After unwinding all morning, I head over to the trailer in the early afternoon. Alan has a couple Mac Classics set up on the table, so I play World Discovery and Storybook Weaver. I’m getting pretty good at World Discovery — I can usually do Central America, South America, and the Middle East without fail. Europe has too many little countries. I haven’t really tried Asia or Africa yet.
Storybook Weaver is a neat little program that allows you to build a picture book using a large collection of customizable clip art. It is really lovely on the color Macs, Donna says, but she thought I should try it out on the black and white ones, to see if we should start including it. I make a little story and even in black and white it’s great fun.
We’re going to invite over Simangaliso for dinner tonight, so Donna and I hit the Pick n’ Pay for some supplies. While we’re there I bump into a lady that looks familiar, but I don’t recognize her at first. I just say “hi” and she says “you don’t recognize me! I’m Thabani’s mother!”. Then I remember last time I saw her she had braids, and I remind her of that. “Ah yes” she says.
Back at the trailer I do some writing. I’m falling behind, though. I post a whole week late, but I’m a four days behind at this point. Catching up is hard! I think I only make it through a day before it’s time to go pick up Simangaliso.
We head into the location and stop by Zenzo’s place. Zenzo’s mother was interested in getting internet access at home, and Alan has put together a price sheet for what he estimates it would cost. It seems too expensive, so he explains that to her. Another option is an 80 rand per month membership at a local internet cafes; it wouldn’t be at home, but they could go into town to use it anytime. It would be a lot cheaper. She agrees, thanks us, and says she’ll look into that.
Then we pick up Simangaliso. We haven’t spent really any time with him yet during my visit, just said “hi”. He is studying most of the time, “distance learning” at UNISA, a popular university. He is very disciplined. He has a real skill for calculus, and is trying to buy a copy of Matlab for his computer.
Back at the trailer I quickly show him iChat with Sophie, how we can stay in touch so easily around the globe. Then we have dinner; pinapple tabbouleh, stir fried beef, green beans, and Lychee juice. Donna is a great improvisor in the kitchen.
We talk about school and work, his studying and his teaching. He usually studies at home because he says at the library he gets interrupted too often: he has a reputation for math. He isn’t working now. He does freelance teaching from time to time, but getting paid can be a hassle, it seems. He has looked for office work at the area energy companies, but hasn’t had any luck yet.
As we’re finishing dinner, I notice that he manages to get every last particle of food off his plate. Not seemingly out of undue hunger, but more of a unaware meticulousness: as he talks he carefully cleans his plate completely of every last dot with his fork.
He’s a healthy guy; he tells us that he does his running early in the morning before the traffic picks up. He doesn’t like breathing all the smoke and fumes. Alan points out this is a rare concern in the Zulu community, where many homes still burn coal and trash. He sees kids stand in the black diesel smoke of trucks without worry.
He talks about the need for connections, and how it’s really hard to get work here without them. Most of the work he’s gotten so far is through knowing teachers and such. He also wants to get a driver’s license, which would help in getting work, opening up job markets beyond Dundee. He has a learner permit already, but needs to go to school and take the final test. It is much more expensive here than in the US. I’m not sure why. But it is an important thing for him if he wants to have more job prospects.
I take out my laptop and we show him Wikipedia. We look up the entry for Dundee and add a little info about Sibongile, which was not mentioned. We look at a few pages he is interested in, like the UNISA page. It takes us a moment to find the Zulu portion of Wikipedia, but I know it is out there because Eric pointed it out a while back. When we find it we browse around and he seems to enjoy it, small as it is.
I think of the one-laptop-per-child program and how going beyond children it might be useful too. Some technologies are just so compelling that people push to adopt and use them despite challenges. Like cell phones, they are adopted by nearly everyone here despite the general lack of technology. They are just too useful to pass up.
I wonder if the internet would be like that even here. I think it would be; the majority of people in developed countries didn’t find computers compelling enough until internet capable computers and access got just south of impossibly expensive. It’s only been 10 years and for many of us it’s hard to imagine living without them.
I hesitate to imply that it’s a very important thing given the other challenges in the area, but I think there’s a lot to be said for increased communication and, hopefully, dissemination of knowledge. I tend to think that human progress is loosely correlated with advances in communication. I think it would be great if something like a hundred dollar internet capable laptop was made for the general populous of the developing world. There’s a lot more to it, like ongoing bandwidth costs, support, printing, etc, but it would be interesting to see how it would develop.
But back to the here and now: Simangaliso is different from the others we hang out with. Most people here seem lighthearted, but he has a serious mood about him. He’s a little older, but it’s more than just that. He takes his study seriously: “I have to solve a problem every day,” he says. “If I don’t I can’t sleep. But if I do I feel a real sense of accomplishment.” Alan and Donna tell me later that they think he’s a bit isolated socially; there aren’t that many similar people for him to relate to in the area, and he can’t afford to live on campus.
But despite his relative seriousness, he still laughs easily. We have a nice chat and then we take him home.
