FACULTY ADVENTURES THANKS TO THE
BALLANTINE GRANT Through the generosity of former trustee Morley Ballantine P ’64, ’68, GP ’05, ’05 and her family, the Ballantine Grant supports faculty pursuits of independent study travel outside of Colorado and typically abroad. The goal of the grant is to enable faculty members to create and carry out a project of significant professional and personal interest, one that will contribute to the enrichment of the FVS program in general and to the growth of FVS faculty members in particular.
Disquiet in Africa « 10
Jen Buckley
ENGLISH FACULTY
Fountain Valley School of Colorado
In her application for the Ballantine Grant, English Faculty Jen Buckley wrote: “My interest in South Africa began as a child in the mid-late-1980s, when my father (himself an activist of the Civil Rights Era) explained apartheid to me and shared the music of Paul Simon and Ladysmith Black Mambazo with me. Ultimately, a trip to South Africa and neighboring Swaziland will enable me to learn more about the region, its complex (multicultural, colonial and postcolonial) history, its natural treasures, its arts, and its literature—all, hopefully, leading me to discover new voices, writers and works to bring into the freshman program…I would welcome the opportunity to travel to South Africa—my lifelong nation of study and interest— as a recipient of the 2014 Ballantine Grant.”
O
ver the nearly three weeks that I spent in South Africa, I experienced many interesting, thought-provoking and inspiring sights, and engaged in several political conversations. But my most memorable experiences are two: driving down the N3 to the south out of Johannesburg and walking in the port city of Durban. Each of these experiences forced me to question uncomfortable things about the world and also about myself, questions that caused me to lie awake at night while in country and still cause me to lose sleep back in the United States. Driving from Johannesburg to the coastal city of Durban on the N3 takes approximately six hours. Sights along the way include some fairly predictable (or so I learned) African sights: shantytowns near the side of the road, which are literally tin shacks where several generations of a family and their livestock reside; seemingly hundreds (if not thousands) of black Africans hitchhiking, looking for rides to school or work or family—many of them shoeless children; women selling fruit and crafts by the roadside, sometimes approaching stopped cars to do so; piles upon piles of garbage—much of it burning; and, of course, monkeys. However, what I was unprepared to see was the juxtaposition of poverty with wealth. The poverty I viewed was comprised of the shacks upon shacks
