Holding Up the Sky (52 page)

When we first arrived at the village, we went directly to the house of the headman and his wife. The headman was not at home, as he owned a small trucking business and was often on the road, but his wife and grown sons were and they welcomed us into the cool of their living room. This was to become our routine on every visit–we would announce our arrival and be given permission to work in the village. Cecil mentioned that the other fieldworkers would meet us here shortly, no doubt having already heard about our arrival on the grapevine. True to his word, just as a tray of cool drinks was being placed before us, there was a timid ‘ko ko' coming from the doorway. The other two fieldworkers joined us in the now crowded room, standing awkwardly pressed next to the wall. I suggested to the Germans that we drink up and get going, before thanking our hosts for their hospitality and ‘asking for the way'.

Outside, the heat was already bearing down though it was still early. We asked Cecil if the container had arrived; he nodded and began to lead us off in the direction of the school. As we left the compound, I noticed a public phone in the yard. I was just thinking that being headman has its perks when Cecil caught my eye and explained that people would come to the house day and night with their problems and requests for help, so the headman had the public phone installed in an effort to allow people an avenue to sort out their problems direct.

At the school, we were greeted warmly by the principal and students, all eager to see what was inside the container that had dramatically appeared a few days before. I had no idea how a truck bearing such a weight would have made it down the dirt road to the village, but before I could ask Cecil and the others about it, the crowd of people erupted as the container was opened and the first cooker was brought out. A large shiny dish made of interlocking reflective panels that spread out like a dancer's fan–the cooker that most reminded me of a spaceship–was being placed delicately on the ground. It was propped up on a steel frame which extended into the middle of the contraption so that a pot could be placed into the centre. Though it was very light, it was so large that it took two people to move it safely.

The next cooker to emerge was a box with a perspex lid and three reflective panels that spread out like wings from three sides of the box. With this cooker, the pot was placed lidless inside the box with its reflective internal panels directing light into its centre. Once closed, the perspex lid of the box also became the lid of the pot itself.

The third cooker was the simplest, the cheapest and the only South African cooker to be included in the study. Richard had given me one of these to take home on the day I joined and I had been doing a field test of my own with Mama, to see if she would cook with it in preference to the stove inside the house. This cooker was simply a black plastic trapezium-shaped box with reflective panelling stapled inside and a piece of perspex that slapped down on top at a forty-five degree angle. It was small, light and easy to lift and store and came with two black pots, one large and one medium-sized, that could be placed inside the cooker.

Soon the container had been completely emptied and an array of strange looking contraptions filled the school yard with over a hundred curious school children dying to handle them but instead shyly standing back. The noise of the school children had soon drawn the neighbours to the school as well and before long the yard was full, with half the community joining the festivities. It took the principal and Cecil almost half an hour to sort people into test families and others, so that the cookers could be properly assigned. From there, we split up so that each member of the team went home with a family and a cooker, ticked off against the schedule that Kurt had diligently drawn up weeks before.

I was assigned to help a family that lived on the far side of the village, allocated the heaviest cooker, the box with the wings. As I waited to be introduced, a thin shy woman in her forties stepped forward once her name was called. Unlike all the others gathered there, she was alone. The community spoke a mixture of Afrikaans and Sesotho, but from her features and her darker skin, I took a punt that she was Sotho speaking and greeted her accordingly. She responded in kind and we began to find out a little about each other as we lugged the cooker away, taking almost twenty minutes to reach her home. She lived right on the edge of the village, as if shunned by it. I found out she was a widow with two school-aged children. Her husband had died in a work accident some years before and she struggled to make ends meet. Other families employed her to fetch wood and collect water, with her children helping after they returned from school. She also took in a little washing, but I had the feeling that it was all dependent on the kindness of neighbours and their own ability to pay for such chores to be done.

Those families with even the most modest means bought paraffin or coal from the store rather than spending up to six hours a day searching for wood in the increasingly barren surrounds. And while no family in the village had a washing machine, there seemed to be an abundance of unemployed young women who earned their keep in the family home by washing and cleaning. I understood why Cecil had included this family in the study, as any saving they could make in time or money might mean more food in the pot. I also knew that I could justify giving her food to cook as part of the field study without offending her, as we wanted families to test the cookers with different staple meals. With this in mind, I excused myself and went to the community store, explaining that the cooker came with supplies which I had forgotten to pick up. In all my visits, I made sure to spend time with this family, always bringing extra food, but in the two years of the project, little changed for them. I watched the children continue to go to school without shoes and in uniforms that were too small.

We returned to Kimberley just before dark and headed to the Holiday Inn. The city was full, but it was only when we reached reception that I realised why. We had arrived in Kimberley in the middle of an international rugby tour and all the faithful had arrived for the match to be played at the local stadium. After sharing this piece of information, the young man at reception went on to tell me that they had unfortunately given our rooms away, as they were unsure whether we were coming and had other visitors begging for rooms. I was irate as it was only seven o'clock and I had an international delegation that was now without accommodation. Realising his mistake, he promised to phone around but couldn't promise anything.

After twenty awkward minutes in reception, he called me back to the desk to inform me he had found a new guesthouse that was willing to take us in, given that everything else was full. When we arrived at the guesthouse a short distance away, I quickly realised that it was not a guesthouse, but the home of a large family who had sent their children off to the relatives and given us all the spare bedrooms in the house. I didn't know whether to be grateful for the beds or angry that some family friend of the receptionist was charging each of us hotel rates for sleeping in their children's bedrooms. Despite being offered a home-cooked meal by our hosts, we declined and made our way to what we had been told was one of the few decent restaurants in Kimberley. It was to become our regular haunt on our monthly trips to the city.

