Holding Up the Sky (4 page)

The days were filled with physical challenges and team-building exercises while the evenings brought us together for barbecue dinners and singing around the fire. It was in those moments, complete with Milo and marshmallows, that my childhood imaginings seemed to come to life.

The retreat to L'Abri was a wonderful escape from our busy preparations. It gave us an opportunity to get to know each other better in an environment that calmed the spirit. It was hard to believe that an indigenous forest existed so close to Pietermaritzburg.

Our return to Nonsuch Road meant rehearsals, rehearsals, rehearsals. We had songs to learn, lesson plans to finish and then more rehearsals. One afternoon, while we waited for the next session to begin, Mary-Anne, Msizi and I were sitting outside the hall on the grass. The conversation came round to the topic of South African dogs. I had noticed that if I walked past a house with a dog in the front yard, it didn't bark at me, but if a black person passed the same yard, the dog would bark hysterically. Msizi said that South African dogs were as racist as their owners. I suggested that the only way the dogs could tell the difference was by smell. I didn't realise how insensitive my comment was until Msizi excused himself from the conversation. Later, he explained that he wasn't angry with me, knowing I hadn't meant to offend; it was that the concept of being differentiated not only by skin colour but even by smell weighed heavily on him. Sometimes it seemed like there was no way to climb out of it. He was quiet for the rest of the day and did not stay up for our candlelight conversations. I was racked with guilt for having brought this on. I suspect I felt twice as bad as I would have if it was a white friend I had upset. Our black friends' lives were hard enough; to add to their challenges in any way made me feel callous and insensitive.

Finally, Brettonwood arrived. We were all staying at the YMCA, overlooking Durban harbour. Each day of the five-day event we would be presenting a school assembly, as well as individual lessons and an informal coffee shop after school where we could sit and chat with the students. The rehearsals paid off, and I felt incredibly privileged to be part of such a professionally run program. Each of us played our part, but it was Steve who held it all together. We were taking many risks simply by bringing black team members to the school. Woven through the design of the program were two ideas: one, that the personal is political; the other, that to believe in God means to care about what is happening in the lives of people around you. The kids we were talking to believed that politics was about which political party you supported and had something to do with communists and terrorists versus the good guys. We argued that if you went to the beach with a friend and he was not allowed onto the sand because he was black, then the personal became the political. Most of the students saw anything other than party politics as something dangerous and therefore to be avoided. We were attempting to communicate that if you were black you could not avoid politics; and that if you were white, you were still impacted by politics although it felt far less uncomfortable.

The second idea was harder to sell, but we argued that as Christians we could not in good conscience avoid something that impacted so disastrously on others around us. At the very least we were trying to build a simple awareness.

We performed a reconciliation skit we had used in Zimbabwe where Msizi played a character who held all the power and Gary, powerless, was seeking reconciliation. Bee, looking like the chairperson of a Board, played God and sought to broker the reconciliation. It was an impactful skit that allowed the audience to laugh at the stupidity of people living next to each other in complete separateness. Immediately following this skit, Msizi spoke about the cost of reconciliation to him, the cost of forgiving people who had much because his community had little. He spoke about making friends with many of the young white men in the hall over the course of the week, when next year, during their conscription to the army, they might roll into his township in the back of an armoured vehicle and point a gun in his face. Yet if he believed in reconciliation, he would have to get past all those things and be open to building genuine friendships. He told them it would be difficult and it would be costly, but it was the only way to ensure that we had a future to look forward to in South Africa.

This moment was the turning point of the week. At the coffee shop that followed the assembly, there were crowds of people surrounding the black members of our team, asking questions, trying to understand their lives and their points of view. I realised these were probably the first conversations of this nature they had ever had. I also knew that this was the kind of contribution to change I wanted to make. Simplistic as it was, I felt I was making a small difference to a big problem–something I had not felt when I was living in Australia. I knew there were problems back home, but none seemed as enormous as the ones faced by these young people. There seemed, at least, to be a place to start. It was an addictive feeling for me and being part of a team made it even more so. I could feel myself becoming more and more drawn in. South Africa had initially been a stopover on my way to another adventure in East Africa where I had planned to spend a year working in a mission school. But the longer I spent here doing something that seemed to add value, the more I considered that perhaps it was a place where I could stay.

Two weeks after Brettonwood, we invited thirty kids from the school to join us at the centre for a youth leadership camp with forty kids from a school in the township. On the back of our week's work with them, the Brettonwood kids were queuing up to come on the camp. As at Brettonwood, I was teamed up with Msizi and we spent a lot of time together preparing for the five-day camp.

One afternoon, Msizi, Chook, Kedrick and I took a few hours off and went down to the swimming hole in the small river that runs through the forest. It isn't deep, but it holds enough water to cool you off from the hot African sun. While we were splashing around, I waded into the deeper part of the pool, expecting Msizi to follow. He stood waist deep and quietly told me that he couldn't actually swim. In my usual insensitive style, I went a bit overboard in my banter: Msizi seemed to excel in everything he did, and at last there was something I was good at that he couldn't do. Glaring at me, he pointed out that swimming lessons weren't readily available to him when he was growing up as black people were banned from the only public swimming pool in Grahamstown. Yet again, I found myself dredging through the guilt of not knowing when to shut my mouth. I swam over and offered to teach him to swim. He eyed me narrowly and then agreed to let me try. I knew that I was falling head over heels for him and the idea of being physically close while teaching him to swim was certainly the driver behind my offer. However, I was unsure how he felt about me. I seemed to be constantly offending him and wasn't sure what he might see in me. My acting skills certainly weren't alluring; neither was my singing. And there were far more attractive girls around who seemed equally interested in him. Still, he had agreed to me teaching him to swim, so he must at least have trusted me enough to believe I would not let him drown.

