Walked around the community today with my new buddy Yozi, finishing up his law degree. He gave me a nickname in Xhosa so when we go into people’s houses he doesn’t have to say Jessica. He named me “Nomthandazo” (nun-tun-day-ze) which means “woman of prayer”. He said it’s not religious, just a nice name. I like it.
You do not wait to be invited, hesitate, to enter a person’s house. It is seen as an insult. For respect, you enter and sit down.
There are flies, in the double digits, that swarm the houses.
Women wash their clothes in basins outside, the sand landscape absorbing the water after they dump their wash buckets. Children’s clothes hang on the lines. There is one tap for many houses; the average is 30 homes, or about people, to 1 tap. Toilets are the same.
It sounds semi-uncivilized. And yet it is - they have yards designated by makeshift fences. A woman had planted a garden of cacti in the sand. Numbers of houses are spray painted on the sides of the homes. Some doors have locks.
The ground is sand. Inside the houses are floor coverings, sometimes carpet but most of the time something that looks like linoleum laid over the sand. You can feel the humps. The walls are patch work of metal nailed together. The more “upscale” houses have one sheet of metal instead of a bunch put together.
Yozi goes in and speaks in Xhosa about the Treatment Action Campaign, the prevalence of AIDS, TB, and rape in Khayelitsha. I hand the people we visit a pamphlet.
I learned to say hello in Xhosa today. A woman smiled as she heard me utter the words.
A child, a young boy, smiled with his whole face when I smiled at him. The kids stared at me, all the children I saw today, and I wonder how often they have white women in their homes. They crawl on sandy floors with the flies. But they smile and live, happy as it seems.
There are power lines that line the street, covering the ground that children walk.
I must have seen 10 dogs that all looked the same despite their mixed ancestry, lying in the shade looking half dead. I was afraid to pet them. A few followed, looking for who knows what. Food, water? A kind pat on the head? People cannot afford to feed their children, let alone adopted animals.
Overwhelmed, but reminded of the beauty of people and the ability they have to persevere in the face of so much unfair oppression.
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