Don’t Talk About It, Be About It

September MUD Newsletter

A few weeks before I left for South Africa, a group of my friends and I from home came together to hang out on a random Saturday night. I knew most of the people that we were surrounded by that night, but there were a few people there that I did not recognize within the group. One person in particular that we ended up sitting close to kept repeating a phrase that now resonates over and over in my mind. After anything I or anyone else said that night, he would say “don’t talk about it, be about it,” and that would be the end of it. Then, I thought this phrase was the funniest and the most annoying thing I had ever heard, but I thought it was quite a catchy phrase. However, now this phrase has such a more profound meaning for me and for my time during this next year in South Africa.

Throughout our orientation week in Chicago, my fellow YAGMs and I went through many seminars and workshops attempting to prepare us for our future year of service volunteering around the world. Under the ELCA’s Accompaniment Model, the YAGM staff and alumni repeatedly encouraged us YAGMs to not just DO but to just BE throughout our time abroad. Being a task oriented person who values my time by what I do or what I accomplish, I kept asking myself, ‘how do I just be’? In theory it makes so much sense that to “be” with people is to live with people, to stand alongside people, to walk with people. In theory it sounds great, but coming out of a college lifestyle where all you do is go, go, go, and do, do, do, it still seemed an odd concept to me.

In my attempts to process these words and figure out their intended meaning, I would say this phrase ‘don’t talk about it, be about it’ jokingly to other people in the YAGM program- but I was still trying to figure out how these words really applied to my life and my future experience. At this point, this phrase only signified that we would have to put our words and theories that we had learned and discussed during orientation into practice and that we would have to carry out these ideas with our actions once we got to our placement sites around the world.

Now that I have arrived in South Africa and have been here for about three weeks now, the meaning of this phrase has still held the previous meaning that I had thought of before but now has taken on many more meanings as well. As many of you know, South Africa in its past history was a previous British Colony throughout the Colonial Era. Because of its English past and as a result of worldwide globalization, English is a commonly known language throughout the country especially among the younger generations of South Africans. However, what you might not know is that South Africa has a total of 11 different official languages representing a widely diverse population within the country. Therefore, English is becoming a universal language that ties these different groups of people together in order to communicate.

However, although the English language may be the language that binds different groups of South Africans from different regions together, it is not often used within households of many South African families, among friends within neighborhoods, or within workplaces in cities such as Bloemfontein (or that I have been in contact with anyway). Afrikaans, Sesutu, Tswana, Zulu, Xhosa, and Swazi are among the different languages that I have come into contact throughout the duration of my stay. While it has been such a wonderful opportunity to be exposed to different languages that are so uncommon in our home culture of the United States, it has definitely posed as a difficult challenge to overcome especially in these first few weeks while I am still trying to learn and familiarize myself with the Sesutu language that is spoken commonly here in Bloemfontein.

In my experience in South Africa thus far, I have seen myself doing a lot of “being” and not a lot of “doing” or “talking”. What once was just a concept that I thought was so foreign throughout the YAGM orientation week has now become my everyday life. For me, this experience so far has given me the ability to experience a part of South African life that I might not have if I was only concerned about talking and sharing with others instead of listening and being. What I have found is that actions are truly louder than words. Although I may not understand what the members of my host family are saying to one another, I can still sit with them, laugh with them, and be a part of their lives. Although I may not understand all the words and phrases of the workers of my work site, I can still eagerly volunteer to help, listen to the stories of a fellow worker, and work with a servant’s heart alongside them. Although I may not be able to sing or understand what is going on during a long church service, I can still stand up and dance together with my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ with a smile on my face. So it’s has definitely shown me that “”being”, either by listening to others’ stories or sitting silently and observing while not understanding, is much more important than talking and evaluating my life by what I have done or accomplished.

As an encouragement to you, either at home in the United States, in the other YAGM locations, or within South Africa – take the opportunity to talk less but to listen and look around more to what is going on around you. Together, let’s not talk about it, let’s just be about it.