Jonathan Field - Maker of Random Stuff

Despite having eaten a ton yesterday, I woke up in the early morning with a growling stomach. I find it worth noting this again, as I’ve noticed it before: the day I ate the most was the day I ended up hungriest. I felt much better and more full on small portions of bean and rice salad. I think we don’t understand nutrition all that well yet, at least in the American mainstream. My stomach growls and growls, but I manage to fall asleep again.

I’ve been here a week. I wake up in Evan’s place at around 9:30. I take my time getting up; I log in for a bit and catch up on mail. I don’t have any more breakfast supplies, but I figure I’ll be fine and I head off to Thalani High School at around 10:30. This is neat because it’s the first time I’ve driven through Sibongile by myself. I pass the stop sign that scares off most whites. And I must restate that I don’t feel this area is dangerous.

I pull up to the school and I’ve arrived during a break or something because there is a sea of students pouring out. They are mostly dressed in the school colors; green, yellow, and black. By coincidence those are the colors of the ANC (African National Congress). It’s actually almost definitely not a coincidence, but the principal says it is because they’re supposed to be apolitical. But obviously they’re not.

I park on the side of the road, lock the car, and walk through a thick crowd of kids. I smile and say “hi” to those who look at me as I make my way to the office. There, after asking a few people I find Donna. She is doing some training. She directs me to meet Alan, who is in the library with Zenzo, one of the boys who watched the movie with us last night. Alan and Donna want to include him in some of our trips, at least because he doesn’t have a job anyways, but possibly for him to make some connections.

I get to the library; it’s pretty small, not that much larger than a classroom. They’re either terribly disorganized or they are in the midst of a major move, but half the shelves are empty and the other half have books stacked in a completely disorganized manner on their sides. Dewey has no jurisdiction here.

But Alan is in the office, just finishing up a fix of some sort. Zenzo is there and we greet. They do have a large collection of encyclopedias on the wall in the library office; Britannica, Americana, Worldbook, etc. They look pretty old, but I suppose all encyclopedias look pretty old to me now. I wonder if there are any Zulu language stuff in Wikipedia. I kind of doubt it. I wonder if there’s any online Zulu community.

The next 30 minutes are spent on a wild goose chase trying to find keys for the mac lab. We go back and forth from the locked lab to the office several times. On the way, Alan does decide to make up a little sign that advertises an “open lab” today from 3PM to 5PM. He posts it near the entrance on the wall. Eventually we find the lab open, full of kids with no teacher.

We take the opportunity to work with random kids. It’s an interesting thing. The class seemed to be 10th graders, from talking to them. Their English is pretty weak overall. Most of them were playing a typing game, though they weren’t doing it in a very structured way. The rest were playing a geography game, but on the easiest setting, where you don’t have to know anything, just match shapes.

I work with one of the kids typing, who is using caps lock to do capitals, and then turning it off afterwards. I try to show him how to use the shift key to do it. He sort of gets it.

I work with some of the kids doing the geography game. I try it on a harder setting, where you have to choose the right name for the world area. We’re looking at a world map divided into about 12 regions. Overall geography skills seem to be terrible — Alan told me of a geography teacher once who couldn’t identify South Africa on a map. I don’t expect much from the students. One of the kids does horribly, not seeming to get a single region right. But one of the other kids does great, only getting Europe wrong on his first guess.

After asking around, Alan finds out that it is a typing class, and they’re all supposed to be doing typing practice. But the teacher told them this and just left. This causes me to feel disdain for the teacher. How are the kids supposed to learn without any guidance? We take it upon ourselves to show the kids how to use the typing program. I get about four kids using the introductory level stuff properly before the class ends. It’s fun, but it feels like a hopeless battle.

The teacher does show up after the class ends. It is Joju, the same lady I met the first night in town whose chickens died from the heat this past summer. She seems worn out. She explains why she wasn’t in class: a student of hers collapsed, and she had to take care of her.

Donna asks if it might be sickness. Joju doesn’t think so. It is emotional. The girl who collapsed, her mother died last year. Her father had died earlier, so she is now the head of her household with four younger children, and she is only 15 herself. Joju the teacher says this girl loves school. She walks 2 hours to school every morning. I suppose I would to if it afforded escape from that kind of reality.

