Holding Up the Sky (51 page)

And so it was that I turned up for work the following Monday, wide awake and eager for the next adventure to begin.

GOING
BACK TO WORK WAS LIKE OPENING A DOOR ON A MUSTY ROOM. I FELT CONNECTED INTO A BROADER LIFE ONCE MORE, OUTSIDE OF MY HOME AND, IN PARTICULAR, OUTSIDE OF RANDFONTEIN. THE OFFICES WERE LOCATED IN A CONVERTED HOUSE IN THE NORTHERN SUBURB OF RANDBURG–EVEN THOUGH IT TOOK ME WELL OVER AN HOUR TO DRIVE THERE EACH MORNING, I FELT INVIGORATED. IT WAS ALSO REFRESHING TO FEEL NO JUDGMENT ABOUT MY LIFE CHOICES. THEY WERE INTERESTING TO MY NEW COLLEAGUES, BUT NOT A SOURCE OF REPULSION SUCH AS I HAD EXPERIENCED FOR THE LAST YEAR IN RANDFONTEIN. IN FACT, THE OFFICE WAS A MIX OF RACES, RELIGIONS AND SEXUAL ORIENTATIONS, SO I SEEMED TO FIT RIGHT IN.

I was also excited by the work that Palmer Development Group, or PDG as everyone called it in South Africa's love affair with acronyms, was doing around the country. By applying the minds of bright people to difficult social, infrastructure and fiancing problems, they were helping to create a country where services were available to everyone. It sat well with me ideologically and challenged me intellectually, as well as meeting my need for social interaction outside the small community in which I was living.

My first task, and the one for which Richard had employed me, was to project manage a solar energy study funded by the German government to the value of six million rands, working in collaboration with the South African Department of Minerals and Energy. It was a massive project of which the first phase–a two-year longitudinal field study–was about to begin. The test sites had been chosen and some local fieldworkers employed. The Germans were on their way in four weeks to take part in a week of fieldworker training, followed by a week in the field visiting the chosen communities, all of which I would be responsible for organising.

I did notice that Michael, my colleague who had been looking after the project before I arrived, heaved a considerable sigh of relief once he had finished the short handover session. Only later did I understand that, as an economist, field research was not really his cup of tea. At the time, I took that sigh to be an indication of the amount of work he was happily avoiding in the next month or two. Despite this, I plunged into the job, as is my way with all things I take on.

There was a joke at PDG that the probation period was known as ‘sink or swim'–the Palmer brothers had the tendency to throw new recruits into the deep end. It was no different with me. In my first week, I met with the various people on the project team. Richard and I would work closely together on this project from the PDG side. Then there was Tony, our client in the Department, Paul the sociologist from one of our project partners, and Marlett who was an independent energy consultant (I didn't know such a profession existed prior to this project) and had worked for the Department for a number of years before heading out on her own. Karl, our German technical expert, would contribute scientific depth and research rigour to the project. And Colleen, who was introduced as a gender expert, was to train the team in investigating the implication of gender in our research. Each one was to become an important person in my life over the next two years of the project, but none more than Colleen who would become my friend and mentor for the next ten years.

The weeks prior to the German funders' visit were a furry of activity. In the rush, I didn't have time to find out how to claim expenses, only how to rack them up. This led to the particularly embarrassing experience of having my credit card turned down when I was buying groceries, juggling my two small children and a full trolley. I went through to the office, unable to believe there wasn't some simple solution. The bank confirmed the supermarket's decision, suggesting that perhaps I should simply cut the card in half and call it a day. I made a mental note as I shuffled out of the shopping centre empty-handed, to speak to Richard first thing on Monday morning about reclaiming all my project expenses.

The week of the training workshop, I made the drive through to Pretoria early on the Monday morning. The young fieldworkers had arrived the night before and were staying at a budget hotel in the city which, according to Marlett, they thought was a palace compared to their own township family homes. It was not lost on me that the Germans were staying at a five star hotel across town. One of my tasks in the setup was to review a few of the nicer hotels in Pretoria and choose the one that most closely matched the Germans' requirements.

