Tell me a story of sand

My office is hosting a group of visiting colleagues next week and I'm taking them around to our partner sites to give them a taste of what it is our students do here. Part of this tasting includes an orientation to the areas in which we work. I've mentioned in a previous post that I really don't like orientating people to Cape Town; to reduce the complexity of the city to anything less than the labyrinth of intersecting points of beautiful chaos that it is, seems, well, unjust. For a twenty-something year old who knows close to nothing about the world to champion this orientation, shoh, the unjustness moves from shaded grey to saturated yellow. But I take the challenge seriously, don't worry.

I'm putting together my orientation pack, and writing a my lines on each of the areas. It all sounds so simultaneously trite and Wikipedia-esque. I'm tempted to replace my words on Khayelitsha with those of someone else. See, a little while ago I asked the Ma's to describe Khayelitsha. Their first words weren't about the history or the politics. Not about the sanitation-absence in RR section that is rapidly mutating into a public health crisis. No. They told me about the sand. "The sand?" you ask. Yes. The sand.

"Oooh, when we first came here the wind just blew and blew." Ma'Regina screws up her eyes and gestures with her hands. There are nods and waves of agreement from the other women listening in.
"Yes," she continues, "it would blow the sand right into your house." She pauses, looking down at the pale green knitting in her hands. Then she turns to me and shakes her head, "you could try anything but that sand would come in."

Man, they spoke about that living, breathing sand and they lamented its ally, the wind. Before the people, the shoes, the feet on the ground there was the sand. It defined their experience here for years. Now that the sand is covered by shacks, by plastic and tyres and development shrapnel, it blows less. Relief.
"It blows less."

So, somewhere between the sand and the suburbs I need to navigate a path that represents a version of Cape Town simple enough to find in a day. I shake my head at me. Ya, I don't know how I'm going to do it either.