Alan and Donna try to make some suggestions on how to improve class, but basically the teacher is overwhelmed. They kindly offer either Zenzo or I to do some assisting, and the teacher seems very happy about that. We don’t make any solid plans, but we agree to talk more.

As we’re leaving for lunch, I start getting a sense that this is an inner city school. Thalani is bigger, rowdier, and less well put together than some of the poorer schools we have visited. But because this whole area is less developed, I wasn’t recognizing it for what it is. The area didn’t look like a city. But it bears many of the inner city school challenges. Zenzo mentions this at some point too. “This school is wild,” he says, “the kids like to rock and roll.”

Donna and Alan, and in a separate car Zenzo and I, all drive back to their trailer for lunch. Zenzo is a pretty quiet guy, but he laughs easily and seems to know what is going on. I ask him about his plans to be a security guard, but he says he can’t do it; you have to take a course to get certified and that course costs 15,000 rand (about $2000), which he has no way to get. So he’s looking for any old job now.

Back at the trailer we have bread, spread with canned Mackerel, plus some fresh carrots and cucumbers. We chat about light stuff. Zenzo is a playful guy, and he makes a face on his plate with cucumbers and carrots. Then he eats the cucumber eyes while joking with us that he likes the taste of eyeballs.

We head back to the lab to see if any kids show up. While we’re waiting, Zenzo and I play with the typing program. I peak at about 70 words per minute with 100% accuracy. I guess I’m pretty good after all this time. Zenzo doesn’t do a speed test, just practice. He can touch type alright, but not that fast. He doesn’t have a computer at home, of course. No kids show up to the lab after school. We figure we didn’t put the sign up in a good enough place, nor with enough time. Alan has run successful computer clubs in the past here, but with a little more planning.

So now we have an open afternoon. Alan, Zenzo, and I drive through Sibongile, and stop at Simangaliso’s place. Since I saw it the first time I have learned that he built it himself. It is traditional for Zulu men to build their own place when they reach adulthood — this seems to coincide with graduation in modern society. The building that they would make used to be a round Zulu hut (called a rondo), but now it can be anything. Simangaliso has built a square room of concrete blocks and a tin roof. On the outside it doesn’t look like much, but it sure looks solid. He has done the inside pretty nicely, though, with smooth plaster, earth toned paint, and a carpet. On the one hand, it is a very humble living quarters, on the other hand, I challenge you to build your own. It is just a single standalone room, and he still uses the bath and kitchen in the main house, on whose yard his room is built.

But he isn’t in his room, he’s working out in another small shack in the same yard. With two other friends he is lifting weights. He lays on a wooden bench and his friend spots a 40kg bar which he does for 16 reps. I ask if I can give it a try. He says sure, and I manage 10 reps. I think I might have been able to squeeze out two more, but Alan seems concerned that I might be overdoing it. Being the man with the broken arm, I suppose he’s right that I do have that tendancy.

Then Alan decides to direct us out beyond Sibongile into the countryside, to an abandoned school. We have to go off road to get there, and the three of us bounce along. We get lost a few times and ask the locals for directions. Eventually we get there. It looks much like the other school buildings, but it is a mess. Unused for a year, every window is broken and the pathways are covered in cow patties. We gingerly step around to take a peek. One amazing find: a whole lot of desks and chairs, in good shape. Other schools need these, but here’s nearly a whole school’s worth unused. Poor distribution of resources. We make a mental note to tell other schools about this if they need some.

Next we drive back to the location, the township, Sibongile. We head to Zenzo’s brother-in-law’s place to check out his broken PC. Zenzo tells us there were eight in his family, four boys and four girls. But his oldest sister died last year. He says it in a matter of fact way, and my comment, “I’m sorry to hear that” doesn’t get a reaction.

As we pull into the dirt driveway, we hear Rasta music playing. We park the car and Zenzo leads us around back, over the yellowing scratchgrass and dusty bare spots. Like most of the houses I have visted in Sibongile, you just have to make a mental shift: at first glance it seems sadly run down, but in fact it is perfectly livable. It’s just that many of us are used to an obsessively cleaned and tended environment. But the fact is you don’t need that to be happy. It’s just a lot of extra money and effort.

