Frogs in a fire

The room we sat in was painted a peachy pink. There was a man and a fridge to my right, a woman sitting on the desk behind me, and nine others squished in a rough circle between the standing fan and the door. The door led to the kitchen, where plastic bowls of porridge walked from the one side of the room to the other in an endless cycle of feeding. When we left, the children in the room outside lay in neat rows with their little legs and arms splayed like a frog's. I assume that the porridge was for them.

We were there, from our respective organisations, to help this centre conceptualise a programme for unemployed youth. I balanced my notepad and my backpack on my lap, and tried not to spill water out of the thick amber glass clenched between my knees.

(As happens at these kinds of events, it turns out the host knew the man three seats to my right.
"I know your brother!" He exclaimed initially, and hardly had to lean forward to extend his hand.
"Yes!" The man replied.
"Yes!" The host chorused in reply.
"But it wasn't my brother, it was me." The shaking hands paused. Laughter burst out and met the peachy pink walls.
"You're right, you're right, I was at Pen Tech and you at UCT?"
"Yes, YES!"
More laughter, more hand-shaking.
"We have a story to tell," the host tells us all, "HAH, we have a story to tell!" The man three seats right of me smacks his knee, the host smiles and smiles.)

We start talking first about who constitutes youth, then the challenges they face and the potential they hold within them. We talk about ambitions and aspirations, and how to build a programme that builds on hope, not despondency. The older participants lament: in the 1980s, the youth had something to fight for, to live for. They had a cause. The younger participants, we do what we do when the older ones talk: we look down, we listen, we try to create a memory from which to draw thought. And we wait, patiently, for the lament to pass.

Values and visions only get you so far, so we shift to talking programmatic design. Structure, resources, programme participants. We set up timelines, we make the commitments we can. I'll work on the budget and help with costing. It's a good meeting, a productive one. We had the chat about youth and about change, and used it to inform a programme idea. It's a seed at most, but it will be nurtured and it will grow, and will offer opportunity for existing potential to flourish.

The man three seats to the right of me sent me a poem this morning. His nephew died in a gang shootout last night, and he wrote him a poem to say good bye.

"Ooh I wish this day was never gonna come
Ooh how I wish that I will never hear these words
Ooh how I wish that I will never see this scene
Ooh how I wish that I will never have to say I told you so..."

We spoke just yesterday about creating options for youth. About building an environment that enables them to live a life that won't get them killed. We spoke in a room painted a peachy pink, next door to a room filled with well-fed frog children. Part of me feels that our words are now ash, seared and burnt and destroyed by a bullet, but they're not. Not really. They feel more like a fire that needs to rage and burn into being a change. Before the frog children grow-up.

A percent on paper

I stumbled, as one does, over the 2013 Annual National Assessment results for mathematics: 8,1% of Grade 9 learners passed mathematics with 30% and above. In contrast, 59.1% of last year's Grade 12's attained the same score. I was initially bemused, and wondered what miracle occurs between Grade 9 and Grade 12 to improve performance so dramatically. The first BOOM that hit me was the numbers of learners that must drop out. More Grade 12s pass mathematics because the ones who've stuck it out until then reflect only a subsection of the group that wrote in Grade 9, and that subsection is more able and more supported. The second BOOM that smacked the wind out of me, was the analysis that showed the failure rates of teachers: "Maths teachers were given five simple mathematical tasks from the Grade 6 curriculum... Two-thirds of teachers could answer only three questions, and just 12% could answer all five."*

You could get lost in the stats, and the regression analyses start to become just seas of numbers washing and waving through explanations of how all the pieces of the puzzle don't fit together. I left the seas and started to wonder what this all meant in terms of people's lived experiences. What does it mean in reality to not be able to work with numbers? I asked my mathematician brother, who explained that "trying to understand the world without understanding numbers is like trying to understand the world without being able to read. You're completely shutoff from some of the most important parts of society." He gave me examples of how trying to work out your household's electricity usage, or transport options, or groceries choices, is impossible if you don't have the tools and abilities to do so.

And then I remembered a conversation I had on my last visit to Kuwait in Site C, with a man who runs a business development consultancy. He helps contractors write-up quotes for the work that they do.
"We help them with pricing." He told me.
I assumed he meant that he researches what the market rates are and what the contractor needs to charge to be competitive, or what the changes are in costs of building materials and tools and where the cheapest places are to buy it all.
What he meant was, "they don't know how to make a quote and to add up a quote. They misquote. All the time, everytime."
"So they lose money?" I asked.
"No," he shook his head, "they don't lose money like you say they lose money. They don't get enough money."
I imagine them with businesses that stagnate, not grow, that cut even, only just.
"Shoh, they must really struggle then."
My naivety is rewarded with a very lived experience fact: "they struggle, but it's their workers who struggle more. They don't have money to pay their workers, so their workers don't get paid."

And there's the real BOOM. Failing mathematics in Grade 9 means that you might misquote. It means that you don't earn enough to grow your company. It means that you can't pay your workers. It means your workers don't have money. It means their families don't have food. That what a 91.9% failure rate means.

The numbers and graphs that decorate the pages of the DoE's website and Angie Motshekga's platitudes, they aren't just numbers and graphs. 91.9% of Grade 9 learners did not achieve 30% in mathematics. A clockwise curl, a line, a dot, a clockwise curl and two more symmetrical dots on either side of another skewed line. That's what 91.9% looks like on paper. That's not what it looks like in reality, not at all. Congratulations Angie, for the 8.1%. Well done.


*Charles Simkins, 2013. 'Performance in the South African Educational System: What do we know?' Centre for Development and Enterprise

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.

The City's Seasons

Like any ecosystem, urban or otherwise, cities have seasons. They have pressure systems that mimic rising and pushing warm and cold fronts, and trends that shift direction like the wind. Unlike the weather, however, Cape Town’s city seasons can’t be neatly summarized on colorful charts and maps. The city’s seasons are born into existence through the action and inaction of people, and that behavior is far harder to predict than falling rain or sunny skies. But there might be a backdrop to that behavior; here are a few ideas.

