We’re getting curious in a new continent

In two days I’ll be traveling somewhere I’ve never been and can’t wait to learn from — South Africa.

I’m tagging along with 17 students from Seattle’s Roosevelt High School, which for 25 years has managed to do something marvelous. Each year, they send students to learn how to lead through conflict and reconciliation in places where people can still taste the pain and promise of both.

The students are part of an award-winning dialogue and exchange program called Hands for A Bridge.

This year’s Hands for a Bridge class knows how much I love eyes, and drew me some as a thank you for a visit.

I first heard of the program when a friend whose kid was enrolled reached out to let me know the class was reading my book. 

One visit turned to several, and last fall, I had to ask: When this year’s cohort goes to South Africa, can I come too?

The program was founded by three Roosevelt teachers in 2001. Every year, I’m told, this trip delivers intimate connections among fellow humans who only seem too far and different. 

Roosevelt students will do homestays with students at Isilimela Comprehensive School in Langa Township, which is predominantly black, and students at Bellville High School, a former apartheid-era school in the Cape Town suburbs that’s mostly white. 

But those aren’t the only bridges built. When the program brings South African students from these two very different schools together with the Roosevelt students, it’s the first time some of them meaningfully connect with fellow South Africans of another race.

Why am I going? I want to see curiosity spark, for me and for all these students, in all directions, all at once.

And just like these students, I’ve been studying the history of apartheid and the legacy of Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and the groundbreaking Truth and Reconciliation Commission. 

More than anything, I want to be with people who might teach us divided Americans what freedom, understanding, justice, and healing really mean.

“Because,” as Hands for a Bridge teacher Michael Magidman so beautifully put it, “in learning to dialogue the world ceases to be filled with creeds, ideologies, motives, and judgments. It begins again to be filled with people."

Stay curious,