Plastic chairs

A few years ago, I was standing in a school quad looking at a furniture graveyard. The skeletal remains of desks and chairs were piled in what must have started as a stack but had grown into a jagged mound of educational debris. I can't remember the school, I can't remember why I was there, but the image of all the bended broken bits; I remember. I can also remember thinking that the discarded plastic chairs where so symbolic of the people and the system that broke them. Their graffitied orange seats would once have been clean and eager, they would have sat upright, prepared and full of potential. But now, at the end of the concrete quad, they're piled up anonymously with the inscriptions of the relatively powerful defining them far more so than their purpose.

I found myself sitting in a concrete quad last week, looking into the backs of some red plastic chairs. They were covered in black marker and shallow scratches, and were easing away from their metal structure at places, but they were still standing. I used to be bemused by the 'JFK' tag that is so ubiquitous in this part of Cape Town; why the fascination with Kennedy? Then I learnt about the Junky Funky Kids and my misguided assumptions were squashed by the contextual realities of Lavender Hill. So I'm sitting staring at JFK, at lists of names and one-liners, and I'm staring at the rows and rows of high school learners on the otherside of these chairs, sitting on the concrete with their hands up around their faces to shield them from the sun.

"It's not right that you come to write your exams the morning after your father gets shot," the principal is saying, "but that's our lives here and we need to work with it."
The learners nod, they understand. "So we try to make things work and we've got our turnaround strategy..." he continues.
It's hot. I put down my pen and phase out of focus. The women next to me are in visceral agreement with the principal, nodding, shaking, moving forwards and backwards in their seats. A little boy escapes his mother's hand as she raises them to clap at a statement she found particularly profound and he runs like toddlers do, aimlessly. I lose sight of him as he circles behind me but then here he is standing, staring up at me open-mouthed. I smile, "Hey kid." No response. No fear, no shyness, no engagement, just silence, absence. So I sit there staring at him as he stands staring at me.

"...and so we painted a wall of commitment and you have all committed to coming to school this year?"
The learners chorus "Yis," as though his doubt is unfounded. He nods, puts away his notes and sits down. As the woman in front of me joins in the vigorous applause, her chair wobbles preemptively. She stops clapping and holds on the metal legs to steady it. It steadies. Three of the four feet back on the ground, the last one hovering permanently above it. I'm transfixed as I watch that chair, it reminds me of something. Falling-not falling-falling-not falling-falling-not falling: yes, like DiCaprio's spinning top.

There is no shade in this quad, only sun and sweat and the soundless prayers of the mothers around me, echoing off the painted walls and into the seated swarm of chance.

Track 6

I was back in Lavender Hill, watching two students, local this time, struggle with a wheel-barrow load of sand. They are struggling partly because the barrow is heavy, but mostly because they keep having to take breaks to laugh at their inability to move it. Or giggle really, and point accusing fingers at one another about who is letting the team down. They're both pretty big, beefy guys, but as one of them explained in defense: "it's my winter body, Jen, I'm not yet in shape!" I laugh and tell him I understand, and I carryon filming because it's going to make great footage; the two of them with this seesaw wheel-barrow and the fits of laughter.

Earlier in the day I ran a workshop with them and thirty of their peers on development. It's kind of amazing to watch really. I remember being in that space a little while ago, feeling like the rose-water rain was gone and I was seeing clearly the injustices and inequalities that colour the real world for the first time. It's disarming, disillusioning in one way, but kind of exhilarating in another: the imperfections of the world give it purpose. Anyway, so it's on that edge that they stand, staring into this simultaneous abyss of a volcano. I wouldn't want to be back there, but it's kind of cool to be an invited observer.

In the small group discussion I led with eight female students, I asked them what they thought the relationship between development and gender was. I got a few blank stares, one or two nods, nothing emphatic. "Er ok," I start slowly, safely, "right. So, imagine there's a country ok, and it's really economically advanced. And it has roads and bridges and dams and everything else, right?" The women nod as they buy into my imagination. I continue, "Ok, and everyone is this country can vote, and everyone can marry who they want and practice whatever religion they want. Sounds good, sounds developed?" We all smile. Pretty idyllic really. "So there's this cool place, but in this country, see, men beat women. Their partners, their wives, their daughters, strangers." Everyone stops nodding. I give them a moment to process this reality. "So do we call this country developed? Can we call this country developed?"

