The State of the Nation and an empty taxi

I gave the gaaitjie a raised eyebrow as the van came to a stop and he opened the door. "Mowbray?" he asked and pointed down the road.
I looked into the van; empty.
"Ja," I say finally, after I see a tariff sheet stuck to a window by vaguely transparent layers of sellotape, "you just look a bit suspicious with an empty van, makes me nervous you know."
The driver laughs and tells me " ja no you mus' be careful." He pulls on his cigarette and the smoke bounces lazily over his arm and out of the window.
"I know," I reply, and settle into the sweating pleather seats.

We sit in a silence broken only by the gaaitjie's shouts, his head breathing in and out of the open window, his neon safety vest folded over the chair in front of him.
"It didn' use to be this empty," the driver starts to say.
"Uh?" I offer an interested grunt in reply.
"Ja no, it is only now the las' few years that it's so." He is wearing a cream T-shirt with a thin orange stripe running the width of his back. There is a small hole in the fabric over his left shoulder, it looks like a mosquito or a fly but after staring at it--almost transfixed--I realize it moves as he does.
"So why?" I ask him, shifting my attention from the minute piece of skin, "what happened now for the van to be empty?"
"People, they lost their jobs. I used to work in sales, for thirteen years I worked in sales and then even I got retrenched."
I "mmm" in response, "that's bad luck."
He nods in agreement. "Ja, so people lost their jobs. They got packages you know, packages and they've got a bit of money so they think they gonna buy a taxi and make money." He laughs, shakes his head like we all do. "But you don' make money so." I can see his sunglassed face in the rearview mirror, he shifts his attention between my reflection and the road.
"You see, say you put in a fifty rand petrol in Wynberg, then you drive to town and you pick up maybe one maybe two maybe a couple of people and that's so thirty-forty rand, maybe you make your fifty rand. But no more."
"Is that what it costs? To get the taxi from the one side to the other?"
"Yis," he nods emphatically, "a fifty rand."
The lights are red at the at the pedestrian crossing at the Nando's. The gaaitjie whistles and calls to the people sitting, standing, paused on the pavement. No response. The lights turn green and the driver shifts the horizontal gearstick forward and up.

"So why do people do it then, why do they buy the taxi?"
"They don' know. They jus' think they gonna make money." He slows to let a car on the left come into his lane, but the car hoots and its driver waves to him to move on.
"Hy gat omdraai," the gaaitjie says.
"Ja," I agree, "he wants to turn around."
Our van starts forward again.
"You see, it wasn't always so. The guys who started here, who were the first ones on this route those years ago: HEY!" He exclaims and starts laughing again. "They made money those guys. They live in the nicest houses, they drive in the nicest cars. So people see that and they think I'm gonna be in a house so and drive such and such a car, but that was then, you know?"
"Ja," I say, "I know."
I get out at the McDonalds and maze around the huddles of school children sitting waiting on the pavement for their bus.

Zuma described the State of the Nation last night. Mixed reviews really, on both Zuma and the state. Me; I like to see the taxi half full, even when it's empty. So aluta continua, I suppose.

In the wind

The south-easter has picked up these last few weeks, and today it flew and bounced and shook the roll-down doors of the factories and warehouses in Salt River with an impatient kinesis that only mirrors the unrest on the otherside of Sir Lowry's Pass. Two workers on their break struggled to light a cigarette: they huddled together, heads bent down, foreheads almost touching, their hands completing the walls around their faces. Creating a vacuum of calm in the bluster of the wind. Oh, the wind. The wind.

I walked in the wind, hunching my shoulders, scrunching my eyes. The broad streets of that part of Salt River were no doubt designed for trucks that weren't running over lunch. It was just me and the few bundles of factory workers wanting a smoke outside. I find the place I'm looking for eventually--the workshop that covered my couches last week--and collect the left-over roll of fabric and a refuse bag of off-cuts. As I stood in the empty loading bay, the roll balanced on my shoulder as I squeezed the refuse bag under my arm, the wind whipped the flaps of my pale green cardigan into my face. I heaved up the roll, shook my head free of its veil and started trekking up Manrose Street to the Main Road.

