How to Play Football

We drove past a group of ten hand-holding pairs of very small children in Hazeldene Avenue. Like us, they were on their way to the Mitchells Plain Grade R Football Festival. Unlike us, they marched in teeny tiny gumboots, holding vuvuzelas. It took them about ten minutes to walk the remaining block, corralled by two teachers who shoved their little bodies away from the street when they veered a little too far to the right of the pavement. Watching the seven minute games of five on five (everyone must get a turn), I learnt some lessons about playing football. I am not entirely convinced of their legitimacy, but since I'm all for learning from community, even the four and five year old members of that community, I'll share them anyway. In no particular order of importance:

Number one: Travel in packs. Do not spread out over the playing area (in this case half of a basketball court). Rather, run as closely to the other players as possible and cling to them when you feel you are falling behind. In most cases, the ball is moving in a circular orbit around the centre of the pitch so it is fine to be the last one in the line because soon the ball will come back to you. 

Number two: When the ball bounces and it goes over your head, which is to be expected since heads are hardly a metre above the ground, wave your hands up to stop the ball like you would bat a balloon. Preferably do this with a number of other players so that your strength is combined and you can hold the ball above your heads together as you run around in circles. 

Number three: Score whenever you can. The ball must enter the miniature goal. It does not really matter if it is your team's or the other team's because the people on the sides of the pitch will cheer regardless and you will be able to do a victory wiggle-dance and your friends in the stands will make a noise on their vuvuzelas. 

Number four: Shaking hands is overrated. It is much better to hug and pat the other players. This can be done at any time of the game and is allowed to interfere with the normal course of play. The ball will still be there when the hugging and patting ceremonies are completed.

Number five: Follow the ball at all costs. It does not matter if the ball has escaped the bounds of the pitch, this does not mean that play must cease. If it goes under a spectator's chair you must feel free to play between the spectator's legs, alternately, you can ask for the the spectator to assist. Momentum must be maintained at all times, so there is no need to stop if the ball has been momentarily lost. Continue running and bouncing around the other players until the ball is found and reenters play. 

Number six: Distractions are welcome. Should a fun song start playing over the PA system, it is fine to abandon the ball and dance (even if you are the only one on the pitch doing so). It is better to do this with a friend so that you can hold hands and swing around and dance together. Do not worry if the rest of the players run the ball into your path; they will play around you and might join in before returning to the ball. 

Number seven: The game does not start still you start playing. If the ref throws the ball down but you are not ready or do not know what to do, just stand around until you are confident. Eventually something will click and you'll realise you must run after the ball, and then you must go go go. But before then, you won't be in anyone's way and are bothering no one, so just relax and stare off into space for inspiration. 

My director and I sat for an hour, transfixed, as one team after the other tumbled down the stands and over each other onto the pitch. They fell, they rolled, they ran with their hands waving in the hair and followed instructions like only a troupe of kiddies can. It was ah-sum. 

Baking Cakes and Taking Names

"I make these shoes, edible shoes. And this lady phoned, I will never forget, she phoned and she asked: what size shoe is this shoe? So I told her it’s a size three. She asked, “Patsy, can’t you make me a size six?” I told her yis, and she asked can I make two shoes. So I said yis. But then I asked her, “Do you know it is a shoe for eating?” And she didn't believe me! She said “No Patsy, it’s such a beautiful shoe!” That's how real it looks."

Patsy wore yellow to the interview. She explained that her hair had minced in the mist this morning and  it didn't usually look this way. She stood with her neon pink binder against the wall for her photograph. I liked Patsy. If it were up to me she'd definitely be accepted onto the programme. Students from a local business school and a business school in the States are running an entrepreneurial training programme for small business owners over July. My students have been tasked with interviewing the potential participants and selecting recruits for the programme. As per youge, I'm doing nothing more useful than sitting in a corner taking notes, and in this case also oohing and aahing at pictures of Patsy's cakes.

