On the 9th of August a friend of mine posted a message saying 'happy women's day, to all the beautiful sisters in South Africa, go spoil yourself today, relax and enjoy'. This status made me ponder at what women's day has come to mean in South Africa. I have always felt discomforted when I would have to responding to these “happy women’s day” wishes being thrown at me. I fear I might start sounding like a pessimist but I ask what should we as women be happy about?

Should we be happy that the stats show that more than 500.000 rapes are committed annually in South Africa? Perhaps what we should be celebrating is the facts that a recent study by Interpol show, every 17 sec a woman is raped. Maybe we ought to rejoice at facts estimating that 1 in 2 women will be raped or moreover the chilling reports that estimates that ‘a woman born in South Africa has a greater chance of being raped than learning how to read’, I hope not.

I hope this is not what the generation after's 1956 women thinks women’s day is all about, pampering ourselves. When we commemorate the 9th of August what should always remain in our minds is the work of the women of '56, women that decided to take it upon themselves to fight the injustices of that time, to make sure that women would not be subjected to inhumane treatments by government. I am sorely sadden by what my generation is doing currently with issues facing women. nothing. This generation has become complacent, thinking that if it not my problem then it's not a problem. This country needs women that will work towards fulfilling the MDGoals especial goal3. Women that will not seat and watch when the stats shows that up to 70 per cent of women experience physical or sexual violence from men in their lifetime and the majority by husbands, intimate partners or someone they know. Women who's core being will react when reports report that 113 million children are out of school in Africa. Women that will shudder when they hear that South Africa is one the countries named by the UN as serving as a transit or a destination for Human trafficking.

As women we shouldn't wait for the month of August to have programs running that addresses inequality in the workplace, schools and homes. As women, when the 9 of August comes we should be already busy hands-on involved in organisations that serve to better the lives of women. we need women that will organizing movement that address gender based violence, movements that empower women. This country's rich history of women who fought against inequality amongst other things should inspire us to be women that refused to be silent and be pushed to the margins of South Africa. Birthing of a radical movement that will say ‘ wa thintu mfazi wa thintibokodo’ and truly embody that phrase is needed and to those that are already knee and hands deep doing their part in addressing these problem. Ndinithulela umqwazi.

 

My turn to speak had finally came. Slowly the day advanced, quickly and quietly my time drew nearer. When i had been given the opportunity i had done an inquiry as to what i should be talking about and for how long. The answer i was given was “ anything about women and as long as you want” well  i assume management thought being a women i would know what to talk about and it would come from the core of my beings, “ womanhood”.  Let’s just say with the freedom i was given to write my speech i began to panic as i soon became desperate “youtube” became my friend as i soon began clicking on how to write and inspiring speech etc. Soon to me it became clear that i needed to research about the people I would be addressing.

N- Street Village ( were i spoke) is both a day and night shelter, a community of empowerment and recovery for the homeless and low- income women. With comprehensive services addressing both emergency and long time needs, the Village helps women achieve personal stability and make gains in their housing, income, employment, mental health, physical health and addiction recovery. You would think with all this information given my speech would then be easier to write, wrong, i soon began having panics on whether should i narrow  the speech down to a certain struggle or should i be broad?

As a tradition of N-Street Village, Carol Wheeler an amazing woman and a board member of SAWIP USA, she had the responsibility each month of throwing a birthday party for the women in the Village who would be celebrating their birthdays. That week and the day I was to speak it would be such day of celebration for the July babies. With that word “celebration” my speech was soon written. as I began scribing down my speech I simply titled it “CELEBRATING WOMEN”.

 

Celebrating Women

 

Good evening Ladies and gentlemen. My name is Nompumelelo Vunguvungu I am a student of law at the University of the Western Cape and I am part of SAWIP class of 2011.

I want to welcome each and every one this evening to this auspicious occasion tonight.

 

Seeing that the room is fully encompassed by women and I myself being one I will speak to each and every one of them.

Coming from and being in a country were women have made their make, their impact in history I thought it would be accurate to celebrate women that have made their make into history and some of them are in this room right now.  I want to commemorate women that faced adversaries head on.  Women that went through some of the toughest struggles in history and never lost heart and never were bullied into submission as to what the ‘ role of a women is’ ( women being beings that should only be heard and not seen, only good for producing children)  I want to celebrate women that broke away from that oppression and stereotype and formed a new legacy for women.

