Art
Our Touch Project Tuesday Group is still going strong. Sadly, Gogo passed away earlier this year and she is missed by us all for her lively personality and witty sense of humour.
We now meet at Latiwe’s house. A pink house with a collection of resident cats and kittens. And we have started someting new together. Art. The group currently consists of myself and Celia (from the Human Dignity Centre) and four faithful ladies who have been part of the group for the past two to three years. They are Latiwe, Makhazi, Iris and Nomisa. I shall post profiles on each of them shortly. For now, I just wanted to share the news that each week we will be working on various art projects and I would like to share the artworks on this blog. The ladies are very excited and eager, a little shy to draw in front of me and so are insistant that I give them ‘homework’ so that they can practice during the week.
They have no experience with drawing, and I don’t think it’s something they ever thought of doing themselves, but they have taken to it with enthusiasm and it’s great to see them drawing a laughing and making jokes with eachother about Makhazi’s strange graphical interpretation of a cat.
Will post more soon.
Yonela
When I was a little girl, I told my parents that one day I would like to live in the township. Perspective is an interesting thing, and I suppose a young child is yet to develop the perceptions that will later guide their judgements. I can’t quite recall what attracted me to the township, perhaps it was the children that I waved at from my car window. I saw children playing.
Today I see children playing, but I recognise a darkness in their midst. The innocence of childhood games juxtaposed against the implications of poverty. One of the ways this darkness manifests itself is in a virus. A virus that steals futures. I know a little girl who has lived in the grip of this virus since the day she was born, her name is Yonela.
Yonela is eight years old. She doesn’t have a mom and lives with extended family. She stayed in the hospital for a week once, and nobody visited her. She understood this to be ordinary and did not cry. One day I went to visit her at her home and found her with infected sores covering her face. We were able to bring treatment. Yonela sat still and endured the pain as a nursing student applied antiseptic and pealed infected scabs from her face. A single tear rolled down her cheek but she did not make a sound. I guess she felt relieved to know there was help, even though it hurt.
Sometimes it’s acceptable because there are so many like Yonela. I have lived in this world long enough to have developed perceptions that limit urgency in my response. But I remind myself that the way things are is not the way things are supposed to be.
I gave Yonela a teddy bear and we named it Themba which means Hope.
"All that is necessary for the forces of evil to triumph is for enough good men to do nothing."
- Edmund Burke
Tshintshiwe (Gogo)
Tsintshiwe Siyolo was born in 1910 to a Xhosa family in the Transkei. Farm workers living close to the land, leaving their doors open at night, sitting up late talking around a flickering fire while children slept on grass mats. Gogo tells me that she was a good child, loved by her parents. She remembers waking early to have tea ready by 5am for them before they left for work.
I met Gogo on a Thursday afternoon in 2008 at a soup kitchen in Walmer Township. It was pouring with rain. They told me that she was a very old lady, and that she had just lost everything she had in a fire. She looked up at me from where she sat, I thought perhaps she expected me to have a solution, but I didn’t. It was several months later before our paths would cross again.
Gogo can’t remember exactly when it was that she came to Port Elizabeth, but we think perhaps it was during the 1980s. I was born to a white middle class family from Port Elizabeth in 1983. I grew up in the suburb of Walmer, adjacent to Walmer Township where Gogo arrived on the assurance that great fortune awaited. Her husband had recently died, leaving her with no income. Her children, already resettled in the city, told her that there was plenty of money in Walmer Township. She says it wasn’t true, and instead, all that she found was lots of people dying, “It was not a good place for a human being to stay”. During her time in Walmer Township she has buried three daughters and two sons. One daughter remains.
When I asked if much has changed in Walmer Township since she arrived, she said that in the old days they used to go to the toilet in the veld, but now she has a bucket system. In any case, she hears that there is danger of rape if one wanders too far away from home.
I met Gogo for the second time towards the end of 2008. I was accompanying a friend on home visits. She works for a local non-profit organisation supporting families in Walmer Township. We returned to Gogo again, this time some university students came with us. She was living in a make-shift wooden shack, constructed over bare ground, mud when it rained. I asked where her bed was, it was the damp pile of blankets in the corner. It rained a lot that winter.
Sometimes when a child begs at my car window, I feel frustrated because I cannot help everyone. It makes me shake my head and avoid eye contact because, what good would the little I could give do anyway? When I lay in bed listening to the pouring rain, I didn’t know how to help Gogo. I prayed that God would provide her with a new house.
In December Gogo received a new house built by local university students during the summer holiday. I did not initiate the project. On the day that the new house was revealed to Gogo, I asked her how she felt, she said, “I would not be surprised if God himself is waiting for me in that house when I arrive.” You can view the photo story from the project here: http://www.masakhanecreations.co.za/ex1.php
I remember the day that I brought a newspaper article about her and her new home to show her. When she saw herself she cried and said that I must speak at her funeral. I think perhaps she felt that her story mattered, that she has been seen. I study the deep lines etched into her dark face and wonder about the years that they represent. The more we know, the more we understand. We speak through an interpreter, who is constantly in fits of laughter at Gogo’s jokes, the only thing I can catch is the glint in her bright blue eyes, but Gogo says that when she speaks to me in her dreams, I speak Xhosa too.
Gogo in front of her home
Maria (Makhazi)
She did return. And not for the food, she became part of our group, sitting and listening quietly for many weeks. One day she began to speak, and we learnt more about the greater context.
Here is a transcript of her story (I hope not too much is lost in translation):
“I started coming to the group because of a dream that I had. So I thought I must go to church because I was doing nothing. In my dream there was green grass. Green grass like on a golf course. And there were beautiful, shiny steps going up. It was raining, and the strange thing was that I was not wet, and the steps were not wet. As I was walking up, there were aloes on the side of the steps. The aloe plants were wet from the rain, but I was not getting wet. To the right side of me, was a white house. In front of the house was a man dressed in white who was looking at me as I was walking up the steps. And the man called out to me, ‘Lady, lady, I am talking to you.’ And I replied, ‘Are you really talking to me?’ And the man said, ‘I want you to love me.’ I was suprised that this man would want love from me!’ Then, before I could answer him he spoke again, he said, ‘It is me, the Lord your God.’ And I said, ‘Yes Father.’ And I then continued going up the stairs. It was still raining and he was not getting wet either. He was wearing a white robe, the only thing I could see was his robe, I couldn’t even see his feet, they were covered by the robe. When I reached the top of the stairs, there was a woman who was making a traditional floor, she was not wet either, and neither was the floor. I asked her, ‘Why are you not getting wet?’ She looked at me, and that’s when I woke up.”
Makhazi told us that she used to spend most of her time in bed, overcome with an undiagnosable illness. After her dream, she wanted to respond, but the churches she knew of in the township were too far from her house, and so Makhazi was drawn to join us on that Tuesday morning. A gathering of Christians, sharing burdens, worshipping God. Makhazi’s Church. She says the pain that restricted her to her bed has left her, “Ever since I started going to church, I havn’t felt any more pain.”
That seems like a good line to end on, but perhaps it’s a bit too fluffy for the reality of Christian living. Makhazi has endured hard times since, her home burnt down one night and she was left with nothing. Just yesterday she lost some money when a child destroyed some items she had bought in order to sell and make a profit. But if you see Makhazi today, you will see joy and life in her face, and she will tell you, “I love Jesus very much, and I believe in him.”