After dropping him off, Alan asks if I want to drive by the food and liquor stores that are across from each other further into Sibongile. Simangaliso had mentioned them at some point when we were talking earlier. I say “sure”, so it’s Saturday night around 9:30 and we head over that direction.
As we pull into the street, I can see a lot of people milling about outside, crossing back and forth and filling up much of the street. There’s loud music playing outside and it looks like it’s all young men. Many of them have open liquor bottles with them. We drive along towards the outdoor party slowly. There is another car ahead that makes its way through the crowd bit by bit. Then it is sort of swallowed by the crowd as all the people walking around obscure it from view.
At this point I figure it might be a good idea to go back, but I look and there is another car behind me now. The road is barely wide enough for a three point turn, so I figure we’ll just keep going and inch through the crowd like the previous car did. Alan and Donna are in the back seat, and I don’t remember if we said anything more than “I guess we’ll keep going”, but there was an air of mild nervousness in the car. Simangaliso himself, who we just dropped off, had advised us only last week to avoid Sibongile at night, and to avoid drunk people. And here we were rolling straight into both.
So I mentally shrugged, and kept on. The street did seem to be getting thicker with people as we approached, and it started looking like it would be nigh impossible to actually pass. But as we got very close people did start to move out of the way and make a car shaped void for us to drive into.
We were pretty much surrounded by people on all sides now; basically all young black men, most of them drinking. Some people were looking into the car at us with mild curiosity as we passed each other. I looked over and noticed my door was unlocked, but I decided that locking it at this point would be kind of like giving someone the finger. Besides, if someone really wanted to hurt us, smashing the window wouldn’t be much of an impediment anyways.
I definitely wondered whether this was dangerous or not. I figured these are just a bunch of kids having a good time and it was pretty unlikely anyone would really want to start trouble.
Then the crowd parted a bit in front of us, and another car entered the road. It was an old small car, a blocky early eighties design, with different colored panels. It turned towards us and approached at an angle. As it got closer, I noticed that it wasn’t actually propelling itself, but rather that a group of the boys were pushing it from behind. The lights were on, though, and it appeared to have people in it. It moved very slowly. At this point I was stopped, waiting to see what was happening. There wasn’t much room to move anyways.
I looked around and tried to look casual. People were for the most part ignoring us. I caught one younger fellow’s eye who was looking at me through the front window. I gave him a polite nod. He just stared at me and without smiling held up his hands, one of which included a beer bottle, and did some kind of little dance in front of the car, bouncing a bit and turning around and looking at me again. I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be menacing or just teasing, but I ignored it. The beat in the street kept going. I returned my attention to the other car.
The vehicle approached quietly and seemingly tried to make its way around us but didn’t clear the turn and our front corners were about to bump. Again, I don’t remember what was said, but there was growing concern in the car that we were in a less than ideal situation. Some of the guys pushing the car waved at their friends in back to stop pushing before the cars hit. I didn’t feel a bump when it stopped, but the guys at the front of the car looked down at the front corner of my car with mild concern. One of the fellows looked over at me, bared his teeth in a frown, and made an apologetic hand waving gesture.
Alan and Donna were giving me bits of nervous advice from the back seat. I tried putting the car in reverse, but as we rolled back Donna looked and saw we were about to hit people and gave a startled exclamation, “stop!”. “It’s alright,” Alan said. “No it isn’t,” she replied.
I looked back out the front window and the people pushing the dead car were trying to push it backwards now, without much success. Then the plan must have changed because suddenly the doors of their car opened, and what must have been twenty people came out, one after the other, in a stream, like a clown car. I remember finding this amusing through my growing concern.
Here we were, presumably rich white folks, with a dead car blocking our forward path and a thick collection of inebriated poor young black men on all sides. Any illusion of protection that our car provided had completely vanished for me. The lack of options at this point allowed me relax a bit and take the situation in a matter of fact manner: probably nothing bad was going to happen, but if the crowd decided to break the windows, pull us out, rob and beat us, it was totally up to them. There wasn’t much chance that we could do anything about it.
But despite the ongoing reports of area violence, even in what one might think was a particularly ripe situation for such, nobody seemed interested in causing trouble. The folks just milled about us.
After a few more terse exchanges between myself, Donna, and Alan, we agreed to try backing up again. I put the car in reverse and slowly inched my way back. People didn’t seem to move until the bumper was brushing their legs, but they did move, and after inching our way back out of the crowd, I managed a three point turn and we drove off.
As we left the township, we sighed in relief. “Even I was a bit nervous back there,” Alan admitted. He’s usually unflappable in odd situations so I take that as an indicator. “Yeah, I got a little worried,” I say, “but I still wonder how dangerous it really was.” I joke “I guess we’d have to do it ten times and see how often something bad happened.” “Well,” Donna mentions, “that is where a friend of ours got his head smashed in”.
“I’m feel bad for leading you into that situation,” Alan says, “I was thinking for a moment there of offering to take over driving. Though I don’t what that would have done.” “It’s okay,” I say sincerely, “it was an interesting experience.”
As I drop them in front of the gate to the trailer, we’re laughing it off. I go home wearing a smile and sleep well.