Ingwavuma. (I know the blog title says ‘eManyeseni’ but we’ll get to that.) To describe Ingwavuma, I have to take you back to a conversation Thoko, my Zimbabwean roommate and I had one day as I was doing yoga on the top of the mountain on my bamboo mat and Thoko was wondering what my Dyna Bands were all about. [On a side note, I was using my Dyna Bands against a tree today and the gardener just clucked away in Zulu, shaking his head: ‘make work’.] I was surveying all the small village homes and commenting to Thoko, “What exactly do the people do here…farming?” I said this last part a little dubiously as the climate and terrain aren’t too conducive to agriculture. “Ai,” Thoko tutted, “Nothing.” Scrutinizing the landscape, she said “Ingwavuma. Ai! It’s a hell of a place.” Flashforward to Thoko leaving the rondawel at sunrise to catch a plane to Cape Town for 10 days.
And so it is that I inhabit the mountaintop all by my lonesome these days. All jokes aside though, Ingwavuma is a beautiful, mystical place. And I’m not totally alone in the Roundawel; I do have a new roommate, a cockroach the size of my head. So far, he’s been keeping ‘below deck’ as per our informal landlord/tenant agreement. The geckos aren’t so bad, they are like living wallpaper, but I was rooting around in a box today looking for matches, and one popped out at me like a Jack-in-the-Box! The season is at its edge and it’s prescribed burn time, though I don’t know how prescribed these burns are, when I see eight year olds setting them. The whole landscape smells like roasted marshmallow and there’s something ironically comforting about seeing these blazes scratched across the mountaintop like little campfires. I am getting slowly but surely getting into the ‘rhythm of rural’. The other day I took a walk to the market, just to see how long that would take without transport {an hour and a half}. But I really saw and noticed things and took pictures of people and places along the way.
I think I got into this more relaxed pace, back in eManyeseni. There’s something about having no electricity that really slows you down. I used to feel really stir crazy, cabin feverish, especially surrounded by Zulu all the time. I needed to read a book, write in my journal, study Zulu words, or play with the kids in the creche, until one afternoon, I was sitting outside with the Drama Team, and suddenly realized two hours had gone by. And I hadn’t done a thing, other than watch the occasional truck drift by and let the Zulu conversation of the others click clack around me. I just kind of let the day settle around my shoulders. And it felt incredibly good.
Since there isn’t electricity here, we have parafin tanks which we ignite by a match to cook and boil water from the JoJo tanks. There are also irons (made of iron!) that you can place flat on the coils to heat up and press your clothes for the day. The people here take great pride of ownership in their personal appearance and despite the dust and lack of running water, always arrive to work in pressed trousers and polished shoes. We boil water and lather up soap in big plastic tubs to wash dishes and clothes (the girls use those ropey red netted sacks you buy oranges in as loofah sponges), and hang the wet clothes where they dance on the line outside the crèche.
The Drama Team I work with are really humourous and lively. It’s so cold up here in the mountains that I have actually gotten out my ‘safety suit’ (you know those one-size-fits-all aluminum style suits they sell at Canadian Tire for when you’re stuck in your car in the wintertime, waiting for AA). I made Sifiso wear it one day on a dare, to conduct the drama workshops and he looked like the TinMan from OuterSpace. These guys have a terrific sense of humour and are always playing tricks on me. I’m trying to learn Zulu, and one day as a bunch of riotous-looking guys passed by in the back of a pick-up truck, heading into the sunset, Mbali muttered to herself, “Hambushone”, sucking on a piece of sugarcane. When I asked her what it meant, she replied, “Never look back.” I thought that was such a coolly poetic phrase, and began repeating it, motivational-style, when we would walk through the village, as in “Keep an eye to the future. Never look back. Keep on keeping on.” Mbali always snickered, but I thought she was mocking my pronunciation until one day, Nomcebo heard me saying that to someone, and said “Ai! Jenn! You cannot say that to people. It is so rude.” It turns out it means “Never come back” as in “Go to hell!” Mbali thinks it’s just hilarious, so as punishment, when we went to the Bottle Store, I made her carry the six-pack of beer covered in newspaper back through the village. It’s such a funny oxymoron how these girls can walk around the crèche topless with no worries, but they giggle nervously asking me if I have a boyfriend, or carrying beer. There is some weird stigma about alcohol here that I don’t quite get. About once a week, I’ll buy some beer for the team to have around the campfire, but the other girls never touch it, only me and the guys. When we were in the Bottle Store, Mbali was giggling like a schoolgirl and I asked one of the notorious Matenjwa’s of the village, “Excuse me, Mr. Matenjwa, but I have a cultural question. If I am here in the village to teach and do workshops but I want to enjoy a beer at night, is that viewed as okay?” At first he thought I meant can we drink while we do the workshops, and he said, “No, as a teacher, you must not drink with the students!” but once I clarified things, he said that there was no problem. However, I do notice the women completely abstain from alcohol, while the guys feel no compunction at all about taking up the slack. One day in the crèche, I noticed Mbali looking really upset. I asked her what was wrong, and she said, “My boyfriend is dead!” I said, “Yeah, right”, not about to fall for that because these guys are always trying to trick me. But then Mbali burst into tears, and said “Ask them, it is true!” I felt horrible and said, “Mbali, I’m so sorry. What happened?”