Migration

I live in Obs. Around this time of the year, the shuttles and busses moving students in and out of Observatory cut their schedules. The Pick ‘n Pay at St Peter’s Square empties. The McDonalds and KFC on Norfolk Road shudder with relief. The undergraduates are gone. They aren’t the only ones.

“I’m going to the Eastern Cape,” my domestic worker tells me, “my son is becoming a man.”

“Ah, congrats!” I smile in reply.

“He’s going with his daddy at the end of the month, I’m going on the 14th.”

Over December, people go home. The women’s club I sew with in Khayelitsha closes as soon as the schools do; the grandmothers have saved all year to spend six weeks back in Pedi and Ngcobo. They go home.

But as people leave, others arrive. GP number plates idle along Victoria Road from Bantry Bay to Llandudno. From the start of school holidays till the end. It’s a transient time this, our seasonal migration.

Regeneration

On the 1^st of January this year, a massive fire burnt through BM Section in Khayelitsha. Thousands of people lost their homes and the political year shortened its summer holiday and started in earnest to answer the questions of the watching public: whose fault was it that the fire could spread through the shakey infrastructure in the way that it did, and whose fault was the arguably slow response to the fire? What upgrading was and wasn’t happening in BM Section, and where were the city’s political leaders? Fire destructs, it also provides reason to rebuild. If there are resources, capacity and political will, crisis can be a catalyst for positive change. It’s a big if, but a possible if.

In January and February the wind continues to blow. It’s hot, so hot, and Cape Town burns. The fires that run up and down and along the mountain parade in the new year and require our attention and action. The southeaster blows and freshens the city, the schools open, the students return. For better or worse, the city regenerates.

Consolidation

And then the city finds its groove and builds its routine. The gaaitjies shout their Mowbray-Kaap’s and squeeze themselves into tighter than tight taxi corners. “Don’t worry, I’m a chicken,” one tells me one day as he huddles over my legs in the front row, “I only need one leg to stand.” The Village Three bus winds its way through every road in Khayelitsha before reaching its destination. Everyone knows to be patient.

I love Cape Town’s routines. At noon everyday the city blinks as the Signal Hill cannon announces: “it’s lunchtime!” At full moon we walk up Lion’s Head. The call to prayer calls us to witness the ways in which we live together, syncretically sometimes, other times in tension. But always together. The first Thursday every month turns the city into an artwork that you can walk through and talk to. And on Fridays the traffic starts early, why shouldn’t it? It’s Cape Town.

We spend April and May consolidating (and ruing the passing of the March public holidays). It’s a time for the city to function.

Protest

To speak of a season of protest is not to undermine the grievances and the pain of people whose homes flood in July. Not their shacks, their homes. Protest in Cape Town is not just about poo and closed highways, and the politics that attempt to divide us. It’s when the inequalities in our city turn toxic.

But Cape Town doesn’t just protest service delivery. The angry upside-down umbrellas that are shoved broken into the bright green bins dotted all over the city articulate our collective rage against the weather. We’re not a patient people, Cape Tonians, when it comes to the weather and dark early mornings. The general air of discontent that settles over the city in the winter dissipates fairly rapidly though, as we move into spring.

And spring pulls us back to migration and movement, and closer to the long December holidays… 

Safe, safer, safest

So, the commission of inquiry into policing in Khayelitsha got the constitutional green-light last week. This makes me happy, but it is by no means a panacea to the reality of risk that simmers between Mew Way and Baden-Powell Drive. A step in the right direction sure, but given the current levels of crime, there isn't a hell of a lot that wouldn't be. Anyway, it's got me musing about safety, and what it means to be safe.

A few years ago, I spent a some months studying in a small university town in the American Midwest. There were a lot of things in that town that perplexed me (that's a story for another time), but the one thing that really got me upside down, was that I could walk alone from the library to my dorm in the student hours of the morning, when it was all dark and misty and quiet except for drunken feet stomping home from the Green Street bars. I could walk and it was safe. Totally. Not the kind of safe I persuade myself I am when I speedwalk home down Lower Main Road by my lonesome at night. A legitimate safe. No turning your head around safe, no giving the shifty eye to someone walking in in front of you, behind you, near you safe... Just you and the road and your backpack and laptop and your iPod jamming your end-of-the-evening choons safe.

I don't feel unsafe often. Especially not during the day. The light offers an invincibility that disappears only as the sun does. I walk under roads and on bridges, I walk in places that smell of pee and stale clothes. I walk past squashed cigarettes that are so well smoked their filters look singed. I walk past people who stand and say nothing, I walk past people who stand and stare. I walk around bruised mattresses and I walk through people's homes; bowing my head as I try to avoid the artifacts of their lives that decorate the pavements, doorways and parking lots that bring my commute to into their domestic space. Sometimes I walk through Golden Acre after rush-hour when only the BagIt is still open and the "TEN RAND FISH AND CHIPS" shout of the woman at the escalator rolls and rolls around the empty space and it's just me and a few other people and I try to imagine what the space looked like an hour or two ago. 

The last time I felt a little uncomfortable was walking around Lower Woodstock in the early evening a few weeks ago, and the last time I felt really legitimately unsafe was probably the moment a few years ago when I got mugged walking to work by a kid with a super-shiny knife bigger than his face. Otherwise there's just the regular unsafe you feel when you realize ah, I should probably be vigilant at this juncture in my life and you take out your ear buds, quicken your step, and try to mozey into the well-lit patches of the street. 

But what makes you safe, really? While there's a semantic difference sure, between being safe and feeling safe-- the latter based on everything from your experiences to how lucky you feel that day, and the former possibly more objectively defined--I don't know that that's how it works in reality. I think it's possible to be both statistically safe and fearful, and that if that fear creeps into and compromises someone's quality of life and embeds itself in their understanding of the world, then it's probably difficult to say that that person is "safe". Safe means means safe. It means no harm, no discomfort.

