Act. Learn. Repeat.

I arrived in the last five minutes of a session that seemed to be about attitudes; the facilitator spoke a lot about inner strength and power so I assume it had something to with self awareness, consciousness, et ceteraness. The group of 30ish students were not engaged. They held their own conversations, bundled in collectives of three or four. The facilitator needed to shout to get her message across, sometimes they listened. Covering the walls were body maps; each student had drawn themselves, emphasising the important components of their identity. "God forgives, I don't" was the motto draped across the body closest to me. Most of the pictures had some reference to life on the margins, and the carefully scrawled lettering indicated a marginal education.

Ok, I thought, tough crowd. There were only two women in the group, they sat together in front of a pillar. I was nervous, it was hot. Really hot. Today is one of those Cape Town days when the cooling wind abandons the city and you sit in your car with the windows down and the fan on, leaning forward so that your shirt doesn't get all warmly wet and stick to your back. The guys in the room all wore jeans, most of them hoodies and zip-up tops. I knew it would be pointless to ask them to de-hood, so they sat as a barely conscious audience, settled in their sweaty seats, beyond distraction. My session today was one hour, not two, I had my crayons and my newsprint paper, I took a deep breath...

At the end of the session, I shook my head at myself.

The students, in their hoodies and big shoes, had kind of been ok. Maybe more than ok on reflection. I had to repeat the instructions for the first activity multiple times, upside-down and inside-out and in as many different ways as I could think. But they'd done it. Every last one of them. And they'd shared in the big group what they had written and drawn. I won't lie, I was more than somewhat surprised. The point of the session is to teach them an alternate pedagogy, as a tool to approach their experience as learners, not just participants. I had to explain to them that classrooms and textbooks and teachers are not their only avenues into education. And I think they appreciated knowing that they can be an expert, and can get a 'A', on the experiences that they can claim as learning moments.

I forget sometimes, that I went to good schools, that my education affirmed me, it empowered me. I forget that for some people, for a lot of people, education can do just the opposite. It can prove to them how little they know, and how often they fail. Formal education at least. I don't think I'd realised that before today, not really. I've read the literature, hells, I've even written a Masters Degree on knowledge and knowing and its intersections with identity. And I've sat in I don't know how many shitty classrooms, surrounded by shitty textbooks that treat children as idiots, not learners, but it's never really sunk in. I've always known that education does not equal intelligence, but being able to see something shift in the group today somehow made that nugget of knowledge more real.

"So Step one...?" I asked them.
"ACTION!" They shouted back. I laughed; I wasn't expecting such an enthusiastic response.
Ok, I thought, I'll play along. I wound my hand up like a baseball player about to pitch a ball and threw out a "and Step two?"
"REFLECTION!"
"STEP THREE?" I'm really into it now.
"LEARNING!"
"And what. the hell. is the point. of learning. without mo-o-o-o-o-re...?"
"ACTION!"
For a moment it's awesome. For a moment they forget that they're sitting there all cool and hooded up. For a moment they all applaud themselves. I guess it was in that moment, that action, that I learnt what I did today.

Changing (most) minds

I had a couple of beers on Monday night with one of my students and a woman recently back from Sierra Leone. She went to do a bit of damage control after she lost funding on a project that's halfway through its implementation. It's a radio serial with some sexual health education undertones. She tells me that in central and west Africa there's a lot to do in terms of reproductive and sexual health. She threw out some stats, including that only 13% of Nigerian women use contraception actively.
"Thirteen percent?" I ask her.
"Thirteen percent," she confirms.
Apparently that's representative of many of the surrounding countries' family planning patterns.

So, first they built clinics. 'They' as in the local and international aid community, not her organization specifically. But not much changed. Then they trained doctors and nurses and community healthcare workers and anyone else they could really. Still no change.
"But why?" was my first question. "Is is a matter of access? Or stigma? Or some upside-down cultural norms?"
"It's not access," she maintains, "particularly not in the urban areas. Or at least access doesn't account for the extent of the non-use."
"So...?" I left my question looming over the table.

That's where they--her organization--come in. Their radio and TV programmes address behaviour and attitudinal change. They target young people--everyone does--and they embed "use a condom" messages in the soap opera scripts delivered to the listening public. It has been phenomenally successful, if their impact research from Sierra Leone is to be believed, and she doesn't believe it.
"We did the research and it turned out that 57% of new clinic users were coming to the clinic because of the show. The number seemed too high, so we asked the firm to redo their analysis. They did and they come up with another 57%. So we sent the data back to Vermont, and we had our own guys look over it. It was still 57%. Now they want to see the actual questionnaires, the pieces of paper. So when I left last week the staff in the local office packed it into a big box, I got to the airport and the guy at the airline told me I was overweight.... [long story short]... I was able to take half of the questionnaires shoved into an extra duffel bag, the other half are sitting in the airport in Freetown."

She doesn't need to persuade me, not really. Attitude change is about the most impossible thing to quantify, but anecdotally, I know it's what makes the difference. Like, I was sitting with a new partner yesterday, in a cramped little office near the Kuwait Taxi Rank in Site C. The walls of the office were covered in photos of his daughter, slips of paper with names and numbers on, and certificates denoting all the courses he's completed. I sat on a squeaky chair, we all did, all four of us; my knees rubbing against the woman's sitting next to me. It's an IT project, and they run programmes for everyone from youth groups to elderly ECD centre managers. And it's here that he tells me the importance of attitude.
"When they started, these women," he pauses to point to the photo on his screen of a group of greying women in aprons, sitting squinting at the computer screens in front of them, "and I showed them how to type, they told me they couldn't, "my fingers won't work on this" they said. So we had to persuade them first, before we could start, that their fingers could work. They used to think Facebook was a dating site, where their grandchildren went to cause trouble, but they changed their ideas and now they have pages for their creches and childcares and they learnt how to put pictures up and they do."

It's what the principal of a high school in Khayelitsha told me when I sat with her after rushing down Mew Way from the IT centre in Site C. "You can teach teachers the content, you can always learn content, but if they don't a passion, or love for the kids, if they don't want to be here..." she shakes her head, "we'd rather not have them."

