Join Democrats Work, the San Francisco Young Democrats, and community volunteers for a Mission neighborhood cleanup event put together by SF Connect and the San Francisco Clean City Coalition.  The cleanup will be around the Mission Firehouse, Mission & Courtland Streets, and Holly Park on Saturday, July 14th from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 noon.  This is a great community event, so please join your fellow Democrats to plant trees, weed, sweep, paint over graffitti, and generally help improve the neighborhood.

Please meet at the Firehouse at 9:00 a.m. and wear your Democrats Work t-shirt!

Anyone who’s interested is welcome to join SFYDs inDolores Park afterward for food, drinks, and conversation, all on SFYD!

You can sign up here.  See you there! 

I just posted an event notice about the Democrats Work project in Reno this weekend.  We’re going to beautify a downtown park with some flowers this Saturday.  Thought there may be some folks who are close to the border who may be interested.  If so, you can sign up here.

Cross-posted from Turn Tahoe Blue

Themba

In Gogo’s mind, she translated the word “hope” to the zulu word themba. “Themba” means not only “hope” but also “believe.” For Gogo, “hope” is not a possibility but a certainty.
Too often, perhaps, we lose hope because we fail to look for it where we least expect it – among poor black people in a South African homeland or an American inner city, or poor white farmers in clapboard shaks in south Georgia. But there it is.

Hope and believe, or “themba,” that’s what it is ultimately all about. Jason Carter, the son of last year’s Nevada U.S. Senate candidate Jack Carter and brother of blogger Sarah Carter, comes to this conclusion at the end of his book, at the end of two years in South Africa.

Jason arrived in Lochiel, a little settlement on South Africa’s border to Swaziland, on April 8, 1998 – nine years ago yesterday. Lochiel is really just that, a settlement, people were forced to move there when the South African government in the 1970s decided to establish “homelands” for South Africa’s different tribes. The Swazi people in townships outside Johannesburg, Pretoria and other places were rounded up and brought to KaNgwane. However, none of the homelands gained real independence or autonomy. People had to commute outside of their homelands if they wanted to find work and survive. Each night they had to go back to their homelands to sleep without any rights, much less any comfort:

[T]he trucks dropped people off in the middle of nowhere, and the government was not going to provide much assistance. There are famous pictures of the “houses” that the government provided in the “relocation camps.” They look like rows and rows of outhouses, or cube-shaped pens, with sides of corrugated iron and a dirt floor.

In Lochiel, Jason was the only white person among the 200 families living there. At first, the locals were apprehensive but soon got used to his presence. He worked in the local schools helping to implement the government’s new education program.

In post-Apartheid South Africa, Jason was in a unique position. As a white American he had few difficulties blending in the industrialized, rich and white South Africa. Though, oftentimes he felt more than uncomfortable, not only because of the abundant luxury so few miles away from the poor townships and settlements like Lochiel where he spend most of his time, but also, or maybe even more so, because of the blatant racism by many.

One would think that a white American would have a tougher time in a black South African community than a black American. Surprisingly, this was not really the case. South Africa, because of Apartheid, is a very complicated country. Jason soon discovered a tool that put black South Africans more at ease with the presence of a white man – their language. He soon picked up enough quite a bit of Siswati and Zulu to easily communicate with people in Lochiel and elsewhere.

While there were many uncomfortable situations for Jason, he had less trouble than some of his fellow Peace Corps volunteers from the US. African-American men had to endure the racism and frequent bad treatment by white South Africans just like black South Africans did. African-American women had to cope with the extreme macho attidudes against women in South Africa’s black society on top of that.

Yet, these few paragraphs don’t begin to grasp the complexity of the situation in South Africa as Jason also discovered a willingness among both black and white South Africans to cross the racial divide, to overcome fear and prejudice. However, looking at race relations in America more than 140 years after the end of slavery and more than 40 years after the civil rights legislation one has to wonder how long it will take South Africans to overcome Apartheid.

30 years prior to Jason joining the Peace Corps in South Africa, his great-grandmother Lillian Carter, at the age of 70, went with the Peace Corps to India. Her experience there is wonderfully described by former President Jimmy Carter, Lillian’s son and Jason’s grandfather, in the introduction to Power Lines. However, compared to Lillian Carter’s life outside of Bombay, Jason’s was quite different. The so-called first and third world were just a few miles apart. The first world actually drives by Lochiel on a daily basis, as it is situated on Highway 17, connecting Johannesburg and Swaziland’s capital Mbabane, where luxury hotels and casinos lure many white South Africans.

Jason Carter easily manages to capture the readers attention by not just describing his two years in South Africa, but rather by drafting a story and taking the reader along for the ride. By doing so, he takes the reader beyond the usual image of black Africa portrayed in the media – poverty, despair, war and AIDS. He takes us inside the daily lives of the family he stays with, goes along on a trip for a family wedding, treats us to scenes in the family kitchen and takes us to a funeral, and another one, and yet more funerals. For that is the reality of South Africa. The country has to battle with HIV/AIDS and in no other place does the utter despair of this situation become more visible than in the current of funerals:

Saturday, umbgcibelo, is the day of burial. Death became a part of my life to a greater extent than I had ever experienced. In my two years in Lochiel, I went to more than 30 funerals.

However, just as many as died from AIDS-related illnesses, “died from sicknesses and a lack of health care, in addition to car accidents.” And all that in a country where first rate health care is available. But only for those who can afford it.

And yet, there is hope and believe – themba. In this short book review I was only able to capture a fraction of what Jason wrote in Power Lines. I’ll therefore leave the closing remarks to Archbishop Desmond Tutu and his praise for the book:

In Power Lines, Jason Carter writes insightfully of strength, commitment, and idealism, his own as well as that of the many South Africans whose stories he tells.