The point that I'm taking my sweet time to make, is just that even if the police in Khayelitsha sort their ish out and even if incidences of crime decrease, that doesn't mean that the residents of Khayelitsha are safe. Until the comforting privilege that comes from having no visceral concern for your wellbeing settles into the homes that stand between Mew Way and Baden-Powell Drive, I don't think anyone can in good conscience conclude that Khayelitsha is safe. My concern is a preemptive one, sure, and hopefully it's one that will be wasted. Hopefully the commission of inquiry won't just look at policing, it will look at what it means to be safe. Hopefully. 

Changing (most) minds

I had a couple of beers on Monday night with one of my students and a woman recently back from Sierra Leone. She went to do a bit of damage control after she lost funding on a project that's halfway through its implementation. It's a radio serial with some sexual health education undertones. She tells me that in central and west Africa there's a lot to do in terms of reproductive and sexual health. She threw out some stats, including that only 13% of Nigerian women use contraception actively.
"Thirteen percent?" I ask her.
"Thirteen percent," she confirms.
Apparently that's representative of many of the surrounding countries' family planning patterns.

So, first they built clinics. 'They' as in the local and international aid community, not her organization specifically. But not much changed. Then they trained doctors and nurses and community healthcare workers and anyone else they could really. Still no change.
"But why?" was my first question. "Is is a matter of access? Or stigma? Or some upside-down cultural norms?"
"It's not access," she maintains, "particularly not in the urban areas. Or at least access doesn't account for the extent of the non-use."
"So...?" I left my question looming over the table.

That's where they--her organization--come in. Their radio and TV programmes address behaviour and attitudinal change. They target young people--everyone does--and they embed "use a condom" messages in the soap opera scripts delivered to the listening public. It has been phenomenally successful, if their impact research from Sierra Leone is to be believed, and she doesn't believe it.
"We did the research and it turned out that 57% of new clinic users were coming to the clinic because of the show. The number seemed too high, so we asked the firm to redo their analysis. They did and they come up with another 57%. So we sent the data back to Vermont, and we had our own guys look over it. It was still 57%. Now they want to see the actual questionnaires, the pieces of paper. So when I left last week the staff in the local office packed it into a big box, I got to the airport and the guy at the airline told me I was overweight.... [long story short]... I was able to take half of the questionnaires shoved into an extra duffel bag, the other half are sitting in the airport in Freetown."

She doesn't need to persuade me, not really. Attitude change is about the most impossible thing to quantify, but anecdotally, I know it's what makes the difference. Like, I was sitting with a new partner yesterday, in a cramped little office near the Kuwait Taxi Rank in Site C. The walls of the office were covered in photos of his daughter, slips of paper with names and numbers on, and certificates denoting all the courses he's completed. I sat on a squeaky chair, we all did, all four of us; my knees rubbing against the woman's sitting next to me. It's an IT project, and they run programmes for everyone from youth groups to elderly ECD centre managers. And it's here that he tells me the importance of attitude.
"When they started, these women," he pauses to point to the photo on his screen of a group of greying women in aprons, sitting squinting at the computer screens in front of them, "and I showed them how to type, they told me they couldn't, "my fingers won't work on this" they said. So we had to persuade them first, before we could start, that their fingers could work. They used to think Facebook was a dating site, where their grandchildren went to cause trouble, but they changed their ideas and now they have pages for their creches and childcares and they learnt how to put pictures up and they do."

It's what the principal of a high school in Khayelitsha told me when I sat with her after rushing down Mew Way from the IT centre in Site C. "You can teach teachers the content, you can always learn content, but if they don't a passion, or love for the kids, if they don't want to be here..." she shakes her head, "we'd rather not have them."

From Sierra Leone to Site C, seems word on the street is wording the same thing: you can build clinics and computer labs, but the fireworks only start popping when people realize they've got to use them, that--at the risk of sounding Obamaesque--they can. All the rabble-rousing got me excited for change and for action and taking a chance, so I switched to chai but it's not for me and I'm back on rooibos and maybe I am too rigid in my attitude toward tea but it is what it is and not even subliminal messages in the lefty news I read can change my mind.

VIVA LA'ROOIBOS, VIVA!!

Click, stumble, repeat.

Thursday afternoon and I'm back in Khayelitsha. Back sitting in the waiting-room of one of my community partners, an organisation that provides mental health services to children and families. The room I'm in is small and yellow and covered in posters promoting sexual health, good nutrition, and generally positive life choices. The staff move between two rooms to my right, either walking between the two doors or calling across to one another. I sit, quite contentedly, waiting.

"You've been here some time now," one woman comes up to me, "can I get you some tea?"
I smile. "Ofcourse, yes please."
"Ubisi?"
"No thanks, kodwa iswekele, no, I mean itispuni iswekile enye?" I end the sentence a question, just to make sure I'm understandable.
She giggles at my shaky Xhosa and repeats, "no milk but one sugar."
"Enkosi sisi."
She turns to walk away and a voice calls from the doorway next to me:
"Don't tell me you don't speak Xhosa, just listen to you with the sugar!"
"Ewe," I agree, "ndiyazi the important things."
More laughter. "Yes you do, keep practicing."

The admin assistant is off the phone and looks over his counter to me, "keep going."
"Are you sure you're not busy?" I ask.
"No, come," he insisted, "keep talking."
We'd spent the preceding half hour practicing my Xhosa. At first it was just him and me, and I hadn't meant to distract him, but he was so psyched about the few sentences I could get out about the weather and the traffic that the small-talk had morphed into a conversation, which now attracted the attention of the whole office. The staff called out instructions, admonishments, corrections and advice as they heard me stumble over the still unfamiliar sounds. There was disagreement--and it was vehement and impassioned--about who was telling me what. There was also a lot of laughter. I wasn't helping myself, complementing my mangled Xhosa with white-girl questions:
"How do you whisper in Xhosa?"
More laughter.
"No, it's a serious question." I replied. "Can you make a soft click?"
A man standing eating his lunch out of a bright blue tupperware leans over to where I sit and starts clicking softly in my ear.
"Shoh, but that's some other kind of technique!" I try to mimic the muted sounds with mixed success.

