Shower, yogurt, grapenuts… what a way to start a day. Alan comes by at 7:30 with Zenzo, who hops in my car. We’re all full in two cars with people and computers. We’re heading to the Ncome school today. You might be able to guess at the pronounciation if you’ve been paying particularly close attention. We’ll take it in two steps: start with NO-may. That’s easy enough. Now you just have to add in the *tsk* sound by snapping your tongue at the same time as the “N”. That’s what the letter “c” stands for there. Does that make sense? Good… you’re on your way to speaking Zulu.
Ncome school is the one that we went to just two days ago that had put in a nice Formica countertop. We had left 6 or so computers there, and were bringing another bunch today, hoping to set up a total of 22.
Alan and Donna take a detour and stop in town. We pull up behind them and they explain that they want to buy some stools for the lab. The school did a great job on building the counter, but they’ll almost surely be short of stools. So they’re going to buy some. To do this, they go to the Chinese stores.
The Chinese section we’re going to is just three stores on one street. There are probably fifteen or so Chinese stores in town. They are all run by a handful of Chinese folks. Aside from that, there aren’t really any Asians to speak of in the area. The store that sells the stools isn’t open until 8, so we take a peek at the other Chinese stores. The first one we go into features several neatly organized sections of clothing and electronics knockoffs. The proprieter is a young man, probably 30, holding a infant son.
Alan is always asking questions, and despite a serious language barrier, he learns that the next store over is owned by the man’s sister. They sell almost identical merchandise, but there is no competition, per se. They’re all in it together. Alan asks about the kids and where they go to school. Turns out that when the kids get to school age, they send them back to China to live with their grandparents. They don’t send them to school here.
We look around; of particular amusement to me is the video game consoles, which look somewhat like a Nintendo or Playstation but which I’m sure are not compatible. They feature only one cartridge with “1000 games” on it. I will guess that this is the only cartridge you’re likely to find in all the world for these little systems.
The other store opens, and we head in to buy stools. We find some utilitarian plastic ones, in a rainbow of colors, for only R 17.50 a piece. We want 20 and start digging out our cell phones to do the math to see if we have enough cash. The middle aged lady who runs the place sees this and asks how many we want, we say 20, and she immediately says “350 rand”. Alan takes the time to finish on his calculator, but of course she’s exactly right.
Pooling our money, we have enough for the 20 and so we buy them. They nest neatly one inside the other, so 20 don’t take up as much room as you might guess. We stuff them in the last bit of free space in my car, and head off to the school.
The drive is about 30 minutes. It is morning, and Zenzo and I drive without much talking. Weaving through the hills in the morning sun, the landscape is just beautiful. It’s already warming a bit from the slight chill this morning. We keep the windows down and let the country air refresh us.
We pull into the school as children are crossing from classroom to classroom. A nearby educator opens the gate and lets us pull in. We shake hands with the principal breifly, and then we set straight to work on the lab. The four of us make short work of laying out the machines and the wiring. On first startup a couple of the machines fail, and we repair or replace them quickly. In the end we have 22 machines. We manage to find two extra chairs and so the room is physically complete. Donna manages the software and soon all the machines are in sync. It’s a nearly clockwork operation.
I look out the window, and see some kids being served lunch. I run out for a closer look and several of the kids run over to me. They are carrying plastic bowls of rice and beans. Not to be facetious, but they’re probably eating healthier than many American kids.
I come back around and it’s just about time for the first group of kids. They are seventh graders, who have mostly used computers before. This school did have a set of Alan and Donna’s computers at one point but they had to pull them out because the kids weren’t being supervised and they were going through mice and keyboards like chalk. This latest setup is a second try.
The machines are set up with KidPix, a simple fun drawing program. We figure we’ll start slow. Kids line up outside and then and then we let them rush in. There are about 30, so some have to share a computer. Alan tells them to just go ahead and experiment, and they do. This is a great way to get an idea of where the kids are at. These kids are pretty advanced, and they take right to it. I see drawings of cars, houses, people, even a province level map of South Africa, all with good detail and creativity.