From Sierra Leone to Site C, seems word on the street is wording the same thing: you can build clinics and computer labs, but the fireworks only start popping when people realize they've got to use them, that--at the risk of sounding Obamaesque--they can. All the rabble-rousing got me excited for change and for action and taking a chance, so I switched to chai but it's not for me and I'm back on rooibos and maybe I am too rigid in my attitude toward tea but it is what it is and not even subliminal messages in the lefty news I read can change my mind.

VIVA LA'ROOIBOS, VIVA!!

The Noble Community

The West discovered the Rest sometime in the 15th century, so the story goes. At first, They were cast as unGodly, barbaric, an abomination against the progress and culture of man. The savage was raw, wild, separated from animals by little more than an ability to grunt and to wiggle their fingers and toes. And then at some point that changed. The savages' affinity with nature meant that they were unblemished by the pollution and rot of modernity. The were pure. They were innocent. They were pristine. They were noble. This noble savage trope allowed for the West to engage with the Rest with sympathy and paternalism; it allowed the West an easy way out of meaningful engagement that would have treated these Others as equal. And then, again, at some point that changed. Somewhere between New Barbarism and the Yanomami, the West decided that actually those that they encountered on their adventures south and east were ferocious in their rawness, were evil in their nakedness. So the story goes...

I sat with a student of mine yesterday afternoon, as we schemed and plotted about the presentation on her service-learning experience she will give later this week. As is our practice, we invite our partners to these presentations to hear the students' stories, to uhmm and aaah, and for the students to acknowledge their partner's role in their learning. However, on Friday we will have a problem. My student worked with a woman not motivated, capacitated, willing or particularly interested in doing her job very well. There is little of my student's experience that does not reflect badly on this woman. She cannot talk about what she did, without talking about what this woman did not do. We mused, we toyed with a number of ethical questions and in response to my student's despondency I pointed out that our partners are not perfect. She stopped for a moment, took a deep breath and said, "well we never talk about that in class."

She's right. We don't.

Allow me to illustrate: a few years back I was complicit in an initiative run by one of our partners that was so ethically dubious I am still embarrassed to think about it today. I was roped into handing out reading glasses to old people who had difficulty seeing; a well-intentioned but badly thought-out project evidenced most clearly by the absence of an explanation accompanying the hand-out of the glasses. (As you might know, reading glasses are to be worn when reading, or sewing or doing something close-up. When you put reading glasses on to walk around, distance and depth-perception are distorted and old people bump into each other and things, and can stumble and fall and general chaos and catastrophe ensues...) Anyway, the part of my involvement that shames me to this day was that I was there as the bouncy young poppet who was photographed handing out the glasses to the oldies: the donors had to have something to look at and feel good about.

It was then that my suspicion of community-based organizations was born, that my quiet skepticism of the whole community-based agenda started to bubble and simmer. I began to wonder: maybe these organizations are not as noble as I thought they were... And why stop at organizations? What about their employees? And what about the constituencies they serve?

"Careful now, Jen," you may start to mutter, "don't project your own ethics and opinions onto the actions of others."

Indeed, fair point, and as a devotee of cultural relativism (despite its many flaws) I can see where you're coming from. But just give me the benefit of the doubt for a moment...

Does being a beneficiary of development mean that you are incompetent, lazy, unmotivated and selfish? No. Conversely, does being a beneficiary mean that you are competent, hard-working, motivated and selfless? If you are tempted to answer yes, then you have to to tie yourself to an argument that believes there is an Essence of Beneficiary: one who is honorable in their intentions, pure in their actions, noble in their engagement with the world. If you answer no, you have to accept that some beneficiaries fall into the former category, and some fall into the latter. And some, like the somes of the rest of the world, are a little of both.

It is condescending, patronizing, and just inappropriate to suggest that community-based organizations, their staff, and the people the serve are "perfect" or "noble" or anything else that melds them into a homogenous whole. So why don't we talk about it? Why do we blame ourselves when projects don't work and plans don't get done and goals don't get met. Well yes, ofcourse, very often it is the fault of the outsider, but not always. It's unPC I suppose, to whisper about failures of The Community, because of a political and historical discourse that has defined The Community as such, but is it not equally unPC not to treat The Community as Our equals and to hold them to a high standard of competency, rigor and success?

Meera Nanda writes abut a concept called "epistemic charity", which describes an academic trend of engaging with indigenous/local/community knowledge. It refers to the tendency to apply a relativist gloss to alternative knowledge systems and say "oh, it's different to ours but it has its value", without actually interrogating the system against its own markers of value. Implicit here, is an argument that "it's good enough for them but it's not good enough for me to waste my time trying to work out its value to me." Something similar happens I think, when we nobilize the community. We are charitable in the way we would be to someone who we believe needs our help, as opposed to being critical of someone who we believe is our equal.

So really, not critiquing the community is arguably as politically problematic as critiquing it. Perhaps what's most problematic, is not giving The Community a chance to defend itself against a critique.

Too big a conundrum for a cold cup of tea...

* this is a thought experiment, as such, some conceptual tools need to be employed. I'm not using the term "beneficiary" unproblematically, but for the sake of not writing a hellishly-long explanation, let's just understand "beneficiary" as a person who receives services and support from a CBO.

Between two corners

Everytime I visit the Wellness Centre, I drive past the neighbouring Daycare Centre. It's on the corner of the road with its brightly painted sign hanging off the building's awning. I've met the manager a couple of times before, there in the Seniors' Club bungalow. We've chatted, been friendly, but today I needed a favour. See, two of my students were meant to volunteer at a daycare centre in Barcelona but the daycare manager couldn't get some community leaders to sign an agreement about staffing for 2013 nor to decide on who from the community was going to help in the container where they run their programmes. So that process has stalled somewhere between a megalomanic and a bunch of kids who'll go back to running around the afternoon lanes and alleyways of Barcelona. Obviously, my students could no longer go there. The director of the homeless centre in Salt River, which was option number two, called me early Monday morning, she was angry and upset. Her organization is being evicted from the building they lease, the owners want to sell. It was unexpected, very sudden and unfair. "Good luck," I told her as we ended our conversation, "if there's anything you need from me, just let me know." I hung up the phone and stamped around in my pajama's for a bit, frustrated and pissed-off to be honest, about how my partner is being treated. Then I headed to work, started to stop running out of ideas and, as I do these days when this whole community development vibe gets to much for me, I phoned Tabs. "Sisi!" she called when she answered the phone, "how are you?"
"I need some help Tabs, how are you?"
She laughed, listened to my quandary, and we made a plan.