I am reassured to see them all shake their heads. No, I'm relieved. I'm not entirely sure what I would have done if one of them had said "yes". But I'm not finished, not just yet. This isn't terrain I'm confortable in, not because I don't care--I care deeply--but because I'm really scared of saying the wrong thing. I have this opportunity here to introduce them to an idea; but it's like that old joke about the Jehovah's Witness not knowing what to say when she gets invited in, because all that she's practiced is the speech at the gate. I feel like gravity has multiplied, that I'm suddenly weighted to the ground, the only thing I can think about is how I'm probably going to insult every branch of feminism just to make a point to a bunch of non-feminists but hells, I've got this far and they're all looking at me now, eight pairs of eyes fixed to where I sit cross-legged on my plastic chair.
"You know, right, that around the world, in different development sectors, diverse projects, everyone says the same thing: if you invest in a women, her family and her community benefit, with a man, " I open my hands, palms facing up, "you invest in him. And that's where it stops." I talk to them about girls' education, about how if you can keep a young girl in school for just a few more years, really, the world is just a profoundly a better place. "You basically make a miracle, everytime a girl finishes school, that's how much better it is, for her, for everyone."

"So, the relationship between gender and development?" I ask again. Their responses are a little more emphatic now. It's a tiny victory, a speckle of a victory, a smidge.

I overhear a conversation later, between one of the women who was in my group and someone else, about her auntie who left her abusive uncle after 37 years. "We never thought she would be able to leave after all that time, after everything he did to her. But then one day, she just did and she got a divorce."

Change hey, what a cray-bean. Could be seasonal, winter to summer.
Could take 37 years.
I like to think it's inevitable.

Say cheese

So on Monday I visited a partner organization of mine who doesn't have a website to take some video footage to load onto our website so that our incoming students can still get a good idea about what is done there. I arrived and after a chit-chat with the director about the weather, the NGO funding crisis and her plans to emigrate with her retired husband to Greece next year, I whipped out my little flip-cam and asked: "Are you ready?"

"No wait!" was the urgent response. "I'm still wearing my apron."

She undid the string around her neck, rumpled the apron into a ball and threw it under her desk. "Ok, ready." she told me. 

I watched a professionally done video of another of my partners earlier today, it was a far-cry from my shakey and sketchy attempts at filmography. But mine, hey, mine is authentic. Just some peeps chatting about the work that they do, covering their faces with their hands at first to accompany the nervous laughter, then building up a confidence and eventually relishing in the opportunity to be immortalized on my sandwich-sized camera. They're going to love my amateur footage. 

Couple of months back, I was wasting time in Lavender Hill with some kids who were insulting my shoes. Apparently my sturdy brown sneakers were ridiculously uncool. "You should buy Nikes," the one ten year old told me.

"Huh, with what money?" I replied. "No man, Nikes are expensive."

"And those were cheap." one of her peers stated disapprovingly. 

"Yes." I replied, and gave her the stink-eye. "And don't be rude!" This is why I'm no kiddie fan. Or at least one of the more compelling reasons why not.

I take out my phone to answer a text and immediately there are shouts to be photographed. I tell the girls that I'm never going to see them again so they'll never see the photos, to which they reply, "we'll see them on your phone."

I acquiesce and start taking a couple of shots, and then a couple more because they all want opportunities to pose in different configurations with different people. One of their hobbit-sized friends walks over to see what's happening. 

"Do you want to be in a photo?" I ask. 

Surprisingly, she shakes her head. "No I don't want to be in a photo today, I wanna get my teeth first."

I stare at her blankly. "What?"

She opens her mouth to show me an empty top row. "I left them at home."

I stop staring blankly. "Fair enough."

"Auntie, auntie!" the girls shout. They've coordinated themselves into a Charlie's Angel style pose. I shake my head and take the shot, and am bombarded by small bodies a half second later, with fingers covered in colourants grabbing my phone. I resist the urge to shove them away. Instead I sigh, hand over my phone and go lean against the pole overlooking the watertank. 