The first day of camp arrived and seventy teenagers flooded the normally tranquil centre. When we began the program with some getting-to-know-you games, the two groups were very polarised. We were hoping they would be able to open up over the course of the five days, particularly as they were sharing rooms. After dinner on the first night, we watched a video about a man who comes to town looking very different to everyone else there. The town harasses and rejects him, simply for being unknown to them and different. As he leaves, they discover that it was in fact Jesus visiting them and it was too late to ask him to return. The video opened up all sorts of questions and discussion including–from the Brettonwood group– questions such as: ‘Are there any black youths in the township who are Christians?' We hoped that by the end of the camp both groups of teenagers would discover that their lives were more alike than they could have imagined; they just lived in different places.

The next morning, I woke up with a terrible clutching pain on the right side of my back. When I put my hand on the location of the pain, there seemed to be welts there. Bee and Liz had a look and said they could see small flesh-coloured, fluid-flled blisters but didn't know what they were. Halfway through the morning session, the pain was worse so went I to find something in the first aid kit that might help. Steve and some of the others looked at the sores, but couldn't diagnose them either.

Eventually, one of the staff members, Carol, took me to Greys Hospital some five kilometres down the road, and we waited patiently for a few hours before I was shown into an examination area where the shirt lifting began afresh. This time, the person looking did know what it was, but it was so unusual that every other doctor in the hospital wanted to come and have a look. I was the youngest case of shingles they had ever seen. I felt honoured. I also felt humiliated and in a lot of pain. The doctor explained that shingles is usually brought on by stress as it is an opportunistic virus that enters a host when they are run-down and weakened. He explained that there is only one treatment for shingles and it is far from pleasant. Leaving me enough time to contemplate all the ghastly alternatives, he eventually returned holding two enormous syringes full of gamma globulin–one for each buttock, enough to prevent me from sitting for the next four days–plus painkilling injections. It was going to be a fun afternoon.

The painkillers knocked me out for the rest of the day but by evening, I was famished. Carol helped me down to the dining hall, although walking was difficult and sitting down was impossible. The other trainees ran off to find some soft pillows that would cushion my tender behind and then fell about laughing as I perched on top of them trying to eat. Msizi particularly enjoyed this spectacle. If I was worried that I had ever hurt his feelings with my careless words, his teasing over the course of the meal more than made us even.

For the remainder of the camp, I hobbled around accompanied by my faithful pillows and the jokes of all my friends. We ran a mixture of bible studies, simulation games, workshops and outdoor activities during the day, and a different movie each night. We also paired up for a very emotional session where one person washed the other's feet, the washer telling the washee how they had impacted on them during the course of the week. The group was also very moved after watching Gandhi. Gandhi's own commitment to change began in 1893 in Pietermaritzburg when, as a young Indian lawyer on his way to Jo'burg to try a case, he was thrown off the first class carriage of the train for not being white.

We also had a few edgier workshops. One reviewed the history of the Church's response to apartheid as outlined in the Kairos Document which had been released three years earlier. Written by an anonymous group of theologians in Soweto, it challenged the Church to take a stand against apartheid. It also criticised the theological justification of racism to which many of the more conservative churches subscribed.

Another session was run by a local community organisation called PACSA, the Pietermaritzburg Agency for Christian Social Awareness. PACSA spent much of their time monitoring the violence in the Natal Midlands area and assisting families who needed support. They came to the camp to raise awareness about what was really going on in the area and what some parts of the Church were willing to do about it. We were very nervous about this session. We felt it was very important but knew that it was the kind of session that could get these camps shut down, deemed too political, especially by some of the Brettonwood parents. These sessions were the heart and soul of my involvement, though, as the people running them demonstrated to me that you could hold onto your faith and still be an activist for change. The system of apartheid was built on the Church and its doctrines, so in many ways, to oppose it seemed ‘anti-Church' to the majority of white people and, ironically, to many black people as well.

The camp ended with mixed emotions for me. It was a fabulous time where we did some great work and helped people from different backgrounds gain a better understanding of each other. I believe we also helped people think differently about the interaction between their faith and the world around them. But I was also disappointed that the two groups remained as separate as they did. I saw little openness between individuals from different races. Perhaps my expectations were too high. Still, high expectations are part of who I am–so I was a little disappointed.

That night, my feelings of disappointment took a back seat. The after-dinner candlelit conversations petered out early as people crawled off to bed exhausted. Only Msizi and I were left by the fire. He told me he was glad we were alone as he had been wanting to talk all week. To my great surprise, he told me about the feelings he had held for me ever since we met. When I smiled, he leant across and kissed me. And then he held my cheek tenderly in his hand and kissed me again.

As all new lovers do, we compared impressions. ‘When this happened, what were you thinking?' ‘When you said that, I was sure you weren't interested.' The biggest question for me was, ‘Does it matter to you that I'm white?' He couldn't lie and said it did, which was why he had hesitated so long. He needed to know what kind of white person I was before he could risk opening up to me. We laughed about all the times I had said thoughtless things. He told me that while he was initially angry with me, when he saw how much it hurt me to see him hurt, he realised it was only naivete and not racism. At that moment, our feelings for one another seemed so tender and fragile, as if the slightest breeze might break them. We agreed to keep things between us and not let the others know that we were now together. Looking back, although we were seeking time and privacy, I wonder whether it wasn't crystal clear to everybody that we had feelings for each other. I suspect Steve must have known, perceptive man that he is, and a sucker for a love story.