Now, letting them guide themselves is one thing. Trying to guide them is something else entirely. After about 20 minutes of free drawing, we decide to show them how to save the file, and then we’ll switch them to playing a math game. This turns out to be very complicated, probably because we go about it all wrong. There are four of us; Donna, Alan, Zenzo and myself. We take a wall each and try to walk kids through saving. For the most part that goes okay, but then we try to show them how to switch programs and they start improvising. I get the first kid to open up “Math Blaster”, and I work my way down the line. By the time I’ve got the last kid on Math Blaster, the first four kids have poked around and found something else to do or play. Really, what should I expect.
Working together, we’re eventually able to get the whole room using Math Blaster. The kids do very well with the math, though initially it’s set a bit too easy. We work our way around and get them to crank up the difficulty a bit until we reach a sweet spot. They play with this for another 20 minutes and then we have them shut down.
We do a little better with this process because Alan sends the first two kids he teaches the shutdown steps to off to show others. Kids love being able to tell their friends what to do, so this goes along pretty smoothly.
In between class, we hang outside for a bit. Zenzo pops a CD of modern traditional music into the car player and turns it up so that the kids can hear it as they walk in the schoolyard.
Alan and Donna decide they’re going to head off to another place. Zenzo and I agree to stay behind and see what else we can do. We have apples for lunch, and we wait for the next class. Zenzo is more ambitious than me, and being a Zulu speaker he is pretty sure he can direct the kids well. So we start with all the computers off, instead of already in KidPix. We discuss briefly whether we’ll keep them in KidPix or what, and then the kids come running in. I decide to let Zenzo take the lead and just offer help where needed. This works very well.
Zenzo makes a great instructor. Speaking in Zulu he greets them and describes how to turn the machine on. They all get this easily. Once the desktop comes up he instructs them to find the KidPix program, and most of them do. I help the few who don’t. Then he sets them off on drawing. We let the kids create whatever they like, and walk around to see what they’re doing. Again, we’ve got a seventh grade class and they do some fairly advanced stuff. One of the kids, I figure out, has drawn a picture of me: the giveaway was the scruffy beard that I have been growing. He had used the spraycan tool to paint it on his otherwise generic drawing of a face. When I figure this out and point to my own beard, he and his friends laugh.
Zenzo instructs the class to save and then to shut down. It goes pretty well and the kids file out and on to their other classes. At this point, three educators have come in to get some instruction on the computers. This turns out to be much harder than the kids. They haven’t used computers before, and I try to walk them through some of the programs they might use… I show the math lady MathBlaster, and the geography lady World Discovery. Zenzo does a demo of ClarisWorks for word processing. They seem alternately interested and overwhelmed.
I ask them what kinds of things they’d like to use the computers for and they have no idea. I get the feeling that they have their hands full and don’t see these as helpful devices, but just another thing they have to learn and or deal with. But despite this, after an hour of struggling learning, when the end of day schoolbell rings, they ask if we can come back tomorrow to show them more. We don’t have any other solid plans, so Zenzo and I agree.
Three of the teachers ask us if we can give them a ride back to Dundee. We’ve got the space, so I agree. Normally they’d take a taxi. I call Alan and let them know we’re heading back to town. On the drive back we turn on the radio. Much to my surprise we get Bryan Adams’ “Summer of 69″. Going forward I’ll always associate that song with me and that car full of fine Zulus.
As we approach Dundee, one of the teachers offers a 20 rand note, but I turn it down and they thank me. We drop them off near the Taxi rank in the center of town.
I ask Zenzo if he wants to go home, but he doesn’t seem that excited. “There’s nothing to do there” he says. He wants to see if Alan and Donna are coming back. So we drive over near their place and wait. We get out of the car, it’s hot and the seats have made my back sweat. Across the street is the Dundee High School rugby and soccer fields. They are being watered by a huge array of sprinklers; the equivalent of 10 firehoses spinning around. As we approach we get a bit of a spray and laugh. Then we seek out some shade and lean against the dull portions of the razorwire fence. In the distance, beyond the sprinklers, the high school team is playing some rugby.