I drove into Khayelitsha this morning to drop off a pair of students at a high school there and to meet with the principal. They were short four teachers last week, and the principal explains, "the department is only giving us three, so we'll have to redo the timetable." She smiles apologetically at my students, as though it's her fault.
I don't know if it's the 7am meeting that's got me off my game, but I have an overwhelming urge to scream and shout and throw things. I get why kids burn their schools: in that moment I could have set fire to something. No, it's not constructive, but neither is not having enough teachers: as though one teacher too few is even the most serious issue here... I leave the school and drive to the Wellness Centre, slowing down to avoid the people walking in and around the taxis idling near the Pama Road bridge.

Tabs hears me talking to Lulu at the reception desk and pulls me into the kitchen, "you want a cup?"
She makes me sweet coffee and we stand for a while and chat. Ma'Monica joins us and I sit up on the counter like I always do, Tabby leaning her arms on my legs, hitting my knees for emphasis when she makes a forceful point. I've been there a while, our cups are empty, and we're paging through the Shoprite advertorial. "Don't you want to help me find Gloria?" I say to Tabs. The internet and phones haven't been paid so were cut off from last week already; there's nothing for her to do here. "Mmmm" she answers emphatically, "let's go."

We walk over the road to the Daycare Centre, greeting and hugging the staff. Gloria's in the office and she doesn't recognize me at first. "I had long hair last time," I tell her, and then she remembers.
"I wanted students from last year," she tells me, when I propose my offer, "so yes, ofcourse they can come." She walks Tabs and I around the centre and explains that there was a burglary last night. Someone broke in the window of the outside room and stole the keys to the other bungalow. "Why do people steal from children?" I want to know, Gloria just shakes her head.
"We're waiting now for someone to come to open the bungalow" she says, "so for now the children must all sit in here." There must be about 20 of them, squeezed into a sliver of room. Their little bodies fit into one another like puzzle pieces. There is no room to play or move really, just to be inside and to listen to the mas tell them stories and teach.

I drive back to the office via the corner of Lansdowne Road and Mew Way. The lights were out when I came in this morning: no red, no orange, no green, just the blue of the traffic car parked on the island in Mew Way. The officer stood leaning against the bonnet of the car watching the wheels and feet negotiate their way over and across the intersection. But the lights were back on now. They'll be off again this afternoon, I can almost guarantee it, but I don't know, just for a moment--maybe it was Tabs, maybe it was Gloria--I felt kind of hopeful.

First Day

Today is the first day of school, along the coast at least. Today is also the first day of service for my shiny new group of American service-learners. Walking to their 'dorm' this morning, I wanted a drink and a smoke and at least another 48 hours to resolve the various surprises of the last couple of days. While the centre we run here resembles a perfectly choreographed flashmob, our community partners have slightly more variables constraining their programming, and substantially less resources to deal with, well, to deal with reality.

The NGO funding crisis in South Africa (here, there, also here, oh and here) has meant that things are a little more turbulent than usual. As with every upsetting situation the world over, it's when the crisis seeps and sinks in between the electrified fencing around my middle-class life that I feel it most acutely. Two of our partner organizations closed last year, a number of them "restructured" or are running on a wing, a prayer and a bathtub of Ricoffy, and others are just ticking over steadily; unsure if they're sitting on a bomb about to explode or on an eternally reliable grandfather clock. Point is, to stay in sync with the uncertainty, my practice has had to change this last little while and my students have had to learn that adaptation is as valuable as any of their other well-honed skills. So, it's the first day of school for both traditional and unorthodox learners in Cape Town, and there are as many glitches in the morning as they are happy instances of things working out.

I arrive at 8:30 at a primary school in Mitchell's Plain to drop-off my two sports students. I can't get in the door. Parents, their school-going children as well as the smaller ones who couldn't be left at home, and an assortment of other people who seem as much interested spectators as anything else crowd the entrance hall. I step back outside where it is quiet enough to make a call and phone my partner: "Ya no, I'm in the principal's office," he tells me, "come through."
I wave to my students to follow me and I start elbowing people out of the way, gently ofcourse, but elbowing nonetheless. I lose my students in the milieu for a moment but we reach the principal's office and there are hugs and handshakes all round.
"Long time I haven't seen you!" the principal tells me.
"Ya" I answer, and we chat for a moment about our respective holidays.
"But tell me," I ask him, pointing to the rambling mass outside of his office, "is this normal?"
He laughs, and my partner replies: "You should've been here an hour ago, you couldn't walk!"
"I couldn't walk now," I say. "Anyway, here they are," I introduce my two students, "I'll leave them to you."
"Yes, yes, good," the principal seems chuffed and I'm waved out of the office into the cramped entrance hall once more.

About ten minutes later we're at a school around the corner (there is a school on every corner in Mitchell's Plain: if you look down on the area you just see little blocks of blue and green roofs breaking small clumps of red-roofed housing). I don't even try to see the receptionist, choosing instead to squeeze through the smorgasbord of entrance hall residents. One woman held a tiny baby with a tiny mouth that was pressed closed as it slept on her shoulder, on the otherside of the room it looked like a senior's club gathering. Obviously little bodies in uniforms far too big for them, shouldering school bags that overwhelmed them, ran and scattered constantly like a swarm of confused ants. Small children scare me at the best of times: when they swarm I am almost overcome with fear. I whisked my school-garden student to the upstairs office of my environmental education partner, greeted the familiar faces as quickly as possible and sprinted out of the school and back into the calm of the van.

"I wonder how everyone else did." I say to the driver after we've dropped off the third and last group at a high school in Khayelitsha.
"Oh no, we drove the routes yesterday, we all know where to go."
I smile at him. "No I'm not talking about the drivers, I know you know what's what, I'm talking about the organizations. I could have been talking to them every week for the last three months about today but the students can still arrive and be a surprise."
He laughs, but it's true. The nature of the crisis doesn't just mean that funding is tight, it means that organizations are tight. A small interruption to their daily operations can throw the whole show off-kilter. Is it right then, you may ask, for little ole Jen-Ben to throw students around like smarties? Well, it's a tricky one. Sometimes taking on a volunteer can build capacity, sometimes it can cost capacity, and usually my partners and I don't know which it's going to be until a couple of weeks into the placement.

