R.I.P. Piglet

One aspect of life in Itipini that is now routine to me is the pigs that are everywhere. Normally they run away from me and particularly my car when I am driving. But the other day while driving back to the clinic, one darted out in front of my car and I couldn’t swerve in time. I hit it with both the front and back wheels and when I looked in the rear-view mirror it was writing and squealing in agony, clearly on its way to death’s door. When I came back later, it was gone, obviously dispatched by some kind soul (or, more likely, someone who couldn’t handle the sound of the squealing).

Coming not a week after my first-ever speeding ticket, my first pig road kill is adding to a growing list of driving firsts. I’ll be happy not to add anymore any time soon.

Greasing the Skids

While giving a tour last month to some visiting students, I was describing all the various things we do in Itipini and a new phrase popped into my head – “greasing the skids.” What we do can best in Itipini is to grease the skids of someone’s life to help them overcome the manifold obstacles that confront them every single day. If you liked physics, you could think of these in terms of the friction formula f=μN. We can reduce the coefficient of friction (μ) and thereby reduce the overall drag someone is experiencing.

Examples of this are numerous:

• We can pay the hospital fee for someone who needs more advanced care than we can provide. The fee isn’t huge, less than 5 U.S. dollars, but even that can put care out of reach of people here.
• We can drive patients to hospital appointments. Itipini, as I’ve noted before, is a good hike from the nearest taxi rank and if a person is weak, say from HIV, the advanced care they need might be physically out of reach for them.
• We can help a family buy uniforms for their children so they won’t get kicked out of school.
• We can provide ready access to condoms and other forms of birth control to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies and the spread of disease.
• We can buy the beads for women who then turn them into crafts that they can sell.
  

What we cannot do is resolve the major issues that define the very heart of life in Itipini. We can’t cure HIV, we can’t make absent fathers provide for their children, we can’t build better homes to replace the decrepit shacks people live in, etc., etc., etc. But perhaps if we help people overcome some of the issues at the margins of their lives, some of the more substantial problems will become a bit more manageable and or at least seem in the realm of solve-ability.

I imagine this phrase has stuck with me because it appeals to that part of me that wants to be doing something, rather than “just” being present with people here. It turns out I’ve been doing something all along – it’s just that what I can do will always be at the margins.

Dorothy and Nthantisi

These are pictures of two of my co-workers. Dorothy, a nurse, sees patients in the clinic and Nthantisi (pronounced “TA-tease” for those of us who can’t master the “nt” dipthong) teaches in the pre-school. (Dorothy is the one who doesn’t like having her picture taken.)

Every morning I pick both of them up at a bottle store (the South African term for liquor store) that is owned by Dorothy’s sister-in-law and is quite close to Itipini. I navigate the usual collection of customers stumbling around the parking lot, do my best to exchange a few words in Xhosa with the sister-in-law, say, “Masihambe” (“Let’s go!”), and off we go to work.

One of the blessings of spending such a long time here is getting to know more about the fabric of life. Dorothy and Nthantisi have been instrumental in shaping my understanding of that fabric.

Nthantisi is in her mid-40s and has 3 children, the oldest of whom is my age. I don’t think she’s ever been married. In addition to teaching in the pre-school, she runs a spaza shop (kind of like a convenience store) out of her home, where she re-sells items she buys downtown; sells airtime for cellphones; cuts and styles hair; and has about a half-dozen tenants in single rooms she’s built out of mud bricks. She also built her own home one room at a time out of mud bricks she made herself. It’s pretty nice. At Itipini, she’s become the integral link in an effort we’ve launched to secure some serious government funding for the ladies who make crafts at Itipini. Some days I can’t believe all the work she has to do just to support her lifestyle.

Personality-wise, Nthantisi reminds me a lot of what I imagine Whoopi Goldberg to be like – loud, overbearing, and hilarious. In our car rides to work, she makes us laugh and laugh and laugh. She has a way of using the all-purpose South African exclamation “Yho!” at just the right time that never fails to amuse me. She is also fond of “Jesus Christ!” which shouldn’t make me laugh but does because of the way she says it.

Dorothy is quieter but she has some pointed and sharp opinions and is not afraid of sharing them, about say, my Xhosa ability, the alcohol consumption of various community members, and so on and so forth. She has a crustiness that is the prerogative of women her age (69) and is made of steel. When a patient gets caught in her tractor beam, it’s game over for them. Since she’s fluent in Xhosa, she is a huge help in counseling patients, particularly those who have just tested positive for HIV or those who seem to drink all the time.

