Issue date: 9/8/08 Section: Editorial/Opinion

Abby Harvey

Nearly one-fifth of the population has AIDS. It is rare to see a home without a concrete barrier and razor wire around it. There are days when people are instructed not to leave home because of the inherent danger of violent crime. Pictures of burglars shot dead in parking lots and runaway boys dead in trees appear regularly in local papers. This barely sounds like a utopia. But that is exactly what I found during my month and half in South Africa - paradise.

UW-Eau Claire offers several summer study abroad options, including the South Africa program I was involved in this summer. A group of almost 20 Eau Claire students traveled to Durban, the third-largest city in South Africa and host of the 2010 World Cup.

While there we studied at the Howard College campus of the University of KwaZulu-Natal. This article is not about my studies, or even about the program. This editorial is about the people; they are the heart and soul of the most beautiful place I have ever ventured to.

The things I've listed are true, they are sad, and to the average American they are atrocities that cannot even be imagined. But ask the average South African about the state of their country and they will say, "It's getting better." A scary thought for sure, as it implies that they've lived through worse. And they have.

I like to think that most people know about the Apartheid and Nelson Mandela and the horrors endured by the blacks in South Africa. I like to think that, but I know it's not true. I know that the Apartheid and the struggle of the blacks have been long forgotten elsewhere in the world and that misconceptions run wild.

There are black people in South Africa; in fact they are the majority. It's possible to travel in South Africa and not be the victim of crime.

Not every person in the country is trying to take advantage of travelers. They love people who take interest in their culture. They hope to show us the true South Africa, not the one found on the news. "Go back and tell them, tell them what we're like, tell them it's not how they think over here." If I had a quarter for every time I heard that during my time there I could afford a plane ticket back.

Although the whites mistreated the blacks so extensively I was never audience to any kind of backlash. The only time I ever viewed, with my own eyes, racial violence was outside of a club. One of the girls on the trip, who had begun to date a local, was leaving. A group of white men got angry because the girl had been talking to them and her black boyfriend came up to the group. They called him a name that has no real equivalent in English and a fight broke out.

The man that I was with, who was also black, got involved as well. During the cab ride home one of them said, "Every black person in the city feels it when somebody says that word." I held his hand and he squeezed it. The only other time I have felt what I felt that night in the cab, holding his hand, was when I held my sobbing mother at my grandmother's funeral.

All of this and still the phrase I heard most was "It's getting better."

Homes made of corrugated steel with tarps for roofs cover miles of land in the townships. These are the shantytowns of South Africa. These areas are rarely visited by white people. When our group arrived to tour these areas children ran after our bus yelling "White people! White people!"

We would try to speak to them in the little Zulu we knew and they would laugh. They would welcome us into their homes and ask about America. One person on the trip once replied to an inquisitive townsperson that you would never see this kind of welcome in America - or this sense of community. The townswoman smiled, happy that she could say that she had something that America didn't. And it's true.

South Africa has hope. Hope like I have never seen. Despite everything I have mentioned, the fights, the disease and the crime, I will never forget the happy faces of the orphans I met or the high school senior, Bridget, who wanted to go to college but her family just could not afford it.

Then there was Gideon, an AIDS patient at The Dream Center, the clinic I volunteered at while there. Although he had been the victim of a stroke and was unable to talk, I never saw Gideon without a smile. Hope is all these people have, but for them that's enough, that's more than they've had in the past. It is getting better.

Harvey is a senior print journalism major and photo editor of The Spectator.

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