I ended up being there the whole afternoon. I drank my tea, practiced my Xhosa, and was moved from chair to chair as space alternated between availability and demand. Eventually I ended up at the desk where everyone keeps their handbags. Behind the zips and the bits of bling I had a little time to think. To muse about why my Xhosa was such a hit. I'm not particularly fluent, far from it. Considering the amount of time I've spent in Xhosa-speaking neighbourhoods the last few years, and more recently the time I've spent in Xhosa class, you'd expect more meaningful linguistic achievement. And yet, my limited abilities are so welcomed.

Look, I suppose I've always known how few white South Africans make an effort, any effort, to learn Xhosa, or Zulu, or Tswana or any of the other nine official languages that we aren't exposed to in the well-decorated classrooms of our Model C schools. But it's really only now after I've mastered slightly more than the "Molo, unjani's?" that I'm starting to think about what that absence of effort means in relation to those vulnerable and bendy struts of all the constitutional goodies: equality, freedom, human dignity etc. I get that English is an internationally understood language, that it's the language of global trade and politicking, but what does a preference for English mean for people who don't call it their mother tongue? How does it exclude and demean? Because it does.

I speak Xhosa like a child, a child with a strange accent and a speech impediment. So, despite my general life confidence, my lack of ability discourages me from speaking in Xhosa. Fortunately, most people with whom I engage can speak English so I'm not silenced. But when I balance the option of speaking Xhosa, to speaking nothing--and in the context of my job sometimes I have to--it's kind of a kak decision to make. Do I speak and run the risk of people thinking I'm a fool, or do I smile and say nothing? As a white English-speaker and all the privilege that goes with that identity, I know that I have an infinitely easier time than most.

And so, while ndisasifunda isiXhosa and I sound like a loon most of the time, ndiza kuzama noko because I don't like that my language has the potential to exclude, silence, and marginalize people. (Also, my white-girl Xhosa is a really good ice-breaker and obviously if speaking Xhosa means more people offering more tea just so they can offer it in Xhosa, then hello yes, I am on that train.)

Between two corners

Everytime I visit the Wellness Centre, I drive past the neighbouring Daycare Centre. It's on the corner of the road with its brightly painted sign hanging off the building's awning. I've met the manager a couple of times before, there in the Seniors' Club bungalow. We've chatted, been friendly, but today I needed a favour. See, two of my students were meant to volunteer at a daycare centre in Barcelona but the daycare manager couldn't get some community leaders to sign an agreement about staffing for 2013 nor to decide on who from the community was going to help in the container where they run their programmes. So that process has stalled somewhere between a megalomanic and a bunch of kids who'll go back to running around the afternoon lanes and alleyways of Barcelona. Obviously, my students could no longer go there. The director of the homeless centre in Salt River, which was option number two, called me early Monday morning, she was angry and upset. Her organization is being evicted from the building they lease, the owners want to sell. It was unexpected, very sudden and unfair. "Good luck," I told her as we ended our conversation, "if there's anything you need from me, just let me know." I hung up the phone and stamped around in my pajama's for a bit, frustrated and pissed-off to be honest, about how my partner is being treated. Then I headed to work, started to stop running out of ideas and, as I do these days when this whole community development vibe gets to much for me, I phoned Tabs. "Sisi!" she called when she answered the phone, "how are you?"
"I need some help Tabs, how are you?"
She laughed, listened to my quandary, and we made a plan.

I drove into Khayelitsha this morning to drop off a pair of students at a high school there and to meet with the principal. They were short four teachers last week, and the principal explains, "the department is only giving us three, so we'll have to redo the timetable." She smiles apologetically at my students, as though it's her fault.
I don't know if it's the 7am meeting that's got me off my game, but I have an overwhelming urge to scream and shout and throw things. I get why kids burn their schools: in that moment I could have set fire to something. No, it's not constructive, but neither is not having enough teachers: as though one teacher too few is even the most serious issue here... I leave the school and drive to the Wellness Centre, slowing down to avoid the people walking in and around the taxis idling near the Pama Road bridge.

Tabs hears me talking to Lulu at the reception desk and pulls me into the kitchen, "you want a cup?"
She makes me sweet coffee and we stand for a while and chat. Ma'Monica joins us and I sit up on the counter like I always do, Tabby leaning her arms on my legs, hitting my knees for emphasis when she makes a forceful point. I've been there a while, our cups are empty, and we're paging through the Shoprite advertorial. "Don't you want to help me find Gloria?" I say to Tabs. The internet and phones haven't been paid so were cut off from last week already; there's nothing for her to do here. "Mmmm" she answers emphatically, "let's go."

We walk over the road to the Daycare Centre, greeting and hugging the staff. Gloria's in the office and she doesn't recognize me at first. "I had long hair last time," I tell her, and then she remembers.
"I wanted students from last year," she tells me, when I propose my offer, "so yes, ofcourse they can come." She walks Tabs and I around the centre and explains that there was a burglary last night. Someone broke in the window of the outside room and stole the keys to the other bungalow. "Why do people steal from children?" I want to know, Gloria just shakes her head.
"We're waiting now for someone to come to open the bungalow" she says, "so for now the children must all sit in here." There must be about 20 of them, squeezed into a sliver of room. Their little bodies fit into one another like puzzle pieces. There is no room to play or move really, just to be inside and to listen to the mas tell them stories and teach.

I drive back to the office via the corner of Lansdowne Road and Mew Way. The lights were out when I came in this morning: no red, no orange, no green, just the blue of the traffic car parked on the island in Mew Way. The officer stood leaning against the bonnet of the car watching the wheels and feet negotiate their way over and across the intersection. But the lights were back on now. They'll be off again this afternoon, I can almost guarantee it, but I don't know, just for a moment--maybe it was Tabs, maybe it was Gloria--I felt kind of hopeful.

The Year of the Yay

As the two and a half avid followers of my little blog know, the end of last year did not leave me particularly inspired about the world. Not just the end of the year, the entire second half really. One horrendous and depressing event after the other just grayed South Africa and Cape Town with a haze of discontent and longing for another reality. But the year has been swept from centre stage to recycling depot and twenty-thirteen has shimmied its way out of the wings. I have high expectations for twenty-thirteen; at the very least it can't be worse than twenty-twelve. Below is my list of five things that I hope will transform my laments of last year into something less Old Testament, and into something a little more Madiba Jive.

