Category Archives: Development

A Purpose-driven Life

14 Saturday Sep 2013

Posted by in Career, Development, Social Responsibility

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I had a couch-surfer spend a few days at my place recently. If you don’t by now know what couch-surfing is, I suggest you Google it with some haste.  My experiences with couch-surfers have been on the whole positive, so when this American guy contacted me through the website saying that he was cycling from Cape Town to Botwana, I was quite interested to see how things would turn out.

So he pitches up on a bicycle – which looked more than slightly shabby.  Slightly shabby is not the word I would use to describe the rider though.  This rider had this big, shaggy beard and was wearing baggy, rooster-print pants which I dubbed “Africa-pants”.  Bluntly, he looked ridiculous!

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A few hours and a bottle of wine later, I’m wide-eyed staring at him as he tells me about his journey up to my little mining town and how the Lesotho mountain pass destroyed him.  I’m thinking, ‘Of all the routes you could have taken to get here, why would you choose the most treacherous, high-altitude and ridiculously cold route in the middle of winter?’  He seems like a real challenge-seeker though, so I say nothing.  Reading about it on his blog later, I was even more amazed that he honestly believed he could conquer Lesotho after already cycling through half the country.

 http://sterlinginafrica.blogspot.com/

The night wore on and more wine was poured and more was revealed about his life and adventures. The Peace Corps in Niger, waiting tables in the top London jazz bar, free-lancing  for Human Rights’ Watch…and now cycling to the Tuli block in Botswana to find a job around the Zimbabwe elections and serve as a correspondent if anything not-so-legit was happening.

Talk about a lost soul!  I couldn’t help myself thinking.

I showed him around our little piece of paradise for a few days and just before he was about to set off, he came down with this chest-cold.  Great, the crazy person is staying on! Note the sarcasm, but I couldn’t in good conscious turn him out to the elements – this poor, lost boy.  The week wore on and I would return each evening from my safe, secure job to find Africa-pants whipping up something interesting and delicious.  In return for my hospitality, he did my dishes and shared his thoughts with me. So many times I found myself being fascinated by his world-view. He was really smart. I mean REALLY smart. He could have been anything – could have by now had a house, a car, a fiancé – stuff we all want, right?  But his life was just so interesting, free and completely centred around his unapologetic sense of self-purpose.

During that week I started thinking about why Africa-pants decided to spend all his savings on a plane-ride to Cape Town, bought a bike and decided to ride north – leaving a girl and all his worldly possessions in London – especially when home and family are in the other direction!  Surely you don’t do this on a whim or because you’ve lost your way.  He was absolutely not lost.  As I got to know him, I realised that he was surer of his purpose in this world than many of the secure, settled individuals I knew.  He knew what he knew and that was that life would be hopelessly boring and vapid if he tried to fit himself into the same box as everybody else.  He was awake to a secret that all of us know deep inside – the secret that there is a greater purpose out there for us – a path that we all must follow in order to reach that destiny.  Most of us are just too scared or lazy to follow that path – making excuses for the things we wished we’d done in our youth.  So few of us are truly brave enough to live our passions and chase our dreams, escaping the trap of the mundane, the secure and striving ever onwards towards that unmistakable pull.

I thought back to my no-so-distant days with Engineers without Borders and to a time where I truly knew my purpose in life. I thought on how unsure my life was back then in many ways, but how incredibly driven, self-motivated and most of all happy I was!  I reflected on my life as an engineer – a rewarding and challenging one – and remembered something I had known before, and forgotten somewhere along these lonely African roads.  The reason I became an engineer was to serve Society and the planet.  My purpose in life was to use my knowledge and my talent to make the world a better, safer and more sustainable place to live in – and I needed to get back on that path, and soon!

Comparing my life right now to his, Africa-pants had no house, no car, no surety of where he was going to sleep that night, but it was undeniable that he was the richer one, the one who knew where he was going in this world.  He was truly living a purpose-driven life.