“He is bitten by a snake!”
“Back in Ingwavuma?”
“No. (sobbing) Mozambique.”
I felt terrible and gave her a big hug, at which point she burst out laughing and yelled, “Hah! Jenn! I am JOKING!” and started dancing around like a twilight leprechaun. These kind of jokes went on and on and now that I think about it, they may have gotten my explanation of ‘Friday the 13th’ mixed up with ‘April Fool’s Day’. They also wanted to get back at me for the ‘Bone Incident’ wherein they gave me some root vegetable to eat but cautioned me, “Don’t eat the bone in the middle or you will ‘go to your home’.” By which they meant ‘heaven’, as in ‘you’ll die; it’s poisonous.’ Which, by the way -- not so clear. Later in the day, I said to Sifiso and Mbali, “Listen, you know that bone thing you were telling me about? I was really hungry, so I plucked it out of the garbage and ate it. You were kidding about it being poisonous, right?” Sifiso opened his eyes wide and said, “Ai. Ish. It is a problem.” I can’t believe they fell for that. Since when do I go plucking things up from the garbage to snack on!
After almost two weeks of workshopping in eManyeseni, the ongoing public servants’ strike which has been going full force in the larger cities, like Durban and Jo’burg, finally trickled out to the rurals and eManyeseni staff was told not to go to work. They mean business when they say that as teachers who do cross the line can be severely beaten. Even the private schools which are not part of the union are on strike right now as a type of enforced solidarity, since the public sector don’t want all the beaurocrats’ children getting ahead of the game on their matrics. Jabula (‘Happy’ in Zulu) invited me to her farmhouse for breakfast, since we weren’t allowed to cross into the yard, but she was chewing her lip, wanting to get ahold of her learners’ exercise books so she could catch up on marking during the strike. Since she was too nervous to enter the yard, she got hold of some of her pupils and asked them to go in through the windows to abscond the books. They followed behind us down the path with piles of exercise books in their arms like little worker ants. Jabula made us tea and toast, porridge, Milo and…chicken! Freshly slaughtered. You know it. I didn’t actually meet that chicken though, so I ate it, and I have to say, Dieudonne was right. There is something incredibly natural tasting about a freshly slaughtered chicken. I am so used to preservatives, but it tastes richer and more succulent ‘au natural’.
Right before the strike, M. Matenjwa, the Director of the School, was giving me a tour, proudly pointing out photos of herself with various renowned politicians (and here is a photo of me with an albino man!) when she took me to the Grade One classrooms to meet the students. They were grinning from ear to ear, pointing at my camera, saying ‘Shoot me’ and scuttling around their desks to come and talk to me. M. Matenjwa had them do an impromptu reading of some Zulu and English words on the board and then some of them started dancing for me. M. Matenjwa, leading me out said, “Jenny, don’t forget to rrremind me that I will have the students crrreate a perforrmance of Afrrican singing and dancing forr you, next week!” Then, clucking over her shoulder, she commented, “Not these ones! They arre all failing! As you can see.”