1. Minimum Norms and Standards for South African schools
Sure, it would have been great if civil society didn't have to take the government to court to demand them to generate a document that should have been compiled shortly after Romulus and Remus got into their little tiff about where to build Rome. Point is, after much protesting and politicking, the Department of Basic Education has to pull itself towards itself this year and outline a set of infrastructural norms and standards for every school. Now, whether such a set of norms and standards will actually result in every school having a sufficient number of toilets and an abundance of window panes is not immediately guaranteed, but it's a step in that direction and it's a step so tangible you can smell the sweat of the activists whose marching feet forced Ms Motshekga into court.

2. The Khayelitsha Police Commission of Inquiry
The first response of the women at the Wellness Centre in Khayelitsha--where I've wiled away a good many days in the last 18 months--to my announcement that I would be taking the bus out to them instead of my car, was that I should never, ever walk in the stretch of Bonga Drive in front of the school. I've driven that stretch so often its every pothole is jaggedly etched in my mind and I've never seen anything worthy of concern, but the women assure me; it's just not safe there. That intuitive feeling of insecurity, that almost imperceptible anxiety that has spent so long on your skin it has become normal, that edginess balanced between fear and content: no one should have to live with that. But in Khayelitsha, as in so many parts of South Africa, many people do. What makes it all the more upsetting in Khayelitsha is that the people charged with protecting residents and for ensuring the visibility of justice are so wholly unsuccessful at fulfilling their mandate. And so the people asked for an inquiry into policing in Khayelitsha. As can be expected, it was first accepted by some, then rejected by others, taken to court, protested outside of court and on December 13 the legality of the commission was heard. While judgement was reserved, I'm putting this on my list because the commission must just take place and I have faith that the judiciary will make the right call.

3. Design Capital Craziness
Yes, yes, I know Cape Town is only the 2014 Design Capital of the World but 2013 will be the year of buildup, which means that like in 2009, people will be employed to buff and shine lampposts, the City will distribute thousands of generically geometrically designed maps (which are mostly useless but well-intentioned) and gaaitjies the Main Road over will have plenty of opportunity to practice the Dutch and German phrases they picked up the last time Western Europe descended en masse to the Mother City. Ofcourse the dark side of it all is the sweeping away of homeless people who live in the City Bowl, along with the other less human flotsam; all cobbled together in the squirming bundle that privilege likes to ignore. Oh, no, wait, no doom and gloom, no no, it's lucky number twenty-thirteen! Maybe the homeless will be allowed to stay so that visiting Instagrammers can take filtered pictures of their romantic destitution, add in a caption borrowed from Chinua Achebe and post it up on their Google+ pages to show how deeply Africa has moved them. Sigh. Look, I think the employment of lamppost buffers and shiners still counts as a win.

4. Cyril Ramaphosa
Controversial, I know. But I'm still looking forward to seeing how his Deputy Presidency of the ANC translates in practice. My optimism is premised on the belief that ANC party politics cannot get any messier than they already are and that Ramaphosa's wealth, while immense, seems more legitimate than most. I don't think he managed his role at Marikana very well, at all, but in the spirit of the new year and second chances, I think that he is able to manage situations like Marikana. He has the background for it--his role in NUM and in the negotiations preceding '94 indicate his competencies--and he's been out of mainstream politics long enough not to have earned the scorn of too many. Also, he respects Motlanthe and he doesn't strike me as the easily manipulatable type, so I'm hopeful that he'll facilitate a dignified exit for Motlanthe that won't make us bear witness to another Mbeki-esque ousting. A hundred years ago when I was on my high school debating team, Ramaphosa was one of our go-to examples of good government officials. Admittedly, that was a while ago but I still like him a hell of a lot more than some of his colleagues.

5. The DA's bright blue Tshirts
I am not the biggest fan of politicians and political parties, no matter their colour of Tshirts. When it comes to social change, I'm a facta non verba kinda person. And politics is way too verba heavy for my liking. So why do the DA's bright blue Tshirts excite me? Simple, they symbolize the lighter side of politics. The side that I can poke fun at, critique, mock and shake my head at. The picture of Helen Zille in her floppy Khaki hat and bright blue Tshirt marching the streets of rural Kwa-Zulu Natal and wagging her PW Botha finger in the black policeman's face could not have been caricatured better. I am not pro-ANC, nor am I pro-DA (if anything I'm pro dismantling every Focauldian institution that regulates my life but that's a dream I'll have to hold onto for a while) but I am unequivocally pro political fashion. Viva the brightly coloured Tshirt that the DA does so well, VIVA!

And so, with one last glance to the wheelie bin of twenty-twelve, I fix my eyes onto the year of yay that will be twenty-thirteen, and thank every god that ever was and wasn't that even if the year starts to fester, I'll always have a cup or twenty-thirteen of rooibos tea.

Sigh. But for reals, Mr President?

It's not the the Mail and Guardian's release and analysis of the KPMG forensic audit on Zuma and his finances comes as much of a surprise. Ever since the Arms Deal and the Shaik trial, it's been fairly indubitable that Zuma's not as squeaky clean and incorruptible as he has always maintained. And it's not that I'm not pro public interest media, but the M&G's pre-Manguang timing is not going to do them any favours when they are inevitably criticized for "being political"...

Look, Zuma is not the first, only and won't be the last politician with a dubious financial history. Shady finance sort of goes with the territory it would seem. Politicians abusing their office crosses party lines like nothing else. For me what it comes down to is inconsiderate abandon of the responsibilities granted to them by their electorate. Now, like most South Africans, I'm no forensic auditor and so as this whole situation unfolds I'm going to have to rely on the interpretations of others more skilled in the gentle art of financial management to make up my mind. But I'm a human being, capable of feeling, and being inconsiderate is something that I can see and understand.