Patsy runs her business from her kitchen in Eastridge, Mitchell's Plain. “My stove is old, it’s an old stove. I’m just praying that it doesn’t break!” And from her kitchen she makes cakes and other fancies. The problem see, is her market. Residents from the surrounding communities are poor, they can't afford Charly's Bakery prices so she has to make cakes at affordable prices, which means she doesn't make massive profit. And when she advertised on Gumtree to reach a wider market, "it all was fine until they heard I was in Mitchell's Plain and then they said no thank you I've found somewhere else." I nod, I understand. Cape Tonians who can afford bespoke baked goods might not necessarily know that Mitchell's Plain is more neighbourhood than hood. Pity, because in addition to everything else, they're missing out on some delicious-looking cake. 

Next on the interview schedule was Zelna. "I'm the only lady in batteries," she explains, "in the whole of SAWEN, it's just me. Some of the other ladies are in construction, but no one else in batteries." Her rows of silver bangles click and clang as she moves her arms. "This game is not actually for a lady, but I'm here." She's here because the man who owned the business before her had a gambling problem and lost everything. She shakes her head at all the gamblers, the drugs: "it was his daughter too," she told us conspiratorially. "She also used that money for gambling and drugs."

But she's got her head screwed on right, she's got ambition she says and she wants to grow the business this year. She wants an empire, she laughs. She broke her ankle because on the 6th of January she fitted 15 batteries and when she got home she was so tired she just fell over. She tells story after story. I'm entranced. The end of the interview and it's photograph time. She stands and says: "Mm, but I'm glad I had my hair done today. Usually I only have my hair fixed on a Friday, but I have an exhibition tomorrow so I must look good." She smiles for the camera and checks the picture on the tiny screen, nodding her approval. 

All in all a good morning. An interesting morning. A morning full of stories; my favourite. And a morning that's reminded me I need a haircut. And maybe a piece of cake. Mm, yes. I wouldn't mind a piece of cake.

First Day

Today is the first day of school, along the coast at least. Today is also the first day of service for my shiny new group of American service-learners. Walking to their 'dorm' this morning, I wanted a drink and a smoke and at least another 48 hours to resolve the various surprises of the last couple of days. While the centre we run here resembles a perfectly choreographed flashmob, our community partners have slightly more variables constraining their programming, and substantially less resources to deal with, well, to deal with reality.

The NGO funding crisis in South Africa (here, there, also here, oh and here) has meant that things are a little more turbulent than usual. As with every upsetting situation the world over, it's when the crisis seeps and sinks in between the electrified fencing around my middle-class life that I feel it most acutely. Two of our partner organizations closed last year, a number of them "restructured" or are running on a wing, a prayer and a bathtub of Ricoffy, and others are just ticking over steadily; unsure if they're sitting on a bomb about to explode or on an eternally reliable grandfather clock. Point is, to stay in sync with the uncertainty, my practice has had to change this last little while and my students have had to learn that adaptation is as valuable as any of their other well-honed skills. So, it's the first day of school for both traditional and unorthodox learners in Cape Town, and there are as many glitches in the morning as they are happy instances of things working out.

I arrive at 8:30 at a primary school in Mitchell's Plain to drop-off my two sports students. I can't get in the door. Parents, their school-going children as well as the smaller ones who couldn't be left at home, and an assortment of other people who seem as much interested spectators as anything else crowd the entrance hall. I step back outside where it is quiet enough to make a call and phone my partner: "Ya no, I'm in the principal's office," he tells me, "come through."
I wave to my students to follow me and I start elbowing people out of the way, gently ofcourse, but elbowing nonetheless. I lose my students in the milieu for a moment but we reach the principal's office and there are hugs and handshakes all round.
"Long time I haven't seen you!" the principal tells me.
"Ya" I answer, and we chat for a moment about our respective holidays.
"But tell me," I ask him, pointing to the rambling mass outside of his office, "is this normal?"
He laughs, and my partner replies: "You should've been here an hour ago, you couldn't walk!"
"I couldn't walk now," I say. "Anyway, here they are," I introduce my two students, "I'll leave them to you."
"Yes, yes, good," the principal seems chuffed and I'm waved out of the office into the cramped entrance hall once more.

