Uta has a serious case of World Cup fever and we are suffering along with the community. The planning committee has big plans to get the entire building 100% complete by the time the World Cup is over so that we have something to celebrate once the World Cup fever clears.

In order to celebrate we will hold a performance at the hall with children dancing performances, choir singers and speakers from the community. Everyone in the committee will have a role. Azaph (a village elder) will start off the performance with a group prayer – as is custom in the village. Angie is helping to choreograph a dance performance. She has the children at her house every week for a rehearsal. We were lucky enough to attend such a rehearsal and we were so pleased to see her running a dance class at her home which can soon be done in the hall! Lucky is making plans to have a feast after the performance. The community wil have meat, pap and sauce. Ethel will make a speech describing the planning committee’s role and what they have been through to get this project off the ground and then completed.

We are so happy to finally be planning this event and we can’t wait for a blog entry in the future describing the time spent at the event! We are so close! Yay!

Shangaan word of the day: mpfula – open

Today a loved committee member passed away. Lizzie had a smile that could brighten anyone’s day. Her laugh was infectious. Lizzie died of TB while staying in a hospital 45 minutes away in Acornhoek. She had been in the hospital for over a month when it happened. She was so strong and so alive just a few months ago. She has young children that will now grow up without her.

We got to know Lizzie when she shared some brilliant thoughts with us about what she wanted to see in her community. She was looking forward to the business opportunities that the community hall would bring. As one of our most dedicated and involved committee members, Lizzie brought such valuable ideas to our meetings and played such an important part in making the community hall possible.

There are walls!

Construction is moving along. The community hall has walls, and we are thrilled.  We even spent the afternoon sitting inside the new building just getting used to it!

Azaph Sithole is the senior member of our committee.  He is an Elder and therefore is well respected by the community.  The group of Elders in Uta work to help the local traditional leadership to guide the community.  He has worked his life to support his 14 children, all of whom have successes that their father can brag about.  He has a reputation across Uta of being able to provide excellent life advice, some of which we’ve had the opportunity to witness.  As an Elder, Azaph has helped us bridge the gap between traditional leadership and Uta’s future leaders.  When the planning committee needed to secure permission-to-occupy from the local chief for the land, his role allowed him to help the group navigate this system and made that process possible.

Azaph announced at our last committee meeting that he would take it upon himself to survey the building site at 5am Friday morning in order to begin construction on the community hall fence.  Azaph has been getting price quotes for fence materials from local hardware stores.

The original and most basic purposes of the community hall are to hold meetings and facilitate pension distribution.  Azaph is an example of a member of the community who collects pension from the government but is currently is unable to do so in a comfortable environment where he and others can be protected from sun or rain. The government will be able to use the community hall as a pension site so that mothers and the elderly will be able to collect every month in a secure location.  Azaph’s leadership in the community and in the planning committee is a blessing and his commitment to the project has been an inspiration to the rest of the committee as well as to us.

We have been working on the community center in Uta. We have been here in South Africa for a month now and have been spending our time, so far, reintegrating into the community and talking about community ideas for the center. We have been working closely with our local youth partner, Forget Sithole, and many other young people to evaluate local opinion and mobilize the community around their ideas. This is being done through formal interviews in both Shangaan and English and casual conversations among neighbors and friends. These are just the very beginning stages of this development project and we are really looking forward to getting even deeper into it.

We will attend a community meeting this week during which a planning committee will be formed for the community center.  This committee will then be in charge of developing more ideas for the center as well as outlining construction plans.  The committee will be made up of both men and women of all ages and backgrounds in order to be representative of the people of Uta.

In order to reinegrate into Uta life, Sarah and I have both joined the local women’s soccer team. This team has only recently started up through the leadership of a few strong females. Its really nice to see the women out getting exercise and enjoying their time together. We practice each weekday and run on Saturdays. Its so fun to play with our host moms with their little daughters on the sidelines cheering us on! We were imagining how funny it would be to watch our own mothers run around a soccer field, aggressively pushing other women out of their way to score goals! (Hi Mom!)  We think its nice for the women who don’t work to have something to commit to in the evenings, and those who do work, its something nice to change up their routine. This is definitely a good way to get to know more people in Uta and reach out to those who will be an asset to the community center and also a good way for us to make even more friends in Uta.

Shangaan word for the day: Nhlampfi – Fish

The GDA to South Africa was an amazing way to spend my last spring break in college. SMRC provided the GDA participants with the ability to fully immerse in the culture and life style of rural South Africa. While on the GDA we experienced more in a week then most do in a trip for three weeks. During the GDA there is never a moment when you feel like you are wasting your time or you could be doing something else. This had a lot to with the home stay experience. Andrea, Katie, and I stayed in Richard Siwela’s brother’s home, which is across the street from Richard. The house was beautiful and you could tell the family had put a lot of hard work into it. They had four or five bed rooms with nicely tiled floor, a newly renovated kitchen with large counter-tops and a nice sitting area with a TV and couches. They also had a really nice bathroom with a toilet, sink, and bathtub. Unfortunately because of the lack of running water the toilet and sink did not work. The family was so welcoming and was really interesting to talk to about their jobs and daily life. We found out our host was the first women in the community to go to college!