Playing fields

The chairperson of the Lavender Hill Development Trust showed me an aerial map last week. She pointed out a dilapidated structure on the boundary of Lavender Hill High. "They call it the pink house," she tells me.
"What happens there?" I ask.
She offers a short laugh. "No one really knows. All we know is that there was a separate entrance," she points to what looks like a gap in the school fence, "and people on foot and in cars would go to house, stay a while, and leave."
Now that the sports fields have been built, and a new fence constructed, access to the pink house is somewhat limited. Now you have to come at it from the east, from the side of the informal settlement, not the M5.

The Development Trust was set up to manage a sustainability fund for the management of the sports fields. "Why aren't the sports fields the school's problem?" you may wonder...

Couple of years back, the infamous Bottles and I were doing an internship with an urban development organization based in Khayelitsha. One of the activities with which I was tasked, was to increase the learners' interest in the sports fields that had recently been built on their school grounds. See, there were three schools in the area for whom these fields were built. Now, all that these three schools needed to do was to sit down and work out a schedule: who was going to use the sports fields on what afternoons for what sports. Months after the fields had been built, the schools hadn't got this right, and the organization hadn't handed over management of the fields. The idea was that if more learners had greater interest in the fields, and knew how to "participate" in the process of using them, the schools would feel the pressure to get their poultry aligned, and, quite simply, to sort their shit out.

And so, two years later, I'm sitting in the HQ/lounge of the Lavender Hill Development Trust drinking tea and joining the lament of the chairwoman.

The sports fields are not the school's problem, because, well, in many cases, the school is the problem. Not the whole school, no-no, and therein lies problem number one: often, schools do not work as one unit. Therefore, problem number two: management of resources like sports fields becomes a political activity. Which leads us to problem number three: between the internal politicking and the external politicking, the doing very often does not get done.

"Another cup of tea?" she offers.
"Ah, I've got to get back to the office." I tell her.

I drive back down the M5, past the primary school on the corner, there are a couple of kids milling around at the fenced entrance. I hope it's break time.

Drops of paint

My hands are covered in paint. Blue paint. In high school, when I aspired to be a hippie, my hands were always covered in paint from various teenage angst art projects. Today, they are covered in paint because on Saturday I painted a shipping container blue, and the paint has become one with my hands it would seem. I was out in Lavender Hill, overlooking a dilapidated wall and an empty plot with plastic bags and rusty tins. There was indecipherable graffiti on the wall; could have been a gang tag, could have been a kiddie's squiggle. Could have been an angsty art project.

So I painted this container. That's a lie. I supervised ten people painting two shipping containers, but semantics, who cares.

At the end of the day, the containers sat transformed. There are a couple of reasons why painting these two containers was meaningful. If we hadn't done it, the small team of women who run this organization would have had to spend some afternoons, which they usually spend feeding and teaching kids from the neighbourhood, painting. So we gave them time. Always valuable. Then there's the tangible: now there are two shiny containers sitting in the restless sand, marking an oasis from the chaos that attempts to creep in. And there's the fluffy: stronger relationships between community-organization-university, and for the students, exposure to the ever-elusive Other. 

But then, right, you've got to think: what do these shipping containers mean in the Gotham of Lavender Hill? 

"Aaah, but don't be such a cynic," you say, "drop in the bucket and all that." 

Ok, ok, drop in the bucket, fine. But, I'll see your analogy and raise you one slice of reality.

Back before my teenage angst I was an outdoorsy kid. I spent my childhood in a frenetic oscillation between trees, mud and my swimming pool. My best, right, was to get out of the pool and drop water into two puddles on the textured terracotta tiles of my parents' stoep. I'd make one puddle broad, make the other one deep, and I'd watch them in their race to be evaporated. The little drops that didn't quite make it to the puddle, they went first; shrinking into nothingness as I lay on my tummy and watched, always hoping that I'd see a drop rising. And that's my point, see. When one drop forms a puddle with many other drops, it looks puddly for longer. But a drop, just the one, is gone before you can think through the science behind it. 

So, it's not that I'm against drop in the bucket development. It's just that a drop falling in a desert needs to be part of flood to have affect. 

