An account of life in contemporary South Africa as presented by a Peace Corps volunteer and the grandson of Jimmy Carter offers a portrait of a country struggling to recover from deep racial divisions.
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The grandson of the great humanitarian and former president Jimmy Carter, Jason Carter writes of a South Africa few people ever see in this eye-opening work of cultural inquiry and investigation. As a Peace Corps volunteer, Carter spent two years with a rural family in a former black homeland near the Swaziland border. South Africa, in the aftermath of Nelson Mandela?s regime-shattering election as president, is revealed in Power Lines to be a country still struggling to recover from deep racial divides. The whites live under conditions comparable to those in First-World Western countries. But black people, Carter discovered, live in another South Africa: a world of punishing poverty and unemployment, where alienation and powerlessness still prevail. Power Lines is Carter?s story of a community?s quest to dissolve barriers. Armed with a knowledge of Zulu and Siswati he traveled the countryside, immersing himself in the lives of blacks and whites alike. In the process, he found many on both sides who are eager to reach out to each other and heal wounds. Shaping his unique experiences into a powerful and timely volume, Carter demonstrates that even in a society as fragmented as South Africa, peoples? desire to come together can still triumph.
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