"With You I Am Well Pleased"

I’ve only been in Cape Town a little over a week yet I have truly fallen in love with the beauty of this city. I had the chance during our time here to work at the University of Cape Town for Rebecca Hodes, Deputy Director of the AIDS and Society Research Unit. The campus itself was gorgeous—set at the base of South Africa’s famous Table Mountain with buildings covered in beautiful vines (the way Morse and Stiles were originally meant to be) and complete with a stunning view of the entire city of Cape Town, UCT was a welcome respite from Yale’s blustery winter.

My work for Rebecca involved researching the literature on the changing attitudes of medical professionals towards the reproductive rights of South African women from apartheid to the present. Reproductive rights encompass contraception, abortion, sterilization, etc. Pooja [Yerramilli] was the other student working on this research project along with me and the two of us got to spend the first week of the trip working from 9am to 5pm in Room 4.29, the office for the Leslie Center for Social Science Research. The work would have become monotonous if it weren’t for the fact that Rebecca herself was so knowledgeable and excited about the topic. She had assigned us readings to do before we arrived and when we spoke about them upon first meeting dubbed them “lekker interesting”. After so much research, I can speak with confidence on the topic of reproductive rights of South African women and the policies, laws, and attitudes that have affected those rights.

The work we did was incredibly interesting and very relevant to some of the pressing issues facing South Africa today. One of the biggest problems, however, is still the legacy left behind by apartheid. Comparing Cape Town—located entirely between a gorgeous stretch of beach and picturesque mountains and bringing to mind California in many ways—to places like Mfuleni, the township housing the children’s home and Power Child campus that all the other Reach Out participants on our trip worked for, you can’t help but notice the glaring disparities in housing, SES, jobs, etc. The fact that such large inequalities still exist in 2011 is demoralizing, and those who just stand by and passively allow them to continue are the people who I personally hold the most accountable.

The title of this post comes from graffiti I saw as we drove to Mfuleni on the first (and only) day that Pooja and I went to work with the children instead of working on our research. I was boiling with anger at the conditions that people were being allowed to live in while others live comparatively peaceful lives in giant beach houses with no worries and no thought to those less fortunate, but that graffiti was able to calm me in a way that I don’t really understand. I do not kid myself with the idea of “sustainability” that people throw around because those kids are not going to remember the “smile I put on their faces” one year from now, let alone when a decade from now when they’re teens and adults, but I know that I won’t ever forget meeting them. Maybe it’s selfish, that I got more out of our crossed paths than the children did but I hope to return the favor in the years to come by journeying back to South Africa (and Senegal, the place of my own heritage) when I know that I can make a truly sustainable difference.

- Mariame Mbaye