Drops of paint

My hands are covered in paint. Blue paint. In high school, when I aspired to be a hippie, my hands were always covered in paint from various teenage angst art projects. Today, they are covered in paint because on Saturday I painted a shipping container blue, and the paint has become one with my hands it would seem. I was out in Lavender Hill, overlooking a dilapidated wall and an empty plot with plastic bags and rusty tins. There was indecipherable graffiti on the wall; could have been a gang tag, could have been a kiddie's squiggle. Could have been an angsty art project.

So I painted this container. That's a lie. I supervised ten people painting two shipping containers, but semantics, who cares.

At the end of the day, the containers sat transformed. There are a couple of reasons why painting these two containers was meaningful. If we hadn't done it, the small team of women who run this organization would have had to spend some afternoons, which they usually spend feeding and teaching kids from the neighbourhood, painting. So we gave them time. Always valuable. Then there's the tangible: now there are two shiny containers sitting in the restless sand, marking an oasis from the chaos that attempts to creep in. And there's the fluffy: stronger relationships between community-organization-university, and for the students, exposure to the ever-elusive Other. 

But then, right, you've got to think: what do these shipping containers mean in the Gotham of Lavender Hill? 

"Aaah, but don't be such a cynic," you say, "drop in the bucket and all that." 

Ok, ok, drop in the bucket, fine. But, I'll see your analogy and raise you one slice of reality.

Back before my teenage angst I was an outdoorsy kid. I spent my childhood in a frenetic oscillation between trees, mud and my swimming pool. My best, right, was to get out of the pool and drop water into two puddles on the textured terracotta tiles of my parents' stoep. I'd make one puddle broad, make the other one deep, and I'd watch them in their race to be evaporated. The little drops that didn't quite make it to the puddle, they went first; shrinking into nothingness as I lay on my tummy and watched, always hoping that I'd see a drop rising. And that's my point, see. When one drop forms a puddle with many other drops, it looks puddly for longer. But a drop, just the one, is gone before you can think through the science behind it. 

So, it's not that I'm against drop in the bucket development. It's just that a drop falling in a desert needs to be part of flood to have affect.