The End of the Beginning

July 19, 2010

by Meagan Demitz, Global Press Institute

World Cup fever has come and gone, and the tournament of a lifetime is over. But even if the soccer fans may no longer roam the streets, and the football teams have all gone home, for 21 young women in Soweto, there is still so much left to hold on to. And this, I hope for them, is more of a beginning than an end.

I have been quite silent about my experience with the Kick it Up project, largely because I’m finding it difficult to put down words and sentences that accurately sum up what it is I did there and what kind of impact I personally had, what kind of effect our presence as the Press Institute had on not just this program, but these young women, and more importantly, the impression that these young ladies made on me. I suppose the best way to start off describing this scene is to simply envision it: Twenty-two young South African women all sitting in a circle. They have come from different places and different experiences, but their commonality is struggle. Everything they have at present is because they have fought for it. Everything they make of their future is going to be because of this fighting nature, too.

If you put 22 American teenagers in a group to learn about journalism for 6 weeks, I dare say a quarter of them would end of petering off halfway through the program. We did lose one girl during the process who, for personal reasons, had to drop out and I respect her decision to do so. But every day for 6 weeks, the rest of the group trouped ahead, sometimes logging in 10-hour days between learning, shooting, writing, and interviewing for their stories. It was mind-boggling to me, on the mornings where I was struggling to get out of bed after just a few hours of sleep the night before, that these young ladies were not just alert, but ready and eager to learn. They wanted more. They demanded it. This was their program and they were going to make the most out of this opportunity, tired, exhausted, or not.

There has been a lot of talk over the past two months about South Africa and what the World Cup has meant for the country and for the people. There has been endless speculation on its velocity for change or what the long-term impact will be after the stadiums are empty and the country hibernates a bit for the rest of the winter. To be perfectly honest, I don’t know what will change after this or how South Africa as a country will be different in the years to come. After such a massive event and given the near frenetic energy around the Cup while we were there in June, it seems unfathomable to me that there won’t be some kind of milestone impact on the future even if that doesn’t become clear for a long time yet.

But if these girls, Sine, Skye, Tumi, Lungile, Annah, Dudu, and all the others are any indication of the future, from where I stand South Africa is basking in hope and the mutual promise that as young women, these girls know they deserve more than this -- there is more to this place than poverty and HIV and crime, and all of those other overused clichés about the plight of the African continent. Working in the international development sector in this part of the world, I know that. I see it every day. But training with the Kick it Up girls was like having your head dunked in a bucket of ice cold water and bringing it up again, dripping wet, only to see a different world. One that is brighter, crisper, and fresher than you remembered it being. Surrounded by all of the leeching pressures of day-to-day life, considering how much these girls had to deal with on an emotional level everyday as they walked into the training room to start another round of guest lectures, lessons, field trips, and interviews, it’s pretty astonishing how present they were in the process. It was a sense of acceptance and this palpable resilience they seemed to have toward their experiences. It made me, as the trainer, feel as though we all needed to work 10 times harder –their level of engagement demanded 150%, one hundred percent of the time. The past is the past, one of the girls said to me one day, and I’m looking towards my future.

We all got up one morning at 4am to take the girls to the SABC Television studios. They were to be the guest audience on Carol Manana’s morning sports show. It was cold and dark when we rolled up to the conference centre where the show films; the girls were tired and a bit whingy about the early hour start. (Let’s admit, the trainers were dreaming of sleep or at the very least, large cups of coffee too). But when we walked into the studio everything changed – the whole group lit up like it was some kind of surreal miracle that we were actually there and it quickly became apparent that this was a massively big deal. The lights, the stage, the presenters, the cameras – there was finger pointing and “ohmygod, look!” exclamations of sheer giddiness as they sat in the audience and talked to some of the staff, as they watched the show and commented on how poised and charming Carol is on camera, as they observed the whole process of a major television production come together like one very complicated ballet of technology that mesmerized all of us.

It was the moment at the end of the show when the guest singer came on, a performer by the name of Liquid Deep (who, according to much younger girls educating the much older trainers, is “super hot” in South Africa) that the impact of this whole project hit me. Will the girls go on to have careers in journalism? Will they be writers or producers? Camerawomen or directors? Editors or sound technicians? I don’t know. That, for the time being, remains a mystery.

What I do know is this: I sat there in the early morning hours of Thursday, June 24th in a television studio in Johannesburg, South Africa and watched a group of girls sing and dance. I watched them laugh and hold each other’s hands, as if to remind one another that all of this was real. I watched as they created an untouchable moment in history for themselves, together as a group that only three weeks earlier had been total strangers to one another. Now there is singing, and dancing, and a purpose that is just at the very beginning of its potential. The future for those young women was, at that moment, so full of hope. They believed in themselves. And I did, and still do, believe in them too.

The success of the Kick it Up project is one that may not be measure in quantifiable outcomes like how many girls go on to have careers in journalism or who ends up on the front page of “Time” magazine in 10 years. I can’t see our achievement as trainers in these terms because the terms changed over the course of the project. We went in as writers and filmmakers to teach; the girls came in as young women interested in journalism. But we came out as something else, something, as I said earlier, I am still not sure I totally understand or can even articulate to those who were not on site. Every project is different, every project is special, but these women? These young women are the future of South Africa. They were long before the Press Institute and Global Girl Media walked into their lives. And they will be long after we are all gone.

And we were there, if only for a bit of time, with information, knowledge, support, empowerment, and mutual determination. We changed something in their lives, how they look at themselves, and how they will approach challenges in their future. I believe this but know that as the trainers we may never fully appreciate or discover how or in which direction this experience shapes their paths. This all remains to be seen.

I think this is the one thing I am having a hard time processing, the inarticulate, nagging feeling that I can’t put into words. I may not know what the future holds for these women, or what our ultimate impact was at the end of the day. It digs at me, this sense of unknown. And more so the realization that these 22 amazing young women will, in turn, never know how they changed me. How in just three short weeks, they gave me the wonderful gift of hope.