For now though, it's the first day of school, and it's gone ok so far.

Deny, surprise, repeat

You know at the beginning of every "Simpsons" episode when Bart stands in front of the blackboard writing some mantra out, over and over and over, usually starting with "I will not...", where the ellipsis indicate some bad or undesirable behaviour? You know that scene? Lately, I feel a little like Bart in front of the blackboard, writing:
"I will not dwell on the bad things happening in South Africa."
"I will not dwell on the bad things happening in South Africa."
"I will not dwell on the bad things happening in South Africa."

And so I won't.

I went to an Appreciation Breakfast at one of my partner organizations this morning that included a lecture on social change. In the past, the organization has hosted some Big Names for the lecture, from business and political leaders to struggle stalwarts and NGO superhumans. Today, they hosted some speakers of far less grandeur and reputation. The speakers were five second-year students from the Leadership and Self Development Course that the organization runs as part of its educational offerings for young people from economically marginalized backgrounds. The lecture wasn't a lecture so much as the launch of their 45-page book on social change titled: "It starts with ME: Youth shaping a better South Africa"

In the book's foreword  the students' lecturer writes: "If all that we see is what is going wrong and how difficult life is, we can become discouraged and give up more easily. If we are aware of the opportunities, and become excited about the possibility of reaching our fullest potential as human beings, life opens up and becomes a source of joy and fulfillment." The book was the result of the students' research project, a project that had seen them talking to young people about their successes, their strengths and their visions for the future.

Now, I may be a flowery optimist, but I'm more fynbos than frills: I'm all for holding hands, but not to the point that I get sweaty palms. Pragmatically optimistic is probably a good descriptor. So I sat there this morning and looked at the cover of the book and thought, ok, this is nice, lovely, well done on them I'm glad they learnt but actually this is not quite my vibe. Then I shut up in my mind and I listened. I shoved out all the horrendous images of the past weeks and months and I listened. I really listened. Look, it's not as though there wasn't a sprinkling of sappy sentimentality, but resoundingly, overwhelmingly, what there was was sincerity.

Five students, who've had their own difficulties in life, talking about other students who've inspired them. And yeah, there was a lot of repetition, but that's what made it real. That's what made me realize that there's some element of commonality to human experience that allows us to be inspired by some of the same things. They spoke about what surprised them about this project, and what surprised them surprised me. "We found out that the youth has so much potential," they said, "that the youth are the future."

Well obviously I thought. Everyone has potential. And then I facepalmed myself and would've kicked me if it were possible. Yes, in my world where wealth and opportunity abound, potential is expected. A meaningful future is pretty much guaranteed. It's not a surprise when someone is successful, it's not something to celebrate. But when the criteria of your study is that the 16 year olds who participate are  still in school, haven't had a child and don't use drugs, I can begin to understand their surprise. And that's what was inspiring. The sincere and honest surprise that hells, actually, I can do something with my life because people who look like me, have families like mine, who go to the same shitty schools and live the same difficult lives can make something magical out of the scraps they've been given to build a spaceship.

Maybe I've gone soft. Maybe my denial of the negative has made me into a marshmallow incapable of cynical critique. The alternative, however, is to face the mess of the farm protests, of the NGO funding crisis, of the everyday poverty that flavours my city. And I'm not quite ready for that yet...

Track 6

I was back in Lavender Hill, watching two students, local this time, struggle with a wheel-barrow load of sand. They are struggling partly because the barrow is heavy, but mostly because they keep having to take breaks to laugh at their inability to move it. Or giggle really, and point accusing fingers at one another about who is letting the team down. They're both pretty big, beefy guys, but as one of them explained in defense: "it's my winter body, Jen, I'm not yet in shape!" I laugh and tell him I understand, and I carryon filming because it's going to make great footage; the two of them with this seesaw wheel-barrow and the fits of laughter.

Earlier in the day I ran a workshop with them and thirty of their peers on development. It's kind of amazing to watch really. I remember being in that space a little while ago, feeling like the rose-water rain was gone and I was seeing clearly the injustices and inequalities that colour the real world for the first time. It's disarming, disillusioning in one way, but kind of exhilarating in another: the imperfections of the world give it purpose. Anyway, so it's on that edge that they stand, staring into this simultaneous abyss of a volcano. I wouldn't want to be back there, but it's kind of cool to be an invited observer.

In the small group discussion I led with eight female students, I asked them what they thought the relationship between development and gender was. I got a few blank stares, one or two nods, nothing emphatic. "Er ok," I start slowly, safely, "right. So, imagine there's a country ok, and it's really economically advanced. And it has roads and bridges and dams and everything else, right?" The women nod as they buy into my imagination. I continue, "Ok, and everyone is this country can vote, and everyone can marry who they want and practice whatever religion they want. Sounds good, sounds developed?" We all smile. Pretty idyllic really. "So there's this cool place, but in this country, see, men beat women. Their partners, their wives, their daughters, strangers." Everyone stops nodding. I give them a moment to process this reality. "So do we call this country developed? Can we call this country developed?"

I am reassured to see them all shake their heads. No, I'm relieved. I'm not entirely sure what I would have done if one of them had said "yes". But I'm not finished, not just yet. This isn't terrain I'm confortable in, not because I don't care--I care deeply--but because I'm really scared of saying the wrong thing. I have this opportunity here to introduce them to an idea; but it's like that old joke about the Jehovah's Witness not knowing what to say when she gets invited in, because all that she's practiced is the speech at the gate. I feel like gravity has multiplied, that I'm suddenly weighted to the ground, the only thing I can think about is how I'm probably going to insult every branch of feminism just to make a point to a bunch of non-feminists but hells, I've got this far and they're all looking at me now, eight pairs of eyes fixed to where I sit cross-legged on my plastic chair.
"You know, right, that around the world, in different development sectors, diverse projects, everyone says the same thing: if you invest in a women, her family and her community benefit, with a man, " I open my hands, palms facing up, "you invest in him. And that's where it stops." I talk to them about girls' education, about how if you can keep a young girl in school for just a few more years, really, the world is just a profoundly a better place. "You basically make a miracle, everytime a girl finishes school, that's how much better it is, for her, for everyone."

