Good evening. I know I speak on behalf of all my friends and teammates when I thank you for being here tonight to celebrate the culmination of our time with SAWIP in Washington. My name is Matthew Chennells and tomorrow we leave to fly back to South Africa.

Although my experience in DC has been like no other, the thought of being home fills me with a deep happiness.

I had a magical upbringing in which I got to develop my academics, sport, relationships, and sense of community at my own pace. My parents allowed me to push myself and were always the best example of who I wanted to be. I watched the way they interacted with people: they instilled in me the idea of mutual respect for others, that no matter what someone’s background there is always something they are able to teach you and that you should treat all persons with dignity. They ingrained in me concepts of fairness and reason. I have one younger brother and nothing specific was ever said to either of us by my parents, we were never sat down and taught lessons; they simply acted and we subconsciously absorbed it all.

When I was young I wanted to be a film director, a radio host, an author, a professional scuba-diver, a maker of fine wines. I studied a business degree, dived into numbers and strategy, and found that as I got older these dreams I had became devolved of childish abandon. And instead of changing my dreams I simply let them fall by the wayside. This is, I think, one of our biggest failings; not that we may give up on our dreams but that we forget to adapt them as we grow.

There is a Chinese proverb that states that you can never cross the ocean until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore. It is only by pushing ourselves outside our comfort zones that we adapt our dreams to the realities that we face, that we turn fuzzy ideals into lives that provide us with happiness and meaning. And it is through exploring our world that we create experiences that shape us.

When I finished my undergraduate degree at university I embraced the opportunity to travel. I needed to find my identity on my continent as an African and I needed to give myself space to think about my future role in South Africa. I worked to earn money and then set off on a bicycle and cycled from London to Cape Town, moving through Europe, parts of the Middle East and Africa. I spent 17 months on the road, living out of bags, often relying on the kindness of strangers for directions, food and shelter. I learnt to be free, to be independent, to be patient with myself, and to take responsibility for every single action I took. I learned about the humbleness of people, about dedication and dealing with adversity, about friendship.

Two events in particular stand out for me as moments leading towards understanding what I now regard as important. The first was in Egypt in November of 2011, the same year that the country underwent revolution. We had visited Tahrir square, witnessed violent mobs and been harassed by gangs of young men. We were staying not far from where protests were underway. It was also Christmas time, a day at my home in South Africa that is filled with family, friends, calm and happiness. Alone in my room, in a foreign country undergoing violent transition and which doesn’t celebrate the holiday, I spoke to my parents, hearing all the time laughter in the background, practically able to smell the braai (the barbeque) through the phone. I felt alone and realized how often I took for granted certain people in my life.

My second story comes from Rwanda, later in the trip. I volunteered at a school for a month and even in such a short time I developed a strong attachment to some of the children there. But I had to leave; when our time there ended and we moved on, I simply packed up my things and cycled out of the gate. I said goodbye to the teachers, to the kids who came to wave goodbye not knowing that I was going for good. One of the older boys, about 13 years old, he knew. He helped push my bike to the gate, helped me open it. Stronger than me, he held back his tears as I cried. I remember cycling out of the city into the countryside with this boy’s strength infusing into me, with this realization that children are children no matter where they are in the world. There is a universal humanity that we all subscribe to in one way or another, and that even if we can create lasting bonds with a few individuals then we can make a difference.

These two lessons I have learnt: the need to actively think about who and what is important to me, and understanding the common ties that we have between us, is what drives me now.

I lived with a man who is not here today and who comes from a background completely different to myself. My favourite time of my day was the 20 min walk we used to take together to the metro station, time to just talk and learn to laugh at ourselves again. These two lessons I learnt he valued as well, but having arrived at from a completely different route. Our conversations were part of this SAWIP process that is teaching me that we are so much more than our race, our individual cultures, and our nationalities.

Benjamin Franklin said: “Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.”

SAWIP does this. It completely immerses us in experiences wider than those we would have got at home and does it with all of us here together. Whether or not we agree with each other, exploring together gives us a shared sense of purpose and engraves into us a sense of duty. I lived with a man from as different a background. Our challenge now is to take our dreams and the knowledge that we have acquired and making them useful in our communities.

We gather here and it’s the first time since I arrived home from travelling that I am able to indulge my rekindled desire to dream. We are different but we have created a family here; a cynical, intense, ambitious and difficult group of individuals. I feel at home with these people that I have known for only a few months and although we irritate each other sometimes and have our differences, I will miss them. I love being here, questioning everything and demanding answers, knowing that we do this because we have a shared dream for our future. And it is precisely because we ask tough questions with no easy answers that these dreams are beautiful. They are beautiful because they question what we currently think of as normal. And they are beautiful because we are in this together.

One of the wonderful things about the SAWIP program is that it drives into you a sense of urgency to do something worthwhile for whatever community it is that you represent, to make productive use of the present and to think deeply about how to make the best use in the future of acquired knowledge and available time. Small businesses, rapid growth, technological change, the impact of social media, massive poverty upliftment; these grand designs crash around continuously in our heads.

It’s like looking at a night sky filled with stars: we see a bright light, develop these fantastic ideas and then peer hard at them, fixating on them. The harder we stare at them the quicker they dull and dim until suddenly, out of the corner of our eyes flashes another point of brilliance, another sparkling thought, and we switch across. The process continues, sometimes haphazardly, sometimes frustratingly; the comfort that we take is that there are many options to choose from and that we are not narrowed down to one unless we force ourselves to. We can just as easily sit back and revel in the glory of the night sky as fascinate ourselves with the distance and brilliance of specific balls of fire.

