Community

As happens in life, I found myself sitting on the pavement outside the closed garage door of a fabric distributor in Salt River last Thursday morning. The manager arrived shortly before 9am, in a flurry of apologies for her lateness. "It was the taxi," she told me, "it went straight through on the freeway to town and I had to get another one back out!"
I nodded sympathetically, "no, no, I know, don't worry. The drivers sometimes do their own thing, it's fine I wasn't waiting long."

She waved me in behind her and walked me around the small shop, lifting and pulling rolls of fabric off the shelves, helping me find one that didn't have watermarks or creases. We each grabbed an end of the cardboard-centred roll and maneuvered it onto a measuring table and then into a plastic covering. I realized the logistical error of my plan when I saw just how much fabric 22 metres translates to. "Uhmmm," I started, "I don't know how I can get that home." We stood the two of us, assessing the totem pole of fabric. "Can I get the couch guy to come here to pick it up?"
"What's his name?" she asked me.
"Riza."
"Oh ja no, he pops in here almost everyday, I'll leave a note that it's for you. It's Jane ne?"
"Jen." I answer, "I'll tell him it's here."

I phoned him on my way out of the shop and he promised to send his cousin to my house later with his bakkie to pick up my furniture. I ran home over lunch and opened the gate to a man shouting "Hiiiiii!"
As he stood in my lounge, nodding and looking perplexed, just him with no friend to help carry, I thought it might be a good idea to ask, "Oh, are you here for the couches?"
Fortunately he answered in the affirmative. "I'm just wondering how to get them out." Clearly not everyone has Mr Isaacs' level of dexterity when it comes to furniture removal. He did have a friend though, and the two of them squeezed my couches out and onto the pavement. I had to head back to work, so I left them there, Riza's cousin, his friend, my two couches, and a hope that it would all work out.

Friday was my community partner workshop, an all day affair at the District Six Museum. We spent the day talking about all kinds of things: volunteers, development, partnerships, research, volunteers again and then at some point in the afternoon we settled on community and just how foreign some of Cape Town's communities are to my students. "We try to explain to them," one of my partners said, "that it's different here. But it takes for them to be out there to really see."
"Mmmm," added another woman, "how do you explain that everybody's your auntie, nobody's your uncle and who is your daddy?" The room erupted in nods and laughs. Wide agreement then.

I thought of the auntie at the fabric shop, of Riza and his cousin, of my volunteer placement partners and of the taxi drivers that move us all around from place to place. I know, I really do, that "community" doesn't actually exist. But sometimes, in some spaces, it kind of does.