Who would have thought? All this from a shaggy, bearded traveller…

 http://sterlinginafrica.blogspot.com/

Talking to Students

29 Sunday Jan 2012

Posted by in Development, Engineer Chic!

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Yesterday, I had the amazing opportunity to talk to incoming students to the University of Witwatersrang in  Johannesburg about mechanical engineering.  The academic development staff at Wits noticed that first year students had a poor understanding of which discipline within engineering is best for them, so hopefully this weekend of talks gave them some clarity!

It was a strage and exciting experience to be on the other side of the lecture room – staring up at the venue filled with bright-eyes young people, ready to take a dive into their degrees. I was struck at the sincerity and commitment I saw in that room, the eagerness to perform and the honesty of their questions. I loved it.  I know one day I will go into lecturing and first-year engineering students are just about the most enjoyable and rewarding group to teach.

I couldn’t help thinking how young they were. I don’t see myself as ‘old’, and sometimes forget that first-year for me was actually 6 years ago. This was a scary thought, but it really crystallized a feeling of accomplishment- of how far I’d come since then. It really took me back to my days as a ‘fresher’ at UCT. I was in awe of the place, set against the gorgeous Cape Town mountains and warm in the late-summer. I was such a nervous, slightly geeky and socially awkward girl – in my all-stars and golf shirts, tripping along the cobblestones of University Plaza and trying to get to my lectures in time. It makes me smile to think of my eighteen-year-old self now and that group of people who I became so inevitably close to over the years.

Sharing notes, copying homework, signing them in for missed tuts (or pleading that did the same for you), deciphering lecturer accents, sitting at the back of class and trying not to giggle, doodling characatures of my least favourite lecturers and secret crushes. Spending all night in the computer labs before a major CAD assignment, stressing about a test and someone explaining a key concept to you seconds before going into the test-venue (and passing). Pleading DP and study groups, relaxing in one of the many hidden gardens during a ‘free period’, “Sooper Sandwich” and chinese noodle (which I never ate) and being at that cafe in Lesie Social Science at 10:00am sharp to get fresh cheese criossants hot out the oven before they all get eaten! Menzies building and Snape’s drawing office that always smelled of dusty old men. Tentatively venturing into the forbidden staff room to find lecturers and becoming so nervous around cute tutors that you end up making a complete fool out of yourself!

Ah! These kids don’t know what they’re in for. All I know is its going to be a wonderful, crazy and difficult road, but worth every hour, every tear, every night in when my BusSci friends went out partying…Its rewarding, its something to be proud of, its an accomplishment many cant have. I looked out at that classroom of high-acheivers, and knew that some sitting among them were going to be the future leaders of this country, people with the responsibility and influence one day, to shape our society and incite change, and I was inspired. I was proud to be asked to speak to them, to inspire them, to give them a glimpse of the future that was entirely up to them.

Village Women, Solar Engineers – The Barefoot Movement

23 Sunday Oct 2011

Posted by in Development, Going Green, Sustainability

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Solar Engineers

I absolutely LOVE  http://www.TED .com

This is my pick of the week:

Bunker Roy: Learning from a barefoot movement

The speaker shares the idea of a barefoot college in India – where the students are the teachers, and the teachers are the students – where there are no degrees or certificates – where community knowledge and wisdom of the people is shared and utilised – where illiterate women are solar engineers – these echo my experiences with working in communities in South Africa.

People living in the worst conditions, on under a dollar a day are some of the most ingenious, creative and inventive people you will encounter…because they have to be! They will surprise you with the solutions they come up with to things we take for granted.