However, we are in a rush to do both. What we forget in this process of learning is that change takes time. It can happen suddenly, but more often than not events build on years of simmering thinking; that for every revolutionary leader that rose to power there were a whole number who fell in trying to do so before them. The abolition of slavery, the destruction of royal dynasties, the fight for colonial independence, rights for same sex marriage; all of these were long processes which culminated in the events we know and remember today; wars won, power taken, laws passed.

We are driven by an individualised society where we need to be the youngest in our field, millionaires before we are thirty. Drive, ambition and ego can be good drivers of change but they are also impatient drivers. In their rush to topple governments they overlook the need to build lasting institutions, both formal and informal. In Egypt now, after the revolution, haste drove elections and the consequences are being dealt with in the deposition of a democratically-elected leader, a leader who moved into institutions that have existed for decades, defined by religion, power and identity. The problem in promoting rapid change is that we don’t change the institutions and fail to see why new leaders act in similar ways to those of old.

The same is true in South Africa: we had change, rapid change in its historical context even given that we took time to try and incorporate every concern. For a number of reasons, though, the institutions in place remained largely untouched. We moved from RDP to GEAR almost instantaneously. Twenty years down the line, our police force is archaic, the education system is as divided as it was before, the transfer of business and land ownership has been wholly inadequate, access to justice is rarely available, and displaced communities find themselves unmoved. We did not smash down institutions to rebuild them, as some suggested would be the necessary source of change for equality. For a number of reasons, we chose to embrace them and transform them from the inside.

This approach works if two things are in place: one, the running of these institutions must be open to questions and be willing to adapt; and two, that we continue to deal with issues of the past. In South Africa, neither of these holds true.

Instead, our institutions operate as before in silos of power. Ministries operate vertically, the police force is structured as it was under apartheid, as is the education system in effect. Access to justice is backed by little political will and development issues in informal settlements remain unresolved. The power of corporates is as strong and tightly controlled as before. In our rush to take over these institutions and gain power we did not adequately assess how they were structured and whether these structures were what we desired.

And above all we have no more processes for healing. For all the good that it did, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was inadequate in its reach and impact; too few were heard and too little was told. There is a layer of hurt and tension that exists in our society that we have not provided space to deal with. Leadership programs for the youth are important, but there is no outlet for those older people who actively suffered. It’s almost as if we are waiting for them to depart this earth, hoping that they will suffer in silence until they do. The irony is that dealing with issues from the past may actually accelerate our integration as a society compared to where it is now.

That is not to say that there hasn’t been progress nor that new systems in place - such as the social grant system - are not playing an important role in alleviating poverty. If we had time, decades, to let the system slowly change then this might not be as important. But we do not. Every year hundreds of thousands of children drop out of school and those that pass matric have a qualification that is rapidly decreasing in worth. Jobs are even more scarce and, even more importantly, not tailored to the type of economy that might most benefit South Africans. Urban informal settlements are growing and sanitation and access to food and water is increasingly scarce. We do not have time to let the situation slowly evolve.

There is a paradox, then: our rush to create new rules of the game after apartheid meant that we have left no space to question or ask for more change and which has resulted in a situation which now requires rapid change. We can be practical in addressing this: we can establish space to talk about conflict from the past; we can look at property ownership to make it more fair, acknowledging that some people’s comforts will be reduced in order to help many more; we can inform ourselves about who is representing us politically and improve the quality of our vote, punishing those who do not perform; we can challenge the dominance of unions or interests that disproportionately protect small groups; we can use technology to leapfrog development issues and provide access to quality education, healthcare and the legal system; we can foster and correctly regulate private business. Above all we can challenge our own thinking and realise that if we want to coexist in South Africa in the future then we must be willing to get up in front of our friends and take a stand. We must be willing to take responsibility for the institutions that we have created and in doing so discover how we can improve them. We must decide for ourselves what level of suffering we are willing to tolerate and if the answer is zero then work towards that.

Institutions are created by people and so they act like people. As with our own relationships amongst each other, trust, commitment to certain principles and the ability to act all come with time and an input of energy. There is no reason to think our institutions in South Africa operate any differently.

This blog must please be read as a thought process that unfolded as I wrote – kind of like having an argument with myself.

I find myself becoming more and more rational about my reasoning during my time with SAWIP. I love to feel, and be spontaneous in doing so, but when I find myself uncomfortable I need to delve deeper and understand why. Rationalization also helps me move from judging others to understanding them better. My thinking on the concept of networking is driven by this.

Since when did an occasion to simply talk and interact with others need a title? The big ‘N’, networking, an official event on evening programs for us these days. We have been prepped on how to network in Washington, how to hold ourselves, how and what to speak, when to give out business cards. Everyone in our group approaches these situations in different ways and it fascinates me how we have taken what is essentially the core of human existence – interaction with others – and turned it into a game, a mechanical operation.

We’re very open about what it means; simply, an opportunity to develop superficial connections now in the hopes of more beneficial relationships in the future. Although I find I am able to participate in this relatively easily, I instinctively shudder at the idea; falseness is something I dislike in people and prostituting my time and energy in this way does not sit well with me. I think it is indicative of the society I live in generally; we often tend to interact with others only when there’s something that we want from them.

But maybe I need to climb a little off my high horse.

I’ve said before that I don’t think people ever act purely in the interests of others, that we are all driven by our own incentives. This could be the wannabe-economist inside me breaking through, but it’s proved over and over again in all aspects of business, family life, volunteer work, our closest relationships, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing; if you get satisfaction out of helping someone then that’s fine in my eyes.

By my own reasoning therefore I must therefore accept that nothing I do, including any of my interactions with others, is done without some benefit for me. What difference, then, is formalizing it through this process of networking? In fact, is it not better that it is acknowledged for being what it is, rather than everyone pretending they are together for something else? Unless I am actively pretending to be something I’m not, small talk, swopping of cards, only asking questions that I have an interest in hearing the answers to does not necessarily mean that I am not being genuine.

