MITCHELLS PLAIN

(Note: To see how the wrestling went, check post below this one.)

Wow. Sometimes this place scares the shit out of me.

Yesterday, I was in a sketchy-looking parking lot with 3 YMCA workers (my immediate partner and our 2 female bosses) when some drunk men began, persistently, to hassle us for money. The girls freaked out "lets' go before they attack us!" so we jumped into me car and I peeled out of the lot, feeling very cool.

I thought they were being a tad dramatic. Then one of them launched into a story- her sister had, earlier that week, been caught in a massive gunfight between two gangs- IN the Police Station- A couple blocks away from the YMCA. Wow. The other girl didn't have a cool story, but today she was robbed. Oh well. Everyone in Mitchell's Plain has been robbed.

Today, waiting to judge a high school debate on abortion (particularly gripping because, statistically, many of the participats will be raped at some point in their lives) I had a truly bizarre discussion with my partner about theology (again.) It blew my mind. He has a strong loathing of Roman Catholicism, because they apaprently mixed the truth of Christianity with paganism. True, maybe, but iw was wierd for him to say it because he is a pretty unorthodox christian who doesn't believe in hell (score- there's more of us every day) and thinks that eternal life is a kind of reinarnation. Then he went into his beliefs on history and geography and race, drawing heavily on the books of Genesis and Revelation and truly bizarre interpretations therof.

His arguments deflated when I convinced him that Isreal is in the Middle East, not Africa, and that the race-based theology of his "experts" was used to justify apartheid. This brand of Christianity is like another world for me. (Homework assignment: flip througha book by "Rebecca Brown: MD". Do so without reading what other doctors have to say about dr. Brown. That's the kind of thinking I'm talking about.)

I am battling with feelings of racism myself these days. It sucks. Comes not from hanging out with Afrikaaners, I think, but from hanging out with colored people... Because I work with mostly the colored culture, all my fears and frustrations are directed towards people of that race, and I long to escape to sanctuary among "my people" who think the way I think, work the way I work and isolate themselves from areas of crime. I know I'm a terrible person, and that scares me toom, because every time I go off feeling superior fate, or God, or my subconscious, makes me do something really stupid so I feel humble again. I don't want to be humbled again.

Anyway, my posts keep coming out negative, complaining and whiny and all that. I'm sorry. I really am. i want to write about people's lives being changed, people overcoming adversity, hope and fun and adventure. I really do. I don't know why I feel so melancholy lately, or why I'm not thrilled to be doing this. I think my sights are set too high.