"So, the relationship between gender and development?" I ask again. Their responses are a little more emphatic now. It's a tiny victory, a speckle of a victory, a smidge.

I overhear a conversation later, between one of the women who was in my group and someone else, about her auntie who left her abusive uncle after 37 years. "We never thought she would be able to leave after all that time, after everything he did to her. But then one day, she just did and she got a divorce."

Change hey, what a cray-bean. Could be seasonal, winter to summer.
Could take 37 years.
I like to think it's inevitable.

Lots of things

I arrived a little early yesterday for my meeting with the director of a sports programme in Mitchell's Plain, so I sat and waited on the uncomfortable plastic chairs in the foyer of the primary school at which he's based for the next couple of weeks. The mustached school principal kept coming to offer me tea, a better chair, just checking to see that I'm ok. The two black mothers sitting next to me got no such attention. In fact they got no attention period. I have my own prejudices and privileges to worry about, so when an older coloured man treats a white woman like the madam, and the black woman sitting next to her like the madam's invisible maid, I know I should do more than give a stink-eye to him and an incredulous 'can you believe this character?' head-shake to her but honestly, I just can't fight every battle. And I'm not even sure that it's my battle to fight: yesterday marked the 35 year anniversary of Biko's death, he was killed in the police station of the suburb where I grew-up.

Anyway, lost in thoughts of black consciousness, I get a big bear hug from one of my favourite community partners and he walks me outside to watch a frenetic break-time soccer match played on the concrete quad of the school. Each team has three girls and three boys to the side, and in an interesting twist, if a girl scores a goal, she gets awarded 2 points, instead of 1. "It's to encourage girls to play", my partner explains to me, "to get them off the sidelines and into the game". At first I'm uncomfortable with the unequal scoring, because it's premised on the idea that the girls aren't as skilled as the boys, that they've really triumphed when they score a goal. Before I get too riled up, I realize that the boys are better than the girls, not because of some God-given ability, but because they play every break time, and everyday after-school. The boys practice constantly. It's only in the last few years that the girls' league was set up, and only this year that it's really gaining momentum. The programme director tells me about the local girl going to Norway to compete in a karate competition, that, "if you just give them the chance, the girls really excel."

To give the girls a chance, you need to motivate them to participate, and you need to incentivize the boys to include them. You need to encourage the boys not to kick at goal themselves but to pass to their female team-mates and allow them the opportunity to score, and when they score, the two points reward both the scorer, and the boy who recognized she could score. Conditioning and socializing children it seems, is a lot like training a puppy: treats when they do something good. In their insistent quest to be the top team, I don't think the boys will tolerate the skewed scoring when the girls have perfected their soccer skills, when it becomes clear that boys and girls are equally able to outmaneuver their opponents. Time will tell on that one...

However, the purpose of my visit was not to stand in the sun and watch soccer, it was to chat about the sports programme, the school, the director, his family, my work, the weather and the coaching qualification he's offering to unemployed matriculants in Qwa-Qwa and Limpopo. Fabulous man, I really do admire the fruit off the tree with him. We chat for a while, and he repeats something he's told me before: "My vision for the organization is that over time it becomes unnecessary."
Unnecessary because things have changed, the world has changed, the schools have changed and kids get to, you know, be kids, and have games and sports programmes worked into their everyday.

I daydream for a moment, thinking of a redundant NGO sector. And then I think of Marikana. 35 years later, black men are still being killed by the police.

"Ya," I answer him with a little smile, "maybe one day we'll all be out of a job."

We look over the sandy patches that constitute the school's garden. After a few days of sunshine, clouds are starting to gather. It's raining again today.

Playing fields

The chairperson of the Lavender Hill Development Trust showed me an aerial map last week. She pointed out a dilapidated structure on the boundary of Lavender Hill High. "They call it the pink house," she tells me.
"What happens there?" I ask.
She offers a short laugh. "No one really knows. All we know is that there was a separate entrance," she points to what looks like a gap in the school fence, "and people on foot and in cars would go to house, stay a while, and leave."
Now that the sports fields have been built, and a new fence constructed, access to the pink house is somewhat limited. Now you have to come at it from the east, from the side of the informal settlement, not the M5.

The Development Trust was set up to manage a sustainability fund for the management of the sports fields. "Why aren't the sports fields the school's problem?" you may wonder...

Couple of years back, the infamous Bottles and I were doing an internship with an urban development organization based in Khayelitsha. One of the activities with which I was tasked, was to increase the learners' interest in the sports fields that had recently been built on their school grounds. See, there were three schools in the area for whom these fields were built. Now, all that these three schools needed to do was to sit down and work out a schedule: who was going to use the sports fields on what afternoons for what sports. Months after the fields had been built, the schools hadn't got this right, and the organization hadn't handed over management of the fields. The idea was that if more learners had greater interest in the fields, and knew how to "participate" in the process of using them, the schools would feel the pressure to get their poultry aligned, and, quite simply, to sort their shit out.

And so, two years later, I'm sitting in the HQ/lounge of the Lavender Hill Development Trust drinking tea and joining the lament of the chairwoman.

The sports fields are not the school's problem, because, well, in many cases, the school is the problem. Not the whole school, no-no, and therein lies problem number one: often, schools do not work as one unit. Therefore, problem number two: management of resources like sports fields becomes a political activity. Which leads us to problem number three: between the internal politicking and the external politicking, the doing very often does not get done.

"Another cup of tea?" she offers.
"Ah, I've got to get back to the office." I tell her.

I drive back down the M5, past the primary school on the corner, there are a couple of kids milling around at the fenced entrance. I hope it's break time.

An island in a river

"I went back home, I thought things would be better, but it was more tough then," he looks left to the fibrecrete wall a few metres away, flicks his hands out in a shooing gesture, looks back at me, "so I came back here to South Africa." He used to be a farmer in Zambia. He learnt English because he was a boy scout; his step-father never let him go to school. His friend told him about South Africa, and the two of them plus a cousin made the long trek south.

