A "maple leaf" dream come true

During the darkest days of the apartheid regime in South Africa, one mother sighed, looked at a picture of a Canadian flag she had hung on the wall and promised her seven children: "Some day, I'm going to take you there."

That some day is now for her daughter, Desiree Blankenberg, 30, a University of Alberta master's student in educational psychology (special education). "It stuck in the back of my mind," she says. And it made her decision where to pursue graduate studies with her Rotary scholarship easy. The country in the far north her mother dreamed about, with a free, open and just society, is "everything I thought it would be."

Here she can walk into any restaurant, hotel, or bar and not worry if she'll be refused service because "we're full." Nor will she have to wait until all white people are served first before a clerk acknowledges she's next in line at a counter.

Apartheid may be dead on the South African books, but not in all South African hearts, particularly in the rural areas and the Eastern Cape where she's from. "The apartheid laws were very strict there," explains Blankenburg. It's why her parents moved their seven children to Cape Town, so their offspring could easily access the only university in South Africa open to mixed races - those classified as neither white nor black by the government.

Taking a coffee break in the Students' Union Building, Blankenberg still has to finish term papers and pack for her three-week Christmas vacation back to South Africa.

She's looking forward to telling everyone about Canada: how she loves the cold, how the snow crunches under her feet, how she can go anywhere with anyone, and how she advises a group of education students - who are all white.

"In South Africa, non-whites cannot teach whites. I told my sister about the practicum group...and the advice I give. She said: 'And they listen to you?'"

There's still a hierarchy in her homeland. "It's a result of a system that moulded them [whites] that way," she explains. "It could have been the other way around. It could have been me there."

People often asked about her lack of bitterness. "It's a destructive energy I can do without," she says, preferring to look forward to a future helping minorities in South Africa get the educational opportunities they deserve.

While more minorities in South Africa are attending schools, more of them are also dropping out. There's a lack of resources and lack of expertise to handle learning disabilities among a group of people still lacking basic skills, says Blankenberg. "There are few white psychologists in the area, and others are fearful to come.So I decided to get those skills."

As little as five years ago, she wouldn't have been able to travel to the University of Alberta because minorities were not allowed to have passports ("How could we? We would tell the world what it was really like"). It was the "passport paragraph" in her welcoming speech to Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu Nov. 27 that started a chain reaction of tears flowing.

Tutu was the inaugural speaker for the U of A's annual Visiting Lectureship in Human Rights, and Blankenberg was one of two students who won an essay competition to welcome him. She spoke proudly of Tutu's passport - and hers.

"Somehow, I was living the time all over again," she says, explaining her emotions that night. She remembered the time South Africans branded Tutu a terrorist and Communist. She remembered where he was from, the heartland of poverty and racist South Africa. She remembered Tutu lived in an earlier time than she, a time "10 times worse" than when she grew up and how could she complain? "All those things came to me as I was reading."

Anger? No. That glint in her eye is determination-to be a role model for a new generation of South Africans, to reach for every opportunity available to better herself and "to rid the African people of the stereotype: a hand out for something."

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