Between mud and bullets

On the Capricorn side of Lavender Hill there's an informal settlement. It was about 2004 when people started moving here. I asked two women who lived nearby where the new residents came from, they told me "all over. But mostly from backyards." There is one broad drive into the settlement, broader than most Cape Town southern suburbs roads and much, much broader than the tracks I used to squeeze my car through in RR-Section. Thing is, this sweeping drive is mud. I suppose in the summer it's sandy gravel, but these days, it's a thick dark chocolate mud. The wide muddy entry, matched with the tinned and wooden structures, makes the area look like my imagining of a turn of the previous century mining village. The area is called 'Overcome'.

Lavender Hill has been in the news recently, the gang violence in the courts has escalated to something resembling a war, which is why the premier's office is calling for the army to be deployed. One of my students is doing research in Lavender Hill, trying to find a meaningful link between school drop-out rates and, well, anything really. He asked the kids he's interviewing for the research what makes them feel safe. The answer was unanimous; the army. But, there are issues with just bringing in the defense force, for a start, it generally doesn't stop the gang activity, it just displaces the killing to another area.

Another student, who's gone back home now, was working with some primary school kids on setting up a school garden. She was talking to our class about these kids, and started with the analogy of a seed. A seed needs water, air, nutrients and such in order to grow and to flourish. Arguably, kids needs something similar. But not really see, and she threw out the analogy. Somehow, despite not having a particularly nurturing environment, the kids here grow. Between mud and bullets, they grow. She made a forceful point with fiery eyes, and told us all that whenever we spoke about Lavender Hill, about the malaise that haunts it, that we mention the kids who grow here.

So on Wednesday, as I drove with my visitors through that section of Lansdowne Road that gets flooded when it rains and the sewerage streams over the road like a swarm of locusts desiccating everthing in its path, and then later when we arrived in Lavender Hill, I told the skeptical faces around me that people don't just survive under these conditions, they flourish.

Despondency doesn't breed change, it breeds discontent, so it's probably worth being hopeful.

Watching the Plot

It's misleading, "Lavender Hill". Conjures up visions of slow-motion swaying Lavender bushes, a gentle slope. Creme brulee sunshine.

"The school's the safest place here," one of the teachers explained, as we watched parents come to collect their children, "so these parents are silly to take their children out of school and back to the courts." The school faces an open field, known as the battleground, surrounded by courts and quads of three-storey flats with washing lines swung between the buildings, the laundry moving breezily as though totally oblivious to the action below. When gang violence flares up, as it does every few days, parents come to collect their children and take them home.

We stood in a line against the wall outside the library, looking over the teachers' parking area to the police cars circling the grassy patch. We'd heard gunshots about an hour or so ago, but the scene was recalibrating as the couple with their trolley of chips and sweets rolled their wares back out onto their patch opposite the school gate. The same teacher turned to my student who volunteers here and told her that it was now safe to collect the children from their classes and take them outside. Outside to the sandy shady patch behind the water tank to inspect how their seedlings were progressing in their polystyrene trays. She gave the row of us one more shake of her head before walking back to her own class.

I stayed in my spot, leaning against the wall with some guys from the Department of Culture and Sports, so casually, like we were having a smoke and talking shit. Parents walked by, with their kids and their rapidly packed backpacks. My new friends run some dance and sports programmes here and "when I drive here in the mornings," the guy in the black jacket tells me, "man I just fly over those speed bumps! No ways am I slowing down past the field." His colleague nodded and agreed. "Ya evens if there is a dog in the road, or something so, you can't slow down. Ya if you slow down there'll be trouble." I nod. As though I understand.

It's getting hot here now. I turn and squint over the top of the school buildings, finding the source. Winter sunshine, nothing like it.

Just wanna make the world dance

One of my community partner organizations recently won a substantial amount of money and yesterday was the big celebration. So I took myself and the three students who volunteer there to the lunch-time party. Our adventure started at the Obs station where we squeezed onto a crowded train. It had started to rain and the train had that distinctive misty windowed damp smell. It was pouring by the time we got to Retreat and we had to do some deft puddle-hopping to keep our under-prepared and under-socked feet out of the raging pavement rivers. A man at the bus shelter missing only his bottom teeth told me to drink some OBS* to warm-up.

