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While reflecting on the past six months on the South Africa-Washington International Program, it dawned upon me that I had yet not written about one of the most difficult experiences of my life, which happened to take place in Washington DC: the visit to the Holocaust Museum.

It took me a long time to make my way through the entire permanent exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum—a very long time. I was lost in that place. I could not understand what was going on. I remember gliding between the exhibits and information boards in a semi-detached way, never quite sure what to make of the images and information I was taking in, but never missing a word of text or a detail in the fabric of each item on display: each crease in the striped pyjamas, and the stiff smell of leather. Those shoes!

I felt like a voyeur; I was not meant to be there. These were the things of other people—human beings, each one of them. And they suffered. And I who had escaped such a fate by virtue of time and space, I who was alive was bearing witness to a past evil at the hands of other people—human beings, each one of them. And they suffered… didn’t they?

As I walked, it was like fiction.

Some time later, during a facilitated debrief session with a museum staffer, I entered my body and I cried. The internal conflict that raged between my disbelieving mind and my shamed body made it difficult for my heart to reconcile this Holocaust thing with Humanism. It was a crisis that I was undergoing, and it frightened me and left me in a state of deep despair.

We say, ‘Never again,’ but it happens again.

I said this to the group as best I could, but even those words—a Crisis of Humanity—were not enough. But they would do.

I am glad for my team. It was my team that expressed to me the importance of never losing spirit. Some fights are tough, and sometimes it is necessary to slay the beast thrice or four times before it is defeated, and even then it may rear its head again. And then again we must fight. Like Sisyphus we must roll the boulder back to the top of the hill, each time it rolls down. Despair is part of life; it is that part which makes happiness so beautiful. And it is our Crises of Humanity that allow us to sing in the calm.

Some time ago someone I care about deeply sent me a stanza of a poem. That was a good day. It was my first introduction to the work of Alfred Edward Housman, an Englishman, a classicist, a scholar and a homosexual.

Housman’s poetry has been lauded as being of the highest lyrical worth, and its simple depth. Shortly after the trial of Oscar Wilde, a fellow writer and poet, and also a homosexual, A.E. Housman penned a poem telling the story of a young man whose ‘nameless and abominable sin’ was the colour of his hair.

Today we know that there have been many fights that have been fought and won, to different degrees. But one fight is far from over—the battle for the human rights and protections of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual people around the world. Indeed in many parts of the world, and even in my own country, South Africa, and this country, the United States, being queer is still a ‘nameless and abominable sin’.

But slowly that is changing, and it takes big, public acts like President Barack Obama declaring June 2012 ‘Pride Month’, and respected people like Anderson Cooper coming out in public to change the tune of the song society sings. And it also takes small, personal acts like me, a nobody, saying 'I am gay'.

And my sexual orientation is not a crime. And the colour of my hair is not a sin.

Oh Who Is That Young Sinner

Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?
And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists?
And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air?
Oh they're taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.

'Tis a shame to human nature, such a head of hair as his;
In the good old time 'twas hanging for the colour that it is;
Though hanging isn't bad enough and flaying would be fair
For the nameless and abominable colour of his hair.

Oh a deal of pains he's taken and a pretty price he's paid
To hide his poll or dye it of a mentionable shade;
But they've pulled the beggar's hat off for the world to see and stare,
And they're haling him to justice for the colour of his hair.

Now 'tis oakum for his fingers and the treadmill for his feet
And the quarry-gang on Portland in the cold and in the heat,
And between his spells of labour in the time he has to spare
He can curse the God that made him for the colour of his hair.

A.E. Housman (1859-1936)

I thought I’d share a bit about my life in the month-and-a-bit that I will have spent in Washington DC by the time I leave July 21^st. It starts at the home.

The Lynch Home—My Home

As I mentioned in a previous post, I live in Chevy Chase, Maryland, a neighbourhood just a mile over the District of Columbia’s north-western border with the ‘Old Line State’. I have the fortune of staying with the family of Tim and Kathie Lynch in a house built in the 1800s, which at one point in the summer housed nine human and four canine members of a strange international extended family: Tim and Kathie and their son and daughter Brendan and Lindsay; Brendan’s lovely girlfriend Chelsea, and their furry friend Maybe; Kathie’s dad Grandpa Jim Perry, and the intrepid Labradors Carson, Charlie and Carrey; as well as fellow interns Pierce, an American who is a friend of the family, and Benji, a member of the Washington Ireland Program, the sister programme from which SAWIP arose.

One of the most important aspects of the SAWIP programme in DC is one to which we don’t give all that much thought before actually arriving in the city: the host family. It’s not easy to enter someone’s home—their family space—and share it for over a month. It’s kind of a big deal. The gravity of that truth does only become apparent when one is actually in it.