Women, Warwick and Biogas-digesters

10 Monday May 2010

Posted by in Development, Engineers Without Borders

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For a quick recap on the EWB project…We are trying to find clean energy alternatives to the burning of harmful treated wood by township caterers. The main technology we were looking at was a biogas digester. This large bucket-type device would be buried in the earth beneath the caterer, and works on the chemistry of anaerobic decoposition of organic material to produce methane gas. In English, this means that there is bacteria in the digester, and if you throw in the right mix of organic waste such as kitchen scraps, manure, water, this will decompose and you get gas on which you can cook! The remaining matter is syphoned off, and is really great to use as compost. Sound too good to be true? Well it is.This device has never really been used in an Urban context such as the one of informal settlement caterers, and I suppose there’s very good reasons why…

Despite our best efforts, every way we looked at this, things didn’t look good.

  • If the becomes too acidic, the bacteria die, requireing re-inoculation which takes two weeks. This wont fly with a catering business.
  • A delicate balance of water and waste needs to be kept. Due to the notorious dryness of the Cape Flats, this won’t bode well.
  • The digester needs to be monitored and controlled by a skilled person, which would be difficult to ensure in the environment in question, with such a high density of people in the area, and safety concerns being a premium.
  • And lastly, one unit costs R35 000! This will be a able to provide gas for one caterer. We can buy 70 energy efficient stoves for this price!

I would have really have liked to make this work, seeing as it would be something totally unprecidented and new. Simply put, it would have been a real achievement! But I’m not so sre anymore. I’ve had to weigh up the benefits of personal acheivement and recognition against the that of reaching out to as many people as possible. I think with all thigs considered, the point that wins it for me is that with the stoves, I’ll simply be making a difference to many more lives, with a project that can very easily be repeated in other environments, with very little extra research or integration.

But at least I can say this: we looked at the bio-digester intesely, comprehensively and optimistically. Its as much as we could have done, and I’m satified with the direction in which we’re going now.

One more thing…I’ve been working with a lady, Caroline from UCT’s Social Science center. She was very involved in the Upgrade of Warwick Junction in Durban, the 10 year undertaking that theCity of Cape Town is using as a precident for their Nyanga Interchange Upgrade (the site of my

project). Anyway, apart from having written the book (I mean literally written the book) on Warwick “Working Warwick”, she has been actively involved in WIEGO (Women in Informal Economy: Globalizing and Organizing) and has just returned from their AGM in Brazil.

This India-borne organization is HUGE, and works with self-employed women, supporting them, empowering them, and helping them lift their households and communities out of abject poverty. Check them out on:

Other than that, I am STILL in Joburg…:) Should really return to the rainy Cape soon…

Coincidence or synchro-destiny?

07 Wednesday Apr 2010

Posted by in Development

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I just noticed something pretty amazing. In my last post, I quoted a paper written by ‘Mistro and Hensher.‘ I had taken that sentence straight out of a term paper I submitted last year for a course, Industrial Ecology. I hadn’t even realized it when I posted it, but now it just seems so coincidental.

The topic of the first workshop I held this year for my project team was The Upgrading of Informal Settlements. I invited a professor from the civil engineering department at UCT to deliver a talk. He had published over 50 papers and was accepted at a resident expert in the field, and guess who it was? Professor Romano del Mistro, the author of the paper I had unwittingly quoted months earlier.
Coincidence or synchro-destiny? It doesn’t matter. The workshop was very well attended, and even though we couldn’t get the projector to work, Prof del Mistro had everyone on the edge of their seats, wide-eyed and left with swelling hearts. His vast knowledge and deep understanding of the situation, not exclusively from an Engineering standpoint but from an underlying and critical social and cultural one, made him an invaluable asset to kick off our project. Thank you Prof.

The colours of "The Rainbow Nation"

06 Tuesday Apr 2010

Posted by in Development

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I got a crash course in project management this weekend from a real, live management consultant so I decided to have a focus group workshop. It worked really well and I’m happier about where the project is heading now. We’re having a project braai this Friday. FUN!