The five-day workshop was a combination of technical and sociological training. The fieldworkers and the project team needed to be able to understand the working of each type of solar cooker in the study, and be able to repair them if necessary. They would also interview the families who were testing the cookers, make their own observations and record information. Our German technical advisor, Kurt, was thorough and demanding but by the end of the week, we felt technically competent. Marlett and Paul did the sociological training, taking us through all the information we would need to make this an internationally valid piece of research.

The workshop also gave us a great opportunity to get to know all the fieldworkers. They varied in age from nineteen to twenty-eight and were from either the coloured or the black communities that we would be working with. We had found them through the local youth organisations, with tremendous competition for the positions as jobs were so scarce in these isolated communities. We had also been aware that the salaries they were to receive would most likely change the dynamics in their communities, in essence making them rich and powerful, not only as salaried employees but also as people having strong connections with national and international development agencies and government bodies. It was a heady experience and we wanted to keep a close eye on the fieldworkers during the first two years of the project. If we played our parts well, we hoped many of them would be able to use this job as a springboard to a career in development.

The fieldworkers spoke a mixture of English, Afrikaans and Setswana so between Marlett, who was Afrikaans speaking, Paul and myself, we hoped to be able to work with them effectively on a monthly basis. Our job was to visit each of the sites, collect the data from the fieldworkers, make our own observations and provide whatever support was needed. There were three sites that we were monitoring, each with household users and institutional users. For the duration of the first phase, households would rotate through four different household cookers and the schools would test the three larger industrial sized ones. The test sites were all in the northwest part of the country, which was largely desert and had the highest number of days of sunshine per year.

The first test site was in Vryberg in the North West province. We had twenty test households in the large urban township called Huhudi, just outside town. There were also two township schools in the study, one preschool and one primary school, both of which were participants in the government's feeding scheme. As well, there was a multiracial high school a few kilometres outside town that Richard had a long history of supporting; as a boarding school, it was ideal for the largest of the institutional cookers.

When we were dealing with schools, not only did the principals, government officials and teachers need to be on board with the project, but we also had to train the cooks in how to use the equipment and this was often where the greatest resistance was encountered. For the school, there were great financial savings to be made that meant funds could be invested elsewhere, but the cooks were being asked to change habits learnt over many years, as well as to overcome their scepticism that the stoves could actually work. Many schools employed local women as cooks to prepare food they were now receiving under the new government's feeding scheme.

The other two sites were in deep rural areas where the primary source of cooking fuel was wood collected from the surrounding veld, supplemented by the more expensive paraffin and coal. One site was just outside Kimberley, the home of diamond mining in South Africa. The nearest town to the site was Barkly West, about 30 kilometres to the northwest of the city, with the village we were targeting accessed off a loose dirt road that seemed to head off into nowhere. The only assurance that visitors were on the right track was a large sign explaining that a solar project was being undertaken in the area, sponsored by the Department of Minerals and Energy and the German Government.

Organising for the signs to be erected was one of the more painful parts of my first few weeks in the job. Sections of the road were no more than quicksand, as I learnt by trial and error on my first foray. At the end of almost a kilometre, it opened out into a large clearing that housed the quiet rural community. Many of its residents still used donkey carts to move around, living in simple houses made of mud and tin. The area was the site of the first diamond discovery in South Africa, and many of the village residents were prospectors or descendants of the original pioneers. Being in the village felt like stepping back a hundred years. The area was so intriguing that Marlett and I later used it as a site for a second piece of research on the emergence of small black mining companies.