Dundee High is basically the rich school. All schools are “public”, but all schools charge a fee. Dundee High charges a very large fee, and thus only the elite can go there. It used to be an all white school, but that is changing. In fact, the Rugby team is almost all black.
“I played rugby in school,” says Zenzo, “until I broke a rib. Then my mother got angry at me. She said that I shouldn’t be playing such dangerous sports.” We chat for a while about random things. Eventually I ask him “What do you think about the future of South Africa. What is your dream for the country?”
He thinks only for a moment and replies “No more discrimination. There are still a lot of people who discriminate here.” I nod, and tell him that it is like that everywhere to some degree. I tell him the story about how Sophie’s family didn’t want her dating a white guy, and how we hid our relationship for the first few years. And how I had to, to a small degree, overcome that descrimination. It’s nothing compared to what he must deal with, of course. But he agrees that if you just be nice to people who discriminate, they can eventually soften a bit.
I ask him, after all the descrimination is gone, what else he would want to see. First he says, “if all the descrimination was gone, it would be a much better place.” and then, “After that, I want a different president.” Heh, I can relate to that.
He tells me how the current president of South Africa just spends money on himself and goes on vacations all the time, and isn’t minding the country properly. He says Mandella was much better. He says that there is a lady who is shaping up to be the next president, but he doesn’t like her. He says he has no problem with a woman being president, but she is no good. She also spends too much time and money on herself.
He is recently of voting age, and I ask him who he would vote for next time. He is a fan of Jacob Zuma, the Zulu who was deputy president until a series of scandals. Zenzo says that the scandals were not fair, that they were because of discrimination. I mention that I don’t really know, but it sounds like he was doing some questionable things, so I’d have a hard time trusting him. Zenzo shrugs and admits it is hard to know. He says he isn’t going to vote because he doesn’t like the candidates. I tell him that I think it’s better to vote anyways, even if you don’t like the candidates. I explain to him how voter apathy is one of the reasons we have a bad president at the moment.
I ask if he’s got a girlfriend, and he says “yes”. Then he tells me that he also has a baby on the way. She got pregnant last November, he says. They have been dating since he was in the eigth grade and she was in sixth. Now he is graduated and she is halfway through 11th grade. He says he wants to marry her, but he can’t right now because he can’t afford labola.
Labola (la-BOWL-ah): it’s a Zulu tradition, literally I hear it means “bride price”. It is eleven cows given from the man to the woman’s family. As I learned yesterday, cows are expensive. Zenzo doesn’t have any idea how he’ll get the money for that, but he has to pay it sometime to get married.
He says he was thinking once that if he married a white girl, he could skip the labola, but his dad told him no. His dad is a very traditional Zulu, and he says a Zulu man must pay labola no matter what. If the girl’s family did not want the cows than they could sell them after. They also have to swing for a ring, the tux and dress, the party, and all the other wedding items. I shake my head thinking of how they’ll come up with that money. I tell Zenzo I was very lucky; many women in the US expect a three month salary diamond ring to get married. Sophie had no such demand. He jokes “you are the diamond ring”. I’ll have to ask Sophie what she thinks of that.
He also tells me that his girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend is playing witchcraft on them. “Muti” (MOO-tee) they call it. The ex-boyfriend cast a spell that has caused a rash to break out on Zenzo’s back. If the rash spreads around his whole torso in a circle, he will die. “So you see, I have to stay sharp.
Alan and Donna aren’t back yet, so I call them. They’re still at the school, and won’t be leaving for a while. I’m starving, and I figure Zenzo is too. I invite him over to my place for some food. All I really have is a can of veggie curry and seed bread, but it’ll do. I show him the place and he says it’s nice. He sits in the kitchen as I heat up the grub. A few minutes later we sit and eat.