The idea of ‘selective networking’ – engaging deeply only with people who you think can further your ambitions – holds some appeal but it limits too heavily the avenues through which we are able to learn. Some of the best conversations I’ve had came from the unexpected. We often pay positive lip service to the idea that there is something that we can learn from every person, no matter how important we may regard them as, and, as Jess said in a recent post, if we truly believe this then we should apply the same interest to everyone we meet, not just those we think we can get something from.

The major reason, though, why I dislike networking derives from the world that I think it represents; an exclusive and highly unequal set of circumstances that I am able to access only through my being privileged, not necessarily because I deserve it, because of my ability or because of my need. That it’s “who you know not what you know” scares me when I think of what this implies for most of the world that do not have this access.

I can’t pretend that my aversion to the idea of networking does not also have something to do with my own image. It’s got to do with the type of person that I want people to see me as; someone with integrity and respect. These two delicious words are full of different meanings; here (informed by some previous semantic-style discussions in our group) I see it as meaning taking a genuine interest in others in your dealings with them, having their interests in mind and not just your own.

For over a year all I did every day was strike up conversations and form relationships with people to whom I had little connection, often in the hopes of getting something out; a bed, food, directions, friends. What I have learnt is that my most meaningful and beneficial connections, the ones that last the longest, create the best opportunities and provide me with the greatest happiness, are those that I put time and effort into and where I asked questions that sought to understand rather than simply know.

We have reached the half-way point in our Washington journey. What SAWIP has given me, what it has made me do over and over again, is to reassess what it is I regard as important and what my goals for myself and my community are. I wake up every day excited, it’s true, but confused and slightly helpless at the same time. I look beyond the next few weeks, months, and I see a world in which I have to make choices about how I want to spend my time. And these choices are expanding every day, refining themselves, cancelling each other out. It’s a maelstrom in my mind and I struggle to hold on to all these thoughts.

Yesterday I found myself wandering up and down a road, backwards and forwards, just thinking, knotting my brain into a series of situations and scenarios that I play out over and over again. One of the host parents recently said to me: “You young South Africans take yourselves too seriously; you need to lighten up”. That rings very true to me. I miss my friends at home precisely because I can relax more around them, or rather not have the pressing weight of being socially responsible bearing down on every thought and conversation I have about now and the future. It’s good to be here and to be immersed in this awareness, but it is overpowering.

When I got back from travelling I struggled to relate to a lot of what many of my friends were thinking and engaged in. One special friend said something to me that still resonates with me now: You feel all enlightened when you return, that you are asking the right questions, seeking the right answers, finding some of them, and others are not doing the same or are doing it differently; but you need to learn to laugh at yourself again and to take yourself a little less seriously.

And this is exactly right. I know that I am a funnier person than the individual who is present on this trip, more fun too I hope. Right now I feel like a big, serious and perplexed elephant lost so deeply in thought that it actually doesn’t remember what it is it’s thinking about.

While walking up and down that road I randomly turned down an escalator into a lower-level, very deserted and rather cold eating area. But there was someone there, completely coincidentally, someone very special to me, and it brought me back down from the clouds and cleared away the confusion: we can get lost in beautiful rhetoric, notions of grandeur, dreams about the corners of the globe, and revelations about the future and so sometimes fail to acknowledge the powerful and simple things that are our actual drivers.

It is true; I do need to think beyond myself. At the same time, though, I need to remember that a huge part of what is important to me involves the people around me and that although the SAWIP experience exposes me to a wider world, its primary impact involves the deep and lasting connections that we are only just beginning to build here with each other.

Please forgive this piece for generalising about our continent.

Africa as a whole is expected to have one of the highest growth rates in the next decade, democracy is expected to spread further and deeper into the region, mobile technology and access to information is becoming ubiquitous and is seen as providing huge opportunities for social and economic development. Above all, though, the continent has what large parts of the world needs: large reserves of natural resources.

We have spent the past few weeks talking to a number of people in different fields and time and again, in our conversations with people involved with Africa, the topic of China’s influence on the continent has cropped up. China generally ends up coming out of the conversation badly beaten, unable, of course, to defend itself on such foreign soil. That China extracts resources from many countries in Africa (some under the leadership of dubious despots) without any regard to western ideas of sustainable development seems to infuriate people here. Particularly, I think, because those in the industry this side can’t do much about it.

When I was in Kenya I read an opinion piece in the local newspaper whose message ran along these lines: why, it asked, should the president of Kenya sit down with diplomats from Europe and get lectured on gay-rights when he can just as easily sit down with a representative from China and talk about building a port?

An interesting question and one that can be divided into two parts: firstly, what is the best way to go about creating mutually beneficial arrangements with African countries for outside countries; and secondly, what, really, are Africa’s key development priorities? We know that countries’ involvement and investment in others are driven by self-interest, whether economically or politically (most likely both), and we must not pretend otherwise.

Broadly speaking, China has what it calls an “ask no questions” policy towards its political and economic dealings with other countries. As long as its sovereignty over Taiwan is acknowledged, it’s generally happy to work with governments no matter what the regime in place. In exchange for access to resources – which it rapidly draws out of the continent – it invests heavily in infrastructure inside the countries it works. I saw this first hand when I cycled along the Nile in Sudan on a newly built Chinese road that stretched from the Egyptian border to the capital, Khartoum. Happily zipping along the smooth surface, I saw small scale gold mines all along the road with Sudanese miners trading the metals they found with local Chinese businessmen for a fraction of what they were worth. The wonderful world of mutual backscratching.