Afterwards, my dad picked me up and we went to Hout Bay for snoek and chips, a tourist must-do in Cape Town. Hout bay is a very funny place, I have to say. On the one side, you have this stunning scenery, some of the most beautiful stretches I have laid eyes on. There are mansions covering the North-west slopes of the bay, and I don’t want know the average price of a home there. You have this gorgeous little bay, right, and its full of Europeans.
But then on the other side of the mountain, just behind all this lavishness you have Imizamo Yethu and Heinberg informal settlements. Heinberg is a predominantly coloured township whose community has suffered endlessly as a result of commercial fishing companies gaining exclusive rights to fish in Hout Bay, crippling the economic core of this once-thriving community. Imizamo Yethu (IY) is populated mainly by black Africans, many of which are immigrants. Last year I had the opportunity to visit IY. I walked through its narrow streets and pathways in the dead of winter, in the rain, with a woman who lives there. This was a turning point in my life. She led us up the road, past where the tar ended and the dirty, washed-away, irregular pathways began. The shacks were so close together that there was hardly any place to walk between them. Nothing grew. I saw a few toilets and had a look into one of them. It was broken and full of human waste. These communal toilets were all that the residents of this township had in terms of sanitation. Can you imagine living without a flush toilet in your home?
One of my tour-guide’s neighbors had a municipal electricity box above his shack, and she had a live cable, running from his shack to hers for energy to cook and heat water. A common sight in informal settlements are the networks of electricity cables radiating from street poles. In IY, they were low enough for a child to reach, and the crude joints had no insulation. It follows that fire outbreaks are also a very common occurrence in townships, which isn’t helped by the fact that shack building-material burns like tinder, spreading the fire so fast that there is little anyone can do to stop it.
IY is a particularly sad place, since the segregation of the community means that there is no sense of working together, sharing or helping one’s neighbor. Rape, theft or worse atrocities are daily occurrences. Joe Slovo township, for example, is a very cohesive community, willing to uplift themselves in the spirit of Ubuntu. This, and the harsh, sloping terrain of IY are some of the reasons that initiatives are more likely to implemented elsewhere.

I could go on and on about the countless problems faced by people daily in IY and other townships, but the reality is that there is not much that I can do. South Africa currently has the highest Gini coefficient in the world (inequality rate between rich and poor). Currently, there are roughly 2 million households living in informal settlements and ‘the South African government is to overcome this housing backlog by 2014; but doubling the budget will only achieve this by 2030’ (Mistro and Hensher, 2009).

The problems faced daily in informal settlements is a serious and ongoing one, and only by widespread awareness of the situation, and an acceptance of responsibility by every citizen, will any major change be realized. I think it’s time for South Africans to stop sitting back and waiting for government to provide. There is so much each one of us can do by sacrificing so little of our lives.
If we each did just a little more, gave just a little more, maybe then the colours of The Rainbow Nation would finally begin to blend, breaking free from their perfectly clean individual stripes and flowing as one united stream. Maybe then could we finally learn Ubuntu, understand it and truly embrace it.

 

Nyanga, I’m starting to learn.

25 Thursday Mar 2010

Posted by in Development, Engineers Without Borders, South Africa

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Well today was simply wonderful! Tumelo (my head of community interactions, and an absolute darling) and I were at Kramer bright and early at 9 am for a talk about the history of informal settlements in the Cape Area, right from when the Dutch first landed. Of course thats the only place anyone ever starts a history lesson about this country, as if history only began when there were white people around! How absurd, but anyway, we somehow managed to be invited to a SHAWCO township tour for semester-abroad students.

Now you must know what SHAWCO is! But if you don’t, I’ll forgive you…Well here’s what their website says… http://www.shawco.org

SHAWCO, the Students’ Health and Welfare Centres Organisation, is a dynamic, innovative and passionate student-run NGO based at UCT, constantly striving to improve the quality of life for individuals in developing communities within the Cape Metropolitan area.

SHAWCO was founded in 1943 by Andrew Kinnear, a medical student who was moved to action by the need which he saw in the impoverished communities of Cape Town.

Well they really are something, but this year failed to get as many UCT student volunteers as they need to tutor children. So come on comrades, why not spend an hour a week changing the life of a young person?

