Rodney Brown

This week’s dispatches “To Explain a Question “ written by Rod Brown and “Recess” written by Rocky Block reflect our time in the community of Cato Crest in Durban where all the students worked with children. HIV and AIDS have devastated this community and all these children have been affected by this disease, many of them orphaned. We were all deeply moved by their love, their innocence and their soul shifting music. We now share with you, the memory of our time with them.

-Nesha

To Explain a Question

This week’s work brings us to Cato Crest primary school where the challenge of teaching our peers at the University of Zululand shift to wide-eyed questioning fifth graders. Our small new-found friends are changing our perception of HIV; they are literally transforming statistics into living faces. There is a quote by Desmond Tutu on the back of our program t-shirt that says: “My humanity is caught up; it is inextricably bound up, in yours.” Here, now, it is evident that the issue of HIV goes far beyond “them” or “those people” and it rather rests in all of us- humanity.  We are now in Durban, a fast paced city that echoes the sensibility of Ann Arbor. It is vastly different from the rural close knit family of the University of Zululand. I find myself wondering what making a difference looks like. Is it a bag carried for an elderly person or a long conversation with a good friend? This is something I have wrestled with a lot this past week.  What I find interesting about what we are doing is how much we, as American students learn. How difficult is it to understand the dichotomy of receiving from those who have less; those who are “oppressed.”  “What you see in front of you is a portrait of young men and women who know how to articulate what it means to daily face the text-book idea of adversity better than most… simply because they live it.” -Rodney Brown

As my students taught the module in front of the entire school I felt an overwhelming sense of pride. Cato Crest genuinely opened their hearts to receive us and it shone brightly in their enthusiasm towards teaching. Why is it in the poorest places we find the deepest generosity? The entire Cato Crest culture is of that  persuasion. My chest fills with pride knowing that we aren’t the Americans here to take and simply observe misfortune. I reflect on the number of students we taught and truly see the success of our work. While not every student gets the opportunity to share the module in an assembly in front of their peers, they are still transformed by the mere learning experience. It happens at the very moment that our students realize they themselves can be teachers, that as eleven year olds they have the power to empower.

My ability to wholly articulate these experiences is proving difficult at best. How can I explain the feeling I got when 900 young people shouted to show their appreciation for us and what we were doing? I can’t. How about trying to describe the feeling I got when I stared into the eyes of 17 Cato Crest kids who in the last 6 months lost both their parents to HIV? That can’t be put into words either. It is like trying to describe the sound of a feeling…  No matter what I told you, it still can’t be explained.

Brown Rod, teammate of Pedagogy of Action, 2007