About ten minutes later we're at a school around the corner (there is a school on every corner in Mitchell's Plain: if you look down on the area you just see little blocks of blue and green roofs breaking small clumps of red-roofed housing). I don't even try to see the receptionist, choosing instead to squeeze through the smorgasbord of entrance hall residents. One woman held a tiny baby with a tiny mouth that was pressed closed as it slept on her shoulder, on the otherside of the room it looked like a senior's club gathering. Obviously little bodies in uniforms far too big for them, shouldering school bags that overwhelmed them, ran and scattered constantly like a swarm of confused ants. Small children scare me at the best of times: when they swarm I am almost overcome with fear. I whisked my school-garden student to the upstairs office of my environmental education partner, greeted the familiar faces as quickly as possible and sprinted out of the school and back into the calm of the van.

"I wonder how everyone else did." I say to the driver after we've dropped off the third and last group at a high school in Khayelitsha.
"Oh no, we drove the routes yesterday, we all know where to go."
I smile at him. "No I'm not talking about the drivers, I know you know what's what, I'm talking about the organizations. I could have been talking to them every week for the last three months about today but the students can still arrive and be a surprise."
He laughs, but it's true. The nature of the crisis doesn't just mean that funding is tight, it means that organizations are tight. A small interruption to their daily operations can throw the whole show off-kilter. Is it right then, you may ask, for little ole Jen-Ben to throw students around like smarties? Well, it's a tricky one. Sometimes taking on a volunteer can build capacity, sometimes it can cost capacity, and usually my partners and I don't know which it's going to be until a couple of weeks into the placement.

For now though, it's the first day of school, and it's gone ok so far.

The Lost City

I went to Tafelsig yesterday. Never been there before. If you take a Golden Arrow bus there, you'd get on the one going to 'Lost City'. The suburb borders a nature reserve and has phenomenal views over False Bay and all the way across the Cape Flats to the sloping rises of Devil's Peak and the back of Table Mountain. It's a five minute walk away from the most tourist blue ocean you ever saw and a stretch of white sand bookended by either end of the crescent-shaped peninsula. It's kind of upside down in your mind, this natural beauty bubble that hides the Lost City. Tafelsig is the home of two major housing projects; one pre-94 with houses that have industrial-looking windows and a couple of steps up to the front door, and one post-94; identified by the lightning bolt design of the house where each half is the same width but sort of misaligned in the middle, giving it a stepped or jagged outline.

"I knew this Dutch family who moved to Cape Town," my community partner tells my students as we stand huddled like penguins against the wind on top of the viewing hill in Mitchell's Plain, "ya, they came to Mitchell's Plain and to Tafelsig accidentally." I'm confused for a moment and then the possibility of the mistake dawns on me. He explains to my students: "In Afrikaans, 'tafel' is 'table' and 'sig' is 'view'. They thought they were moving to Tableview, which is a totally different suburb."

"It's where those postcard pictures of the mountain are taken," I chip in. 

"Ya," he agrees. "So they moved here thinking it was somewhere else. But then they stayed. For the two years they lived in Cape Town they lived in Tafelsig even though it wasn't what they were expecting. The kid went to one of the worst primary schools in Mitchell's Plain, but didn't want to leave so they just stayed here."

Finding the Lost City accidentally. I suppose that's the only way it's found. 

Gardens and recreation

"Oh, you're a little early!" exclaimed the woman we were visiting at the garden project in Mitchell's Plain.
"Ya, I know, sorry. But we can wait don't worry." I was taking a few visitors around my community partner sites; one of the components of my job that I do without thinking about it too much. I only ever visit the partners who're happy to interrupt their day to talk shit for a while and I think they quite enjoy it, regaling my foreign colleagues with twisted, funny and often wildly untrue tales. And why not, it's so tempting. My visitors' temporary pictures of Cape Town are blank canvasses, you really can paint on that canvas just how you like and some of my partners embrace that artistic liberty like Picasso on hallucinogenics.

