Kid Version
Hi guys!
How are you? I hope that you are doing well. I imagine that some of you must have started school already. I hope that you are loving it, especially if you are going for the first time. What have you learned already? I learned something very interesting a few weeks ago: Did you know that a mommy and daddy sea horse say hello to each other by turning a brighter color? It’s true! Sometimes I think people do that too when they see someone they love very much. I bet I turn brighter a lot here in Mthatha because there are so many people to love, but I don’t know for sure because I can’t see myself! Who makes you turn brighter when you see them?
In the preschool where I work, the kids like to sing a lot. They have been teaching me a lot of good songs, and I hope that I can pass them on to you when I get back. But I have also been teaching them one of my favorite songs – you may know it:
My God is so big, so strong and so mighty, there’s nothing my God cannot do. The mountains are His, the valleys are His, the stars are His handiwork too. My God is so big, so strong and so mighty, there’s nothing my God cannot do . . . for you!
The reason I like this song is that sometimes there are problems around me that seem impossible to fix. Some examples are making people who are very sick well again or turning people with black hearts into people who know how to love. But this song reminds me that God can do anything. Have you ever thought something was impossible? What happened?
I also work at a clinic, which is like a doctor’s office. This is very new for me. I have to learn about things like medicines and I have to drive people to the hospital a lot. Have you ever done something completely new? Were you nervous when you started? Did you like it? With me, I was a bit nervous at first, but now I enjoy working here a lot because it gives me a different way of learning about and loving people. I think it is good to try new things, don’t you?
I have been able to spend time doing a bit of traveling during the weekends. Near Mthatha, there is a great area called the
Isn’t it funny how sometimes time goes so slowly (like when you’re waiting in line to buy ice cream) and how sometimes it goes so quickly (like when there are 15 minutes until bedtime and you’ve just gotten to the best game of the whole day). Right now, time feels like it is going very quickly for me. I have less than three months left until I go back to the
Well, whether it goes quickly or slowly, I’m excited for the time when I can see you again. I think I’ll turn so bright you’ll have to close your eyes.
Love,
Sarah Jackson
Grownup Version
Hello everyone!
I’ve discovered what happens when you combine an English major with lots of time to think: she starts comparing her life to the books she has read. A while ago, I remembered Tales of the Unexpected, a book of short stories for adults by Roald Dahl that I’d read during university. Dahl is brilliant in showing how there are surprising and even fantastic currents underlying “normal life” that peep through every now and then. In many ways, my life here in Mthatha seems quite normal to me: I live in a house and drive to work every day. I attend a weekly Bible Study and go to church when I’m in town over the weekend. I have access to phones and the internet and to transportation when I need to get out of town. And yet . . . . There are elements of life here that are so foreign compared to anything that I have ever experienced, elements that pop up only when I step back and look at the last few months as though they were part of a story, as indeed they are.
Recently, someone likened my life here to
Another time, I was on a walk along an isolated beach, and saw two large brown shapes in the distance. As I got closer, I realized that it was two giant cows lounging nobly like royalty on the beach. They simultaneously stuck out and seemed so at home that it felt like they might have been there specifically to impart some wisdom to me on my journey. Unfortunately for this pilgrim, though, cows are notoriously aphasic, and I wasn’t able to determine what their sapient eyes were telling me.
Another surreal aspect of my life here is how the imagined becomes real. Just as political maneuverings too distant for
Stories that used to be only in books are coming to life. There is one lady at Itipini who reminds me of the “Fool” in Shakespeare plays. The Fool is usually the one who, despite his jocular tone and perhaps even unstable mental ability, is the most discerning and offers the most wisdom. This lady, Boniswa, is a psych patient and for a long time was covered in Calormine lotion because she had chicken pox, which made her cry. She is quite large and has a high voice that would be the female Xhosa equivalent of Owen Meany’s. She smells bad because she bathes so infrequently that the other day, the whole community banded together and forced her to clean herself. She was more than willing to oblige right then and there by the communal water tap and got halfway through stripping off her filthy clothes when one of the ladies who work in the kitchen led her off to a more discreet location. Boniswa always has so much to tell me that she is sure would help make my life easier, but I can’t figure out anything that she is saying. Some days, she will sit for hours outside the clinic, and others, she will wander around, speaking to herself, only to skip off and then return again. She is Itipini’s Fool, and I wish I were wise enough to be able to hear her.
