White boards and legalese

I don't spend much time in the city centre. I used to work in Shortmarket Street and live in Gardens, giving me a happy 20 minute walk to work past the National Gallery, the Rose Garden, St George's Cathedral and Greenmarket Square. It was 2010 and the whole city was saturated with FIFA madness. Loved it! But I quit that job and moved south, and now I just don't get to the city very often. I had a meeting in town yesterday, at the government department with which I'm negotiating a new partnership. From the building's lobby, you can see "authentic" African prints breezing from the stalls of Greenmarket Square, you can hear the French and Portuguese of the traders, you can breathe that bitter, chalky smell of hundred, a thousand, seemingly identical wooden figurines. The cobbled ground and nirvanic tourists complete the scene.

Inside, the only refreshment on offer was water-cooler water, no tea, so I sat empty-handed in the very ambiently-lit boardroom. The man talking to me speaks a lot about the bureaucracy of government, using terms like "compliance" and "management" and pseudo-legal terms so unknown to me that I couldn't write them down. It's a whole new ballgame. Hells, it's a whole new genre of sport. One of my partners is affiliated with government, but that's the city government, not the whole provincial-national shebang, and in any case I visit them in their satellite office in Stocks and Stocks, which is perpetually loud and apparently the place where uncomfortable chairs go to die. The rest of my partners; they work so close to the grassroots they're practically underground. So this was new and unfamiliar terrain. I'm not used to "confidentiality agreements", nay-nay, I'm used to endless cups of tea and conversations about people's children and it's Matric Dance season at the moment, so right now I spend my time looking at photos of sons and daughters on smudgy phone screens. But signing long-worded documents, shoh, I don't even know what those look like.

I try not to come across too panicked, and manage to fake-it through the meeting although not without tugging incessantly at my hair: in the mirror in the lift going back down, I see that I've squidged my short locks into an afro.  Hopefully my new partner was so disturbed by my Edward-Scissorhands hair that he didn't notice how me and my bright purple sneakers clashed with his board-roomed world. Wait, before the freaking boardroom, this building has a damn lift! A lift. Have you ever?! Usually my meetings take place in up-cycled shipping containers, or dingy rooms adjoining someone else's facilities, or the director's long-suffering lounge, or, actually, just outside there under the tree where some mosquito invariably upsets the rhythm of the meeting by swooping around our heads so persistently that we have to pause to find something to swot it, or a kid who's willing to run over the road to borrow the school kitchen's mosquito spray. But a building with a doorwoman and a sign-in sheet and a lift with a mirror and a boardroom. It's a miracle I didn't pee my pants never-mind gurgle incoherently, my thoughts more occupied with praying for some rooibos in a cracked mug to drop from the ceiling and into my sweaty hands than on the process of "escalating" complaints if something goes wrong with my students.

The meeting ends and I'm back on the cobbles outside. It's started to drizzle so I bow my head and shuffle between the canopies of the stalls, ignoring the shouts of the sellers around me, urging me to stop, just quickly, and choose which piece of Africa I'd like to take home.