One of the organization's volunteers came to pick us up and for the first time in years I crouched in the back of a bakkie*, trying to strike a balance between not settling on any of the wet surfaces and not being thrown from corner to corner as we bumped our way along. We reached the director's house, to a rousing chorus of "you're the one that I want" from Grease; karaoke-style. I sing about as well as a goldfish can survive out of water, so karaoke is equally as punishing to my dignity as it is to those in earshot. I gave my students a weak smile, accepted a glass of wine, and found a table to perch on.

A couple of hours later (in between doing shots with the women from Lavender Hill who dedicate their school-day afternoons to looking after neighbourhood kids, and trying out the director's secret blend of red wine and coke) I belted out a bit of Celine Dion, followed by some Bruno Mars, interspersed with more than a smidgen of Disney classics. Two of the women tried Micheal Jackson's moonwalk, then Elvis's pelvic thrust, and my students alternated between giggling on the couch and yodelling their hearts out.

It rained all day.

Last quarter, one of my students who I placed at this organization spoke about how the womens' warmth, their nurturing, their sense of humour and their uncompromising demand that everyone has a talent worth sharing, enabled her to break her Ivy League-inspired silence and find her metaphorical voice. I don't need to find my metaphorical voice, I have all the self-assuredness I need in life. I'm a metaphorical voice on two legs. But, sometimes I need a safe space, a couple of drinks, and a group of women whose overwhelming energy deafens off-pitch, off-key, un-harmonised, un-dignified singing, because sometimes, just sometimes, I like to share my absolutely horrific non-metaphorical voice with the world.

What was left of my dignity when I walked out the front door was lost in the conversation with my students on the way home.
'So you know you're always complaining about our singing?' they asked, referring to the Monday morning Xhosa class that happens in the classroom next door to my office. The class involves a mandatory singing component, which my students take very seriously.
'Yes, you sound terrible.' They do. Terrible. As a tone-deaf totally unmusical lay-woman I pronounce this with certainty.
'Well,' I was told, 'you really don't have much room to complain, now do you?'
I smiled in reply. They have a fair point.

*Old Brown Sherry
*truck

Lavender Hill v Mitchells Plain

I spent a fair bit of time in the bus with Alfonso yesterday, he's one of the drivers who takes my students to and from their volunteer placements. We chatted about his plans to build a garden on the corner of his street in Seawinds, and how he can't grow vegetables there because some skelm* will come steal them in the night. Our conversation turned into a lament about living in Lavender Hill, and how he wants to move back home to Micthells Plain. We drive past Westridge and he explains:
"There is only one gang here, the Nice Time Kids. The NTKs." He gestures over to the left, to the new 'plot and plan' communities popping up. "And the area is safe because of them."
It seemed a little counter-intuitive: an area safe because of gang, not because of it's absence. So I asked him, "I don't get it. If there's a gang, why is it safe? Don't the gangs shoot at each other and that?"
"Ja, they do. They shoot at each other. So then when there's only one gang, there's no one to shoot. You see?"
"Aaaaah, ok, ja, I see."
We turn up The Cedars Avenue. He points to the right, "So this section, you see, not here, but just those few blocks there," we drive slowly while he points the streets out to me, there is a man selling fruit on the left, under a green shade cloth, "you see there, there you now have The Americans."
"Really? I thought the Americans were in Hanover Park, Manenberg, that side."
"Ja, but then here you get the small splinter groups. Just a few members. It's not so big, but they are still here."
"And they fight with the NTKs?"
"Only sometimes. Because they know their streets."
I nod and stare forward.
"And that's why it's better here than in Lavender Hill, in Seawinds." He pauses as he turns right at the intersection. "The gangs there don't have streets like they do here."

We drive slowly, school has just ended and there is a parade of little uniforms crossing and not crossing the street. Alfonso rolls the window down and shouts a greeting to the one doekie*-wearing mom who smiles a wave and a shout back.
"Ja no," Alfonso turns to me,  "I think it's time to come home."

* trouble-maker
* headscarf