About a year ago now I went on a site visit of "problem toilets" in Khayelitsha with some ward councillors and city officials; a particular flavour of politician. At one point, we stopped at a standpipe where a young woman was just starting to fill up a large bucket of water. We stood around as local residents talked about their lack of access to toilets, about how they have to come to fetch water for cleaning, cooking, drinking, washing, everything, from this standpipe. They explained how the ground here is dirty and invited one of the visiting officials to reach down and feel it. Not given much of a choice, he bent down and connected just the tips of his fingers with the ground. It looked dry at places, but he'd got a bit of a mushy patch.

As the group started to move on, the official walked over to the standpipe where the woman's bucket was close to full. Looking away from the standpipe and toward the group as he started to talk again, the official moved his hands under the steady stream of water filling the woman's bucket. The water covered his hands and then dropped into her bucket as he rubbed his fingers clean. I looked at the woman standing next to his shadow and watched her watching the water flowing over the man's dirty hands and into her bucket in sepia slow-motion.

"What if she has to cook with that?" whispered my companion, equally mesmerized and confused by the scene.
"Obviously he didn't think about that." I whispered in reply. Now I wish we had shouted.

There are many ways to be an inconsiderate politician: you can steal tax money, take bribes, you can revel in your unearned wealth while your neighbours starve. Or you can wash your dirty hands in somebody else's bucket. I can't quite work out whether inconsiderateness occurs along a spectrum, where bribery is definitely worse than insensitivity, or whether each activity occupies its own paradigm of wrong, and it's how deep you go down that paradigm that adds to the severity of each action.

And as if Zuma isn't bad enough, the DA circus that is sure to arrive soon will no doubt drive me up the mountain. Yuk, yuk, yuk. Maybe anarchic self-government is the way forward?

Coming and Going

I didn't realize til I drove into Khayelitsha this morning how much I've missed being there. Yes, obviously I missed the Seniors Club and the staff at the EWC, but I didn't realize the extent to which I'd missed the place. I can't quantify why, and I hope it's not some romanticized ideal of community playing mind-games with me, but driving over the Mew Way bridge and into Site C I just breathed this deep and relieved sigh, reassuring myself that it's ok, Khayelitsha hasn't left in the last month, it's all still here. Still broken, still unbroken, still fixed. Sure, things have changed, in such a mutable environment meaning comes from change, but it's still here.

A couple of months back, someone asked me what the empty plot over the road from the Site C terminus was about. Today, the construction of the new Shoprite exposes the skeletal beginnings of the building. The tshishanyama fires fill the road with a heavy and moving fog. I wait as I drive down Phaphani Crescent for the woman on crutches to swing her way over the road. The house on the corner, that turquoise one; man, the lavender bushes on the verge outside border on abundant.

I had a meeting at a partner organization in Site C, and then, ofcourse, I made a quick stop at the EWC. I couldn't not. I follow Bonga Drive past the Police Station, past the carwash where the vacuum-cleaner cord hangs from a loose plug a little way up an electrical pole, and comes to rest in a pool of muddy water at its feet. The potholes aren't as bad as I remember them, or perhaps they've been filled up and re-holed in the time I've been away? Those potholes become miniature tidal pools when it rains, with shreds and shards of food packaging swimming lazily about in them. At the corner of Pama Road, there's a salon offering mani's and pedi's for finger- and foot-nails.

My ma's are excited to see me and I sit down for a quick cupcake with them. They're loving the change in the weather, and have new outside furniture that they show-off. They tell me that:
"There are two other ladies who came here," a pause, "was it last week?" Ma'MP asks me.
I shrug. "Two ladies from where?"
"Oh, they are like you," is the answer. "They come from the college to be with us."
I smile. "Ah, that'll be nice!"
"Yes," is the answer. "We showed them your poster," she points to where it still hangs on the wall. It reads: "Ndifunde lukhulu kuni", I have learnt so much from you.
It's not that I'm territorial, not that I'm jealous, but I'm really, really happy that my poster still hangs on the wall, that my presence will be felt by those two other ladies.

I wave at the security guard on the way out, at least after a year I no longer have to go through the ritual of signing her well-thumbed ledger. I swear like a pirate at a taxi on Lansdowne Road after it forces me closer to the pavement than I usually like to be. I can see the tops of the water-reeds in RR-Section, this area really is as much raw as it is urbanized. There's a sign saying "No Dumping Here" just next to the porta-potties lining the Mew Way N2 onramp. A mound of sky blue rubbish bags have started to collect at its base.

A protest

So, again, I made the mistake of reading the comments on an article about the service delivery protests in Khayelitsha last week and the week before. Some fool said something to effect of: "I don't understand why they must protest, surely they have toilets in the townships?" Short answer, No, no fool, "they" don't. But you're not getting off the hook with a short answer, nay-nay. Your undercover racist-classist denial deserves a beating. If you choose to ignore reality because living in your make-believe world makes you not such a bad person, then honestly, I have no sympathy for your ignorance.

Months and months ago, almost a year now, some women who live in RR section asked me to investigate why they didn't have flush toilets but their neighbours did. Now, I knew that the sanitation situation was dire, but I was like: hold up, I thought all toilets flushed? Even the dodgy porta potties at music festivals flush. Anyway, I told them I didn't understand their question so they said they would show me. We drive into RR Section along an untarred single lane between shacks and other informal structures. Past women doing washing in big metal buckets. Past men sitting on 20litre paint tins, shooting the breeze. Past kids with sticks, past sleeping dogs. Past the flies that sleep on the sleeping dogs. The lane is so narrow; everyone has to move out of the way of my car as I drive past. 

We get to an open space with a standpipe and three blue portable toilets. Some toilets you can flush, those are closer to the main road, but deeper in, there are just chemical toilets like these. We stand around watching children play in the soggy ground, my friend who is with me shouts at the toddlers to stay away from the toilets. The one woman disappears for a bit and comes back with a mask. She wears it when she goes to the toilet because the smell is so bad and she is worried of getting sick. Mshengu toilet hire come here two or three times a week to clean out the toilets, but these three toilets are used by 200-300 people: all the people in the surrounding shacks. It's not enough.