I had no hands to wave at the gaaitjie who called out to me, but he understood my nod and the van stood waiting a few metres to the left of the intersection when I reached the top of the road. I paused and looked at him, the wind between us, the fabric under and on top of me and he ran towards me, arms outstretched. "Sorry sorry," he said, "I didn't see you properly from down there."
"No worries," I handed him the refuse bag, "as long as it fits."
He waited for me to get in the van and then passed me the roll of fabric over the heads of my fellow commuters. The refuse bag sat on my lap.
"Allright?" he asked me before he tapped the van in a signal to the driver to move off.
"Allright." I nodded in reply.

On Tuesday, on another taxi, the man next to me looked up sharply as the gaaitjie started talking to the front-seat passenger in a language I didn't recognize. He must have though, and he called out a greeting. They met with the familiarity of strangers who share their foreignness. They chatted, the three of them, and at the crescendo of the gaaitjie's story my neighbour leant forward to shake his hand and laugh. I started laughing too, it was just that kind of contagious, serendipitous happiness that pulls at you.
"What language are you speaking?" I asked him.
"Swahili." He answered.
"Cool!"
"Mambo?" He asked me.
"What's that?"
"It means how are you doing."
I smiled, "I'm good, thanks."
The taxi stopped and he moved to the door, turning back to me, to the gaaitjie, giving a bit of a wave.

As I sat today, surrounded by fabric in the stationary taxi, I felt the van shudder as another taxi stormed by. Taxi's, it seems, like people, respond to others moving past them; caught for the briefest moment in the same frame. And people, like the wind, move past those moments so fleetingly; somewhere else to be.

Community

As happens in life, I found myself sitting on the pavement outside the closed garage door of a fabric distributor in Salt River last Thursday morning. The manager arrived shortly before 9am, in a flurry of apologies for her lateness. "It was the taxi," she told me, "it went straight through on the freeway to town and I had to get another one back out!"
I nodded sympathetically, "no, no, I know, don't worry. The drivers sometimes do their own thing, it's fine I wasn't waiting long."

She waved me in behind her and walked me around the small shop, lifting and pulling rolls of fabric off the shelves, helping me find one that didn't have watermarks or creases. We each grabbed an end of the cardboard-centred roll and maneuvered it onto a measuring table and then into a plastic covering. I realized the logistical error of my plan when I saw just how much fabric 22 metres translates to. "Uhmmm," I started, "I don't know how I can get that home." We stood the two of us, assessing the totem pole of fabric. "Can I get the couch guy to come here to pick it up?"
"What's his name?" she asked me.
"Riza."
"Oh ja no, he pops in here almost everyday, I'll leave a note that it's for you. It's Jane ne?"
"Jen." I answer, "I'll tell him it's here."

I phoned him on my way out of the shop and he promised to send his cousin to my house later with his bakkie to pick up my furniture. I ran home over lunch and opened the gate to a man shouting "Hiiiiii!"
As he stood in my lounge, nodding and looking perplexed, just him with no friend to help carry, I thought it might be a good idea to ask, "Oh, are you here for the couches?"
Fortunately he answered in the affirmative. "I'm just wondering how to get them out." Clearly not everyone has Mr Isaacs' level of dexterity when it comes to furniture removal. He did have a friend though, and the two of them squeezed my couches out and onto the pavement. I had to head back to work, so I left them there, Riza's cousin, his friend, my two couches, and a hope that it would all work out.

Friday was my community partner workshop, an all day affair at the District Six Museum. We spent the day talking about all kinds of things: volunteers, development, partnerships, research, volunteers again and then at some point in the afternoon we settled on community and just how foreign some of Cape Town's communities are to my students. "We try to explain to them," one of my partners said, "that it's different here. But it takes for them to be out there to really see."
"Mmmm," added another woman, "how do you explain that everybody's your auntie, nobody's your uncle and who is your daddy?" The room erupted in nods and laughs. Wide agreement then.

I thought of the auntie at the fabric shop, of Riza and his cousin, of my volunteer placement partners and of the taxi drivers that move us all around from place to place. I know, I really do, that "community" doesn't actually exist. But sometimes, in some spaces, it kind of does.