The US (and Europe) do not find themselves in the same position. The irony of living in strong democracies means that they do not have the luxury of engaging with countries whose records at home oppose their own views of freedom and franchise. Can you imagine the outcry if the US traded with Sudan (they’ve actually gone further and imposed sanctions on the country)? Western countries therefore find themselves in a predicament: limited to invest only in countries that are relatively free and open but which are thus available to everyone. And this bound is pushed so far it is sometimes pathetic: last year Hillary Clinton visited Uganda on her world tour, praising the country as a bastion of democracy in the region. This, in a country whose president has been in power since 1986 (EU monitors decried the last elections) and whose government came close to introducing the death penalty for being gay. Rwanda’s government has been lauded for its progressiveness (President Kagame even has an honourary doctorate from an American university) despite it being effectively a police state and the existence of clear evidence of its role in funding militia in the eastern DRC for access to precious minerals.

China’s approach has rapidly allowed it to gain huge traction on the African continent, so much so that many people are wondering whether the US still has the clout on the continent that it used to have. The answer to the first question (the easiest way to approach getting what you want from other countries) would, it seems, be to simply take what you want and give what is asked for.

And why should we, from outside, determine what is in a country’s best interests? All countries have gone through or are going through their own political and economic transitions from centralized power to broader inclusion; the US and Europe are no different in their histories. Yet now we seek to impose western standards and values on other countries that are undergoing the same process. If China is taking resources, but ploughing money back in, then the problem would not seem to be one. Infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure. That is what we heard Africa needs and we heard it here in the US! In fact, the Wall Street Journal today reported that America had a net flow of capital out of Tanzania last year – where President Obama is currently visiting – compared to China, which had a net inflow.

That same road in Sudan (the one with all the exploited miners) also had other huge impacts: a parent living on the river banks, far from a nearby town, begged me to please heal his child who had huge sores covering his head, assuming that I had the medicine and knowledge to do so. There was nothing I could do, which left me empty and feeling hopeless, but what I realised was that the nearest hospital was now only a few hours away on a bus, compared to the three day trip that it would have been only a few years back, before the Chinese built the road.

It might be that this development comes at the sacrifice of certain political, economic or social freedoms. Ethiopia has seen overall positive growth, despite it being a heavy-handed police state with little political freedom. Rwanda has overcome many problems and has a growing economy, despite having almost no informal economy (unheard of in an African country).

But all of this begs a bigger question: what is the long-run sustainability of the interaction that China has with these countries compared to that of the US. The mutual backscratching mentioned earlier fails to identify whose itch is getting relieved; if the majority of China’s investment goes to political fat-cats then the population receives no benefit or becomes even worse off, as in the Nigerian delta and the oil-fields there (interestingly, involving European companies). An even greater issue is resource sustainability; China’s extraction leaves in its wake a barren future for the country’s inhabitants and future generations who will be left with little in the end. And this affects most countries in the continent; resource scarcity is already going to be a platform for conflict with neighbours in the future. Ultimately, what happens when these regimes fall, because fall they almost inevitably do? Will populations turn to those who collaborated with their corrupt governments or will they turn to those who support their wish for freedoms.

The US’ current approach, articulated strongly by President Obama this week on his tour to South Africa and Tanzania, is targeted to exactly counter the approach by China: funding for HIV and AIDS through the PEPFAR program will continue to be available to further the giant strides it has already taken; new investments in renewable energy and the provision of electricity look towards a sustainable future; the (potential) extension of AGOA, a trade agreement benefitting Sub-Saharan African countries, will encourage economic integration with the US; and, importantly, massive commitments to youth leadership development in Africa aim to initiate within these countries their own internal processes of change and greater accountability, most likely with US support.

We must not pretend that either the US or China are invested in Africa for anything but their own self-interests. Both countries will look to exploit the resources, natural and otherwise, that Africa has. What we can decide, though, is to support an approach that better improves the lives of African people. President Obama’s approach is bold and full of flourish, but it may be too late.

In the next few years I will have to begin defining for myself what kind of job I want to do, what kind of work I want to be part of in my future. This decision, as for most, is a difficult one for me. My dream is to be able to do work that allows me to work for myself with clients that I am able to choose, and that allows me directly or indirectly to contribute positively to my community. Idealistic and naïve, maybe, but that’s why it’s a dream. I am privileged that I am able to have choices: I have no student loans to pay off, no debts and no dependents relying on me to support them. I am, essentially, free to choose what path I want to take. What drives me therefore is only my own purpose, which I have chosen to define as such: “What can I do to be the most useful to my community?”

I find it strange to map out a career for two reasons: the first is that I have no idea what I am going to be like in the future, what will be important to me and what I will want to do. Combined with the fact that it is far easier for people of my generation to switch professions and learn new ones, this makes it difficult to map out what path my life will take. Secondly, I have no idea what the world around me will be like in the future, what new industries will be created and what new jobs will be in demand. If the past two decades have been any sign of this, then the future is likely to involve radical change with radical new demands.

No humans like uncertainty, and this is why we seek out security, money, family, comfort, routine. And this is not necessarily wrong. But what it does mean is that we are pre-disposed to thinking along very narrow lines. When I look at future jobs, for example, the corporate world exerts a strong pull on me: good social standing, doing enjoyable work, getting paid well, building skills and networks, and providing a safety net for future plans. This is what we are pushed towards; the nature of the South African education system and the labour market mean that throughout our lives this is the ideal of what we aim to aspire towards. And again, depending on who you are, this is not a bad thing. But we are never taught a different story: unless couched in some kind of business strategy course, working in non-mainstream fields, starting your own business, thinking of new and independent policy platforms or innovating existing ones are not ideas that we embrace. Often we do not think of these and most of the time we are not even given the option to do so.

