dolls i made for kids at creche out of mango pips, macadamia shells & grass & chip packets. Soon destroyed!
Thoko, Thembisile and kids at the creche...
Wow the power to endure the long run of days! Beauty all around but everything takes time to manifest… Hot dry wind days, nights becoming cooler, but millions of stars and the milky way shining down on us! I am still trudging to the village twice a week to play with the children at the crèche, and the weekly class with little ones at school. We play animals and sing songs that Sarah helps me to translate in Siswati, which I am learning painstakingly slowly. I bought some paper and a few crayons last trip in Nelspruit, and a little blackboard and some chalk, and Luca, a recent young visitor left some bubbles – these meagre activities the children pounce on like ants, screaming wildly. It is fun, I love these children dearly, but after a few hours of trying to communicate and then the walk back, I’m quite exhausted. Still dreaming of circles and activities with older kids, my language problem makes any organising take that much longer…
We’ve been eating well with produce from the garden, tomatoes, cassava & pumpkin leaves, chives, parsley added to staples like beans and rice or mealie pap. Peanuts, green beans, mealies, pumpkins still on their way. Cannot complain, although I sometimes long for nibbly or sweet things, that in the city world one can resort to so easily. We have been blessed with lovely rich mandula fruits from the wild, and maroela, with which we are fermenting a brew. The three of us potter about doing chores or other more sedentary activities in the heat… it gets quite intense sometimes, although there is all this space and nature around us, we do trip over each other’s feet and personal habits and obsessions sometimes. In a heated moment of frustrated projection, it has been a good lesson to own what I may be cross or anxious about, relax and let it go. Although I feel huge gratitude for the blessings that are here, it hasn’t been easy all the time. Sometimes I go a bit crazy longing for a soulmate love and friends and a space of love home. But I have been playing my ukelele a lot, learning lots of chords, and occasionally producing a new song. And writing children’s stories, there’s now a hippo story and a baboon story, and a river story and a wasp story coming. And Frog, leopard and lizard all want to speak too… And I’ve been making hanging things, with stones and string and grass, that I hang around the place from trees… And it was great having Soozi and Ewald and Luca and Fleur visiting…
Last week I went to Nhlazatsche, the nearest town, to attend the opening of Sangoma Mandla’s new ‘dropping’ centre providing 3 meals a day for orphans. He has miraculously acquired daily donations of vegetables and mealie pap and meat. He already runs 2 other drop-in centres/home based care programs staffed by volunteers for HIV/AIDS sufferers. And he is a practising Sangoma, and trains up-and-coming sangomas too. I slept over for two nights, helping prepare food for the big day. One morning, some people arrived for a femba, a ceremony to exorcise bewitching, and I was invited to attend. Various accoutrements like beads and special skirt and wig are piled on as Mandla goes deeper into trance, while the trainees vigorously drum a certain beat on cow-hide drums, and chant. It turns out this sick lady’s late pastor has bewitched her and he is ordered to leave. Mekwaas, a young trainee sangoma, tells me later that the femba always discovers the possessing spirit. Mekwaas has been in training for 4 months, visions in her dreams from her ancestors guided her there. Mandla’s daughter is also in training, a strong mature girl who is only in grade 10. She came to join in the drumming before going off to school.
It is a hot day. The ceremony takes place in a blue and red-striped tent, attended by some officials from the Dept of Correctional Services (!), a headteacher, children, and the management and staff of drop-in centres. It is refreshing because everyone breaks into singing in between and sometimes during each speech. Then everyone receives lunch. I meet Faith, an amazing woman from Zimbabwe, who had to leave her children with her mother, to come to South Africa and earn money. She is a high-school teacher, counsellor and has managerial experience. She started off teaching at a private school, but she says it is so demanding and she got so exhausted she had to stop. She had no time to attend to her needs or pray or anything. So she has to come to volunteer at Mandla’s centre. She is amazingly cheerful, and crochets delicate white cloth, as she chats.
