South Africa is in the news this month! This past week it held an election. In a little over a week it celebrates the 10th anniversary of its multi-racial democracy.

In January, I was lucky to be able to spend three weeks in this “beloved country.” For two of them, I was with a group of faculty and students from Episcopal Divinity School, traveling around in a small tour bus. We spent most of our time in the Eastern Cape province, formerly known as the Transkei – one of the centers of anti-apartheid activity. We also spent time in two of South Africa’s three largest cities, Durban on the coast, and Johannesburg, inland.

At the end of this two-week study tour, I flew to Cape Town, a breathtakingly beautiful city on the Western Cape. There I spent a third week, hosted by Dot Cleminshaw, a white woman in her seventies, who has devoted her entire life to struggles for human rights.

Three weeks is hardly long enough to get to know a country. But the experiences were varied enough at least to make a good introduction. We visited churches – large and small; Anglican, African-initiated, and Unitarian; meeting in everything from cathedrals to houses. We visited neighborhoods – cities and townships, wealthy and impoverished, urban and rural.

We visited museums, most of which couldn’t have existed until ten years ago: The Nelson Mandela museum in Umtata, near where he grew up. The Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, modeled on Holocaust museums in the States and elsewhere. The Hector Pieterson Museum in Soweto, memorializing the 1976 student uprising, and named after the first child to be killed by police. There were even two museums built expressly to commemorate interracial communities destroyed by the Group Areas Act – one of the many diabolical programs of the apartheid government.

We met people of all ethnic groups – black, coloured, Indian, white. We got to know people who were devoutly religious, and others who were thoroughgoing secularists – often, the two had been allies in the struggle against apartheid.

We stayed at a theological college in the charming small city of Grahamstown, and got to know some of the students and faculty. In Port Elizabeth we stayed at a hospice for parents and children dying of AIDS. And when all of this got too intense, we took time out and enjoyed fabulous, warm, integrated beaches on the Indian Ocean.

What’s my overall impression? Ten years after the end of apartheid, a sense of novelty and excitement is still in the air. People were talking about “the change” as though it were yesterday, remembering that first big voting day, with people queuing up for hours. I got the sense of visiting a vibrant new country, still experimenting, still finding its way.

This week, the African National Congress, or ANC, won the election in a landslide, taking 70% of the vote and winning 8 of 9 provinces. This isn’t at all surprising, given the achievements of the last ten years. The government has demonstrated its commitment to the people, bringing clean water to more than 9 million people, electricity to more than 2 million, and telephones to 1.5 million. It has raised the literacy rate of 15 to 24 year olds to 95%. It has brought free health care to millions of children, and built housing for millions of families. They have brought hope, where none existed before.

None of which is meant to deny South Africa’s staggering problems. None of them can be traced to apartheid alone. And yet in South Africa, every problem has its own unique stamp, stemming from that terrible legacy. Take crime, for example. Just about everywhere we went we were surrounded by razor wire fences, and told not to venture outside them. The terrifying crime rate has its roots in the 1980s, when gangs of drug and commodities smugglers began to move in from the north. The National Party government took no steps to counteract this, because they didn’t see it coming - they were too preoccupied trying to put down anti-apartheid uprisings.

A second problem, the high poverty and unemployment stem from a complex mix of factors, including shifts in the global economy that came just at the wrong time. But here once again, there is the legacy of apartheid; the National Party is perhaps the only government in history that deliberately set out to destroy the education and skills base of its country’s working class.

And then, of course, there is AIDS. In South Africa, it’s pandemic. As of last year, 4.2 million people were HIV positive, and people are just now starting to die in great numbers. Families headed by children – some as young as 6 or 7 – is just one of the tragic results. Once again, the tragedy bears the fingerprints of apartheid, which shattered South African family structures and sowed the seeds of promiscuity. But in this case, the current government also has a lot to answer for as well. Thabo Mbeki is a brilliant, well-educated man, with many accomplishments. But he also has some disastrous blind spots, and this is one of them.

The amazing thing is, how in the face of overwhelming difficulties, people in South Africa dare to sing songs of life. They seem to have a way of taking tragedy and turning it around. In Gospel terms, they’re “Easter People.”