Many people complain about the binding nature of the corporate world and then go in themselves (Imight be one in the future). I have friends from university who claim to only want to work in big business for a few years in order to gain the required skills, networks and capital and then leave and start out on their own. A few years have passed now and I am waiting to see in the next while how many actually take the plunge. Because there is no doubt that it does tie you in. Rewards for hard work are delayed into future salaries years down the line; in order to realize your increases you are required to remain at the company and climb the ladder.

And if my goal is to gain skills and networks and then leave to start my own socially-beneficial organization or enterprise, isn’t that just a lazy way of saying that I I’m happy to take the easy road for now, putting off the hard decisions till later? There are many ways I could be much more useful in that time and still come out at the same place in the end. It is true that there is space in organisations to innovate and come up with your own means and ways of doing things, but this space often requires years of dedicated service before these ideas can be realized, and it is very difficult to create change in long-lived organisations.

I won’t dive into my own creation just for the sake of doing so. I understand that I need to have an idea to work on first and I understand that for some people working in such environments described above is what makes them happy. But for myself, I want to experiment and learn more about who I am and who the people I live with are. I want to make the social, political and economic order in which we live question itself and keep re-inventing. If I fail, all the better, provided I am able to learn from the experience.

My biggest fear is that if I choose to work in the current economy, in a comfortable corporate job, that I am buying into a system that I do not believe in. I don’t believe that I will get sucked in and change who I am (a friend spoke the truth when he told me I will only change if I choose to do so) but I am scared of the thought that I am profiting off a system that I regard as unfair. The free-market and competition in business has the ability to help and lift many through a combination of the ‘free-hand’ and some necessary regulation. But this requires a fair business environment and universal access to good information. I do not believe the South African economy is in this state; most industries, from bread and banking to retail and fast-food outlets, are dominated by a few very powerful organisations. This is not healthy competition; the power of the rich controls the lives of the poor, a situation that has been in place in our country for centuries. The wealthy have access to education and connections that the poor do not; as such our society is one of the most unequal in the world and this inequality is increasing. Working within this arrangement must therefore imply for myself that I am either working towards something greater at a later stage or am engaged in an attempt to try and create some type of reform from the inside.

We need people inside and out if we want to create a more fair and equitable agreement between our country’s citizens. I know there are plenty of people who are as committed as I am (if not more so) to this dream and who are working in these industries to do so (and likely more capable than I am at it). Even at the end of this piece, I am completely unsure what direction to take. A different friend asked me a version of the standard question I always get when I mention these ideas, but one that is important nonetheless: “How am I planning on putting bead on the table? Buying a house? If I have the life I have through the current system then why am I ungrateful, why should I not want the same for others?”

I don’t know, but I don’t think we think enough about what we can do or that we are brave enough to try what we are not sure is possible.

Today we were invited to attend an “industry symposium” in the city centre titled “Innovation for Competitive Economies”. Hosted by the South African Embassy in Washington, the focus was on the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) program, a massive international investment program which will result in the world’s most sensitive radio telescope being built in South Africa. Besides it’s ability to delve into the mysteries of space quicker and deeper than ever before, the program has been sold as a driver of South Africa’s expansion in science and technology and plays a key role in moving towards what the Minister of Science and Technology, Derek Hanekom, spoke about in his keynote address at the event: moving South Africa towards a knowledge economy.

This struck me as strange. Back in South Africa the idea of a technology science revolution makes few headlines. They’re there, but newspapers at home are concerned primarily with the government and public service delivery, what’s happening between business and labour, sport. Yet here we are, watching our country being branded in a very specific way by our ambassador and minister; if I relied only on what little news of the country reaches me here and on what I heard at this event I would think of South Africa as a place with problems but one that is heading in the right direction. I would think that the country, although suffering from unfortunately low levels of growth, is progressing nicely and moving up the value chain. I fear that the picture painted here is too rosy.

I sat and listened and it took me back to my younger days, reminded me of a certain political/diplomacy theory I learnt in some class I took (and what Wikipedia was quick to refresh me on). The logic of two-level games was developed by a gentleman named Robert Putnam and his theory looks at negotiations between different countries (namely, democracies). The idea is that diplomats and/or politicians have to negotiate at a domestic level with their constituents (building coalitions and manoeuvring among concerns within their local society) and at an international level with representatives of other governments (building country ties and positioning their countries in different ways). These executive members try and implement domestic concerns at an international level without compromising their coalitions at home; they basically try and get the best deal internationally that they can without upsetting too many people at home. If they promise another country something unrealistic, for example, it may be difficult to go back to their voters to try and sell it to them. The theory goes further, in that the more support they have domestically, the more credible their international commitments may be, and vice versa.

The USA is a good example of how this plays out in reality; anything President Obama promises on an international stage is placed under intense scrutiny in Congress and the difficulty he has ratifying anything at home impacts heavily on his foreign policy abroad (interestingly, this may make his foreign policy increasingly limited, but more credible).

I listened to our Minister selling South Africa as a future knowledge and technology innovation leader and it rang similarly in my ears with what Ambassador Rassool spoke about before him as well as to us a few nights previously: South Africa has the best banks, the best universities, the best consultancies, the best research centres, the best services on the continent. But our domestic situation is not captured properly by this: we have an economy with a strong ‘1^st world’ economic bias towards these strong and established industries described above (including stringent labour laws), but that is situated in a ‘3^rd world’ society that has little human capital, large amounts of unskilled labour and high levels of economic and social poverty. I may have made the distinction too clear cut but there is a perception that the business environment is weak and faith in the government is lacking.