Another similarity between my experience and
I have also been able to change settings in a more planned way by taking several weekend trips. These have allowed me to explore yet more gorgeous areas in this country, and have allowed me to rest a bit from what can be a rather hectic environment in Mthatha. Not far away is the
I also got to take a trip to Hogsback, where I’d been previously with the after school kids from Grahamstown. I met up with three friends from Grahamstown and it was such a gift of a weekend. I never realized how nice it is to spend time with people who actually know you so that you can skip the awkward introductions phase and get right down to laughing and playing and talking and praying. On my first trip here, I’d vowed that if I ever came back to Hogsback, I would climb this one particular mountain with which I’d fallen in love. And we did! Now I understand why there seemed to be so much intriguing purple on the side of the mountain – there were these lavender but rather vicious bushes that we had to climb through when we lost the trail and decided to just go straight up. Whenever I see a beautiful place, I am torn between wanting to sit down and paint it or go and walk in it. When I get to do both, I understand that place so much better. This mountain makes sense to me now, as much as a mountain ever could.
Recently, I also got to go back to Grahamstown to help at a follow up for the Reading Camp that we put on right before I left for Mthatha. Teachers from area schools came for the day and we took them through some of the activities we did at camp. It was such fun to be back in an environment where literacy is valued so highly, and to see the teachers getting so excited about passing on what they’d learned. For the rest of the weekend, I got little sips of my former life there, getting to go out to the monastery for a short while, and to the Cathedral for church on Sunday morning. In some ways, it was a very hard weekend because it reminded me exactly why I miss Grahamstown so much, but that is the very best kind of hard weekend to have.
The changes in location are not the only unexpected shifts in my experience here. The most surprising challenge to me has been the continual emotional roller coaster that I ride every day. It is not rare for me in one morning to go from total joy (seeing one of the preschool teachers getting excited about improving her classroom) to total despair (accompanying a 16 year old girl who is HIV positive and has just given birth as she goes to the government clinic and realizing that nothing can be done for her new child because she’s come in too late to give her the drug that would drastically reduce the chance of the child contracting the disease), to total frustration (Mthatha during rush hour traffic), to total surprise (a TB patient who had defaulted from his treatment long ago coming into the clinic to start again), to total disgust (people having a literal feeding frenzy when food is brought into Itipini), to total blessedness (getting to spend time talking with people like Jenny, for whom I work). This whole process used to make me feel like a teenager, but now I just think of it as what has to happen when you’re in Wonderland.
Another aspect of Wonderland is that it demands things of
find myself thinking things like “Remember the Sputum!” (Ie, remember to take the sputum samples in to the lab for testing, but it always makes me think I’m commemorating some major event like the Alamo or the sinking of the
While often my life does seem quite fantastic, I have also become aware of how I provide moments of surrealism for the people around me. On one occasion, I was taking a lady to the hospital. Things had been a bit rushed when we’d left the clinic, so I had no idea why or where exactly she needed to go. But when we arrived, she began her mission – whatever it was -- like a bloodhound. She grabbed my hand firmly and began dragging me all over
Another instance when I provide people with their double take for the day is when I go on a run. Recently, children who live along the road where I run have started to join me, regardless of whether they’re barefoot or wearing skirts or pushing wheelbarrows containing water jugs. At one point, there were about ten of us making our way down the road in a little clump. The kids don’t usually last all that long, and sometimes collapse rather dramatically in the street, but we make quite a spectacle for the drivers passing by and the adults on the side of the road. When I manage to ignore them, it feels like I am in a commercial that would bring tears to your eyes if you were in a sappy enough mood so that by the time you got to the end and realized that it was for something like Mastercard or Colgate, you would be subliminally convinced of the relevance of the product to what you’d seen on the screen.
I also turned a few heads when I burst into tears in the internet café upon hearing of the death of Deena Barber, my history teacher from high school, who had been awaiting a lung transplant. Even when I was her student, I knew that if I ever taught anything, she would be my model of how to do it. She demanded and received the best from people because her hopes for them were both high and attainable. She was 100% her own person and encouraged individuality in everyone she taught. The only reason Mthatha didn’t understand my tears is that it didn’t get a chance to know her. Rest in joy, Deena.
When I was applying for my South African passport before coming here, we had to hunt down a document I’d received when I was a baby which stated that I was a South African citizen. Being in the mid-1980s, this was issued a decade before the fall of Apartheid, so it made sense that alongside information about my date of birth and my parents, was the declaration that I was officially a member of the white race. It made sense, but it was shocking. Moving to Mthatha has made me more aware of my race than I ever have been. I can be doing a normal activity like pulling out of my driveway and people will unabashedly stare at me. In church the other week, a boy who had been misbehaving was placed next to me, the only white person in the entire congregation. He proceeded to watch me for the rest of the three hour service. I am the recipient of multiple propositions by a wide range of black men each day and I have never heard such a density of corny pick up lines and just blatant requests, depending on the level of intoxication (“I’ve always dreamed of having a white girlfriend.” “Keep dreaming.”) I’m a bit tired of being a novelty especially since I keep scaring the babies at Itipini with my apparently dazzling whiteness. By virtue of my race, something that I’ve not noticed much before for better or worse, I am automatically an oddity, a slightly surreal addition to the experience of many people whose paths I cross.
