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Kiara Soobrayan
Jesuit Refugee Service
Johannesburg, South Africa 

Disclaimer: this final post is about my emotional relationship with the work that I have done. It is not about JRS or the general sphere of development in South Africa. I intended it to be deeply personal, and thus, it may come off as self-indulgent (and perhaps it is, but I felt it was an important conclusion to my time here).  

As my time at JRS has come to a close, I’m overwhelmed with a feeling of loss, both for the person I was before I came here and for the people I have met during my time here. I feel markedly changed by this experience. I don’t think that anyone could spend so much time in conditions of such extreme poverty, while attempting to help people who’ve experienced the worst of what the world has to offer, without changing in some way.

I’d like to say that I’m hopeful, but at this very moment, all I feel is anger and determination. I feel angry for all the women who’ve come to us because they were raped by South African police as a form of punishment and subjugation. I’m angry for all the children orphaned by war, who’ve passed through our office on a daily basis.  And I am angry for all the people who’ve left their lives behind, fleeing war and deeply consuming poverty to try and find survival in South Africa, only to be subjected to pain and discrimination. What does it say about this country if we let someone who is fleeing war bleed to death on our own soil?

My time at JRS has made me ashamed of my country. I am ashamed of what we have become and how far we have strayed from the 1994 dreams that filled the heads of our activists as we were lifted out of Apartheid. My heart bleeds for all the people that we have robbed of their hope. 

In the same breath, my determination to create change in South Africa has only strengthened. My parents fought too hard for too long to let South Africa’s moral compass degrade. I love South Africa, and my time working with refugees here will not end with this internship. I’ll be back, and I hope to continue the work that my parents started.

Kiara Soobrayan
Jesuit Refugee Service
Johannesburg, South Africa 

In South Africa, Nelson Mandela Day is commemorated through 67 minutes of service, one minute for every year that Mandela dedicated his life to public service. My organization didn’t get to planning for Mandela Day until the week before. So while other organizations had organized school building projects or health awareness fairs, we walked down the street to a cancer hospice that sat in a posh Kensington home.

The hospice was well-maintained, well-funded, completely clean, and not at all in need of our help. In order to find ways to busy the many hands that made the three-and-a-half-minute journey from JRS, a number of staff began pulling weeds that had grown between the bricks in the driveway. Determined to remove as much of the weeds as possible, JRS workers insisted that we lift the bricks.

The concerned hospice workers looked on as JRS staff dismantled the driveway brick by brick, leaving a gaping hole of a mouth in the albeit weed-free entrance. When the call for lunch sounded, JRS workers were quick to lift themselves from the dusty floor and go to lunch, leaving myself and another intern to pick up the literal pieces of what they left behind.

We left the hospice feeling well-fed, congratulating ourselves for the work that we had done, as the hospice workers scrambled to put their driveway back together with no concrete and no map of how the puzzle-piece bricks fit together.

This, in my opinion, is the problem with development work. The development organizations, for all their brains and brawn, tend to push their voices in front of the people they are supposed to be helping. We did not stop to consider that perhaps the driveway was best left as is, weeds and all. We did not falter in our pursuit of the weeds even when the hospice workers tried to deter us because we, the NGO, knew better. In all likelihood, we created an even bigger problem than what existed in the first place.

Without a drastic change to the ways in which we think about and enact development work, we’re going to continue to create holes in driveways across the world.

Kiara Soobrayan
Jesuit Refugee Service
Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa

I have been working at the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) as a monitoring and evaluation intern for a week now. I’ve spent most of that time visiting refugees in their homes, evaluating their living conditions and health, and assessing their progress since joining JRS. The work is incredibly emotionally draining. The majority of our clients live in situations of extreme poverty with no help or assistance outside of JRS. This work is emotionally demanding in more ways than one, often causing you to question your morals completely.

One of the men who we are providing medical assistance to has a penchant for young girls. High on drugs, the underage sex workers who work at the brothel beside his house flock to his little home in search of drugs. Some of the girls are 15 or 16 years old. JRS is providing him with life-sustaining aid, and he is using his life to provide drugs to young girls in exchange for sex. He is committing statutory rape.

Do we stop providing aid to him? Do we get to make the decision about who lives and who dies?  Does Man X forfeit his rights because he’s violating the rights of others? These questions have been at the back of my mind for the last few days. I don’t have an answer at the moment.

The rest of my time has not been any less eventful. I’ve met many incredible people who sacrifice huge amounts of themselves to do this kind of work. The health workers who I have accompanied form personal relationships with their clients. When a client passes away, they mourn their death. I have had a difficult time dealing with this newfound knowledge. How does one cope with losing so many people? Doesn’t it feel disheartening?

On a more positive note, I’ve been practicing my French with our clients from the Congo. I’m really happy that the language helps put people at ease and makes them feel more at home in this difficult environment. If you would like to see some pictures of my journey with JRS, please take a look at my new Instagram that features pictures from my visits.

Kiara Soobrayan
JRS (Jesuit Refugee Service) Southern Africa
Johannesburg, South Africa

I will be working with the JRS (Jesuit Refugee Service) Southern Africa. In addition to my work with them, I will be meeting with JRS DC a few times before I leave in order to become familiar with the organization before my departure. JRS specializes in refugee rights in South Africa, providing education and services to refugees and asylum-seekers who have not had and do not have the opportunity to access basic services.

I have to admit that I am quite nervous about my time with JRS. I am a very emotionally sensitive person and I am not sure how much of a toll that working in a refugee organization will take on me. The people I have spoken to emphasize that you have to create some kind of distance between yourself and the people you are working with so as not to get emotionally overwhelmed, and I am just not certain if I am capable of creating said distance. This time with JRS will determine whether or not refugee rights will be a field that I will continue to work in for the foreseeable future.

Even though I am quite nervous about my work, I am excited to finally work in the belly of a big human rights organizations. I am quite interested in how budgeting and funding for nonprofit organizations work. Where does the money come from and how does one decide how it is spent? JRS partners with a number of research organizations all over the world, and I am curious about how this affects their funding and the projects that they take on.

I have always had a problem with Western organizations working in Africa without regard for the African context. JRS has quelled some of my reservations, especially given that the majority of the JRS staff appears to be South African. I would love to see how JRS’s global ideas and global network translate to their work in South Africa.