The past month has seen major civil protests, some of them wide-ranging, in Turkey and Brazil, two developing countries with positive recent track records. In fact, in the last decade, Brazil seen the most sustained rise in living standards in its history, youth unemployment is at an all time low and its immigrant population – often scapegoats for public anger – is tiny (0.5% of the population). To sell South Africa as moving in the direction described earlier fails to acknowledge the realities back home which are almost the opposite to this; unemployment, particularly amongst the youth is high; human capital and skills are low, living standards are low and only slowly improving; racial divides are still strong, and immigrants have been subjected to brutal treatment by locals.

We are told to be ambassadors for our country in this Capital of the world and this forces me to think of what it is I am trying to represent. It has left me wondering whether the South Africa that we are seeking to represent here in Washington accurately reflects the realities back home, or whether, as my man Putnam might say, that what we are trying to sell to international investors and to the world at large is something people at home won’t buy.

It is a strange thing to know a place primarily from the media that you are exposed to but have never actually explored yourself. We know it through its travellers and the knowledge, ideology and thinking that it spreads around the world. We know its music, its films, its celebrities, its companies, its leaders, its heroes, and its enemies. There is surely no culture in the world that more people identify with, that more people from separate backgrounds feel that they know so well. We think we know this group of people, this United States of America.

Our SAWIP group has finally arrived in Washington, DC, the capital of the USA, to start the second leg of this program. The past two months have been, in short, a series of workshops and learning sessions designed to get us thinking and exploring parts of South Africa’s history, its legacy and our role in the society in which we reside. What this next step does is put us in a unique working environment in one of the most competitive places in the world with the aim of exposing us, challenging us and teaching us.

How I approached this culture in which we are going to work I found quite surprising. There are naturally bigger questions about the structure of the American society that interest me but what I found the most exciting, the parts that surprised me the most were the small things: I know this country as a great one, in the scale sense of the word, but I forgot that it is composed of millions of small people going about there ordinary lives.

Seeing normal Americans doing normal things like catching a train, doing normal jobs like working in a supermarket, doing normal tasks like buying food, was what astounded me. I came out of the airplane, got my passport checked by a security guard and got ushered through a series of corridors until I found my bags. These ordinary people doing ordinary things was almost one of the biggest culture shocks that I’ve had (although I speak right now from a single day’s experience only).

Even more is the mix of American identity that I have already born witness to. This plays out in two distinctive ways: firstly, I have interacted with a multitude of different races and cultures all with the same accent and the same mannerisms (taking class as given), with an American style of holding themselves; and secondly, I have seen and heard people of completely different cultures speaking completely different languages shopping at the same places and making use of the same public facilities, with the same outcome in mind.

Needless to say, this view will change over the next few weeks but, right now, this is what America has been for me on this first day: an oversized shock of different people with similar characteristics taking part in this massive game and all somehow finding their place.

Inherent in the creation of any society are the institutions that form the foundation for social development, the process by which a social group learns, adapts, grows, and reflects. These institutions imply more than simply organisational structures; they describe the rules of the game, both formal (laws enforced by courts in the legal system) and informal (cultural practices sustained through collective understanding), as well as govern how members of society interact with one another. The nature of population growth, economic change and the massive global integration of different countries, among other things, has fundamentally changed how these rules are established and how they play out.

Human nature is generally biased, and this applies to our approach to social development as well; our own experiences of people and places force us to put a personal spin on it, and knowledge that we actively acquire helps us to balance this out with some objectivity. All of this helps us define the role that we see for ourselves in our communities in the future, and if we seek to orientate that role wholly or partly towards positive social change then we need to decide where to begin.

Do we try and hit it at the highest level or do we turn to our immediate neighbours? When we try and work towards changing a situation we have to decide how much we are willing to take on. Do we try and enact macro level change, altering these institutions in society to create broad and far-reaching effects, or do we focus in on a micro level, where we develop personal and intimate interactions with people in the hope that these interactions will feed back into society with some sort of multiplier effect.

It is an important question, but one whose answer we often take for granted: we assume that with the scale of certain problems in South Africa that effective social development can only occur through large scale change and we often fall into the trap of looking for the magic bullet, the one core idea or intervention that will snowball into something much bigger. When we get too carried away in this, we lose touch of what is real about people and what is real about what drives them. Our egos often get in the way; to be the one person with the pure medicinal answer to cure all our social evils is a wonderful dream. I am guilty of this thinking as well, and I think we have forgotten, in our search for grand answers, what it means to build from the ground up; for all our talk about grass and roots, we have in our minds the leaves and fruit that comes much later. We look long and hard into the future but often forget to acknowledge the small steps that we have taken to get to where we are.

Our time spent at Solms-Delta Wine farm last weekend reminded me of this choice we make when we try to serve our communities. Through its own individual and relatively small actions with regards to development and inclusion of its labour force into its operations, as well as its heartfelt appreciation of the past history of the farm, the organisation has created waves in the farming community and is now regarded as one of the most socially progressive farms of its type. The impact it is having on its own community as well as its contribution towards shaping broader social structures comes not from advocating sweeping policy changes and fighting for reform, but rather from leading by example and being excellent in doing this.

This is a good example of what it means for something or someone to be a role model: not acting in a way that attracts recognition for doing what is regarded as socially popular, but rather focusing on staying true to a vision and recognising along the way that others are willing to buy into the same vision. This is what is happening at Solms-Delta, and it sounds like something which we would like to strive for, but at the same time a small part of it puzzles and slightly worries me.

What the social interactions at Solms-Delta tell me is that it comes down to individuals and their preferences to make social change happen. To take it right back to the beginning of this blog post, we have moved away from the blue-print idea that you can create the right structures and incentives so that less emphasis is placed on individual willingness but rather on coordinated social pressure to enact positive social outcomes. In this situation, even if an individual steps out, momentum and expectation mean that anyone who steps into the position is incentivised (in whatever way) to continue the good work; where social development is rooted in the attitudes of specific individuals it becomes harder to adapt and continue in the same vein if that person moves away or begins to hold others to ransom through their actions.