We'd been in Makhaza the morning, then Khayelitsha, and we'd winded our way along Baden Powell Drive to Mitchell's Plain. I'd walked to the office to find the woman I needed to find, and yes, I was early. She exchanged a glance with the director, I couldn't quite work out what was going on.
"I'll just go wait at the car..." I started making my way to the door.
"No, no!" I was told. The director pulled a bit of a face, "it's just that we need to deal with a quick issue outside." The two of them shared an embarrassed giggle.
"Ok no, tell me!" I  smiled my demand, I stepped in closer to where they stood, and we formed a conspiracy of a triangle.
My tour guide looked to the director, the director looked to me, "well, it's just that that space down there is used by the community for a whole range of..." she paused, looking for the right word, "recreational activities."
In my experience, when someone talks about a recreational activity it's going to be of the sex, drugs and rock'n'roll variety. So, "aaah," I replied, "no I understand"
"Mm, we just have to clean some things up," explained my guide. "Go stand in the parking lot and I'll give you a wave when I'm..." another pause, "when it's all ready."

Walking around the garden later, she explained how plants grow here, despite the horrific soil that oscillates between sand and clay with nothing really nutritious in between. How they flourish while being pulled and pushed by the summer south-easter and winter north-wester. I've been visiting this garden for just over two years now and knowing what this space used to look like, I can see the magic that's embedded in the undergrowth. I feel kind of sorry for my visitors, sure it's a beautiful garden in it's own right, but it's the growth and change that they can't see that makes it so worth seeing. Kind of like seeing a frame of a movie that's paused on the cliff-hanger of the narrative, but not having a clue how the characters got there, not knowing the depth of their histories, hardly aware of their meaning... You can't really understand the extent of what's in front of you, can you?

I never did find out the cause of the euphemistic cleaning.

Lots of things

I arrived a little early yesterday for my meeting with the director of a sports programme in Mitchell's Plain, so I sat and waited on the uncomfortable plastic chairs in the foyer of the primary school at which he's based for the next couple of weeks. The mustached school principal kept coming to offer me tea, a better chair, just checking to see that I'm ok. The two black mothers sitting next to me got no such attention. In fact they got no attention period. I have my own prejudices and privileges to worry about, so when an older coloured man treats a white woman like the madam, and the black woman sitting next to her like the madam's invisible maid, I know I should do more than give a stink-eye to him and an incredulous 'can you believe this character?' head-shake to her but honestly, I just can't fight every battle. And I'm not even sure that it's my battle to fight: yesterday marked the 35 year anniversary of Biko's death, he was killed in the police station of the suburb where I grew-up.

Anyway, lost in thoughts of black consciousness, I get a big bear hug from one of my favourite community partners and he walks me outside to watch a frenetic break-time soccer match played on the concrete quad of the school. Each team has three girls and three boys to the side, and in an interesting twist, if a girl scores a goal, she gets awarded 2 points, instead of 1. "It's to encourage girls to play", my partner explains to me, "to get them off the sidelines and into the game". At first I'm uncomfortable with the unequal scoring, because it's premised on the idea that the girls aren't as skilled as the boys, that they've really triumphed when they score a goal. Before I get too riled up, I realize that the boys are better than the girls, not because of some God-given ability, but because they play every break time, and everyday after-school. The boys practice constantly. It's only in the last few years that the girls' league was set up, and only this year that it's really gaining momentum. The programme director tells me about the local girl going to Norway to compete in a karate competition, that, "if you just give them the chance, the girls really excel."

To give the girls a chance, you need to motivate them to participate, and you need to incentivize the boys to include them. You need to encourage the boys not to kick at goal themselves but to pass to their female team-mates and allow them the opportunity to score, and when they score, the two points reward both the scorer, and the boy who recognized she could score. Conditioning and socializing children it seems, is a lot like training a puppy: treats when they do something good. In their insistent quest to be the top team, I don't think the boys will tolerate the skewed scoring when the girls have perfected their soccer skills, when it becomes clear that boys and girls are equally able to outmaneuver their opponents. Time will tell on that one...