I ask him about slaughtering and cleaning animals. He says most Zulu men learn to do it. I tell him I’ve only ever cleaned a fish, and that most Americans would probably get sick if they tried to slaughter a cow. He laughs. He asks if I want to watch him slaughter the lamb for the party. I grimace and say I’m not sure, I think I’d probably get sick.
He says that when he was a kid, they would tell all the kids to stay in their room while they did the slaughtering so they wouldn’t have to see it. But he sneaked out to watch, and so they taught him. He says there is a movement to outlaw the Zulu slaughtering of cows at home, on the grounds of animal cruelty, but we agree that since they’re going to get slaughtered somehow anyways, it seems like a strange law.
We spread some peanut butter and plum jam on seed bread for dessert, and we drink several glasses of cold water; we’re probably dehydrated from the hot day.
He tells me that Dundee used to be a lot worse. He grew up in a rural area not far from here, but his family moved to Sibongile in 1996 when he was about eight. He said that they used to have a lot of shootings and stabbings. There was a lot of gang activity and he was scared and just stayed in the house most of the time. One time a gang member was chasing another, and they burst into his home. The fleeing member slipped and fell onto their kitchen floor, and the pursuer stabbed him in the back and then ran. They took the stabbed man to the hospital but he later died.
But now, he feels, it is pretty safe. There is a lot of burglary, but not too many shootings or stabbings. He can go out of his house at night and stretch and get fresh air. He says that most of the gang types have migrated to Joburg, and joined bigger gangs. He says Joburg crime is awful. Durban is a little better. I consider whether I want to visit Durban with Sophie when she comes.
He tells me that he really felt like himself when he was instructing and teaching today. He thinks maybe he wants to try to get a job teaching, but he’d have to go to university. It would take three years of study. He says he hates studying and adds with a laugh “what if I study for three years, and then on the first day of teaching, I die?” I say “that would be awful, but what if you don’t do the study, and then you live to be sixty? You’ll have no money for forty years!” He laughs again, “that’s true!” I say “I don’t know how long I’ll live, but I do make plans to live.” I wonder how much different the odds are that he or I will see sixty. It does change the equation of what you should plan for.
He asks if there are gays in the US. I tell him yes. He asks if they can marry. I say that they can in some places, but not everywhere. People are arguing about it right now. He tells me that in South Africa, gays can get married now.
I learned last week that Thabani was homophobic, as are most boys, I think, before they are sexualy active and comfortable. I was that way in any case. I also read in the papers that the deputy president of the country is homophobic, and attributes it to Zulu culture. So I assume Zenzo is as well. I tell him “you may think it’s crazy, but I don’t mind homosexuals”. He says “Oh, I don’t mind them either. It is fine with me, as long as they don’t come on to me. One time a man proposed to me though, I said ‘No! Do I look homosexual?’”.
He says he wants to travel. I mention that it’s expensive, but that Lucky, (he knows Lucky, the guy I met at Connexions the other day) was smart and got a job on a cruise ship, so they pay him to travel. He considers this and mentions that it might be a good idea to become a flight attendant. Or a pilot — then he takes that back; he wouldn’t want all those lives in his hands. I tell him he really should look into what it takes to become a flight attendant. He tells me he’s never been in a plane, but he was in a tall building once and it made him a little scared. But we agree he could get used to flying in any case.
I wash up and then I drive him home. We decide on 7:30 for tomorrow morning. We don’t have a real plan yet of what we’ll do when we get there. I’m a little aprehensive of trying to get all the teachers and kids going. We’ll think of something.
At this point Alan and Donna are home. But I run to Dundee Cellular to get another SIM card and some more bandwidth. Then I drop by the trailer. They’re going out for dinner tonight, but I’ve already eaten so they’ll make it for two. I fill them in on the plans, and they’re very excited. They give me lost of pointers for tomrrow, many of which I forget. They also give me one of the extra Macs to play with, so I can figure out which programs I want to focus on. But instead of doing that I write in my journal before going to bed.
I have to start planning Sophie’s visit soon, too!