One of the best parts about staying in Uta was that over the few days we were there we really got to know different members of the community. I just remember the first day we arrived we decided to walk as a group over to Shiviti Primary School. When we started walking we had about ten kids from the community walking with us, but the farther we walked the more kids and members of the community joined us. It was also amazing to watch Saul and Megan run into old friends from past trips to South Africa. It was just so exciting to observe the relationships that years of being a part of this community had established. By the time we got to the school we had 25 or so kids walking with us, and they were so excited to show us their school!

The pride they had about their school and their community was remarkable. The school was closed because it was a Sunday, but later in the week we were given the opportunity to go back and visit. When we went back to Shiviti it was late in the afternoon and students had already left for the day. So we decided to go see the library Megan and the interns had worked on. When we walked in the brightly painted room we saw a class of students each with a book quietly reading to themselves. It was almost unbelievable. The library was no longer an SMRC run project but a resource 100% utilized by the school and the students. While talking to the children of Uta, they tell you about their dreams and hopes for the future. Even the answers given by children as young as 8, clearly showed the success of SMRC projects. These children are empowered and believe in their futures, they want to be lawyers, doctors, and teachers. Which is amazing in anof itself, but the truly inspiring thing is that they all want to receive their degrees and then come back and work in their community.

Being an intern for SMRC in DC, I had read a lot about our work. But that never prepared me for what I saw in terms of our impact in the community. But the commitment to change and a future without poverty is two sided, the people in Dixie and Uta have taken it upon themselves to see results and development. This two sided commitment is what makes all the difference.

Join SMRC and your friends at a happy hour event TOMORROW night (Thursday, 5:00pm onward!) to celebrate the incredible development of a Community Center in Uta, South Africa. Sarah Whitney and Claire Bristow, SMRC Global Development Fellows are on their way to implementing a remarkable space for youth and women’s empowerment on health and education issues, microfinance and even business development.

MADAMS ORGAN
Time: 5:00pm
What: Fundraiser for Uta Community Center
Cover: NONE
Who? You!

Join us at 5pm or throughout the evening. There will be a RAFFLE to win cash and the bar has generously offered to donate $1 from every drink sold (there are still happy hour prices, too!) and 20% from all food sales to the cause.

Can’t wait to see you there!

What a trip! We led 8 individuals to South Africa for a week, and we learned more, saw more, and met with more people that offered us insights into our development work in the community. Libraries, sports fields, classrooms, and more have been built there, but only when we see them in full use can we be sure they are becoming the sustainable development projects we hope to see. Here are some pictures from our visit, courtesy of Jessica Schwartz.

Sarah Whitney, Global Development Fellow discusses her project to build a community center in Uta, South Africa. Help send her to South Africa this summer by support our fellowship program on Razoo’s March Goodness contest.

Congratulations to The Buffelshoek Trust our partners in Manyeleti, South Africa on their incredible progress building a health clinic in Uta village that will have HIV/AIDS resources. SMRC has been involved in developing relationships with the community and has worked on some fundraising initiatives to construct the clinic. We are excited to work in the clinic, bringing interns, medical students and most of all, working with the local population to ensure that the clinic is highly effective in providing health care. Here are some pictures of the clinic under construction. The roof is being built as I write this post!

The past two months have been full of challenges and rewards for the Uta Bakery Social Entrepreneurship Project.  I have focused primarily on fundraising during the fall and winter, and I am very excited about the research and design part of the program to which I will dedicate the majority of my time in the spring.

Learning about fundraising has been an incredible and valuable experience.  Fundraising was a field about which I knew very little before I began my journey as a Student Movement Fellow, and I quickly learned that it takes a lot of time and careful thought and preparation to carry out.  Some of the most successful fundraising events for the Project have been: the Uta Bakery Bake Sale at Colorado College, the SMRC 100 Movement, and the Spare Change for Social Change Penny Campaign.  The Bakery Project has started to plan many exciting upcoming events, including a Uta Bakery Team running to raise funds in the Georgia Half Marathon, a Casino Night at Emory, a Lose Your Shoes Barefoot Soccer Tournament at Emory, and much more!

As I am designing the Bakery Project, I have realized that I have a lot to learn about business and also baking.  I am, therefore, hoping to get a job at a bakery near Emory next semester. I am also planning on meeting with Emory professors in the business school and in the development field in order to learn as much as I can about social entrepreneurship. I recently met with Emory professor Peter Brown to discuss some of the inherent difficulties in doing development work in rural South Africa, and I look forward to other invaluable meetings like this as the Project progresses.