We're standing looking over the community garden of which he is pioneer and custodian. Inside, is another man about 20 years old. He's from Zim. He doesn't say why he left, only that he did. Things were always going to be better here. He smiles.

Living in a wendy-house, living in a shipping container. On a floor, on a mattras, maybe on a couch. Better here.

"I'm 20 years old and I haven't been on a good path in a while," says a guy with an Afrikaans accent. He's wearing a black beanie, he speaks softly, so softly I can hardly hear him. He's local, from around here. But transient. He's come, gone, come, gone, but now he's back. Crossing the borders of the city like his peers crossed the borders of a country.

"Give me your tired, your poor" said Lady Liberty, "your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."

Some community organizations, like this one in Salt River, remind me a little of Ellis Island. "We're like a train station," the director explains to me, "you come to the platform, you get on the train, and then you get off at your destination. You don't stay here and stagnate, you move on." They don't specialize, like so many organizations do, in one group of labels. Here, they do them all. The homeless, the destitute, the poor, the exiled. "We aren't the only NGO in the area," the director waves her hands over her shoulder, "but we never turn anyone away." It means that their programmes are diverse, disparate, a baggie of puzzle pieces that don't all build the same puzzle.

But baggie's of mismatched puzzle pieces is what built the most powerful state in the world. So maybe it's ok for Salt River too.

As I walk back to the Main Road to catch a taxi back to the office, the wind blows empty milk bottles and chip packets over the road. The two women walking in front of me are too deep in conversation to notice.

Charity

"Madam," I hear from the pavement, "can you help me?"
I look down. A woman sits on the low bricked wall on the corner of Main and Dane. I smile at her and she hands me a folded-up piece of paper. I wonder why she has written her story on this paper, why she doesn't talk to me. I don't quite know what to do.
"Hello," I start, and keep smiling. I must look like an idiot, standing there, looking down, holding this sweaty piece of paper.

I read it. She is the mother of five children and the sole breadwinner. She needs food, money, clothes, a job, anything really.

"Uhm," I say at last, "so you have five children?"
She nods and answers, "yes."
"How old are they?" I ask. I'm not sure why I ask. It's not like I have a right to know this. If a stranger came up to me and asked me how old my cousins were, I'd give them the stink-eye and suspect them of being missionaries on a divine hunt for a potential convert.
"Different ages," the woman answers me, and she moves her arm up and down in a "this high" gesture.
"Aaah," I say. And I nod. Because nodding is so helpful Jen, so helpful. We chat a little more and then "ok, well," I scrabble around in my bag for a bit and hand over a R10 note, "have a nice day!"

Have a nice day, it's storming outside. I can hear the rain hit the plastic skylight above my desk like bullets from a semi-automatic.

And this is why charity sucks. See, that R10 will not even cover her taxi fare from here to her home in Gugulethu (another piece of information I seduced out of her; her participation incentivized by the potential of a cash reward). Maybe someone else gives her R10, and someone else. Ok and then maybe she can buy a loaf of bread and her kids can be fed this evening, they went to bed hungry last night she told me. That doesn't suck. So maybe charity is ok for her. No, maybe the money is ok for her. But what about the process of asking for the money?

On Monday evening as I arrived home, a man came up to me and said: "I can see you've just come home, and I know it's unfair, but I want to ask you for help."

Unfair? On me? Say whaaat? What's unfair is that you lost your job at Telkom after working there for years. What's unfair is that when you were retrenched some technicality meant you couldn't draw from your UIF. What's UNFAIR is that you are forced to relinquish your role as care-giver and stand in front me, a stranger, and rely on me to feed your children. That's unfair.

Look, I'm not saying that living in a symbiotic relationship with people is a bad thing, that relying on the input of others is wrong. I'm all for reciprocal living. But entering that relationship with no power to dictate the terms of engagement is not ok. So this is really why charity sucks. Because it's a short-term interaction where the playing-field isn't even discussed. If I saw the same man or the same mother every day, maybe it would be different. Maybe. For now, I'll just pay for their stories. Because what the hell else am I supposed to do?

I walk on. My feet slush in mud as I make my way to the office. The sky has been grey for weeks.

Drops of paint

My hands are covered in paint. Blue paint. In high school, when I aspired to be a hippie, my hands were always covered in paint from various teenage angst art projects. Today, they are covered in paint because on Saturday I painted a shipping container blue, and the paint has become one with my hands it would seem. I was out in Lavender Hill, overlooking a dilapidated wall and an empty plot with plastic bags and rusty tins. There was indecipherable graffiti on the wall; could have been a gang tag, could have been a kiddie's squiggle. Could have been an angsty art project.

So I painted this container. That's a lie. I supervised ten people painting two shipping containers, but semantics, who cares.

At the end of the day, the containers sat transformed. There are a couple of reasons why painting these two containers was meaningful. If we hadn't done it, the small team of women who run this organization would have had to spend some afternoons, which they usually spend feeding and teaching kids from the neighbourhood, painting. So we gave them time. Always valuable. Then there's the tangible: now there are two shiny containers sitting in the restless sand, marking an oasis from the chaos that attempts to creep in. And there's the fluffy: stronger relationships between community-organization-university, and for the students, exposure to the ever-elusive Other. 

But then, right, you've got to think: what do these shipping containers mean in the Gotham of Lavender Hill? 

"Aaah, but don't be such a cynic," you say, "drop in the bucket and all that." 

Ok, ok, drop in the bucket, fine. But, I'll see your analogy and raise you one slice of reality.

Back before my teenage angst I was an outdoorsy kid. I spent my childhood in a frenetic oscillation between trees, mud and my swimming pool. My best, right, was to get out of the pool and drop water into two puddles on the textured terracotta tiles of my parents' stoep. I'd make one puddle broad, make the other one deep, and I'd watch them in their race to be evaporated. The little drops that didn't quite make it to the puddle, they went first; shrinking into nothingness as I lay on my tummy and watched, always hoping that I'd see a drop rising. And that's my point, see. When one drop forms a puddle with many other drops, it looks puddly for longer. But a drop, just the one, is gone before you can think through the science behind it. 

So, it's not that I'm against drop in the bucket development. It's just that a drop falling in a desert needs to be part of flood to have affect. 