 I want to observe your Rosa Parks who fought for civil rights and dared to challenge the system of that time and paid the price and yet made billions of people question the racial segregation in America. Another group of women I want to celebrate this evening is the women of SA that in ’56 took a stand against the pass law systems and went marching to the union building to the then Gen Prime Minister Strijdom and stood silently for 30 minutes many with children on their backs and broke silence only to sing you strike a women you strike a rock ( wath’intu mfazi wathint’ imbokodo)  I want to celebrate women how did not turn a bind eye when they saw that the injustice happening in their country I want to celebrate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi ( DSSK)  a women from a small country called Burma because of her voice she was detained 21 years and 15 of those under house arrest, she was only released in 2010. A woman whose heart for her people cost her, her liberty, a woman so small yet feared by military because she knows the power she has as a woman. Her voice.  I celebrate these women because in my own struggles this is were I draw my own strength in them and many more that I have not mentioned tonight, women that face adversaries much greater that those faces by us everyday. Women that have paved a way for us to all have a fair shot at a fight out there.

Tonight I call on all of you to draw your strength from each other, put on your battle armor and be an inspiration that I draw my strength from, be a force to be reckoned with in your homes, work place and life in general. 

As Michelle Obama said in her speech when she was addressing women in Africa she said that the battle is still fierce it’s time for women to go out there and fight against inequality in the work place, “be women that will transform inequalities and abolition hunger in this country, women that will show the world that HIV is preventable and should never be a source of shame, women that will show that women are no longer second class citizens, women that will stand up and says  that violence in any form in any place including the home is a human rights violation”. As I conclude I leave you with the words of Maya Angelou  “Courage: the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently.”

 

Thank you and have a great evening.

 

 

The youth is too quiet!!!! These are the words of Congressman John Lewis when one of our team mate asked him on what his position was on the youth of today. Those that have spoken to the congressman before will note that he has two particular voices, voice 1 is the everyday acceptable voice that speaks to you with peace and quietness and voices 2 is one that holds your attention for ransom until your full being pays attention to what is spoken, this voices emotes stories of struggle and misfortune that the Negro nation went through in the US and still goes through this is the voice that he used to answer the question “ the youth is too quiet!!”. The gain of independence was only the first step for the Negro nation and South Africa knows fully well that paper rights are just that, until they can fully be enforced against every one equally. Mr Julian Bond who had been along side the great King and Congressman Lewis had told us stories of how the movement began and yet to had warned us of the immaculate memory Congressman John Lewis has. As Congressman began to explain what he meant by the words the youth is too quiet he reiterated that when the civil movement broke in the US it was the youth in varsity that took the stance and made it too strong to be silence. He came back to SA and said it was the same youth in ‘76 that mobilised together and resurrected a movement that would soon over throw the regime, were as they could have said to themselves that the “leaders” are in exile or in prison but they took initiative and went strong to fight against injustices thrown to them and in the year 2011 it is the same youth that has started what is now called the ‘Arab Spring’ because they were tired of the dictatorship and corruption of the government amongst other this. The youth is too quiet statement rings so true in the communities we stay in, the varsities we spend our youths in and in other places we choose to place ourselves in. In our own campuses things such as discrimination and racism still exist, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not does not extinguish the reality, we are more incline to group ourselves with people of the same colour and language. Issues that we as the youth can take a stance on while we still can. Issues such as teenage pregnancy, AIDS, unemployment, complacency, poverty etc as the youth we could choose to do something about these issues and more instead of waiting for the government to come in and do it for us. I fully agree the youth is too quiet, when some one is being bullied, raped, abused and many more other horrific things we choose to participate rather than stand out and be the voice of justice, the voice of truth. We reject being different.

How does one describe New York.  Each i would assume would have a different take on the Big Apple, the city that never sleeps, the concrete jungle were dreams are made of. Here is my take on this big beautiful city. It is over populated (as it would be, it’s New York), tall buildings, dirty and yet it has an allure to it. On our first arrival we assumed the bus was wrong so was Claire and every one who had been there before because where we were dropped of was nothing like Gossip Girl or Brown sugar or any other movie that was made in New York. As we soon made our way to the Subway with luggage in hand ( you can only trust a girl to bring 2weeks worth of clothing for just a weekend) we made our way to our residence. Having already been told that the evenings would be packed with formal events we soon made our way to our first one at the SA Consulate General offices.  There we were greeted with the smooth music of Hugh Masikela and South African traditional cuisine even iwisa made an appearance. Soon we started our meet and greet with the guests, some were South African and worked in the office of the Consulate and some were deployed in the UN security council and others were under the employment of Standard Bank and various other corporations.