We’ve been eating well with produce from the garden, tomatoes, cassava & pumpkin leaves, chives, parsley added to staples like beans and rice or mealie pap. Peanuts, green beans, mealies, pumpkins still on their way. Cannot complain, although I sometimes long for nibbly or sweet things, that in the city world one can resort to so easily. We have been blessed with lovely rich mandula fruits from the wild, and maroela, with which we are fermenting a brew. The three of us potter about doing chores or other more sedentary activities in the heat… it gets quite intense sometimes, although there is all this space and nature around us, we do trip over each other’s feet and personal habits and obsessions sometimes. In a heated moment of frustrated projection, it has been a good lesson to own what I may be cross or anxious about, relax and let it go. Although I feel huge gratitude for the blessings that are here, it hasn’t been easy all the time. Sometimes I go a bit crazy longing for a soulmate love and friends and a space of love home. But I have been playing my ukelele a lot, learning lots of chords, and occasionally producing a new song. And writing children’s stories, there’s now a hippo story and a baboon story, and a river story and a wasp story coming. And Frog, leopard and lizard all want to speak too… And I’ve been making hanging things, with stones and string and grass, that I hang around the place from trees… And it was great having Soozi and Ewald and Luca and Fleur visiting…
Last week I went to Nhlazatsche, the nearest town, to attend the opening of Sangoma Mandla’s new ‘dropping’ centre providing 3 meals a day for orphans. He has miraculously acquired daily donations of vegetables and mealie pap and meat. He already runs 2 other drop-in centres/home based care programs staffed by volunteers for HIV/AIDS sufferers. And he is a practising Sangoma, and trains up-and-coming sangomas too. I slept over for two nights, helping prepare food for the big day. One morning, some people arrived for a femba, a ceremony to exorcise bewitching, and I was invited to attend. Various accoutrements like beads and special skirt and wig are piled on as Mandla goes deeper into trance, while the trainees vigorously drum a certain beat on cow-hide drums, and chant. It turns out this sick lady’s late pastor has bewitched her and he is ordered to leave. Mekwaas, a young trainee sangoma, tells me later that the femba always discovers the possessing spirit. Mekwaas has been in training for 4 months, visions in her dreams from her ancestors guided her there. Mandla’s daughter is also in training, a strong mature girl who is only in grade 10. She came to join in the drumming before going off to school.
It is a hot day. The ceremony takes place in a blue and red-striped tent, attended by some officials from the Dept of Correctional Services (!), a headteacher, children, and the management and staff of drop-in centres. It is refreshing because everyone breaks into singing in between and sometimes during each speech. Then everyone receives lunch. I meet Faith, an amazing woman from Zimbabwe, who had to leave her children with her mother, to come to South Africa and earn money. She is a high-school teacher, counsellor and has managerial experience. She started off teaching at a private school, but she says it is so demanding and she got so exhausted she had to stop. She had no time to attend to her needs or pray or anything. So she has to come to volunteer at Mandla’s centre. She is amazingly cheerful, and crochets delicate white cloth, as she chats.
the opening of Mandla's dropping centre. Mandla is above the roses...
The big pot chefs...
And the happy recipients...
Back at Umphakatsi days go by, hot, so a lot of time is spent carrying water for plants before the sun sets. I go twice a week to either play with the kids at the crèche or do the class at school with the little ones. They are completely wild, and jump and hang on me like fruit on a tree. I would like to just play, but we have to do ‘structured activities’. The school has some resources like paint and crayons and plasticine, so we have been using that, it all gets created in the moment! Thoko has just organised an additional Sunday afternoon activity session with children of all ages, and I meet up with them all on the Football field. 100 kids pinching me, hanging off me, climbing all over me! But we have a great time running around, dancing and singing, and they have a good laugh at me doing queer antics mirroring them! Unfortunately my grasp of Siswati is still too limited to really play good imagination games or create stories, so have to shelve that vision for a while… The kids have lovely names, like Evidence, Agreement, Beauty, Surprise, Thanks, Waiting, Patience, Quiet…
Sarah arrives back from meetings in Joburg and Cape Town in a beaten-up old 4-wheel drive truck that she bought in Nelspruit for a borrowed R13,000 from her brother… It needs new tyres, windows, rust-repair and bearings and goes for a while, but doesn’t want to now…! This week I spent a morning making masks out of cardboard for the kids at school, they colour them in, and went wild dancing with them on. But then I was really disappointed, the teacher made them hand all their masks in for the school to keep, I was amazed, they couldn’t even take them home!
Sarah arrives back from meetings in Joburg and Cape Town in a beaten-up old 4-wheel drive truck that she bought in Nelspruit for a borrowed R13,000 from her brother… It needs new tyres, windows, rust-repair and bearings and goes for a while, but doesn’t want to now…! This week I spent a morning making masks out of cardboard for the kids at school, they colour them in, and went wild dancing with them on. But then I was really disappointed, the teacher made them hand all their masks in for the school to keep, I was amazed, they couldn’t even take them home!
Virgin masks...
... become interesting characters
Full moon and equinox was a strange time, we have been bombarded with chem trails here, the day after full moon, the sky was a day glo orange, hot humid heat and haze, what are they doing? I have to take a trip before the end of the month, to use my internet airtime before it expires and send this to the world. The Space of Love Gathering is happening 2 weeks over Easter at end of April, come if you can make it!!!!! From 20 Apr – 2nd May includes informal and work gathering with structured activities on weekend of Fri 22 Apr – 25 Apr. See http://spaceoflove.co.za/2011-easter-sol-gathering-umphakatsi/
And here I am posting this in a café with a cappuccino and a piece of chocolate cake, God, what an indulgent treat! A HUGE lightning storm a few nights ago, lightning and thunder reverberating through me, the valley, the sky, veritably changing our very molecules in the moment, wot. I had to leave at 4am this morning to catch the bus at 5.30 zzzzzzzz
Love
And here I am posting this in a café with a cappuccino and a piece of chocolate cake, God, what an indulgent treat! A HUGE lightning storm a few nights ago, lightning and thunder reverberating through me, the valley, the sky, veritably changing our very molecules in the moment, wot. I had to leave at 4am this morning to catch the bus at 5.30 zzzzzzzz
Love
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