Jail (among other things) is a threat the keeps us from committing crime; principles in good schools with strong parent bodies are incentivised to keep their schools running well; city mayors with active citizens are held to account; village elders are shown respect, despite potentially being unable to contribute to the physical well-being of their community, because it is through their role as bearers of information that knowledge is transferred over generations; policemen or teachers who are held up as leaders in their communities have an interest in maintaining professional and ethical behaviour in order to retain their social status. All of these are examples of how different incentives, formal and informal, lead communities and people to act in certain ways.

I am still unsure whether it is more beneficial to rely on individuals or institutions when we think of social development or whether – and this is more likely the case – that it requires a mixture of both. Individuals can be nurtured to serve their communities and structures can be created and adapted to strengthen platforms that people with different opinions and backgrounds can come together to work on.

The values that we represent are generally acknowledged to stem from a mix between our genetic inheritance and our family and social environment. However, the idea that people around us have shaped what we have become and, in some cases, continue to shape who we are going to be is often taken for granted.

I’m using my parents in this post because, although we shouldn’t need a specific day to celebrate them, Mother’s day a few days ago gave me a beautiful opportunity to spend time with those people I love, get them some time in a schedule that I have somehow managed to exclude them from. Coming from a stable immediate family where I share a deep connection with my parents and my brother I have often taken my relationship with them for granted. Maybe this only happens as you get older (easy on the comments!), but you begin to realise how much you actually absorb from those who influence you. I don’t just mean development of your personality and character, but actual ideas, thoughts, opinions, knowledge both innate and learned.

My SAWIP application form gave me a small space, a few hundred words, to try and lay down this contribution from my family to my personal development. My question to myself now is how often do I step back and think about how much I learn from specific people in my life? That small blank space on the application form was nowhere near big enough, but it made me transform abstract ideas and feelings curving around in my mind into lines on paper, small squiggles whose form and place set in concrete words that try to sum up these influences.

Never before have my words carried so much weight and substance. When I was travelling, away from my home for a long period of time and wandering nomadically down my continent, I developed an appreciation of how special it is to have my family near me now while I study and I’m acutely aware of how hard it is for some of my friends whose families are not so physically accessible to them, for whatever reason. It is scary that it was necessary for me to remove myself in order to truly value what I had.

To paraphrase one of my more eccentric calculus tutors: time is jealous. It moves quicker than we realise and unless we stop and take the time to think, the people that we have now might move on with it. It's easy to spend easy time with them, but my challenge to myself is to sit down and actually write down or record what I get from these people. To ask them their opinions on life and the world and, as objectively as possible, put them down in a way that makes me aware of what these are. To almost create a document in which resides the people that make me who I am.

This is not a rushed process; we have the time, but we must use it usefully.

Never in my life have I been required to be as organised as I’ve had to be in the last few weeks. Never before have I had to keep a diary and pens nestled away in my pockets for when I check up on friends or make plans to see them.

“Thursday night?” A frantic flick to the required date – Alas! – not to be: I'm being psychoanalysed for SAWIP.

Don't ask.

[“But the last Tuesday in September’s looking pretty free at the moment. How bout I pencil you in...mid-afternoon fine?”]

Though it is rough and all of us in the team are working hard at managing everything, the nice thing is that we are all in the same boat. We are not unique in this either and it extends beyond us as well; people, friends and family are busy in their own lives, trying to coordinate their own wants, needs, loves and hates. A quick peak over the side of our boat shows a never-ending fleet of others, each tossed around on this wild sea, some looking terrified, some determined, some trying to steer their ship, others being sick over the side. The world concerns itself with being busy.

The night before Worker's Day last week was my first evening of respite in a while and I arrived back to my room and collapsed. I desperately needed to see some scarce friends, but I realised that I didn't know what a single person was doing that night, and the lure of deep sleep and mindless trash on TV was unfortunately too strong. I began wondering as to what exactly this 'busyness' is that I've found myself caught up in.

Being busy should, hopefully, imply doing things that you think have a purpose, whatever that may be. My last post mentioned the inspiration I draw from our team in pushing myself to be excellent in what I do. Even if I never strove solely for it, to me, excellence has always implied what we regard as a standard explanation; being the best you can at each thing that you do, whether it's in your academics, relationships, service to community, sport, your own personal development, etc. There is no doubt that in my life some of these are taking a hit at the moment – I’ve clearly bitten off more than I can chew – yet I'm happy with this state of affairs where I’m not achieving quite as much in certain areas as I would have liked. Why is this?

It’s because now I see excellence in a broader sense, a greater overarching idea of being the most useful you can be, given everything that you are doing. I hope you’ll forgive me for diving into economic jargon, but it’s a sort of overall maximisation of excellence that we seek – as opposed to in specific areas – that weights the different things we are doing based on the importance (and costs) we attach to each outcome that we want; the best net result that we can attain. Ideally, we learn to trade off what does not fit into this picture (although we struggle to figure out what these aspects are) and remove them from the equation while maintaining a balance in our lives. But this sounds quite lazy.

In our group we’ve chatted about it before, but this idea of balance is interesting. It’s often expressed in a good way, a necessary means of keeping all aspects of life in sync and not becoming bogged down and lost in one area. But it may also be the opposite, a tacit excuse to justify not striving for excellence, an excuse not to give attention to things you know you should probably direct more focus towards.