Sitting in the restaurant that night, I couldn't help but be struck by the contrast between the elegant surroundings in which I now sat and the poverty I had seen during the day. While I had lived and worked in both towns and townships for many years, I sometimes found the transition from township to town difficult. Working on this kind of project meant we didn't only encounter people in community meetings, in the schools and halls. It was a far more intimate exchange when we entered people's homes, talked to them about what they ate, how they prepared it, how they managed to meet their basic daily needs. Knowing what it took for the families to prepare even a simple meal, then to later sit down in an expensive restaurant and dine with our funders, discussing the technicalities of the project design and management, made the food stick in my throat.

Early the next morning, we were up and off to the airport for the fight to Upington. After many hours of travelling, we finally arrived at the Pofadder Hotel, already weary though it was not yet lunchtime. Because we were on a schedule, we dropped off our bags, grabbed a packed lunch and began the drive to the Namibian border and our next test site of Onseepkans. The scenery became more mountainous as we approached the border and after almost 50 kilometres of hot fat road, we were relieved to enter the oasis of green that surrounded the Orange River. We turned left just before the border post and headed west towards the village, hugging the river's edge, passing a number of farms and an old derelict shop on the way. Marlett told me she had plans to buy the shop and convert it into a house where she would come and spend the winter. I soon realised that she was only half joking, easy as it was to fall in love with this remote, enchanted place.

Our fieldworkers, Doreen, Nola and Ezekiel, were to meet us at the Mission in the afternoon. We had considered agreeing on a particular time, but knowing the distance we had to travel and the concepts of time in deep rural areas, we simply agreed on the afternoon. We also knew that we would be the only hire car driving into the village that day and that the fieldworkers would be alerted to our presence within minutes and would make their way across to the Mission. Who needed mobile phones really?

As we approached the village, I saw that the houses were made of what seemed to be reeds rather than the wattle and daub I was used to. Marlett explained to us that many of the homes were built this way to allow the breeze to cool the house; even in winter, Onseepkans reached temperatures typical of a European summer. We threaded our way through the village until we saw the Mission just ahead. Pulling into the courtyard, we found the priest already waiting. The Mission was multipurpose in the community and we were planning to place an institutional sized cooker in their school. I heaved an enormous sigh of relief when I saw that the large container full of solar cookers had arrived safely and was now tucked away against the eastern wall of the courtyard. We made our greetings and introduced our international guests. The priest was delighted to be taking part in a project such as this and while interest from the outside world was not as uncommon as you might think, this project had potential to save the community time and money if it could work, rather than simply providing data for policy makers in the nation's capital.

Not long after our arrival, our three fieldworkers entered the Mission compound and made their way over to the container. The priest had been given the keys when the container arrived and we had just opened it and were peering inside when they appeared. There were twenty-five solar cookers for households, five of those being spares in case of damage and five more to be tested at the school here and at the Mission in Pofadder. Our plan was to help with the distribution of the cookers to the families and then to put the larger cookers in the schools. Kurt was on hand to ensure everything was in good working order. We spent the rest of the afternoon going from home to home, speaking with families as one of the fieldworkers explained how to use the cookers. Families appeared to be cautious though curious enough to agree to participate. We set up each cooker with a pot full of water before moving to the next home, promising to come back once the water was boiling. Marlett and Tony from the Department were kept busy translating the questions of the Germans to the families we visited, particularly the women who for the most part were taking custody of the cookers.

I hit the wall at about four o'clock, having been up well before dawn two mornings in a row, but it wasn't until dark that we finally climbed into the kombi and made the drive back to the hotel. Despite desperately wanting to go straight to bed, protocol insisted that we once more have dinner with our guests before calling it a night. I was also aching for home and my baby, who was still breastfeeding morning and night. Many times in the last few weeks, I had flown through the door at the end of a long day and swooped him up for a feed, relieving the pain of the last few hours. Without him now, there was nothing for it but to jump in the shower, express the milk away and change for dinner.

The Pofadder Hotel was run by a husband and wife team, though it was Mrs Pofadder, as Marlett and I called her, who dealt with the guests. She owned two pets that she seemed more inclined to introduce than her husband. Going with her wherever she went was her small white poodle that Marlett and I would have liked to boot into the hotel pool after its first attempt to snap at our ankles. Her other pet, one more to our liking, was a colourful parrot who had the auspicious name of Vicegrip. He spent most of his time in the office on his perch, squawking happily at all passers by.

We shared a fine meal at Mrs Pofadder's table before being introduced to Hendrick the barman, who kept our group supplied with one nightcap after another. As a non-drinker, I struggled to keep up with the Germans, all seemingly well-practised after dinner drinkers. But it was Marlett who was the surprise packet. She later told me that after a bout of alcohol poisoning at university, she seemed immune to the stuff and could drink any man under the table, a talent sure to impress and infuriate in patriarchal South Africa. Knowing the local side was well represented, I made my excuses and snuck off to bed.

We spent the next morning at the Mission in Pofadder, setting up the institutional cooker there with Doreen's help. She had come back with us the previous night from Onseepkans and stayed the night at the Pofadder Hotel with the team. In all her twenty-four years, she had never had money or cause to stay at the hotel. We left Doreen at the Mission, telling her that Marlett and I would be back in four weeks to see how things were going, before making the long drive to the last site in Vryberg in the North West Province. I drove for most of the way, occasionally splitting the driving with Marlett, hurrying our visitors back into the kombi whenever we made a pit stop. I was anxious to get to Vryberg–the sooner we finished there, the sooner I could get home. So obvious was my desire for speed that Kurt and Marlett gave me the nickname of ‘fast forward' on that trip, one that stuck for the duration of the project.