Arriving on Williams Lane, I felt a little like that girl Goldilocks—the one from that childhood story that was used to teach little kids never to eat bears’ porridge or sleep in their beds. While I had been invited in the Lynch home—quite unlike she of the aurulent fro—I felt somewhat shy and self-conscious at being in a new space; someone else’s home—again unlike that lass-that’s-too-crass. But my reticence soon dissipated. I have seldom felt more welcome than I have felt this summer.

Life has been great chez les Lynches. I thought that there’d be a clash of cultures, but instead there’s been a cultural exchange. And so they understand me when I say ‘shame’ with a smile and I have begun writing the date using the American format (did you notice at the beginning of this post?). These minor adjustments represent the altogether more serious behavioural and attitudinal shifts that you must make when you move into someone’s space, or when they move into yours. We learn and we teach.

Goldilocks and I have our locks in common: hers were golden and mine are dreaded (pun intended, just ask my Dad). But the similarities end there. Our stories are poles apart, our experiences antithetical.

[I can never remember how the Goldilocks story ends: Does she get mauled by the Bears and have her hair turned into a weave for Rihanna? Do the Bears have her arrested and press charges? Or does GL run off with Mama Bear and live the life of a tag-team porridge-addict con artist duo?]

It’s not important how Goldilocks’ story ends; what’s important is that mine doesn’t go like hers. If I didn’t know when I was 7 years old I know now that that is Goldilocks’ Lesson: She approached the event of being in a home that was not her own with arrogance and insensitivity. I am grateful that my father taught me better than that. Had he not, I would not be so comfortable as I am now to call that bright yellow house on Williams Lane my home, and it’s menagerie of inhabitants my family.

Ideas. Powerful entities. Beings, even. Born of necessity, or curiosity, or determination, or by accident: born of life and living. They are beautiful, and ugly, and they shape the world. The bad ones shape it into something from which to avert our eyes and gnash our teeth, but the good ones, they bring smiles to the human faces of the world. Author Napoleon Hill said, ‘Ideas are the beginning points of all fortunes.’ I’d but alter those words to speak of good ideas and fortunes for greater humanity.

Nexii is a good idea. It is an idea about good.

On Monday 21 May the SAWIP Class of 2012 hosted Tamzin Ratcliffe, the founder of Nexii, and Alfred Johnson, an intern with the project. The pair presented the initiative, which officially launches in September this year, and fielded questions about its inception and the support it enjoys at this pre-launching phase.

You are wondering what Nexii is. I wondered too. An apt description of the initiative is found, of course, on its website: ‘Nexii aims to make impact investing a reality at scale by providing the meeting place for investments that are primarily social or environmental in purpose and intention and by supporting the intermediaries who serve impact investors, intermediaries and high impact investment initiatives.’ To my mind, the Nexii platform—for that is what it is—marries the idea of business for profit with that of social good—concepts which have traditionally been seen as diametrically opposed to each other. In this regard Nexii should be seen as a facilitator of this connection, an enabler of good.

In a world fast becoming one where economic and financial involvement is a prerequisite for success and personal and community upliftment, I think that the thinking behind this project is laudable. Nexii represents a drive to create a platform where businesses can become an active part of creating positive change to ordinary human beings. Technically, it is a stock exchange geared towards investment with social aims. Nexii sets criteria that NGOs need to meet in order to be listed on the exchange, insuring their repute. It also provides rules for engagement that protect the NGOs from pressure from the businesses who invest in them or from having the carpet swiped from beneath them.

NGOs struggle, we know this. Many of them do great work, innovative work that reaches the core of many of the problems that are faced by the communities in which they operate. Dr Rhoda Kadalie, the Executive Director of the Impumelelo Innovations Award Trust, speaks of the need for government to partner with NGOs to upscale the impactful work that they do. I agree with her, but I also thing that the private sector bears such a responsibility, especially in a country of such inequality as South Africa. In that light, I support the Nexii project’s commitment to providing a reputable place for social good projects and businesses to meet and collaborate.

I must be honest, now at the end of this piece, as I wasn’t at its beginning, I don’t fully understand everything that Nexii does. I’ll probably have to read three or four times before I can grasp the concepts of social impact bonds and other such socio-financial instruments. But I can say this: that the space most certainly is being opened up for a redefinition of the way we do business and the way that affects our interactions as human beings. This space is being driven by thinking people; people with hearts full of ideas and ideas with heart.

When we infuse humanist notions—ideas of ubuntu—into those aspects of our lives to which they are most foreign, a real magnification occurs of our capacity to realise good.