Tie-dye Tshirts

As an American student in Cape Town spending only two days a week volunteering, there isn't a hell of a lot you can do in three months. I tell my students this when they arrive, fresh off the plane and filled with shining purpose. The primary "task" that they can complete while here is to support the community development practitioners who live here, whose days and weeks are defined by the work that they do at organizations in their own communities, in their homes.

Invariably what this means is that my students end up doing bits and pieces unrelated to a clear development goal or agenda. A lot of the time in fact, they end up saying thank you. Strange that. But not really. See, the only way 'development' is going to happen is if the Cape Town locals who my students encounter at their volunteer placements keep doing what they do. And it can be an exhausting, demanding, and thankless "do". It's a "do" that requires experience impossible to replicate in black and white books, that requires a contextual empathy nurtured and sensitized over years, that requires a persistence reminiscent of the Little Engine That Could.

My students can't to "do" that "do".

But they can stand on the sidelines and cheer the people who can. Give them a bit of encouragement, wave some metaphorical pom-poms and leap into a flag-waving formation. And so, on Monday mornings, students make their way to my desk with request forms. Requests for funding to cook a big meal for their placement colleagues, to hire speakers for a swing-dancing lesson and have a bit of a mid-morning jive, to buy materials for a tie-dye Tshirt workshop so staff can have brightly matching shirts for special events. Requests to say thank-you, to say GO TEAM, to say hells yeah keep going yo.

And if you think about it, nothing says hells yeah quite like a tie-dye Tshirt...