I do believe in being aware of this balancing act, perched as we are on a sort of multi-dimensional see-saw. But maybe we do not need to remain in equilibrium at every point in time; we might, in fact, never be stable, always flailing our arms in certain directions and struggling to stay upright. What if we should see this idea of balance as a long term idea, that over time (don't ask me how long) we shift to keep balanced overall even if we pendulum in the present from one extreme to the other? Like slow tectonic shifts in the deeper bases on which we build our lives even as we run around trying to get things done. We all feel this; sometimes it's good to be uncomfortable, drained, outside your comfort zone, off-balance.

I am enjoying this busy state at the moment; I find it exhilarating even as I feel myself being exhausted. For two reasons:

1. I feel like I am pushing my boundaries, exploring what I’m capable of; when I work late, move non-stop, miss my friends and family, stop doing the things I enjoy, I know that these are testing who I am and what I want. It’s also making me continuously re-assess what and who I regard as important.

2. I feel that most of what I'm doing is actually useful to what I want to do in the future.

I am not pretending in any way that I live every minute of my day with purpose and drive and zeal. Far from it; I know that I can be lazy and I know when I need down-time. But driving yourself hard, pushing your limits, reaching out and stretching for your goals gives you a sense of elation. And when those end goals are things you regard as valuable to yourself as well as to others, there can’t be too many greater feelings.

Except when you keep getting stabbed by pens in pockets.

Gathering together a diverse group of young people and expecting them to learn from and find direction through their interaction together puts a lot of pressure on those individuals. In SAWIP, there is an implication that we will naturally learn from each other, that simply putting people in a circle will break down barriers, foster friendships, create shared goals.

I often use this word, ‘learning’, very easily in conversation when I talk about SAWIP and my expectations of the program. As a means of talking about my own personal growth, the word has become quite stale. As a catchall term it has come to represent in some of my social circles a lovely but largely shallow and useless process, a wonderfully fuzzy term that captures the niceties of our politically-correct and diverse population, all colours of the rainbow gathering together in a feel-good ceremony of rich but ultimately impractical approaches to problem solving.

“All this talking, talking. Why don’t you just go out there and do it?”

We have used the term often in our SAWIP camps and I defend it; I genuinely believe in that simple word and that even in the short space of time I have known you I have learned from you about my own approaches to what I want to do in the future and about the different ideas and opinions out there, out beyond me. The first few weeks of getting to know many of you has been a small dose of social integration shock therapy for me and, in a bid to nail down some of this vagueness, I want to tell you what I mean when I say I have learned from you.

In her recent blog post Lwamba asked herself a question I have often asked myself: “What made you think you are so special in caring deeply about the issues?” The idea of a homogenous youth in South Africa (soon the subject of a Mazetti-Claassen blog post I hope!) is a strange one. I thought that coming to SAWIP was to give me a space to meet people doing great things and take from them what I could (and hopefully help them understand some things themselves) to make myself more useful in my community. I had this idea in my mind of fifteen of the same type of people, a paintbrushed model of the young change-maker (an awful term) with a tired but driven zeal, ambitious but with an ear to the ground, a clear conception of right and wrong, a vivid understanding of race and class dynamics.

I left to travel in Africa to look for my own sense of African identity and I searched hard for it, not realising, perhaps, that I didn't know what it is that I was searching for, or that it doesn't exist as I see it. Perhaps the strongest thing I have learned in SAWIP then – and have revelled in learning – is that my one-size-fits-all idea of an active youth is hardly the case at all. We are all vastly different; not just in backgrounds but in outlook, personality, beliefs, what we regard as important, our own judgements. This is what makes me the most excited for this program; that we’re not going to simply discuss and create solutions for problems in our country, but that we are going to argue about them, debate them from completely different points of view, cut them up and dice them, fry them and force ourselves to swallow them. Cooperation is great, but the best medicines burn on the way down.

So we are assembled together and the hope is that we learn stuff from each other. Seems easy enough, but this fails to take into account something very important: that through the very nature of the selection process for the program, the people that have been brought together are strong-willed, used to excelling in some arena, and think of themselves as capable. We live in an individualised society where there is no second place; you come top of the class or nothing, you get the job or nothing, you are the centre of attention in a debate or you’re not given attention. Admitting that you don’t know something is a sign of weakness or incapacity, and a culture of collaboration is barely fostered. My hopes for South Africa are not all optimistic; this doesn't mean that I don't think we can succeed in tackling our issues, but that there are some aspects of our society that we need to put in into sharp focus and be real about.

To learn from others requires humbleness, but I don't believe humbleness can be learned. It is a by-product of the experiences we have and all we can do to engage more is to put ourselves in situations where we can experience new people, places, ways of thinking. Surrounding myself with my SAWIP team has taught me to be excited, not necessarily for a positive future, but for a future of positive trying. You are teaching me the ability to be inspired, and I absorb a huge amount of your energy every time we get together.

And finally, what you have taught me relates to something I have thought about for many years and something I have been working on as a sort of personal challenge; that is, the way I judge people, categorise them. The process of lumping people into categories is a core part of human nature, one of the ways in which we deal with a world crammed full of information, particularly when we feel threatened. Often I have been shown that my initial judgements of people have been wrong, and being around all of you has taught me that again and again. Whatever conceptions I held about the type of people I thought I was in a team with have long vanished; the depth of what you have all shared and that I have been fortunate enough to be a part of makes me feel privileged to be on this journey with you. You continually teach me to be aware of the assumptions that I am making.

This is only the beginning of a long adventure. When I think of the next few months I have this amazing feeling of potential that I imagine the explorers of old must have thrived in, of discovering a lost or buried city or forgotten place, one that holds a deep history, full of untold treasures and stories. As we dig down into this place over the next few months I know that I will undoubtedly learn more and different things as we continue to gather and hash out an idea of what our future might look like. I feel lucky to be able to share this with you all.