Since I have been holed
up in bed with a bad cold the past two days, I have had a lot of alone time to
reflect on what I learned and experienced at the Human Rights Weekend. First
and foremost I was stunned by the location itself. How many people can say that
they spent a weekend on an olive farm nestled in the base of a mountain on the
South African countryside? I was particularly stunned by the stars at night,
which were brighter than I had ever seen them before. I cannot say that I have
ever been quite so content as I was floating along on the lake at the damn.
Besides the giant spiders, I really enjoyed getting to see another parts of
South Africa outside of the City and its suburbs.
What made the weekend all the
more interesting were the people I had the privilege of getting to know over
those three days. The environment that Africa Unite created was conducive to
really interesting conversations between people who otherwise would not have
had much of an opportunity to engage. I thought it was really interesting to
get to hear other people’s opinions on culture relativism in particular,
because so many of us come from very different backgrounds with different
exposure to those issues.
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| Emily (second from left) at Human Rights Weekend |
I had a really interesting
conversation on the final day of the seminar on female genital mutilation and
how one goes about going into communities and telling them that a practice so
important to them is violating their woman. FGM presented a different case for
us, in that it genuinely compromises the health of the woman undergoing the
procedure along with compromising her ability to safety give birth to a child.
At the close of this conversation, we agreed that it is our role as activists
to provide people with an awareness of their rights and the health risks
associated with practices that potentially infringe on those rights, rather
than go into communities and impose on them what we feel is right. It helped me
to be able to talk through these issues with people who have more exposure to
the problems at hand in order to better inform my opinions and approaches to
these sorts of issues.
I’ve noticed more and more
that the smallest of conversations have had serious impacts on me here. Many of
these conversations have been a bit too personal for me to share in the context
of this blog, however their importance continues to resonate with me. The novel
that I am currently reading for class (Heretic: A Novel) also touches on the
importance of these seemingly unimportant conversations with strangers. Though
a work of fiction, there is a scene in the book where a character named Arthur
reveals himself as the magistrate at Nelson Mandela’s trial. He recalls
initially leaning towards sentencing him to death, if not for the words of a
stranger in the coffee shop. The stranger said, “Perfect justice is impossible,
and since it is impossible, is mercy not always a better option when rendering
justice?” Even though the novel is a work of fiction, there is truth in the
idea that one persons casual words with another can forever change the fate of
another.
This concept had me thinking
back to a poem I wrote a couple years ago that touched on the same idea that
anyone is welcome to read below.
A man with the beard of god once told
me,
that words worth memorizing sprout forth
from the mouths
of only the greats.
That only those who have been wounded
in their mind and heart,
should be memorized and recited.
The average person has nothing to say,
nothing worth listening to,
nothing worth engraving into the marble
of monuments.
But,
I have heard passing comments
from faceless mouths,
when waiting for a coffee
or passing on the street,
that lift me
higher than
the
heaviest of books.
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