 It was an amazing opportunity to be amongst such greatness in one evening and yet it bothered me the most that we had to come all the way to the US to get to speak with people in the offices of importance in our own countries and that only 15 students would be amongst the lucky ones to hear about the on going struggles that is faced by the SA UN Security Council  members, hearing of the great job that the consulate was doing in New York to bring awareness about our own country. I still find it truly sad that we had gotten such opportunity that some will never receive and some times it may not even be their lack of enthusiasm with regards to the issues affecting them directly and indirectly but rather the unavailability of the opportunity to availing itself to the people that may also want to hear about it the most.

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I wasn’t raised with a silver spoon in my mouth nor was raised with a passport in my hand to travel the universe whenever I wanted. As a child I had days when I wished I had been one of the privileged, one that would not have to wonder if the meal I was eating was the last one or if I would actually have lunch for school in the morning but I did and today as I stand to the in the land of the liberated I am truly happy that I did come from such background so that I may acquire the traits that I now posses and I can truly say that I am in the journey of saying I have made it and if I had to describe my success it wouldn’t be in monetary terms at all but rather the breaking away for the stereotype of just because you grew up in a certain environment that means I was destined to die in it. I am the first one in my family to go to University, the first one to jet off in a plane for a different country.

I wonder with 60 % of the population in Africa being under the age of 25 how many of our youth can say the same thing about their lives.

I have not made on my own, No, I had help along the way, people that believed in me and pushed me to realize the potential I possessed and what I could be if only I left the self pity party and reach for what I want and drab it with both hands and not let it go when I do get it and it is those people that have created my success and I am mightily grateful to each and everyone of them.

Paulo Coelho says in his book the Alchemist “if when you want something, the entire universe conspires in helping you to achieve it” and I believe that is what happened with my internship this year. I am currently interning in an Organization that empowers woman to break ground, to run for office in their countries to sustain them selves economically and their communities and couldn’t have asked for a better place to spend my vacation. My internship allows me to finds out about the struggles of women in Africa that come from the same background as me but they have successes beyond what they themselves would have possibly dreamt of. I am truly privilege of this chance.

 

Going back to the theme of my blog which generation I am I hope by now you can draw your own conclusion and internalize the question to you which generation are you?

Truly having been warned of the weather in DC this girl still thought people were exaggerating a little. As soon as left the comfort of the airport with excitement and all, there was rain and it wasn’t the Cape Town rain I am used to but rather this rain was extremely warm which made you wonder if you should wear a jacket or run for shelter. I decided to be brave and be ‘one with the rain’ and I took a slow walk to the car to go to the welcome BBQ (Braai).

Having never been to DC before this was truly an exciting moment in my life and I was ready for anything that this place would throw at me. My host family was every friendlier and warm than I had expected.

 

The first few days were a challenge, having to adapt to a working environment and the metro system, at the same time it was amazing how willing the people were to help you if you looked lost.

As the week past along it was soon June 16^th and this day having great magnitude in my life and I believe every South African it was hard not to be part of the celebrations in South Africa for the first time in history.

SAWIP had planed an event with the Ambassador of the Republic of SA Mr. Rasool and some American students from Howard University and members of the corporate sector. What I took from the event or the day was that “what are you going to do as the youth to change/ impact your country” a question I would like to ask myself “which generation are you”. This is a challenge that has been thrown at me for some time now especially being in this youth month and looking at the sacrifices that were made by those before that I may have the freedom I so much enjoy today. I seat right now in a country with its own rich history of the struggles of the black people and I wonder if this is the “dream” Martin Luther King Jr dreamt or if this is the future that Biko, Mahlangu and many more fought for lost they lives trying to realize it?

And having felt this conviction in my own life I have decided that I am not going to wait for someone to create an opportunity for me to make the change that I want to see but rather I will be like the Aung San Suu Kyi, Ma Albertina Sisulu and many more other great women that I can draw strength from and make sure that my generation with not be compliance or idle but rather one that will create jobs, fight the HIV and AIDS pandemic a generation that will not be afraid to shine and realize that dreams of those that have fallen.

Having never heard these words until selection camp when Papa John kept saying them as theme for the weekend (i believe). I guess this being my first blog I should follow the chronological order of the events. Well let’s skip the application, interview and head straight to the beginning with the end in mind weekend. Well selection camp day arrived and group of 6 of the most wonderful and inspiring leaders I have ever had the privilege of know got into the taxi provided to us by the school. I believe that once the excitement settled down we realised that we were quite privileged to have been honoured with this opportunity but not yet apprehending the life altering that was soon to follow.