Of Mud and Marxism

There is only so much traipsing about in the muddy cold that I can deal with. Particularly when it starts raining. I'm spending the week with a visitor from our home campus in California, taking her around to some of our partner organizations. Today we visited a micro-farming collective in Gugs and Philippi. More accurately, we went on a tour of the organization's community farms with 17 Americans who are piloting a drip irrigation system. They are "consulting interns" from the "Community Enterprise Solutions" arm of the "New Development Group". My visiting colleague articulated my feelings on their wordy origins perfectly, with the adequately descriptive: "You can't make that shit up."

When they first emerged from their van, there was a moment that we considered placing bets on what country they were from, but it took all of a few seconds' assessment of their backpacks and jeggings to claim in unison, "American!" (Two friends of mine recently explained the jeggings phenomenon to me and I was very pleased to be able to put my new-found knowledge to good use.)

It's a really unfair stereotype. I've placed close to 50 American students in service organizations this year, and the only uniform statement that I can make about them is that they've all been different. Some of them have been great; very sensitive and critical, with no stronger desire than to avoid being the stereotype. Some of them have been less great. But the group this morning, hells. Maybe it was the cold that turned me against them, maybe it was the "we've come to do a needs assessment and then give you what we have already decided that you need" vibe going on. The tour-guide, an epically amazing man who has spent the last 20 years with this organization, explained to them that they have tried drip irrigation before and it didn't work. He also explained in late 1970s Marxist discourse how we are all slaves to the neo-liberal supermarket empire. His words and phrases were more than faintly reminiscent of what Morpheus said to Neo about the red and blue pill.

Ya, so it was just an odd morning. Left-wing extremists and International Development Practitioners, mud and rain. In the end, all I really wanted was a peanut butter sandwich and a cup of rooibos, away from it all.

Competition for resources

Tomorrow is Youth Day and South African NGOs are in overdrive; themed public holidays are gold in terms of fun pictures to send to funders. But in an area like Khayelitsha, where there are more NGOs than flush toilets, organizations run into a little snag: not enough community participants to go round. And hells, there are even those community members who just don't want to participate. Criiiisis! This morning at the EWC, I sat knitting with the seniors. We sat outside the bungalow today, on the little stoep with our backs to the sun, giggling and drinking tea. The centre itself was empty, much to the great distress of the centre manager. They had planned a Youth Day celebration, and no one had come. The ex-manager was, as always, being blamed, but she's got used to the blame game and has perfected an arched response: "well, actually, it's no longer my job."

Ma'Monica waved to me from across the grassy patch separating the bungalow and the centre, "Ntombezaaaaan, yizapha!*" I had my knitting, my tea and an absence of centre politics, but when Ma'Monica shouts, it's not my place to say no. "What's up?" I ask her as I shuffled over. She rattles off a list of instructions.

I started with the first one: make a sign. I've become a pro at this, with just scrappy newsprint and permanent markers. I joined the rest of the team in the kitchen while the manager flapped in and out. As we edged further and further past the start time of the event, and the hall still lay empty, she finally flipped. "Go and find people outside, tell them to come in." Tabs and the other sandwich-makers mumble in Xhosa, the manager can't understand. But she gets the gist.
"I'm being serious," she says a little more harshly now, "management is going to be here in ten minutes and there's no one. Go and call the community."
Someone tries to explain that there are a number of events going on today, and that the centre usually works with older people, like the seniors, so will have little draw for younger members. The manager is unpersuaded.
"Go to the school," she directs us. You can see the primary school from the kitchen window, "go and get the Grade 7s."
I'm not about to take kids out of class to get them to come and perform for Management so I stay where I am, adding a careful colour outline to my black-lettered sign.
But Tabs has a job to do, so she leads the other women out and they split up. Some patrol the streets outside, some head to the school. I try to embed as much of a stink-eye as I can in the smile I give to the manager.

Soon 'participants' start dribbling in. Some in school uniform, some recruited from the corner opposite the church where they usually sit and smoke. But it's not enough. So the manager comes out to where I'm sitting with the seniors. Usually on days like these, the seniors are under strict instruction to stay outside. But times are desperate.
"Don't you want to join in?" she asks.
I giggle as I listen to Ma'Noms' response, "No, not really." I know she's just making the manager sweat; the seniors will go.
"Are you sure?" a desperate plea in her eyes, "you're not interested?"
I wish the ma's had held out for longer, but they're too sweet, too kind, too agreeable.
"No, it's fine," replies Ma'Noms, "we'll come. We'll come just now."
Another eight seats filled.

I sidle up to the ex-manager in the hall, she starts to laugh.
"Why are you laughing Lu?"
"Hah, I must keep young!" she replies.
"Mmm," I start to laugh too.
She pulls me closer to her and stands with her arm around my shoulders and starts to whisper, telling me just what she feels like telling her managerial replacement...


*Come here my girl!

Improving Schools

I went to the launch of UCT's Schools Improvement Initiative yesterday afternoon. Took a bunch of my students, jumped into our little bus and made our way to Ilitha Park. The launch was at COSAT School (all architecturally designed with green grounds and grass), and combined with the red roofs and front gardens of Ilitha Park, it looks almost middle-class as my one student pointed out. You could almost forget you're in Cape Town's biggest township. The launch itself, well, it was a launch. Flowers on stage and chicken-wings on the refreshment table. A choral interlude, a powerpoint, and speeches from politicians who observed protocol. I was impressed at the time, taken in by the concise presentations and choreographed singing, but now I realize I'm not as psyched as I thought I was.

The SII is, unsurprisingly, an intervention aimed at improving schools. It's not that it isn't a necessary, relevant, important intervention, it's just that in the sober reflection of an average Tuesday afternoon, the launch last night didn't show me how it is all that different from other necessary, relevant and important interventions. Khayelitsha is home to a barraging multitude of interventions like these, and the launch didn't leave me with the sense that this one is different. This one, yes, this one, is going to work. It's going to change things. It's going to be the intervention version of Obama's Hope poster.

Maybe I'm a cynic. Maybe working at the intersection of university and community has furnished me with jade-coloured glasses. Maybe the SII will be different, I really hope it will... In the meantime, I'll just nibble on the yoghurt-covered cranberries I found in my trail mix and try to remember and hold onto that initial spark of excitement I felt last night when the programme director welcomed us all.

