Gimme Hope

So, once again my bags are packed. But this time, they're packed for home. And when I say bags, I mean a small amount of clothes, a small amount of assorted tourist tat, and a small mobile library of information, books and handouts from the 60 or so projects I've visited in the last 6 weeks.

Planes: 16,000+ air miles, 8.58 tonnes of carbon (£60 to offset, reforesting Kenya); trains: (I loved the Chicago El) and automobiles: (from taxi drivers with nazi tattoos and nazi sympathies to kind, generous and interesting individuals who showed me their culture, and one who invited me to his home and family, not to mention the 4x4 up the Sani Pass).

8 hotels and guest houses: ranging in quality from "never again" to "i've got to come back here". Countless new culinary delights from the pink lemonade of my first day in Louisville, to the bunny chow of my last day in Durban, and the more countable things who have eaten me: 1 brown recluse spider, 6 mosquitos and the 20kg adder who wanted a kiss more than I did!

I've been to the Soweto home of Nelson Madela and Desmond Tutu but sadly didn't manage to find a plaque commemorating where Lucas Radebe was born. I visited the Phoenix settlement with a handful of Gandhi's and listened to amazing stories of the birth of non violence. I've stood where Churchill stood addressing the crowd as he first became a hero by escaping a Boer prisoner of war camp. I've heard of the amazing legacy of Muhammad Ali, and how his early years of segregation shaped the man and the boxer.

Just as importantly I've met many less famous people equally doing extraordinary things. The 14 year old from iLanga, who is raising his brother and sister, all of whom contracted HIV from their now deceased parents, who spoke to me about how exclusion most often stems from fear. The vicar from Chicago outside whose church flies 77 tshirts to mark the 77 young people of Chicago who were killed due to violence in the last school year. The amazing woman running an arts centre from the Durban harbour, who supports both new artists and new arrivals. The residents of St. James Court in Old Louisville who annually turn one of the most challenged neighbourhoods of the city into the South's answer to the Venice biennale. And the many many people who've taken different steps of this journey with me who have shown me different ways of doing things, and different ways to think about doing things.

Maybe it's because as I write from the back garden of my Johannesburg guest house, and a cockatoo takes on a guard dog for fun, I'm overwhelmed by a feeling of hope. But I think that, unsurprisingly, has been a golden thread throughout all the stories I've heard. When there was despair there was defeat, but where there was hope they have nearly always managed to make something good come of it. Don't get me wrong, the learning is all about how we cultivate and harness that hope: but it seems the essential raw material from which good things could come.