Ryan Hartley (a participant in the LLL initiative in 2010) wrote a letter about his experience in an LLL house. This story encapsulates some of the best ideals of the LLL initiative. The story is best told by Ryan himself:
It was only by accident that I ended up in the live and learn project. A friend had heard rumours, whispers from the East of a University Housing system beyond the residences. Students would be placed in these houses to live together and to learn from each other.
Each house receives a topic (the house I would eventually end up in was Gender: a perfect fit because I already had one), discusses it within the house and with the campus at large. They are also supposed to run a project addressing the topic, but we learned they would be lenient for a year or two. Looking for a change of pace (and a single room) I leapt at the chance.
There is a general conception that Stellenbosch consists of two large blocks of individuals, two types of people: young Afrikaners following in the footsteps of their parents and young English students who thought that UCT looked a bit rubbish. This is most definitely not the case.
Also, in that house and all the other houses of the Luister, Leef en Leer [Listening, Living and Learning] Initiative were South Africans from every province, Tanzanians who’ve driven across America, Americans who have lived in Tanzania, Dutch Theologians, ambitious businessmen, liberals, conservatives, Christians, atheists, lawyers, accountants, political scientists, ser leaders and SRC Members, gay and straight, black and white. In that plethora of ideas dreams and theories were a hundred conversations and quite a few arguments.
As I spent two years in the Gender House I would hear many things hundreds of views on the topic of gender, sometimes from people totally removed from my sphere of reference. There would be times where I agreed and times where I absolutely most certainly disagreed, but it always made me think. Mostly I thought how wrong everyone else was, how I wished they’d clean the kitchen when they were done and why someone would steal shampoo from my shower window (answer: they had dirty hair), but that was still technically thinking.
As the University’s “Think Tanks” the Live and Learn Houses did quite a bit of thinking. Even so, there was quite a bit of doing as well: over the past two years I’ve found myself sokkie-ing [Afrikaner dance] with 32 Canadians after arguing about the Winter Olympics, doing a lot of negotiation with Instandhouding [Maintenance] (with some occasional success, I’m happy to report), having Soup with Environmentalists, Debating the Concept of Diversity with University Management, killing snails on an organic farm and defending a woman’s right to choice in print and having dinner with a Vice-Rector, stretching my skills with Microsoft publisher and baking bran muffins for a feminist professor.
[In 2011] Listening, Living and Learning is going bigger than ever with a Media House reporting and presenting Live Feed to the entire campus on the University’s fancy new screens and interesting topics galore: Millennium Goals, Telemedicine, The President’s Planning Commission, Education and, closer to home, Clusters — dreaming a different Stellenbosch. There’s a sense that we’re hurtling towards something new. You could be a part of it.
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