When we drive out they show me other toilets that have locks on them. My friend asks them why this is and translates for me later the rapid and angry Xhosa that I heard in response. 

"It is so drunk people and children can't get into trouble in the toilet. What happens is that a few shacks will get together and they will have the key and then they can use the toilet. But this is also unfair because sometimes with the toilets that flush, people will just put a lock on them so that only they can use them and not the other people around. This means that those other people also have to walk further and come and use the toilets that are not in their area which makes the problem even worse."

Unfortunately, the situation isn't as straightforward as this even. When I did a walking tour of "problem toilets" in Site B with some city councillors, they explained that the city also gives out padlocks to families so that they will take "ownership" of the toilets and keep them clean and in good working order. They don't give the families cleaning supplies to clean, or tools to fix broken toilets, so I assume they believe in the power of fairy dust...? 

My point is just, to you, the fool who thinks that "they" have toilets: hello yes, welcome, welcome wamkelekile to the real world. Here, in the soiled soil, behind a mask, in front of a padlock and amongst a group of toddlers splashing each other with water so infested with ecoli it is almost impossible that these children do not have diarrhea: I hope you have found your answer. 

Highway to the Danger Zone (?)

The last couple of mornings, I've woken up to desperate texts from my students: "Do you think we can go out to Khayelitsha today?" I want to tell them yes. In fact, I want to shout a resounding YES, one which will reverberate off the dry-walling in my office as I sit, still half-asleep, reading the news reports on the latest service delivery protests on the Cape Flats. Things don't look good, so I call Tabby.
"Yes sisi," she tells me from the Wellness Centre, "things aren't good here."
"But is it safe, I mean could I come through to say hello?"
She pauses. "I don't think so sisi."
Look, the Wellness Centre verges the epicentre of the unrest around Bonga Drive and Mew Way, so I can understand her hesitancy. But what about everywhere else?

A student of mine usually spends her mornings in the Fezeka community garden in Gugs, farming with a group of apron-wielding older women. Last week, they told her not to come; bricks had been thrown at the neighbouring community court, they weren't sure what was happening. Another student, doing a recycling project at Khayelitsha station was told something similar, as were my students running educational workshops just there down Lansdowne Road. It's not that their sites are particularly volatile, it's that the surrounding area is. I picture the Golden Arrow bus that was stoned last week, flailing into shacks. Stretches of the N2 are closed today.

So I want to tell my students yes. I want to tell them that it's safe. Can I tell them that without contradicting the man in Makhaza who told them no matter what, their white faces meant they looked like Helen Zille's daughter?

A little while ago, Lulu gave me a lesson in race. We were sitting in the Wellness Centre office, both bored and hot. I offered to drive her to Langa so she could give aromatherapy to the seniors' club there. Thing is, Lulu is blind and can't navigate the way, and I don't know Langa. So she shook her head and turned down my offer "South Africans don't know each other," she explained. "They'd see you are white and take advantage." It's Lulu's sentiment that I remember this morning as I write to my students, explaining to those of white hue that the politics of the DA - ANCYL relationship and the meaning of their race makes a trip to Khayelitsha a potentially bad idea in the context of the current  protests. 

I'm angry with ANCYL, for making statements like "we'll make the province ungovernable." And I'm angry with the DA for being unnecessarily antagonistic and not taking responsibility for service-delivery in the way that they should. I'm pissed off with both for embedding their claims in a discourse of race. Mostly though, like my students, I feel incredibly guilty for not seeing my Ma's last week; they were expecting me. Oh, and ofcourse I feel guilty for making an issue of social development an issue of middle-class me. 

It's just a lose-lose-lost situation on all fronts. Time for tea then. 

Tell me a story of sand

My office is hosting a group of visiting colleagues next week and I'm taking them around to our partner sites to give them a taste of what it is our students do here. Part of this tasting includes an orientation to the areas in which we work. I've mentioned in a previous post that I really don't like orientating people to Cape Town; to reduce the complexity of the city to anything less than the labyrinth of intersecting points of beautiful chaos that it is, seems, well, unjust. For a twenty-something year old who knows close to nothing about the world to champion this orientation, shoh, the unjustness moves from shaded grey to saturated yellow. But I take the challenge seriously, don't worry.

I'm putting together my orientation pack, and writing a my lines on each of the areas. It all sounds so simultaneously trite and Wikipedia-esque. I'm tempted to replace my words on Khayelitsha with those of someone else. See, a little while ago I asked the Ma's to describe Khayelitsha. Their first words weren't about the history or the politics. Not about the sanitation-absence in RR section that is rapidly mutating into a public health crisis. No. They told me about the sand. "The sand?" you ask. Yes. The sand.

"Oooh, when we first came here the wind just blew and blew." Ma'Regina screws up her eyes and gestures with her hands. There are nods and waves of agreement from the other women listening in.
"Yes," she continues, "it would blow the sand right into your house." She pauses, looking down at the pale green knitting in her hands. Then she turns to me and shakes her head, "you could try anything but that sand would come in."

Man, they spoke about that living, breathing sand and they lamented its ally, the wind. Before the people, the shoes, the feet on the ground there was the sand. It defined their experience here for years. Now that the sand is covered by shacks, by plastic and tyres and development shrapnel, it blows less. Relief.
"It blows less."

So, somewhere between the sand and the suburbs I need to navigate a path that represents a version of Cape Town simple enough to find in a day. I shake my head at me. Ya, I don't know how I'm going to do it either.

Foreigner

Khayelitsha has never seemed far away. It's 30kms down the N2 and I can drive there in 20 minutes if there's no traffic. I have friends whose daily commute to work takes them longer than that. I suppose what I'm getting at, is that conceptually, Khayelitsha has always been part of my city.

This week, I went with one of my students to her research site in Harare. We wanted to experiment with different modes of transport to get there, so after some time perusing the Golden Arrow website, we squeezed on a taxi and made our way to the terminus in town. I bought a packet of Niknaks, and sat down next to the window. We were off to a good start. An hour later we were as far as Nyanga. Alfonso, who drives our students to their placements during the school term, says his GPS always triggers off an alarm when he enters Nyanga, letting him and the tracking company know the van has just entered a dangerous area. I get it, it's dangerous, but hells, it's also just Nyanga. People live here and love here, go to school, go the bank, sell Tupperware at the terminus.

