Dunoon (Class Project)

As part of a project for my Politics of Poverty class, we went to the Dunoon Township for two days of interviews with local residents about their lives. The Dunoon township is an informal settlement area of about 1500 shacks. We partnered with the South African Homeless People’s Federation (SAHPF) to assist with their enumeration of the township and to have local residents to enter the township with. The SAHPF works to secure housing for homeless people and slumdwellers. Part of their process for securing housing includes surveying an area to determine needs and numbers of residents, etc to gain information for applications for government housing subsidies. This process is called enumeration and we were asked to help the SAHPF with this portion of their project. In turn, they provided us with a valid reason for being in the township as well as translators and time to speak with locals to answer our project questions. Below are the reflections I wrote for my class project.

The process of learning and gaining understanding about poverty from those most affected by it was unlike anything I could have expected. I feel as though I walked in wanting to learn something very specific and left feeling as though I know less, but understand more the issues that I am studying. I cannot pretend to understand or even relate to the people that I interviewed. My life, circumstances, background, history, family, class, culture, race, and education have made me so far disconnected from the interviewees that it is difficult to begin to understand. We didn’t have the vocabulary or understanding to comprehend and relate to the people we spoke to or the space in which we spoke. This, I think, was the single greatest lesson that I learned during our experiences in Dunoon. My naïve expectations to understand and relate were met with warm greetings, frightened refusals to speak to us, deep conversations, shallow calculated responses, suspicious looks, attempts to impress, and a wider range of expressions than one could describe in words.

The range of emotions I felt from sorrow to frustration to joy to helplessness perhaps express more what I experienced in my two days in Dunoon than the attempt to express the disconnection I felt from those who I interviewed. From discussing HIV/AIDS with an HIV positive woman to playing with children to exploring a new environment that I never have before, I engaged in a new praxis and a new way of learning that truly opened my eyes. This new understanding of what I do not know is more useful than any single piece of knowledge that I could have learned about this topic.

Following the interviews, I asked the interviewees if they had any questions for me. Nearly every interviewee asked me the same question – how this interview was going to help them? Essentially, what was I going to do to improve their lives as a result of learning from them? The first time I was asked this, I didn’t know what to say. I am still not quite sure what to say. I would like to think that the lessons learned from this experience will inform my perspectives and actions for the future and that this in some way will lead to change or improvement for their lives. The truth is that I have no idea.