Underneath it all is a really wonderful sense of humor that has taken me a little while to draw out. One time I was playing the guitar outside the clinic with some children and she came out to ask me to quiet down. I serenaded her with “You Are So Beautiful” and she walked back into the clinic shaking her head and chuckling and I escaped my “talking-to.”

Dorothy has been a widow for nearly 30 years and only started working at Itipini two years ago, when she realized she was bored with retirement and the clinic was looking for another nurse. She is originally from Libode, a village about a half-hour outside Mthatha and goes there nearly every weekend. Why? Because of all the funerals. Since the onset of HIV, funerals are a regular weekend occurrence across South Africa and people are expected to attend funerals even for distant family members. I used to ask Dorothy on Monday mornings about her weekend but I got so discouraged about hearing about funeral after funeral after funeral. One Monday morning, I asked her if she had been to a funeral on Saturday and she said something like, “I was supposed to but I took a back way into Libode so they wouldn’t see me. People expect you to go to all these funerals but it gets in the way of work you have to do. I did what I needed to and then came back to Mthatha.”

So… a slice of my daily life.

In which I prepare for a career as a mother bird

The food must have been good.

My Daily Workout

Taking a page from Oprah

What makes Jesse Zink and Oprah Winfrey different? One will work in a shantytown in South Africa and the other won’t. On one of her many jaunts to Africa – and this is a true story – Oprah was planning to visit Itipini but at the last minute her “people” pulled the plug on the visit because they decided it was too “dangerous” for her here. Too “dangerous” for her but not for the Episcopal Church!

But what do Jesse Zink and Oprah Winfrey have in common? We both have book clubs.

Thanks to a generous donation from a supporter, I have several copies of Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” In my new high-school after-school English class, we have just started reading this classic and, I sincerely hope, will make it to the end sometime before the second coming.
I knew it would be above the reading level of the students but I picked it in the hopes that they would rise to the challenge. So far, the results have been mixed. There are all the usual group-related challenges of varying skill levels and levels of interest, not to mention the fear of embarrassment in front of one’s friends. Navigating these in another language is, like everything else here, aggravating beyond belief. I stop frequently to test their comprehension and the students give me dumbfounded looks and are unable to answer some pretty basic questions.

But there are also the small victories. You should have seen the look on their faces when I gave each student a book and said it was an “isipho” (gift) that they could keep forever. I’m not sure if any of them had ever received such an expensive gift and I’m sure none of them had ever received a brand-new book before. It was like when I told them they could buy two pairs of socks each. Watching the students help each other sound out words (the advantage of having varying skill levels in a group) is great, as is seeing the look of (moderate) disappointment on their faces when we reach the end of a chapter and finish our session for the day.

I had initially thought about reading “The BFG” but decided against it because I was worried there would be too many made-up words in it. (I’ve never forgotten the words “whizpopper” or “snozzcumber” even though I read the book at least 15 years ago.) These students have enough trouble with real words without any other complications. “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” was my compromise choice but I realize now that every Dahl book has made-up words in it so we’ll just muddle through like we do with everything else.

But “Charlie” has proven to be an inspired choice for another reason, namely that Charlie’s life is a lot like that of students. He lives in a small, run-down house on the edge of a big town, is desperately poor, lives close to starvation, and so on and so forth. I just hope the book doesn’t raise the hopes of my students that some day they’ll find a Golden Ticket out of their current lives.

I also have another English class of younger, middle-school age students. My lessons with them have so far been comically awful and frustrating, due as much to my own woefully inept and insufficient planning as to what I realize are universal attributes of middle-school students. But that’s a story for another time.

A Talented Child

Here’s a talented child.

Not only can he change a flat…

… and read a book…

he helps his mother clean up the lunch dishes.

In Use

My burgeoning little library is becoming a popular place to hang out.

A young mother can come to read… and simultaneously feed her child.


When, for reasons that I don’t quite understand, school is cancelled for a day, children can come use the colouring books. These children were there for nearly three hours on Tuesday.

All very small steps but all in the right direction.

A Travesty of Justice

This news will likely come as no surprise to faithful readers who recall those halcyon days when I was a lead-foot ambulance driver but it came as a shock to me. I got a speeding ticket!

