New Relationships

The delegation is preparing to depart tomorrow morning for the Eastern Cape. Our time in the Cape Town area has been very active. This past week has created many new relationships for our delegates and has provided an opportunity to review and deepen our long standing partnerships.

The delegation did spend time this morning at the District Six Museum. It serves as a memorial to the forced movement of 60,000 inhabitants of various races during Apartheid South Africa. The goal of the museum is to join people into a community where there is respect for co-existence of different races. Our transition early tomorrow morning will shift our physical landscape from urban townships to the more traditional rural communities. The ongoing devastation of Apartheid continues to be felt in every community. The primary and intended goal of this policy, or system was the segregation, or discrimination on grounds of race. It remained a system that was strictly enforced from 1948 to 1991. The ongoing results of a government approved and enforced system of racism is seen even more clearly in rural communities. I am excited and honored to go home tomorrow to Malungeni. It is time for all the cousins to meet one another.

I offer this poem from Mary Oliver to honor our journey tomorrow;

“You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of rain are moving across the landscapes, over prairies and deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting, over and over announcing your place in the family of things.”

In gratitude for your interest and support of our journey…..
James Cassidy, President AIAIA