However, the purpose of my visit was not to stand in the sun and watch soccer, it was to chat about the sports programme, the school, the director, his family, my work, the weather and the coaching qualification he's offering to unemployed matriculants in Qwa-Qwa and Limpopo. Fabulous man, I really do admire the fruit off the tree with him. We chat for a while, and he repeats something he's told me before: "My vision for the organization is that over time it becomes unnecessary."
Unnecessary because things have changed, the world has changed, the schools have changed and kids get to, you know, be kids, and have games and sports programmes worked into their everyday.

I daydream for a moment, thinking of a redundant NGO sector. And then I think of Marikana. 35 years later, black men are still being killed by the police.

"Ya," I answer him with a little smile, "maybe one day we'll all be out of a job."

We look over the sandy patches that constitute the school's garden. After a few days of sunshine, clouds are starting to gather. It's raining again today.

"We grow them small here."

I ended the day by taking a photo of my students sitting on the pavement while we waited for our transport to pick us up. I was tempted to go to sleep right there, in between the taxis that dropped the sports teams off at the cross-country race. It was a long day, filled with small children. I don't trust small children; they move too fast. One moment they're standing in a straight row, the next they're in a pile-up. The transition so quick and smooth, it's like their little bodies are centred around powerful magnets that snap close to each other when activated. It doesn't help that here in Mitchells Plain, "we grow them small," as my students were told when they arrived at the school.

I thought that the morning's dance classes were going to be the messiest thing I saw that day. The smallest class had 35 learners. On a constant sugar high from the crappy sweets they buy at the tuckshop, they bounce constantly. While my student tried to teach some Grade 3s basic hip-hop moves, some boys at the back of the class did their own dance.
"It's the chicken dance," the one boy giggled, "the Chicken Licken dance!" His friends laughed and chicken-lickened with flapping arms and pecking heads for a bit before they lost interest and climbed underneath the semi-standing ping-pong table.

The school doesn't have a sports coordinator. There are volunteers, like my dance student, who run the physical education and life orientation classes. But,
"What happens on the days you aren't here?" I asked my student.
"The kids sit in their classes."
"And do what?"
"Well, the teachers go to the teachers' lounge because it's a free period for them, so the kids just sit."
"They sit?"
"Yeah."
They sit and make a noise, disrupting the classes around them. The teachers from neighbouring classrooms have to leave their own classes, come and shout at them for a while, go back, and try to teach with 35 children doing whatever the hell they want in the room next door.

Off to my other student's English class for the longest hour and a half of my week. It was as though the learners would get a small electrical jolt everytime they sat still for longer than half a minute. Turning around, sideways, in a few instances underneath their desk and upside down when looking for an eraser on the floor. The teacher who was meant to be here had to go and set up the cross-country track. If we hadn't been there his students would have sat unsupervised, replicating the problem above. Not that our presence seemed to encourage productivity.

It's 2.15pm and the school day is over. I'm ready to collapse. But it's off to cross-country we go. I'm in the school bus with the learners. The teachers are discussing whether getting a whistle and blowing it periodically to get the kids to sit down would be at all effective. As we reach the traffic lights at the corner of Spine and Eisleben, the intersection that advertizes itself as "Snoek Point", a police van rolls up to our left. A chorus of shouts goes up from the learners: "Dissie boere, dissie boere*! Sit still!" I laugh out loud, it's all too absurd. But the kids are momentarily calmed.

Our role at the cross-country venue is to separate the finishing runners into the "girls" and "boys" channels, and to keep them in the order in which they finished. The finish line is at the bottom of a hill, and there is no efficient way of noting down the names of finishers, so a queue of runners waiting to have their names recorded starts to wind its way up the gravelly slope. Runners run past the end of the line, have to be hauled back up to the top of the slope, some can't slow down in time so crash into the back of the line and push five or six learners over who rapidly reshuffle their places. I can shout with a volume comparable to a foghorn, so was positioned at the stop of the hill to scream directions to the jostling runners. It was like I was an orchestral conductor, standing on a tiny rock in the middle of an oncoming tidal wave, trying wave each droplet of water into the direction they should go.

I sat at my kitchen table last night after dinner, put my head on the wood and fell asleep for a while.


* It's the police! Technically, "it's the farmers!", a throw-back to the days of white Afrikaans policemen.

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