Up North

I don't often get out to the Northern Suburbs; I'm a City Bowl to Metro East kinda gal. So when I do go there, I have very few, very particular memories of all the things that happened there on those streets, in those spaces. There's this concept called embodiment that I studied at some point in life, and it's about how we carry meaning and memory on our bodies. Kind of the exact opposite to Cartesian Dualism and the separation between mind and body. I was driving down Modderdam Road--now Robert Sobukwe--and I started to think about how places have history etched onto them too.

At the traffic lights just after the bridge--the lights where you turn left to go to Valhalla Park--I remember turning right. Turning right and curling round to a children's home and special needs school. I was doing research see, on SNE policy and how the policy accommodates chronically ill children (it doesn't, not really), and this road led to the school and the ward where I did my research. It was the research where I interviewed an imaginary friend. The girls were stuck in their ward and in their school and they created two characters, Dzbe and Dzba, who spoke a language called Ntsikibe Taal; a mix of Afrikaans, Xhosa, some American English and a whole lot of mumbling. These characters, the girls' friends, came from buite (outside) and they were healthy, bouncy, exuberant, and more than a little over-the-top. It was Dzbe and Dzba who I interviewed--through an intermediary ofcourse--about their experiences of education, of marginalization, and of how to have fun. And it was Dzbe and Dzba who I thought of when I stopped at the traffic lights. I imagined them dancing round the red-yellow-green lights like muppets at a 70s disco.

And then I turned onto De La Rey and drove and drove and drove until I passed where I used to turn-off the road to go to Delft and Leiden. In my short-lived days working for a social development consultancy, I did an evaluation on a life coaching programme for school senior management teams. My role in this all was to write school profiles, using everything from their ANA and matric results to interviews with the principal, to taking photos, grading the infrastructure and looking at the classrooms where the computers used to be before they were stolen.
"They were new computers," the principal told me proudly, lost in his own memories of place.
The clearest memory of my fieldwork there, was that each school had these inspiring vision and mission statements up in their reception areas, all outlining an intention to be the best school in Delft, to give quality education, to create opportunities for meaningful learning. Some of the statements were done in Word Art, some carefully stencilled by hand.  All had some kind of ornate border, either flowers or curly-wurly loops and lines. Some even had spelling mistakes.

If you go a little further north, and a little further east, you get to Wallacedene. I did some research on housing here; specifically the relationship between housing and TB. I sat in a wendy-house with a sangoma eating spinach. She talked to me and told me I was in mourning.
"Mourning for what?" I'd asked her.
"Mourning for your old life."
She was right, in her way. It was my first job after graduating, I was twenty-two and a little lost in the world. I missed being on campus and I hated my job.
"So what do I do?" I'd asked her.
"You ask for change."

But I didn't drive that far on Friday, no, I didn't drive that far. I turned instead onto Francie van Zyl to meet with a community health partner of mine. We had tea in his office, in polka dot mugs.

Imaginary friends and spelling mistakes. Sangomas and spinach and hot cups of tea when it's cold-cold-cold outside. I look at a map and I see it all laid out. Maybe I should head out North more often...