Anyway, we are back in Ingwavuma now, which seems positively luxurious with the electricity and running water. I don’t even care that it’s cold, especially after running in the mountains, but sometimes when it’s too chilly I heat up water in the kettle to pour into the basin and let the hot water stream over my shoulders. There’s something about having a limited supply of hot water that makes the whole experience positively decadent. I’ve been doing a little cooking here too. Sometimes, we’re a hard-pressed for ingredients, so I’ve had to experiment a bit. The other day, for instance, I was making pasta and realized we had no sauce, so I concocted my own using…wait for it…strawberry yogurt, mayonnaise, sugar, and carrots. You would think that would taste weird, but it is actually yummy! Thoko even added mince and ketchup to hers. Ironically, I was considering doing that myself but thought it might be ‘over the top’. The other day Thoko was about to cook some chicken and I told her, ”I’ve got some pasta on the go, if you want”, but she cocked an eyebrow and asked, “What will the ingredients be?” That said, back in eManyeseni when I brought our campfire s’mores back to the cottages for Dieudonne and Nolwazi to try, Nolwazi clapped her hands together and exclaimed, “Oh, I love the things you white people cook!”
Oh, and today Fana and I were shopping at the Spar and I discovered the most delectable invention: chocolate chip peanut butter. I had been trying to convince Fana to try a peanut butter and banana sandwich because a lot of times when people don’t want to cook here, they just eat bread. So I was trying to convince him to at least put peanut butter and banana on there to get some protein and fruit in with the carbs, when we saw the CCPB sitting like a little genie on the shelf. The sad part was when they went to scan it there was a problem with the bar codes. I don’t really get why they couldn’t just type in ’18 rand’ but the end result was: No Chocolate Chip Peanut Butter for us!
On the weekends, I’ve been taking a few road trips. Gama, Nati and I went to visit Dieudonne in Jozini one weekend where we hung out eating oranges at the market (Nati ate the whole thing, peel and all!) We went to meet Dieudonne’s friends, Ibrahim and Moses, outside their garment shop and then drank soda water at Tiger Lodge. This past weekend, I went with Fana and his family to the glitzy shopping centre at Richard’s Bay. It seemed like a bit of culture shock after a month of Ingwavuma/eManyeseni. Everything seemed so shiny. Fana wants to open up his own business and was in the market for a laminator and airtime machine. We had fun horsing around with the toys in the toystore, pretending we were a couple shopping for furniture (the salesclerk got my cell number, so she can SMS me some deals on chesterfields;), and eating at KFC.
One weekend, Thoko and I went to her pastor’s wedding. The little ring boy looked so sharp in his pressed white trousers and peach cumberbund, but the bride looked positively remorseful. When I walked into the church, I felt very much the obviously conspicuous wedding crasher, being the only white person in the congregation, but the people here are so kind. A woman took me by the hand and led me to sit with the head table, so I could have a perfect view of everything. Since the only Zulu words I really understood from the speeches were ‘umama’ and ‘ubaba’ (the other words I know like outhouse ‘indluyangasese’, rooster ‘iqhude’ and milk ‘ubisu’ weren’t in there) I spent the entire wedding weaving possible scenarios for her unhappiness, though the boisterous pastor beside me kept roaring, “She’s shy! Ai, she’s shy!”
Other than that, the team here keep trying to ransom me off to their various brothers and cousins for ‘lobolo’ (bride price). Mbali wants me to marry her brother whom I met for five minutes the other day in the yard, and Nomcebo always teases me about ‘drunken high school geography teacher’ who is a notorious hanger-onner at the Bottle Shop and always calls out little missives to me in English, such as: ‘We meet to part, and we part to meet’, from under his striped knit cap. One day I got transport back to Ingwavuma with him and he must have sploshed half a mickey of alcohol on me trying to mix a drink in the cab of Senzo’s truck.
In closing, here are some of my favorite Zulu words so far: kuqxakeka (This means ‘confused’. A useful word for me, since I often am confused, but how do you pronounce it exactly? That ‘qx’ gets me every time!)
Cow: Izinkomo (I like it because it sounds like ‘is in coma’ which is true of the cows here. They do not even blink for fast-moving vehicles.)
Angry: Nyanya. (It sounds like that mocking sound kids make, in the schoolyard.)
That is all for now, from Zululand.
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