the township schools are just so used to overcrowding that it now seems normal to them. It’s sad because these kids really deserve individual attention. It’s also hard to talk to them about ways to respect one another and take care of their pets when they are climbing all over each other and stepping on each other and pummeling each other to be able to see us.

A strange end to my time here - we got pigs. These great obese potbellied pet pigs. They were rescued from some petting farm or other. They’re grossly, enourmously overweight and of course so cute because of that. The idea was that we could get them and keep them here at the office and use them as Interactive Teachers when the kids from the local squatter camps come by for a soup day or an animal education discussion. So I went to get these pigs the other day from a tony vet’s office in Constantia (a tony suburb of Cape Town) where they were being kept. Because of some neglect they’d suffered they were wary of people, and we couldn’t get close enough to inject them with the tranquilizer we needed to get them in the back of the bakkie (pickup truck) to take them to Animal Rescue.  So we ended up chasing them about with a tranquilizer dart gun - a great big huge machine-gun-looking apparatus that the vet there uses to dart wildlife (he works in conservation). It was an amusing scene to the onlooker, I’m sure - five adults with a gun that looks like it came out of MEN IN BLACK chasing two knee-high rolling tubs of lard around a field. Fat as they are, they are fast and squeal loudly.

They are here now, though, sitting out back. Well, lying out back. We’re waiting for the tranquilizer to wear off. Then we’re going to try and re-acclimate them to people. And we’re going to put them on a diet. Their “test-run” will be tomorrow when we have a few people over to the office for a publicity-fundraiser tea. (They’re big on tea here.) The problem is that everyone will want to feed the pigs, so their diet will be off to a very bad start indeed.

Although, aren’t all diets that way?

Whenever I think about leaving South Africa I get a sinking feeling in my stomach. this place is my strange and wonderful home now … We have had lovely weather the past 2 days … yesterday I had off work b/c I couldn’t get a ride there, and I went walking to the gym, and looked up and saw the mountain - Devil’s Peak - that I’ve lived under for the past year. Since the clouds were gone I could really see it, and from my particular location and angle it looked even more spectacular than it usually does, with the shadows of the clouds lying on it and those african trees at the foothills and the blueblue sky and greengreen grass from all the rain and the greygrey stone pointing upwards. I will miss “My Mountain.”

Of course I will not miss seeing the suffering; though it’s strange to think that the United States is comparatively so suffering-free – it’s almost unfair, in a way. The most horrible thing happened the other day – something you wouldn’t see in the States. A man and his 3-year old daughter brought in a dog that belonged to his neighbor. You could tell he was once a stunningly beautiful dog - he looked exactly like a Golden Retriever, except that he was jet black. The man’s neighbor had had the dog in this condition for a MONTH and he hadn’t done anything and finally the neighbor took pity on the dog and brought him in. The dog’s front leg was completely mangled; his leg was swollen into the thickness of a cricket bat and ended about halfway down; there were a few folds of skin and sinew holding the remains of a paw on. It had been hit down by a car a month ago. It’s front leg was practically pancaked. It also had enough mange to turn part of its skin into elephant-like rough folds, and it’s bones were RAZOR sharp and jutting everywhere. It was in the most pathetic condition. There was a lot of discussion about what to do with it, because obviously it’s a cruelty case and we want to prosecute (not that the inept and overloaded South African courts will do anything, but it’s the principle of the thing) but you can’t just let the dog suffer until you can drag it to court. I wanted to euthanize him because he was obviously suffering horribly - he was listless and couldn’t stand and whimpered when anyone touched him. We tried to carry him to the mortuary so he wouldn’t have to walk, but that hurt him; even though he would have been within his doggy rights to bite me, he merely pressed his teeth lightly against my hand and yelped. You wish dogs could understand English or Xhosa or some language and hear some sort of apology or explanation. But we just euthanized him and told him that wonders awaited him in doggy heaven, which of course he could not understand.

I just wish there was less crime and poverty here - it’s much easier to prosecute when cruelty isn’t the backdrop of everyday life. We see a LOT of animals in HORRIBLE condition, but this one was the one dog I’ve ever felt like crying over.

We had some kids from the local squatter camps into the office yesterday. Well, all this week we’ve had them in, although Friday was the day that all the little gangstas chose to come in. (we were showing them around the vet office and doing nonviolence and humane education workshops and feeding them soup). (they’re all freezing and starving, nearly literally, so soup is a big draw.) But since yesterday was unofficially “gangsta day” (I think all the little soon-to-be-real-gangstas heard about the soup and came) the big kids where literally trampling the little ones in their rush to get soup, and then when we gave them bread and butter the big kids would punch the little ones in the head and grab their bread out of their hands. It was too bad, because it was about 1/3 gangsters and the rest were their younger siblings, little preschoolers.