Adult Education

Tabby writes her Adult Education exam on Friday. She's been studying furiously the last few weeks, she really wants to do well. "I've never failed anything," she told me over tea, "I don't want to fail this." But she's struggling a little, after she was put in the wrong class and covered the wrong material for half the term before the teacher realized her mistake and moved her to where she should be. A glitch in the university's registration system and suddenly it's even harder for Tabby to learn. It would be ironic if it wasn't so frustrating.

The manager at EWC isn't making things easier; refusing to give Tabita time off work to study. But Tabby has balls the size of Russia, and is mitigating the situation as best she can. When I visited a week ago, Tabby gave me her books to sit with in the kitchen, pretending they were my own. She stood a few steps to the right peeling carrots, or rather peeling one carrot repeatedly, while I read out her notes slowly, repeating the lines, each line, and she listened. Between us Ma'Monica's soup bubbled, behind us Yandi cleaned the sink. The manager walked in and out. She tolerates me because she has to; my presence at the site precedes hers and was negotiated by a former manager and she can't tell me to leave. I smile as I answer her questioning gaze, "I'm just doing some reading." Tabby refocuses on her carrot and peels furiously.

On my visit last Friday, Tabby passed me a note as I sat warming and humming next to the heater in the office: please go to the kitchen we will discuss this further. Take the book with.

So I took the note, scrabbled around on her big desk to find her book, grabbed some other papers to cover it up, and made my way to the kitchen. I would have whistled and swaggered nonchalantly if I could have pulled it off. She joined me a few minutes later and we stood at the food-preparation table. Sitting would imply that we were spending time in the kitchen, standing means that she caught me in passing as I paged through the thick manual.

"So the question is about how you learn. About how it's a cognitive and social process." I tell her.
"Ok," she says, "so I discuss what needs to happen in my mind and then also around me?"
"Yeah, and you need to give examples." I read off the rest of the instruction.
She pauses for a few seconds, "Where must I find the examples?"
I start laughing, standing there in the kitchen with "my" books, hiding from her manager. "Tabs, I think you can start finding them here..."

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...

Knitting needles

Ma'Sarah and Ma'Regina started a process yesterday that I assured them would fail; teaching me how to knit. "You can't just sit and do nothing." Ma'Sarah told me.
"I like doing nothing," I replied in defense, "and anyway it's hard work trying to follow your conversation. I have to listen hard."
Ma'Sarah raised her eyebrows. "Here," she passed me her knitting, "knit."
I looked at her blankly but grabbed the needles somewhere near their tops. Ma'Regina, sitting next to me, took the ends of the needles and guided them confidently in and through and around the wool. "No Ma, slow down you're going too fast I can't see what you're doing!"
Ma'Regina chuckled and kept going. I turned to Ma'Sarah for support, "Ma I can't see what I'm doing so I can't learn." Ma'Sarah joined in the chuckling but persuaded Ma'Regina to slow down so I could watch how our hands were moving. Ma'Regina pulled and directed the needles slowly and deliberately now, " 'yabona*?"
"Ewe Ma, yes Ma, I see."

As we continue our tandem knitting efforts, the Ma's start explaining about the garden situation they've got going on. A group from the city (local government) came to visit last week, and wanted them to fill in a form so that they could receive equipment and soil and seedlings. "But we can't just go filling in forms you know," Ma'Sarah started.
"Yes," Ma'MP continued, "because we are under EWC* and we can't sign for other things even if we want to."
"So what did you tell the people from the city?" I asked.
"No we told them they had to speak to management, that they must make an agreement you know."
"Ya no I know, I see. but did they understand?"
A few head shakes. "I don't know. You see they wanted us to fill in the form and we said yes we want your support but we can't fill in the form." Ma'MP sighed. "I hope they speak to management."

I hope they speak to management too. The Ma's want the city's support, they want the resources they offer, but the politics of their relationship with EWC dictate that they can't ask for it, nor can they accept it. It has to be asked for and accepted on their behalf...

"Huh-aaaah!" Ma'Sarah interrupts my thoughts. "You are taking too long." She takes her needles back from Ma'Regina and me. She turns to me, "Next week you bring your own needles and wool ok?"
"Ma," I start telling her that knitting really is not part of my capability-set but she doesn't let me finish.
"Ok?" she asks again.
"Yes Ma, ok." I agree. I'm going to have to go and dig in my mom's sewing cupboard this weekend, but the politics of my relationships with my Ma's dictate that I can't refuse their insistence to teach me, I must accept their offers of help. I smile as I write this because I don't mind those politics, not one bit.

* Uyabona: You see?
* The NGO whose land they use and whose (sometimes limited and erratic) support they rely on

A sprinkling of insight

I have to teach a smattering of Asset-Based Community Development soon, and have started pouring over the relevant papers. You'd think that for an approach summarized as ABCD, there might be more colour and cartoons involved. But alas, no. ABCD is about a lot of things, premised on the idea that in development work you should really try and work with what you have, not with what you don't. Seems fairly intuitive that one.

Reading about it all reminds me of a conversation I had with Lulu a while back. Lulu is an aromatherapist at the Wellness Centre where I do my fieldwork. She is blind, and is perpetually being prayed for by people she meets on the taxi. According to her fellow commuters, God is punishing her with blindness because she doesn't pray enough. She shakes her head.
'You know what I tell them?'
'What?' I ask her.
'I say, even though I'm blind, I have a job and a house,' she pulls her face into a micro-expression of rebellion, 'I tell them they should save their prayers for themselves and their problems.'
I smile. 'You're right,' I say, 'you have a house and a job and they have neither. They should pray, not you.'
'And anyway,' she continues, 'what do they know? This one man told me to read Psalms. Obviously he doesn't know the Bible because there are no stories of blind people in Psalms.'
I start laughing. 'Wise words, Lulu.'

The commuters on the taxi look at Lulu and see her disability. They see blindness, weakness, punishment, need. Lulu, with her 'endogenous community knowledge', knows her assets, she knows her strengths. She also knows how to sass her way out of the victimization that others' throw on her, which is really just as valuable.