Holding Up the Sky (3 page)

In the years to come, he would go on to be an award-winning film maker and journalist, directing numerous documentaries on the lives of black South Africans, before and after the end of Apartheid. Through his work, he was offered many scholarships, training courses and conference engagements all around the world. However, like a true homing pigeon, he was always drawn back home.

When there weren't programs being run at the centre, the nights were quiet. The other Australians would end up in the guys' cottage, talking with a few other volunteers. Not comfortable there, I would follow the trainees up to the house where someone would build a fire while the candles were being lit. Each night we took turns to tell stories about our lives and the people in them. It was during this nightly story telling that I began to understand the impact of state sanctioned poverty and discrimination, not in an abstract way, but in the lives of people I shared a house with, people I was beginning to care about. It was impossible not to be moved, not to want to be part of working towards a different future. Having said this, they were not always heart-wrenching tales; my new friends also made fun of themselves, telling jokes and lighter stories of their love lives and ill-fated pursuits of the opposite sex.

My ears pricked up whenever Msizi told stories about one conquest or another, as I hadn't yet plucked up the courage to find out if he was seeing someone. It didn't seem as if he was, but he was also a bit of a dark horse so it I couldn't be certain. This, of course, made him even more intriguing to me.

Towards the end of our first week, Steve announced that we were going to visit a few project sites in the township. Both projects were at creches–child care centres–one in rural Sweetwaters and the other in a peri-urban area called Edendale township. Steve and the team had been constructing a new creche building in Sweetwaters and providing education materials and volunteers to assist at the creche in Edendale.

Sweetwaters is utterly picturesque in its physical beauty but also desperately poor. People live in small mud huts scattered over the green hills, connected only by dirt tracks created from years of use by families and their cattle. There is one tar road that runs from Hilton, a leafy white suburb in the hills, through Sweetwaters to the main road in Edendale township below. Sweetwaters was technically part of Kwazulu, the homeland reserved for Zulu speaking people, and not part of South Africa.

We all piled into the program kombi, drove down Nonsuch Road, turned up into Hilton and out the other side. Instead of staying on the main road back to town, we turned right and entered another world. We drove along the tar road for about a kilometre before turning onto dirt. I wasn't sure that the kombi was built for this type of road. It wasn't just dirt, it had ruts and hollows that rocked us from one side of the kombi to the other. I suspect this was Steve's favourite part of the journey, fancying himself as a driver in the Paris to Dakar rally.

Finally, the dirt road gave out all together and we left the kombi to continue on foot. After fifteen minutes of wishing I had worn more appropriate shoes, we arrived at our destination. The creche, which doubled as the teacher's home, was built of mud like all the other dwellings surrounding it. Wattle trees, which were fast growing and in plentiful supply, were cut down and the branches stripped to create a series of poles. The larger poles were sunk into the ground at intervals and the narrower, more supple branches were then woven in and out of the poles until the structure of a wall was built. A small gap for a window was cut into each side of the house and a larger one for the door and frames fitted into place. The women, who do all the building, would then collect mud and slap great clumps of it into the woven wall structure until it was about twenty centimetres thick. Tin sheets were then placed on top and secured as a roof and the structure was complete. If there was enough money, the outside wall would be thinly rendered with a watery concrete mix.

The tiny creche appeared to have been built many years ago, as it was now crumbling away in parts. Lucy, the teacher, and the twenty tiny preschoolers in her care spent the day inside the two-room structure, or playing on the grassy area outside. One room was much larger than the other, the smaller of the two acting as a kitchen and the larger as the classroom itself. On the wall were coloured pieces of card with words and times tables written on them. About twenty metres away from the building was a pit toilet, a hole in the ground surrounded by rusted sheets of corrugated iron.

The children were clean, but dressed in hand-me-down clothing, some with holes, some too small. When we arrived, they were inside sitting in a large circle on the mud floor, which was covered in a variety of patterned blankets. Having no phone, Lucy had not known exactly when to expect us, but was very pleased we had come. The children, on the other hand, looked horrifed and started inching towards the far wall in an effort to get some distance between us. Lucy, clearly embarrassed, explained that the only white people they ever saw were the police and they were afraid of them. As we sat down on the ground, she assured the children that we were not the police, but people coming to help build them a new school. From the looks on their faces, they didn't believe her.

Tshidi came into her own at this point. Having some early childhood education training herself, she suggested that she take the kids outside and play some games with them. Before long they were singing and dancing in a circle around her, but still keeping their distance from us. It was over an hour before they would come near. I suspect their curiosity about the cameras and the photos we were taking got the better of them.

This was my first real experience of children living in poverty. I was moved in such a way that, even then, I thought it would be impossible to walk away and go back home to Australia. I thought about all the things I would spend my life doing if I returned to Sydney and none of them seemed more important that doing something practical to improve the lives of these children and children like them. I was never good at staying removed and unattached when it came to the hardship of others. My brother, Jon, an accountant and far more pragmatic than I, would make balanced decisions at these moments and logically weigh up the options – all head. I, however, all heart, would make a decision on a food of empathy and live with the personal cost later. Sometimes I wondered if I was adopted.

We spent the rest of the morning playing with those children who would let us near. One little boy, sporting a moth-eaten green jumper and a mohawk, captured my heart. He was curious about everything, once he'd summoned the courage to come over. He followed me around, asking rapid-fire questions that Vusi was struggling to translate fast enough for his satisfaction: ‘What's your name? Where do you live? What's that? What are you doing now? Can I touch your hair? Do you have any sweets?' On our way out, Steve showed us the site that had been cleared and levelled by the parents of the children in readiness for the wattle and daub structure we would start building on our next youth leadership workshop in April.