Haha I’m making it sound worse than it is, the kids on Thursday were great and it was amazing to see them interact with the animals and with us. They were attentive and seemed to really care as much as they could at their age and considering their life circumstances.

One of the white people who works at the center was bemoaning the fate of these kids and said that these kids didn’t ask for their lives and didn’t stand a chance - which I agree with … but then she hit me with, “all people with HIV should be forcibly sterilized by the government!”

ummmm …. so, where do you even START with a statement like that?

Our new house came with a cleaner/maid/whatever you want to call them. It’s marvellous because I HATE cleaning and now I don’t have to do it. This unpleasant task is delegated to someone who is being paid to do it, and I can go on not doing my dishes. Her name is Hazel and she is quite nice and we have long chats about her kids and Cape Town … and today, about the dynamics of working as essentially a servant for white people. It came about when I offered her a cup of coffee yesterday - I had just woken up and she was in the kitchen, and it is my belief that no one should start a morning without this delicious and wholesome beverage. I was being polite and it was really not a problem to make an extra cup. Then I noticed that she was teary.

This morning she seemed a lot happier and accepted my offer of a cup of coffee , apologizing for being upset yesterday. She explained that 2 girls who had left this house a few days ago had left her a Thank-You letter and flowers. By the time she received the note, it had been opened by our landlords. They also harshly questioned her about WHY she had been left a letter and flowers.

I realized that accepting a cup of coffee from me came with intricate social details that I never really think about.

I went to the Apartheid Museum in Joburg a few weeks ago. They set up the space chronologically very well - the darker rooms were during the 1970’s and 1980’s gradually emerging into windowed displays of Mandela and the end of apartheid. I left feeling uplifted and hopeful, with the museum’s slogan - Apartheid is just where it belongs, in a museum - ringing in my ears. But then I remembered the exhibit on ”Life Under Apartheid.” It contained photo after photo of the racial divide, including a section on black servants in white homes.

Fourteen years after Mandela was elected, that particular part of “Life Under Apartheid” ISN’T only in a museum. It still very much exists, as does the master-servant mentality.

Having servants in the States is so different from having servants here. For starters, it is incredibly gauche to use the word “servant” at all. The older generation likes to project an almost altruistic motive on the people who nanny their children and clean their house, and say things about their maids like “Oh, she helps me so much with the house work!” The younger generation tends to affect friendship with the servants, having small talks with them, saying “hello” and “thank you.” My guess is that this occurs because in a supposedly egalitarian society such as the United States, where equality is not only in vogue but in the Constitution, we can’t bear the thought of a master-servant relationship.

I think that’s as it should be - to  be a maid or a nanny is a job, a career, and should be treated as such by all parties. Here, however, the domestic workers are all black or coloured and the people employing them are all white, and the employers seem regard them with slight suspicion at best and airs of ownership towards the servants at worst.

For the girls to leave Hazel flowers and for me to whip up another cup of coffee is an American cultural sentiment - guilt over having a relationship that lends itself to inequality, perhaps; and just general friendliness. I don’t know that that is understood here. Hazel says that the landlords question her when she seems to close to the tenents - asking her “What did you say to them!?” and “What do you want from them?!”

I wonder if within certain demographics in South Africa, servants should be “seen and not heard.” Or, perhaps, anyone who is not white should be seen and not heard? Or, after apartheid, maybe the idea is that people who are not white must be at least seen, in the name of equality, in white areas. But to hear someone is to grant that person an equal status as the hearer … is South Africa ready for that?

The other week we went to a lot of schools to do our Nonviolence/Humane education for the kiddies. The one that sticks out in my mind was one in Gugalethu where the principal thought it might be nice for about 8 classes to see our presentation all at once (we usually do one class at a time).

We do a puppet show for the younger kids. The main characters are a girl called Thandi, her friend whose name I forget, and her dog named Spotty, who also has a friend with a name I forget. The basic plot line of the puppet show is that Thandi and her friend work together to take good care of Spotty and his friend, and everyone treats each other nicely and respects one another, etc. The idea behind the idea behind the puppet show is to try and ingrain the idea of nonviolent problem-solving amongst township youngsters, especially when it comes to the care of their pets. It’s a lot of fun for me to do the puppets, and the kids dance around to our song at the end of the puppet show.