Stepping out

It's not often that I call an area "dodgy". In fact, I almost never do. But yesterday, hey, yesterday, I found myself thinking: "But for reals Jen, you have good ideas and then you have this." I was buying wooden planks see, from a place in Lower Woodstock. But I didn't have the strength to drive in the afternoon traffic, so I figured I'd just take a taxi down Main Road, hop off somewhere close to where I needed to be and walk through a side-street down to Lower Main where the wood shop has been for the last 82 years--as the man who walked me round their expansive yard told me.

I explained to a friend last night (over several glasses of piwi*) that what made me nervous was that there were too many people loitering. Loiterers always give me the twitchies, I kind of what to say, "but hi, what are you waiting for friends?!" Anyway, there was a group sitting in a small circle on the pavement, another group bundled on the stumpy wall in front of one of those Victorian terrace houses. There were two guys walking behind me, the one called out:
"Hey sister, you've got a good step!"
His buddy laughed. So did I to be fair.
A workman who heard the exchange lumbered over from his parked bakkie to join me in the middle of the road (I figure if I walk in the middle there's a greater chance of someone seeing me and intervening if paw-paws start flying). He nodded his head in agreement and added:
"Yes, it's a good compliment."
I look at him and smile, "yeah, yeah."
"Yes," he continues, "not everyone can walk so, with such attitude."
Oh the irony; here I march with confidence with my 'fro and skinny jeans, all the while embracing my inner meerkat and surreptitiously mapping in my mind all the people, the streets, the subtle and not so subtle movements around me, tensed and ready to run the hell out of there if needs be. But my step, oh my step gives none of that away.

I choose a different side-street to walk back up, and it's marginally better but it's only when I'm sitting squished in the front row of the taxi that I take a deep breath and shake my head at me. The gaaitjie is singing along to the radio, between sucking on a purple bompie* that he holds between his teeth when he manages the door. The woman sitting next to me has a little boy sitting on her lap, he's got that vacant look that kids sometimes get, when the world just gets too much for them and they're tired and their eyes just glaze over in happy oblivion. The taxi stops to let her off and the gaatijie stretches out his arms to hold the little boy as she squeezes herself through the seats. With her feet firmly on the ground and her handbag safely on her shoulder, the gaaitjie swings around and deposits her son in her arms.

The whole exchange was oddly beautiful. The mother in her bright blue ensemble, the little boy with fuzzy hair and soft eyes, the almost awkwardly skinny gaaitjie with the bompie swnging from his teeth and his arms held out; patient despite the busyness of the afternoon commute. I dunno, maybe you had to be there.

* pipe and wine
* plastic sachet of frozen flavoured ice

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. 

An island in a river

"I went back home, I thought things would be better, but it was more tough then," he looks left to the fibrecrete wall a few metres away, flicks his hands out in a shooing gesture, looks back at me, "so I came back here to South Africa." He used to be a farmer in Zambia. He learnt English because he was a boy scout; his step-father never let him go to school. His friend told him about South Africa, and the two of them plus a cousin made the long trek south.

We're standing looking over the community garden of which he is pioneer and custodian. Inside, is another man about 20 years old. He's from Zim. He doesn't say why he left, only that he did. Things were always going to be better here. He smiles.

Living in a wendy-house, living in a shipping container. On a floor, on a mattras, maybe on a couch. Better here.

"I'm 20 years old and I haven't been on a good path in a while," says a guy with an Afrikaans accent. He's wearing a black beanie, he speaks softly, so softly I can hardly hear him. He's local, from around here. But transient. He's come, gone, come, gone, but now he's back. Crossing the borders of the city like his peers crossed the borders of a country.

"Give me your tired, your poor" said Lady Liberty, "your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."

Some community organizations, like this one in Salt River, remind me a little of Ellis Island. "We're like a train station," the director explains to me, "you come to the platform, you get on the train, and then you get off at your destination. You don't stay here and stagnate, you move on." They don't specialize, like so many organizations do, in one group of labels. Here, they do them all. The homeless, the destitute, the poor, the exiled. "We aren't the only NGO in the area," the director waves her hands over her shoulder, "but we never turn anyone away." It means that their programmes are diverse, disparate, a baggie of puzzle pieces that don't all build the same puzzle.

But baggie's of mismatched puzzle pieces is what built the most powerful state in the world. So maybe it's ok for Salt River too.

As I walk back to the Main Road to catch a taxi back to the office, the wind blows empty milk bottles and chip packets over the road. The two women walking in front of me are too deep in conversation to notice.