We enter through the kitchen and a very young nephew of Zenzo’s is cooking something up. The kitchen has all the required equipment. The living room has a few low wooden chairs with cushions, a small TV and a pair of huge PA style speakers where the Rasta music comes from. The wall has a lineup of 10 or so pictures of family members. The floor is laid with a remarkably fine and glossy tile; 20″ ceramic squares with painted designs on them.

Zenzo turns the music down and shows me the PC, sitting in part of the entertainment cabinet alongside the TV. It’s the oldest PC I’ve seen in a long time, no mouse, and what appears to be a monochrome screen. But it lacks a power cord at the moment so there’s no way to tell what’s wrong. We throw it in the car planning to take it home and see what it does.

Then we head over to Konalethu’s place to pick up his computer which recently stopped working. When we get there he isn’t home, but his grandmother says he is on his way, by taxi. So we decide to wait. We sit by the side of the road and watch a bunch of young girls playing jumprope with a tattered old cord. They sing rhymes as the girls take turns doing jumps. Zenzo hops in for a moment and the girls laugh. They probably range from 8 to 12 years old.

Right as we’re about to give up waiting, one of the common little Toyota taxi vans pulls up, “combis” they call them. It’s full to the brim of people, and Konalethu hops out. He is wearing a nice white collared shirt and gray slacks. He says he was at the library. He shows us how the PC no longer starts up, though the light comes on. No beeps, no video. We make no promises but pop it in the car and take off. Right before we leave I hop into the jumprope area and the girls laugh as I manage a few sloppy but successful jumps.

We head over to Connexions, Simphiwe’s place, and check the machines out. The old one is a lost cause, when powered up the screen just displays garbage. Certainly not worth fixing up either, it looks like a knockoff 386, so it wouldn’t be able to even run Windows 95. Konalethu’s machine is much newer, a Pentium. However when I open it up I see that the heatsink and fan have fallen off the chip, so I’m pretty sure it’s toasted. Simphiwe has a Pentium MMX on hand, which I swap in, but that doesn’t work either. Simphiwe says that he couldn’t even buy a motherboard to fit that case, so it basically comes down to a new computer. A bummer, because there’s no way Konalethu can afford that.

It’s a bust. But at least we know both machines are truly toast. It reminds me how important the details are to Alan’s approach. One of the smartest things about the project from a technical standpoint is how it’s so easy to do field repairs. A big part of this is because he installs large numbers of identical machines. Each SE has basically five components: motherboard, memory, power board, screen, stiffy and hard drive. Any time you’ve got two machines that are dead there’s a fair chance you can salvage one of them right there unless the same component failed in both. Every machine that dies becomes part of a parts stockpile, so the whole operation is pretty self sufficient now that everything is over here.

We head back to drop the unfixed computers off. Alan decides to stop at Simangaliso’s to check out his laptop while Zenzo and I drop off the two bad machines. I am trying to learn the roads, so I ask Zenzo not to tell me the way. I manage to find it with only a minor hint. When I pull into the driveway, his brother-in-law is sitting on the front porch. I am sloppy with the manual steering and and I don’t turn enough: the front left corner of my car grinds into the dry grassy corner of his land with a scrape. He jumps up with a concerned look, and I feel stupid. I back it out with another scrape and straighten the car. I apologize as I come over to shake his hand, but he says not to worry, and he’s got the big smile on that is so common over here.

The rest of the drop-offs are uneventful, and eventually Alan and I are back at the trailer where Donna has prepared a monsterously great meal: eggplant curry, rice, and steamed broccoli. Then we have some homemade spiced peach compote with bread for dessert. We fill her in a bit on the conclusion of Blood Diamond and I head off home to write and to sleep.

For some reason I wake up again in the middle of the night. I’m comfortable and relaxed, but I suppose some part of my body clock hasn’t adjusted yet. I was dreaming of ordering a double shot latte with half a shot of hazelnut at Starbucks. I’m not sure why. But it sure sounds tasty.