By Dick Hagen
The Land Staff Writer
February 29, 2008 03:15 am
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Reflecting back on my recent two-week experience in South Africa, memories linger of the beautiful rolling hills, the moderate temperatures and the gentle black South African families that we visited.
And strangely, I wonder about America.
As I view out my upstairs office window here at the Little Ponderosa on this blizzardy, early-February day, my thoughts focus on the seeming indifferences that surface in our day-to-day existence here in America.
Do we really love our country? Do we appreciate our vast natural resources? Or our material comfort? Or our tremendous network of churches, schools, highways, technology-enriched agriculture, dependable electrical energy and super food stores bulging with thousands of different items? Most importantly, do we really understand our working democracy?
After two weeks with people who have so little, I realize more than ever how guilty I am of taking for granted all the things that are part of my “comfortable” life here in rural Minnesota.
Thanks to the entrepreneurial spirit that has been a legacy of America ever since our Pilgrim fathers touched shore on our eastern seaboard nearly 400 years ago, I have had the pleasure of this most remarkable American experience. My grandparents, both sides of the family, were Norwegian immigrants. My parents were bilingual; when certain conversations weren’t intended for us kids, Mom and Dad switched to Norwegian. This often happened when we had company and the adults suddenly decided the table talk was only for them.
We indeed are an absolutely amazing country. However, in our eternal quests of being bigger, bolder and perhaps even more ambitious in assisting with democracy in other parts of the world, it seems the joy and peacefulness that used to be the very fabric of rural America and rural Minnesota just isn’t there like it used to be.
Is that to say the lives of the black South African families I had the pleasure of associating with are shining examples of “making the most” with what you have?
Indeed.
I witnessed poverty like I’ve never before seen. Yet the people in the Kwazulu-Natal province where we traveled seemed content and at peace with their world. Perhaps that is simply because the size of their world is the miles they walk each day.
Our mission was simple, at least in theory. My friends, George Tesch of Olivia and Bill Elmstrom of Ortonville, and I were to look at various parcels of land — belonging to churches of the Umvoti Circuit, South East Diocese, Evangelical Lutheran Church South Africa — and offer suggestions as to how this land might be made more productive.
Sounds easy. Until we got there and realized these church families have no machinery, little education beyond what they’ve learned from their own back yard garden plots and no particular means of getting their products to market. Did we accomplish anything? Each evening as we reviewed the day we’d say, “Only the Lord knows.”
We know we met with some caring, sharing and loving people. And we hopefully established a business contact with Pannar Seeds, headquartered at Greytown, South Africa, not far from where the three of us traveled. A retired farm couple with a “sense of adventure” could have a tremendous experience volunteering a few months of their lives each year to work with these black Lutheran communities on how to become better farmers.
I would like to revisit these communities sometime. Even though the three of us were often the only whites we saw all day, we were comfortable. Education, money, some farming assistance from people who know farming and the continued reliance of the older women of each church community are keys to the future of these people.
Land reform is slow, and filled with challenges. Even though the 48-year struggle called apartheid is history, I sense that within the black community there is a growing stratification between the “haves” and the “have-nots.” Certain things don’t change, wherever you live and travel. I love and respect my new friends in rural South Africa, and admire what the Southwest Minnesota Synod ELCA is attempting to do with this new partnership program.
They say “if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.” I’m certain God had many a chuckle as he listened to the plans George, Bill and I laid on our new friends in South Africa.
Dick Hagen is staff writer of The Land. He may be reached at dickhagen@rswb.coop.
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