The dancing is normally quite cute, but on this particular day there were about 200 5-year-olds in one small cement classroom. It was quite a sight to see them all filing in, this never-ending-line of miniature people … kind of like that scene in the one Monty Python movie where the Catholic sends some of his kids away and the line of disowned Catholic kids files along for the entirety of the three-minute song “Every Sperm is Great.”

The problem with 200 kids dancing at once in a small room is the space and the noise. The kids were standing on each other, dancing on tables, standing on chairs, thrashing around raucously, kind of like a kindergarten bar fight. It made me nervous but the teachers seemed to be used to it and smiled benevolently and clapped along. It was every kid for himself, though I saw a few had fallen by the wayside - they had their hands over their ears and were scowling at their peers. You could just tell that the scowlers were headed for a career as librarians.

Most of the schools had far fewer children in the classrooms for our presentation. They were all cute as buttons and looked like they were lapping up the puppet show and the presentation afterwards. I do the puppet show, but Junior does the presentation for the little kids as they’re in Xhosa (the native language; when we do older classrooms they are in English). All I know how to say in Xhosa is “good day, thank you, turn right” and a few other phrases, none of which are useful for a humane education puppet show. (And yes, it is a problem when, giving directions, I can only remember how to say “turn right” and not “turn left.” We come near to getting lost when I am navigating the bakkie.)

It is fun to do the puppet shows and it seems as though the kids really pay attention - shows of any kind do capture small childrens’ attention. But I always wonder what these kids go home to once they leave school. They’re all in their little uniforms, looking spic and span and studious … but even in classrooms a few years older than the kindergarteners there is a conspicuous lack of attendence. (Pardon my spelling.) From other work I’ve done in the townships you know that their home situations often aren’t ideal by any means - even when they have a functional family they have the state of the shack to deal with. I don’t know if the kids can process the “humane treatment of animals” part of our presentation, since they’re so young and have so many other things to deal with. I think that’s why the presentation incorporates the idea of nonviolent problem-solving and working together - in the hope that some of it sticks, and that even just once, one person or one animal has a pleasant moment at the hands of one of these kids.

I was at my internship yesterday, and managed to bum a ride on one of the mobile clinics into a township. (The organization I work with sends mobile veterinary offices (trucks with medicine and an examination table in them) to townships and holds clinics for poor people and their pets/work animals.) Howard and Junior, two of the animal officers, park the truck wherever and people see us from their shacks and come over with their puppy or cart-pony or whatever if it’s ill or needs a vaccination.

Yesterday we parked on a soccer field next to a school. It was a very rudimentary soccer field, of course - a couple of poles for goals, and an uneven ground scattered with broken glass and made of sand, dirt, and scrubby bush in different places. The kids seemed fine with it, they were all dressed in their little school uniforms and kicking a ball all over the place. We normally wouldn’t have parked on their field, (we were supposed to drive around to the front of the school) but the road was blocked off by a throng of people and a police vehicle standing around a dead body. Figures.

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The strangest thing happened to me today. I was walking along Main Road, waiting for a minibus. It is MiniBus Law that when you want one, you will have to wait for one, and when you don’t want one, five of them will pull up alongside you and their operators will practically DEMAND that you take them, even you are clearly walking in the opposite direction from which it is going. Oh, sorry, Minibusses are these white 15-passenger vans that broke down and rusted out in 1982 and are still in use today. They are NEVER full, contrary to what you or the law or a sane, non-blind person might think - because they are 15-passenger vans and this is Africa, they typically drive along with about 23 people in them. They are usually driven by someone who may know what the gas pedal is, but only occasionally remembers that there is a brake and finds “turn signal” and “red light” to be laughable concepts. But they are cheap and I’m cheap even by student standards, so I take them wherever I need to go.

But I digress.

Anyways, I was waiting for a minibus to get to a little strip of road a few kilometers from my house. There’s a coffee shop there. It’s not Starbucks, but it’s as close as I’ve come to one in this country. Finally a minibus passed. I hailed it like a true New Yorker hails a cab - and you don’t even have to hail these things because as I said, they practically beg or force you to ride in them. I just hail them for kicks and giggles - maybe because it’s in my genes to hail cabs (my mother is from New York).

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Sarah Mills ‘09 will be in Cape Town, South Africa going to neighboring townships with Community Animal Welfare workers, helping with veterinary care for township animals. She will also be doing humane education in township schools – since the townships are often violent places where human needs are great, animal needs are often ignored and the legacy of violence continues amongst children.