So we left Nyanga via the perpetually winding Lansdowne Road. Stopping, starting, past shacks, past goats, past shiny cars and donkeys carts. Wet laundry hangs in long lines along the railway fence, potholes, taxis, mostly just people. People, people, people. Site C and we're in Khayelitsha. Past the Caltex petrol station with it's bright red Coco-Cola sign, reading "Welcome to Kuwait". It's a mystery that one. Mew Way finally and the end is in sight. I stop the bus somewhere along Spine Road, the driver shouts at me as we leave, he only charged us for tickets to Rylands, a stop about an hour earlier. I explain that it's not my problem he made assumptions as to our intended destination, I asked him for two tickets to Harare. He grumbles and waves us off.

We walk down Spine Road, into Ntlazane. The wind makes this walk seem longer than it is. There's a man lugging rubbish down the road, another cleans his front yard. Two toddlers play in front of the door to their shack. I wave to them as we walk past, but they're too lost in their game too notice us. After two hours, we arrive. I'm exhausted.

An hour later, we leave. I can't do the bus again. Just can't. So we wave down a taxi and go through to Site C. At the taxi rank we change taxi's and hop on one going to Town. We sit in the front row with two other girls and their luggage: two massive traveling bags. I sit in the gap between sits, the weight of my neighbour's bag pulling my body forward and keeping me balanced. I realize as we drive that we're going to get to town as the after-work exodus begins. So instead, as we reach the crown of the freshly named Nelson Mandela Boulevard, the taxi pulls over to the edge of the highway and drops us off on a narrow shoulder. We walk up the highway, to the pedestrian bridge at Roodebloem Road. Over the highway and we start the trek down to Main Road. Get on one last taxi, and back to the office.

The round-trip has taken close on five hours.

Suddenly, the distance between here and Khayelitsha becomes vast, impregnable, uncrossable. This is the seventh year I've spent moving from west to east of the airport, and never before have the parts of my city felt so apart. But now, I get it. I get how the suburbs and city bowl can seem like a foreign far-off place. I get it how it's so much easier for here to go there, than for there to come here.

The world is unfair, welcome to Kuwait.

Station v Station

So Kuyasa, Land of the Solar Panels. It always surprises me to see the rows of identical houses, with rows of identical geysers hooked up to rows of identical solar panels on the roof. I can't remember who the project belongs to, I think someone Scandinavian. It looks Scandinavian. In between all the identical houses are electrical wires netting the surface of the roads. I'm used to seeing electrical wires form a canopy, not a ground-cover. But I wasn't there to look at alternative energy sources. I was there to look at informal trading in Khayelitsha. More specifically, I was in Kuyasa to look at informal trading at its train station.

Now Khayelitsha train station, HEY! You can buy live chickens from squawking cages, or snack on some chicken feet off the braai. You can get your hair done, or buy a fridge. Fruits, veggies, washing detergents. The bridge over the tracks extends the shopping experience, with flapping canvas stalls and rickety metal structures. It smells of fire, of fresh produce, of less fresh produce. Someone is playing beating music, a man sits on a wheelie chair in front of his container shop chatting to a couple of guys who stand leaning against the open container door. The City wants to regulate the space, but there's public land and no-man's land and private land owned by Chinese businesses. There's some rental and no rental and no uniform designation of space and services. Regulating that space is going to be a challenge, to put it lightly.

A couple of curves down the road is Kuyasa train station. Think lonely tunbleweeds and wide open spaces. Shiny new red brick buildings with no occupants, broad entrances covered by (closed) black roller-doors. All the infrastructure, none of the activity. Just nothing. It's almost eerie. White elephant eerie. The woman showing me around points out a young couple sitting on a bench, sharing a naartjie, there on the far side of the quad. "That's about as lively as it gets," she tells me. Two people and a citrus fruit.

The cynic in me would say that once upon a time, someone in the City was tasked with upgrading a train station in Khayelitsha. They took one look at the mutable Khayelitsha station, shuddered, and then shuffled a little further down the tracks. Struck by the absence of lively chaos at Kuyasa, they smiled to themselves and built a beautiful station. I shame my inner cynic into a corner. It's probably less sinister than that, probably less intentional. It's probably, like most flopped souffle development projects, a combination of shitty/overly optimistic planning and too little political will or know-how to challenge the plan once it's been set in motion.

Improving Schools

I went to the launch of UCT's Schools Improvement Initiative yesterday afternoon. Took a bunch of my students, jumped into our little bus and made our way to Ilitha Park. The launch was at COSAT School (all architecturally designed with green grounds and grass), and combined with the red roofs and front gardens of Ilitha Park, it looks almost middle-class as my one student pointed out. You could almost forget you're in Cape Town's biggest township. The launch itself, well, it was a launch. Flowers on stage and chicken-wings on the refreshment table. A choral interlude, a powerpoint, and speeches from politicians who observed protocol. I was impressed at the time, taken in by the concise presentations and choreographed singing, but now I realize I'm not as psyched as I thought I was.

The SII is, unsurprisingly, an intervention aimed at improving schools. It's not that it isn't a necessary, relevant, important intervention, it's just that in the sober reflection of an average Tuesday afternoon, the launch last night didn't show me how it is all that different from other necessary, relevant and important interventions. Khayelitsha is home to a barraging multitude of interventions like these, and the launch didn't leave me with the sense that this one is different. This one, yes, this one, is going to work. It's going to change things. It's going to be the intervention version of Obama's Hope poster.

Maybe I'm a cynic. Maybe working at the intersection of university and community has furnished me with jade-coloured glasses. Maybe the SII will be different, I really hope it will... In the meantime, I'll just nibble on the yoghurt-covered cranberries I found in my trail mix and try to remember and hold onto that initial spark of excitement I felt last night when the programme director welcomed us all.