————-
Power Lines: Two Years on South Africa’s Borders
By Jason Carter
National Geographic Society
Washington D.C., 2002

Power Lines is availabe at Amazon, Barnes&Noble, and Powell’s.

Jason Carter has not only written this book about his time in South Africa. He has come back from South Africa with a set of ideals, a willingness to get involved and themba. He has recently co-founded “Democrats Work” with Thomas Bates. The motto of Democrats Work is “putting our values into action.” Check out their website and find out how you can put your values into action.

Cross-posted on MyDD and Daily Kos

Join Democrats Work and volunteers from local Young Democrats chapters for one of two community service events in the San Francisco Bay Area on Saturday, March 24th.  We will be getting dirty in San Francisco and helping teachers on the Peninsula.  As always, make sure you wear you Democrats Work t-shirt, which we will sell for a special price of $10 at the events.  All are welcome, so bring a friend!  The details are below, on the Calitics events page, and on our website.

Democrats Work in San Francisco from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 noon

Join the San Francisco Young Democrats and Democrats Work for some weeding and bark replenishing at Juri Commons (a neighborhood park in the Mission) and also participate in a planting of the median of Guerrero Street (between 29th and 30th Streets) with the San Jose-Guerrero Coalition.

We’ll gather at Juri Commons, and some of the Work Crew will head a few of blocks down the road for the Guerrero planting.

Juri Commons can be reached by taking BART (or Muni) to 24th Street/Mission and walking down Mission to 25th Street.  Turn right on 25th Street and walk to San Jose Avenue.  Turn left on San Jose Avenue and walk to the middle of the block.  You will be at Juri Commons.

Democrats Work in Santa Clara from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 noon

Join the Peninsula Young Democrats and Democrats Work to assemble classroom kits for public school teachers.  We will be working with RAFT, a local organization that takes donated materials and repackages them for classroom use in area public schools.

We will meet at the RAFT Processing Facility, 1035 Walsh Avenue (Building C Manufacturing) in Santa Clara. Click here for a map.

About Democrats Work: Democrats Work mobilizes grassroots Democrats to perform community service . . . as Democrats.  We partner with Democratic organizations to help connect Democratic volunteers with visible, tangible service projects in their communities – such as cleaning up parks and neighborhoods, working at food banks, building houses, sponsoring basketball tournaments, and helping at church bake sales.  Through this service-based approach, we aim to promote the Democratic brand at the local level, showing our neighbors that Democrats work hard to improve their communities every day, not just at election time.  You can learn more about us at www.democratswork.org.

(Because it is good stuff. – promoted by Brian Leubitz)

Democrats Work and the San Francisco Young Democrats joined forces to provide strong work crew that spruced up the Gilman Playground in the Bayview.

Check out Sarah Carter’s on Daily Kos about our great work event this morning in San Francisco.  I wrote about it on the Democrats Work blog.  Good times!

I wanted to highlight this event for those of you in the Bay Area.  It’s a group of Dems putting all of our good progressive values in action.  Tomorrow, the project is restoration of a playground in the Bayview. Details here.

If you’re in Santa Cruz, check out this event,a John Edwards community service program.

San Diego? There are several events:
Black History Month Presentation with Asm. Karen Bass
Target Iran presentation
ACLU Workshop

OC:
Dr. Alicia Portnoy presentation.
Seal Beach: Senior Patriots Against the War

(This may not satisfy Katie Merrill’s demand that the netroots only do what she says, but as with everything online it is a great way to bring together people who want to work together on this. – promoted by blogswarm)

I want to introduce Democrats Work, an organization dedicated to mobilizing grassroots Democrats to perform community service projects . . . as Democrats.  I also want to invite anyone in the Bay Area to two upcoming service events, which are also listed on the Upcoming Events section on Calitics.  Could be a free Democrats Work t-shirt in it for you! 

The “big idea” behind Democrats Work, which I co-founded and am now the executive director of, is our belief that we need to build a service-based approach to politics.  Let’s take the energy and enthusiasm we have around election time and use it to make positive contributions in our communities all year long.  Let’s do tangible things – clean up parks, paint schools, sponosor basketball tournaments, help at neighborhood rec centers – that people can point to and say: “The Democrats did that for this community.”

How does Democrats Work fit in?  We are working to connect Democratic volunteers with visible, tangible service projects in their communities.  We partner with Democratic and progressive organizations – including local clubs, state and county parties, and local chapters of national organizations, campaigns and elected officials – to get their members and supporters to volunteer for local service projects as part of a Democrat-branded “Work Crew.”  Basically, we are building a sustainable infrastructure to keep Democratic volunteers and supporters visible and active during the “off season.”

As for the “big idea,” what could a service-based approach mean for our country and our party? 

First, we simply do some good in our communties.  By making tangible contributions and increasing the visibility of Democrats at the local level, we show our neighbors that Democrats get things done.  When there is a need in a community, we want people to say, “Call the Democrats, they always have people who can help.”  Second, we engage the grassroots during non-election time to keep folks active and involved.  Instead of asking people to get involved every two or four years, we tap into that energy year-round and keep the band together.  Third, we reach out to people who might not otherwise get involved in purely “political” activities, but share our values. Not everyone wants to hand out campaign literature or phone bank or even wants to work for a particular candidate, but they are willing to paint a school or clean up a park with their friends.  And, fourth, we build a unified stable of motivated and easily mobilized volunteers who can help candidates win elections.

Check it out.  Send me your thoughts.  Let’s put our values into action by doing some good in our neighborhoods.