We walked back down to where we had left the kombi, abuzz with all that we had seen. I wonder what Tshidi, Kedrick, Vusi and Msizi must have thought of us, fascinated by what was so ordinary to them. We climbed back into the kombi and bumped our way along the dirt track back to the main road and down to Edendale. Along this road, the first built-up area of Edendale you reach is called Caluza (pronounced as if the ‘c' is a tisk). In less than two years, unable to resist the desire to make a contribution here, it would be the place that I would call home.

Where Sweetwaters Road intersects with Edendale Road, we turned right, travelled along a few hundred metres and then turned left onto a dirt road that ran parallel to the main tar road. Steve pulled the van up outside a very different creche: a wire mesh fence surrounded the building with a heavy metal gate blocking its entrance. We called out a greeting and entered the yard. Hearing the noise, a teacher emerged, followed by half a dozen curious little faces. The teacher returned our greeting and the children came rushing over, pushing each other aside to be the first to grab a hand. Very quickly, we were pulled over to the playground area, which was composed of a dirt patch with a row of tyres half buried in the ground, and drawn into games of follow-the-leader and other universal playground pastimes.

I looked up to see where the rest of the team was and noticed Kedrick and Vusi had stayed outside and were chatting to someone they appeared to know. I also noticed a small crowd had gathered and were hanging off the gate, watching us play. There were five little boys there, ranging in age from five to ten. All were dressed in what appeared to be secondhand clothes bar one little chap who was wearing a new blue safari suit. Clearly these boys wanted in on the fun. I was unsure if they were neighbourhood kids or street kids, but I did think it odd that they were not at school, or supervised at all for that matter.

Another group of preschoolers were gathered around Bee and Chook and were giving a joyous rendition of ‘Jesus Loves Me'. Others were chatting away in Zulu to Matt and Liz while Charlie took their photo, after which they crowded round Charlie chanting ‘Photo, photo'. I wondered how many English words they knew. Clearly we weren't the first to come and take their picture.

On the whole the children were better dressed and better nourished than their counterparts up the road. They were housed in a brick building that was at least three times the size of the Sweetwaters creche. Even the atmosphere between the two areas was different. Edendale was full of barbed wire and tension, giving you the feeling that you should keep one eye looking over your shoulder. Sweetwaters was the opposite, having that wonderful relaxed rural feel about it. South Africa was proving to be a country of contrasts: I had assumed they would only be along racial lines. Clearly it was much more complex than that.

The experiences of the day prompted a long discussion with Msizi that night about the struggle for political reform and what the role of white people was in that. He felt that it was important not to simply lobby from the sidelines, that to have a genuine impact, you had to identify with the day-to-day diffculties of black people's lives. I believe his comments were infuential in the way I would choose to live my life in the years that followed. Given my initial discomfort at feeling so white and apart in Africa, the idea of being part of a community was very appealing to me. My conversation with Msizi also clarified another question I had. Given the strength of his political views, I was unsure if he would take me seriously, being a white foreigner. I felt he was letting me know that he believed I had something to offer.

In six years, the apartheid system would be abandoned and though the violence in the townships was reaching fever pitch, programs like ours which would have seemed radical ten years before seemed to be tolerated. What I didn't realise at the time was that we were tolerated but still closely watched. While there seemed to be a groundswell of support in the white community for more integration in the country, few were thinking of the political upheaval that would be necessary to integrate at all levels. So while it appeared that protest marches like the one David was organising would include ever increasing numbers of white people, the government and the police were closing a vice on any such organisation in the townships.

A few days later, Steve was uncharacteristically absent from morning devotions. Beth later told us that he had been up most of the night after a phone call had taken him to the township. Through his youth leadership weekend camps, he had come to know many of the local youth leaders in the townships. A call had come through from the family of one such young man: a group of men had attacked his home just after dark, forcing their way inside and locking the family in a bedroom before murdering the young man. I never knew this person's name, only that they hacked him to death with machetes. As no one would come to collect what was left of the body until it was light, Steve helped the family to clean up his remains before returning home covered in blood. Not surprisingly, his attempts to sleep were thwarted by nightmares.

We had ten days left to prepare for our week-long program at Brettonwood High School, a large white school in the suburbs of Durban. The team had never done anything on this scale, so there were quite a few nerves during rehearsals. Mary-Anne, Msizi and I had teamed up to work with five different classes and to run a seminar on fear. I hadn't spent a lot of time with Mary-Anne up until this point, although we were quite alike in looks and temperament. She had trained as a nurse in Cape Town and was doing this year to build her understanding of community work before she moved into a squatter community just south of Johannesburg to live and work. She planned to build a two-room metal shack, with one room acting as a clinic and the other as her home. I was deeply impressed by her vision. She did, in fact, go on to build the clinic and lived in that community for many years. On the back of her amazing work, a substantial community organisation was established that offered a variety of services to the people living there. She later married a doctor and, together with their two sons and adopted black daughter, lived in another informal community outside Pretoria called Winterveld, providing the only medical care to tens of thousands of their neighbours.

As a dry run for Brettonwood, we ran an evening program at St Anne's, a private girls' school in Hilton. We performed five short dramas, Kedrick sang and Msizi read some poetry. The major theme was reconciliation: the things that divide us are not as powerful as the things that unite us. At the time, a message like that delivered by a multiracial group in an Anglican girls' school was quite edgy. Nevertheless, we received positive feedback and were feeling pretty pleased with ourselves.

Steve arranged for us to go away on a team retreat a few days before Brettonwood. We went to L'Abri, a Wilderness Training School set on the side of a cliff in the Karkloof mountain range, overlooking the indigenous forest of the Mshwati River valley. The property is now, not surprisingly, a National Heritage Site.