We went on a tour to Kensington, a ‘coloured’ area, and then again to the Nyanga market (I think someones trying to tel me something, don’t you?). It was great to see what SHAWCO is up to, helping children, abused women, the elderly, the mentally ill etc.

After we got to campus, I just had time to check my mail and it was off again to Nyanga market (see what I mean), this time with Brennan (head of EWB) and other members of my team.

We met up with Shannon Royden-Turner, of Jakupa Architects who are currently upgrading the entire Nyanga taxi-rank area. They are creating an urban framework for the area, incorporating better flow and a public space that residents can be proud of. They also did the urban framework of the Greenpoint Stadium!



So all in all, I had a full and very tiring day trudging around Nyanga and Kensington, shaking hands and talking to people who live in those communities and seeing people in a slightly different light. It wasn’t nearly as scary today as it was on Tuesday (there was a hectic taxi strike on Tuesday and we were threatened when we drove past that area). Even the meat market wasn’t so bad, I’m even getting used to the smell! Poor Christina, my deputy had a tough time though, it was her first time after all. But gear up Chris! There’s going to be a lot more of that to come!

I watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s when I got home…again… “Oh I’m just craaayzy about Tiffany’s”


Gugulethu and Gandhi’s Grandson

23 Tuesday Mar 2010

Posted by in Development, Engineers Without Borders, South Africa

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So I got up at 6:30 am this morning and dragged myself to campus. I met up with three other members of my project team at a BP garage in Kenilworth. The plan was to go on a tour of the NGO Abalimi Bhazekhaya (the planters of the home), and their community gardens in Gugulethu.

At the BP the strangest thing happened: we met up with another group of people who were going on a different field trip, coincidentally meeting their tour guide at the same garage!
These were a bunch of sociologists from all over the world: Australia, Uganda, UK, Lebanon, USA, Brazil and SA, and they were part of Rajmohan Gandhi’s organization, the Initiatives of Change. This group was following Prof Gandhi on a worldwide tour. They were really interested in hearing about our project with Engineers without borders, especially since they had a sustainability expert in their group! So after we all frantically exchanged details and schedules, our tour guide, Rob arrives and it dawns on us (20 or so) ‘intelligent’ human beings that we were heading out on the same tour!
Abalimi was simply awesome! How it works is women from the surrounding community (grannies really) all plant on this tiny peice of land, and share everything they produce. They feed their families from it and whatever surplus is grown is packaged at a central packing house and sold to rich schools and businesses (organic fresh produce-yum!). These food baskets are an assortment of the most beautifully fresh, delicious looking vegetables, herbs and eggs. You would never guess they were grown in the midst of such heartbreaking poverty. The smell alone made us so hungry, I didn’t believe veggies could do that! We might actually choose the Abalimi food-garden in Nyanga as our site for our bio-digester. There are tons of problems we still have to work out though.
I walked around Nyanga market, this is the area with the highest murder-rate in the country. The people were quite scary, and the meat vendors smelled of slaughtered sheep. It was awful, but right across the road was Abalimi. A real Haven of Hope (one of their colleagues id Haven of Hope)!
The group we were with from Initiatives of Change invited us to a talk by Rajmohan Gandhi, the grandson of the great Mahatma Gandhi, this evening. It was at UCT, and hosted by the vice chancellor. I didn’t even know he was coming to UCT! So much for emails! The talk was amazing. Prof spoke of being a boy of ten and sitting beside his awesome grandfather at the multi-religious prayer groups he used to hold, between 1945 and 1949. He’s recently written a biography Mohandas: A True Story of a Man, His People and an Empire. I have to check this one out, even though its not on sale in South Africa…yet...

After the talk, I went to say hello to the Prof. He was just so pleasant and humble and was oddly excited about the fact that I’m with EWB...He also sent his regards to both my parents. How sweet!

Well, no rest for the wicked! Shower, then back to work.. thank god that I have tomorrow off to work!