The last site was by far my favourite and the most difficult to get to. It was located deep in the Northern Cape on the border with Namibia. We few from Kimberley to Upington and then drove the two hours west to Pofadder, a quirky little desert town boasting the famous Pofadder Hotel where we spent many pleasurable nights during the course of the project. Pofadder can get hot, with temperatures in the low forties being commonplace. The heat tolerant residents of the town of Pofadder referred to our test site as ‘the front stoep of hell'. Frankly, I wondered why we were testing solar cookers there as I felt sure it would be possible to fry an egg on your head if you stood in the sun for long enough.

The test site was at Onseepkans some 50 kilometres to the north of Pofadder, though we were also testing the institutional cookers at the mission school in Pofadder. Onseepkans is a border post into Namibia and a small farming community on the fertile banks of the Orange River. Essentially, the community supplied workers to the local farms. There was also a mission in Onseepkans, established by the same Catholic priest who ran the somewhat famous one in Pofadder. In Onseepkans, the coloured residents only spoke Afrikaans, so Marlett took the lead. I soon developed an Afrikaans vocabulary that related to food, cooking, wood collection and other daily chores. The journey to Onseepkans was a dry one, but over time I began to appreciate the enormous beauty of the mountain ranges, the stark, magical quiver trees and the breathtaking colours of the desert as we made our monthly pilgrimage.

The solar project itself had come about via a number of retired German inventors who for some reason were very interested in solar energy, though interestingly Germany isn't blessed with a great deal of sun. They invented a number of prototypes and pressured parliament to find avenues for commercial distribution, particularly in third world countries where deforestation is an enormous problem.

After discussions in parliament, funds were allocated through the Department for Technical Cooperation, or GTZ, an aid-type wing of the German government that sponsors projects in developing countries, particularly those than can be addressed by some form of German technology. The German government set up an agreement with the South African government, allowing the Department of Minerals and Energy to commission a research project to test the viability of solar cookers in South Africa. Given PDG had done a great deal of research in domestic energy, the Department contracted us to do the research.

It was this chain of events that saw me flying out to Kimberley with Kurt, our German technical consultant, Tony from the Department, three German donors and Marlett after only four weeks in the job, hoping like hell the signs were up in each of the sites when we arrived.

The plan was for me to do the first two days of the trip, flying back after visiting Barkly West, and for Michael, my colleague who had managed the project up until now, to handle the other two sites over the next three days. Richard had made this arrangement out of respect for the fact that I had a baby at home whom I had never left overnight before. My boss, thankfully, was a man who loved his family deeply and understood the need to balance work and home.

The night before we were due to fly out, Michael phoned to tell me that he had just arrived at the hospital with suspected encephalitis and wouldn't be able to replace me halfway through the trip. Though I was upset that I would now have to spend five days away from my little boy, I was also worried about my friend, as this could turn out to be very serious. What I didn't know was that, besides being a very talented economist and having a brilliant mind, Michael was also a bit of a hypochondriac. As it turned out, he did not have encephalitis but rather a bad case of sinusitis, a fact that no one in the office, especially me, would let him forget for years to come.

The trip began with check-in at 5.30 in the morning at Jo'burg airport, an auspicious moment I nearly missed, what with an hour and a half's drive from Randfontein and getting lost trying to find the long-term parking turn-off. As I raced around the corner to the departure gate a few minutes before boarding closed, there stood an anxious Marlett and Kurt, plotting a plan B in case I missed the only fight to Kimberley that day.

We arrived after a short fight, gazing like all Kimberley's visitors into ‘the Big Hole'–the deepest open mining pit currently on the earth's surface, so we were told. It was only a short drive from the airport to Barkly West and when we reached the turn-off to the village, there in all its glory was the solar cooker sign. The Germans were so delighted that they insisted we all pile out of the kombi and take a photo. We were soon back on the dirt road, Marlett offering to manoeuvre the kombi along its treacherous length. But before we had gone too far, we spotted Cecil, one of the fieldworkers, waiting for us under a tree. He was eagerly welcomed into the front of the van where he skilfully navigated us through the deep sand drifts.