While learning Xhosa probably doesn’t help in the sticking out arena, as the proportion of whites who know Xhosa to Xhosas who know English is very low, I am plugging away at it for necessity’s sake and because I do love the language. My tutor, Yoliswa is fantastic and is fun to work with. We’ve just finished translating a children’s book where I learned my new favorite word: bhanyabhanya, which means multicolored, but from what I’ve gathered, one doesn’t use it to describe people’s clothes because that’s an insult. We’ve been working on adjectives but will be proceeding to tenses, which I’m very happy about because I’m dying to learn the conditional. It’s been fascinating to see how the people I’m with affect the tenses I need. With the kids at the preschool, I’ve been using the imperative so much that I’m eager to use the conditional so that I can explain consequences of their actions (Instead of just “Don’t hit,” I want to say,“If you hit me, I won’t play with you.”) The only down side to all this Xhosa is that my French is really suffering. The other day, I tried to pray in French just because I missed it, and the entire thing came out in Xhosa!
Twice a week, I need to remind myself to speak in English. This is during an after school English class that Jesse set up for a number of high school girls at the beginning of this year. We’ve been reading through Charlotte’s Web. I’ve been surprised by how much I’ve really enjoyed the book again and by what a genius White is at introducing difficult words to children in a natural way. I remember learning the word “salutations” from that book. Jesse picked the book because he thought it would relate to the girls’ experience, largely because there are a lot of pigs at Itipini. And a few of the girls and I had fun one time pointing out Wilbur and then identifying the rest of the human characters as different people in the community who obviously look nothing like the originals. But I see a more general similarity between Wilbur’s world and that which these girls inhabit. White isn’t hesitant about talking about death; from the beginning we know the primary struggle in the book is for life. That is true for a lot of people in Itipini as well, and the end is just as uncertain. Some characters make it and some don’t. But in that battle, there is born a real friendship and love. It isn’t always easy to see, but every so often I get a glimpse of the community here and it is all the more striking amidst the mud and garbage. I bet if White had made it here to Itipini, he would have had another classic.
Going to the pediatric ward to work with Pumeza has continued to be a highlight of my time here. I almost always bring crayons and paper for the other kids to draw so that they can decorate the rather bare walls. It is much more colorful in there now. It is so important to establish routines, especially fun ones, with kids. All of the kids love making me do a q click and then we have a good laugh at my feeble attempts. Amahle, one of the patients who was there for about three weeks, always pretended that she wanted to go home with me. She’d start to leave and even made it out the door sometimes. But at the last minute, she’d go back in and blow me a kiss from the window instead. Pumeza and I have the same conversation every day about a picture of Simba from The Lion King. I ask what it is and she says it’s a lion. I pretend to get scared that there’s a lion in the room and then I ask what it’s like. She says it’s a little lion and that he’s laughing. We think this is so hilarious. Probably because it is. Athi, another girl who has been there as long as I’ve been coming, always asks me to sing a lullaby when I leave. And then right as I leave, I say “Nisale kakuhle, nilale kakuhle” (“Stay well, sleep well”). And then, my own personal routine as I’m walking back home is to whisper to myself, “Oh, those kids . . . the love of my life . . .”
Another way that I’m encouraged here is by the scenery. Directly surrounding Mthatha is a sea of hills. And that really is the only way to describe them, I think. It is as though once, long ago, this was an ocean, and then somehow it got frozen all of a sudden, with some of the waves rolling and others in the middle of cresting. And though in the passing millennia a layer of grasses has grown on top and scattered villages drift like flotsam amidst the waves, this area still retains its former movement and expanse. Until recently, it has been golden, but as the temperatures get warmer, spring blushes emerald on these hills. Who knows? Perhaps as life returns in the coming months, the land itself will thaw and will start to ripple and roll again.
I’d like to leave you with some things that people have said which have amused me. The first one is by someone who has very good intentions but whose follow-through is dubious. She was telling me about how she visited a particular charity organization “every single now and then.” I think that sums up a lot about commitment in this country. The other two quotations are from Dorothy, the nurse who works alongside Jenny at the clinic. Every day I fall more in love with her. We usually start the customary greetings by laughing for a little while. Neither of us quite knows why, but we don’t mind. One time we were talking about singing in a group and she was thinking of someone whose voice wasn’t top notch. “What if you have seven voices,” she said, “when only one is required?” Nice euphemism, I thought. And just recently, she noticed a boy whose nose was running more than usual. “Hey, wena,” she said, getting his attention. “Your nose is very busy.”
I hope that you too are laughing wherever you may be. As I begin to approach the end stretch of my time in