Nelson Mandela is a prime example, of course. Visiting Robben Island, where Mandela was imprisoned for 18 years, brought home to me just how astonishing his journey has been. To be entombed in that brutal place, and to emerge with no trace of bitterness or hatred – what can that be but resurrection?

And South Africa is full of people like that! That’s the most moving thing about my journey – the stories of ordinary extraordinary people and communities, who have refused to give in to hatred or defeat, who have turned tragedy into ministry, who have taken personal responsibility for South Africa’s future. To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, let me share two stories from my trip. The first is about a monastery. The second is about a garbage dump.

On a misty Saturday morning, our tour bus climbed the side of a green mountain outside Grahamstown, so that we could pay a visit to the monastery of uMariya uMama weThemba (Mother Maria of the Themba people). Brother Timothy, a tall hearty man in his late 50s, is the prior; I’d actually known him when he was a monk in California.

After worship and lunch, Timothy told us the story of how the monastery developed. Archbishop Tutu had approached him in 1989 and asked if his order would consider establishing a house in South Africa. “Apartheid will come crashing down,” Tutu said, “and people will be looking to religious leaders.” They decided to explore the possibilities, scoured the country looking for a place, and finally found this one, on the grounds of a former convent.

South Africa has a legacy of missionaries who came to impose their own ways on the people. In contrast, said Brother Timothy, “We came with no agenda - we came only to pray.” “But then,” he went on, “our ministry began to walk down the driveway.” People came at first in small numbers; a few victims of violence: “People who were being beat up came, abused children came.”

A turning point came for the brothers their first Holy Week in South Africa, on Maundy Thursday, 1999. Three small boys from a nearby village were playing on the railroad tracks, a train came along, and two of the boys were killed. The Brothers went to their funeral, and reached out to the families. According to Timothy, this “blew the people in the community away” – never before had white people treated them with compassion. After that, “the trust level went way up,” and the monastery’s ministry began to grow.

Brother Timothy summed up the brothers’ experience with these words: “We learned that, if you open the door, they will come in. What God has really done is brought conversion to us.” He continued, “This is a great time to be here – full of life, energy, and hope.” Andrew, another brother, chimed in: “The more we give away, the richer we become.”

A few hours’ drive from Grahamstown is the city of Umtata, in the heart of the former Transkei, close to Nelson Mandela’s birthplace. When we got to Umtata, we spent an afternoon touring his village and the new museum, and then were told that in the morning we would visit a place called Itipini.

If you’ve traveled in the Southern Hemisphere, you’ve probably noticed the informal housing developments – housing built one on top of the other, and created of cardboard, tin, tires - whatever can be scrounged. You may have called them “hovels” or “shacks”, and the villages “shanty-towns” or “slums.” Despite the government’s best efforts, South Africa is still full of this kind of housing. Itipini is one of these informal developments. In the local language, Itipini means “garbage dump” – and the housing was in fact built on top of a landfill. Our guide told us that people choose dumps to build on, because no one will move them off.

The morning we were to visit Itipini, I admit I was a little apprehensive. Seeing these developments elsewhere, I’d always assumed they’d be cauldrons of despair. Our tour bus stopped a quarter-mile from the village, so that we could enter without causing a stir. As we walked up the hill, our noses confirmed – we were definitely in a dump!

The big surprise came as we got to the village center. We’d been briefed in advance about the health clinic – a place where infants receive well-baby care, and adults receive AIDS education and TB treatment. But we hadn’t been told about the preschool, where dozens of tiny children sang to us. We hadn’t been briefed about the women’s cooperative, with its bright beaded crafts to sell. And we hadn’t been briefed about the youth choir which was rehearsing for a concert, singing African music a capella, with great spirit, a kind of joyful defiance.

Here were people who had nothing in the way of material goods. And yet they were blessed with a vibrant community life that we often lack. It wasn’t Easter, but the words suddenly came into my head: “He is not dead – he is risen.”

Sometimes, resurrection is a thing we believe in. Sometimes, it’s a thing that happens to us. And sometimes – when it doesn’t happen, or we can’t seem to believe, resurrection can nevertheless be something we do, a decision we make. In the words of the poet Wendell Berry, we “practice resurrection.”

Or in the words of another poet, Adrienne Rich:

My heart is moved by all I cannot save.
So much has been destroyed.
I have to cast my lot with those who,
age after age; perversely,
with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.