It’s my first one ever and came on the way back from my trip to Stephen’s ordination in December. Some camera took a picture of me going 84 km/h in a 60 km/h zone and I now owe 300 rand, about a tenth of my monthly stipend. I was going to try to blame my fellow missionary Matt, who drove part of the trip, but in the picture it is a very clear that I am driving. I could plead ignorance of the charges as the ticket is mostly in Afrikaans.

On the plus side, I guess this is a good sign that I’m finally used to driving stick shift on the left-hand side of the road.

This is neat

The Episcopal Diocese of Maryland has a Lenten children’s program that is centred on Itipini. Check it out!

UPDATE: I fixed the link. It should work now.

The 8 Commandments

All the work I’ve lately been putting into getting the children of Itipini into primary school has brought to mind the Millennium Development Goals. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, the MDGs are a set of 8 goals established by the United Nations in 2000 that seek to improve life in the developing world. One of the goals is universal primary education by the year 2015.

Itipini will not meet this particular MDG this year; there are some children who won’t be in primary school. Why not?

A major obstacle to primary education throughout the developing world is school fees. But that’s not an obstacle in Itipini. For parents who can’t afford to send their children to school, African Medical Mission will pay their way. AMM is not exactly flush with cash but there is enough money to ensure that it should not be an obstacle to education.

Think for a moment about what it takes to get a child into primary school in the developed world. School fees and school uniforms are not generally at issue. What it requires is a mother or father or guardian who will wake the child up each morning, feed them, clothe them, and send them on their way. Then, when the day is done, that same person needs to welcome the student home, feed them, and make sure they get to bed on time. For the student to be successful, she or he might need help with their homework or someone to read to them. If none of this happens, other people might start to notice and there is a whole array of tools – from truant officers to foster parents and so on – to ensure that the child ends up in school.

It is this second set of non-monetary, social obstacles that is the prime obstacle to universal primary education in Itipini. While there are many mothers (almost exclusively, given that the fathers are AWOL) and grandmothers who do their best to feed their children and make sure they go to school, there are also many who do not and who really don’t seem to invest all that much energy in their child. There are children who run around Itipini all day because no one has bothered to sign them up for school or tell us they can’t afford the fees. We made a big public push to get children registered for school but still parents show up now – two weeks into the school year – and ask if it’s too late. I guess I should welcome the fact that they’re trying at all but I want to scream, “Where have you been? Don’t you care?”

In the developed world, the long arm of the state would intervene in these situations. But the South African state has a weak to non-existent presence in Itipini. There are no truant officers or enough social workers to intervene when necessary. I do my best to play the role of guardian for those children who I know need it. I ask them what they learned in school, I try to find out about their homework, and so on and so forth. But to do this effectively for even one child is hard and takes an immense amount of time and there are scores of such children here and millions more like them across the developing world.

The Episcopal Church is one of many organizations that has made achievement of the MDGs one of its primary goals. This is laudable and should be widely emulated. But we will not achieve the MDGs simply by writing checks and sending money to the developing world. At some point, we need to stop and answer the question of agency – are the people on whom this money is being spent ready for the advantages the money will bring them? Most are. But what about the ones who aren’t? How do we best help them?

I’m planning on coming back to this topic in future posts but I want to raise it now because it’s been on my mind constantly these past few weeks. I have no answers, just questions.

(Here’s another one – what if all that effort and money we expend in getting the children into a school puts them in a sub-standard or failing school where the quality of education leaves a lot to be desired? As a statistic, that child is in primary school but is it doing him any good? This is not a hypothetical scenario.)

Reality

Somehow, what was once just an off-handed suggestion – “a library, that would be neat…” – has become a full-fledged, operating reality in Itipini. It has only become a reality thanks to a huge array of people, including

• numerous readers of this blog who sent me nearly 300 books in the mail (not cheap!) to add to the ones I already had for a grand total of 356 on the shelves (currently…).
• other people sent posters, which help make the walls a little friendly
• a group of volunteers from Whitworth College in Spokane, Washington who visited for a few days and painted the inside of the container to make it a bit more welcoming
  

To my very great surprise, people in Itipini – particularly the children – are really into this idea of a place for books in the midst of their community. I had expected having plenty of time to ease people into the idea of checking out books (and even more time to get people used to the idea of returning books) but I am now coming up with a cataloguing and record-keeping system on the fly.

What you really want to see, I am sure, are the pictures. Before you look at these, remind yourself of the “before” shots.

Admittedly, this picture is posed… but isn’t it wonderful! (You might remember this child as the one who helped me change my flat tire.)

The Whitworth students drew a crowd.