Current Events

I've been reading the East London Dispatch this week, trying to get a jump on current events before I head off. In the process, I learned some things.

First, not all English is created equal. For example, does anybody want to take a stab at defining a lift club? My first thought was a shack on stilts where people gather to drink alcohol and wash away their worries about gas prices. But that's obviously not it. Ready for a hint? Here's a quote from the article: "There are five of us in our [lift] club and each person drives to Bhisho once [a week], so at least you drive for 120km, as opposed to 800km per week." That's right, lift club = carpool! I found all kinds of other strange phrases and ways of using words I've never seen them used before. Sometimes, it makes reading those articles really hard to understand (especially when you're tired, which I am).

The second thing I learned, is that in order to understand current events, you have to have context. I was reading a series of articles about Juilus Malema and the trouble he's gotten himself into with the ANC, but in order to understand the significance of the disciplinary action taken against him, one would have to know the history of the ANC and what they do now, the structure of the political system in South Africa, the relationship of the Youth League to the ANC, and Malema's track record as it relates to those two organizations. And that's just a start. If you know those things, you will better be able to understand what is going on, but beyond that, there's a another whole layer of understanding involving how people are perceiving these events and what impact they might have on the future of South Africa. I don't have enough context to be able to answer these questions or even to make good guesses as to what they might be. I've discovered that sometimes when I'm reading a local or national newspaper, I don't know all of the details surrounding key events, but because I have enough context about my environment from past experience, I can usually make educated guesses. I don't have any of that as concerns South Africa, and so reading the Dispatch is hard.

When I get to East London, I imagine I'll face similar problems. I hope that I'll pick up on the language pretty quickly and that it won't be a perpetual hindrance as I'm trying to blend into my surroundings. However, I imagine that three months won't be long enough for me to be able to gather a life time of context about South Africa. I imagine I'll be spending a lot of time asking people that are caught up on current events to explain their significance to me, and hopefully that will help. I'm sure that by the end of my sojourn there, I will better be able to make educated guesses about context because I will be more familiar with it, but I'm sure I won't have the understanding of a native. Which only makes sense.