Back at work

I met with a man from Tanzania on Friday. He came to South Africa to study Buddhism then he married a woman from East London and he stayed. Now they live in Ilitha Park and it takes him seven minutes to get to work. Work is in a container next to the Kuwait taxi rank in Site C. Or a set of containers really. And they're planning on building a sustainable building with sandbags and tyres to house the growth of their operations. They do all kinds of things. Essentially they offer IT services to residents of the surrounding neighbourhood, and to the foot-traffic that pushes through the space, in transit to and from the rank. But really, they do it all. Business plans and letterheads. Lecturing and logo design. 

Four of us sit, behind the door, between the walls, on small islands of space in the sea that is the manager's office. On his wall are pictures of his daughter. First as a baby, then as a toddler, all the way up to her most recent school sanctioned headshot. She is in Grade 9 this year, at school in Joburg. He misses her, ofcourse, but she's at a good school (Oprah's school) and she is pushing through. He tells us that a lot of the learners don't. Their families have problems, someone gets sick, schooling comes to an abrupt halt. But not his daughter. He laughs and says he is not interfering, she must stay there and succeed. 

We sit. Me, the man from Tanzania, the manager, and one of my students. He was in Ghana recently, and he laments with the Tanzanian about the fufu he ate there, how it kept you full from morning till evening. They both miss the fufu. Banku apparently, is a different story. My student shakes his head. 

I ask how things are going here, how their plans for expansion are progressing. 

"We tried to get space in the Plaza, but it's R200 a square metre," the manager explains. "It seemed so much, so I went and did research. You don't pay that much at Canal Walk."

The Site C Plaza popped up last year, after being in the pipeline for years. 

"You need to know someone," he goes on to say. "Like with the new station development, we want a space there, but you need to know someone."

"Who do you need to know?" I ask.

"I don't know," he laughs, "but I know I don't know them!"

The station development sounds impressive. From what he gathers, it's going to transform the Site C station and rank into an integrated transport hub. Lots of change, lots of opportunities.

We chat for a while, about this, about that. And then we walk outside into the sun and hug and handshake. As we drive down Lansdowne Road to the highway I point upwards as I explain electricity access and usage to my student. It's like a spiderweb in the sky. The wires criss-cross from lamppost to tree to lamppost and on and on. It's not beautiful in any romantic sense, but the lines and the layers of the aesthetic do draw you in.