String Mops and Golden Hair

I was worried about European fairy tales giving African girls the idea that blond = beautiful; I am not blond; therefore I cannot be beautiful. (See my May 29, 2008 entry.) Last week two girls, maybe ten years of age, showed up at the after-school club in Tembisa with string mops. If they weren’t new they were at least very well washed. The girls arranged the mops on their heads so that the long gray strings cascaded down their backs. As they delicately brushed the strings back from their faces I was reminded of the torn, cream-colored cashmere shawl my mother let us have for dress ups when I was a child. Gold metallic threads glittered in its long fringe. When I put the shawl over my head, I held my chin higher. I glided gracefully across our basement playroom. I felt beautiful, although I no doubt looked as ridiculous as a child with a mop on her head. The Tembisa girls strutted more than glided. I’m hoping they were imagining rock stars instead of Cinderella. Or maybe that isn’t an improvement…

Return to Alex

Tuesday I went back to Alexandra, the township where I visited before with colleague Ruth Maxwell and the team from Rosebank Union Church. (See the blog entry for April 27, 2008) We made a second visit to Takalani pre-school. When we arrived in April the children were just exiting the building to use buckets on the porch as substitute toilets since the neighbors were not excited about that many ‘extras’ using their public toilet. This time we saw three new toilets being installed for the pre-school. A group of men hacked away at a cement patio to make a little niche to hold the sewer pipe. Of course the new toilets are in the next courtyard where the babies stay. The pre-schoolers will have to go around other houses to get there, but hey! It’s better than buckets!

We dropped off some toys and food supplies, and I read We All Go on Safari; a Swahili Counting Book. We skipped the Swahili since it isn’t a Southern African language, but the kids had fun counting in English and identifying the different animals.

At the next place we also dropped off supplies. Maria, who runs this little pre-school, wants to reach the poorest of the poor. She only charges fifty to a hundred rand (US$8-15) per month, depending on ability to pay, and provides a hot meal for the children. There were forty-two of them plus three workers in a sheltered courtyard about 10 by 15 feet. The floor was on a couple different levels, neither of them smooth or even. Two tiny, windowless rooms on one side provide a place for napping children. I suspect they also serve as family bedrooms at night. Oh, yeah. One toilet. Maria is making plans to add toilets and close in the courtyard a bit more from the cold Johannesburg winter. Rosebank Union Church with will do what they can to help.

I read Our Gran and We all go on Safari. I was struck that not only do the children enjoy the books, but the workers seem to be encouraged by someone coming with an interesting activity. Part of the tiny courtyard was taken up with a jungle gym, hung with laundry and a few storage boxes, although they didn’t stop children from climbing. In one corner a tattered sign hung from a string: Music area. Five feet away in another corner a sign read, ‘Art area.’ I didn’t see any particular difference in the two cramped corners, but the signs said to me that this woman with little formal training is trying to put into practice what she has heard about how to run a pre-school. Her heart is huge. The need is tremendous.

Ruth is trying to recruit people who would be willing to go into the many similar pre-schools and day care centers in Alexandra Township on a regular basis. A child psychiatrist in the church said, “Read to these children every day, and you will change their lives forever.” Seeing the enthusiasm of my Tembisa kids being read to weekly, I can imagine it is true.

Surprise Workshop

I found out Friday that I was teaching a writing workshop on Saturday. It is my husband, Steve, who is good at thinking on his feet. (He’s in Bolivia right now where he was scheduled to teach a three-day workshop on he-knew-not-what, presumably something related to his field of theological education. They kept saying they would get back to him on the exact topic.)

In contrast to Steve, I am the sort who over prepares. My manuscripts go through 6, 8 even 11 drafts. I can’t stop fiddling with a presentation until the moment I give it. I’m always certain it could be better, afraid I will make a fool of myself by having completely missed the boat.

I had discussed with Dondo, the children’s librarian at Tembisa West Library, the possibility of a writing workshop for people who would like to learn to write for children. We were motivated by a writing competition by one of the local publishers. The competition has a deadline of June 30. True, we had originally discussed last week and this week for a two-Saturday course, but then he found out it had to go through the library committee, and I took off for Cape Town and Blantyr. I thought we had postponed the whole idea. I called Friday to see if he had been able to arrange anything for June. It’s a good thing I called.

“Yes, we are expecting you tomorrow morning at 10,” he said. (“Tomorrow” being the 31^st of May.)

“Oh,” I said, thinking quickly. “How many?”

“We have five signed up.”

Five is not a bad number to work with. It isn’t hard to get each one involved. There is time for everyone to share his writing. They form their own relationships to encourage one another.

So I went—straight from the ice rink and my early morning practice with a stop at Mug and Bean for a hazelnut latte since it would have taken too long to go home in between. (It’s a tough life, I know.)

I think all told we were more like ten, although some who arrived early had to leave, and Dondo kept recruiting anyone who came through the doors of the library that he thought should be interested in writing for children. I merged a session from my Kenya workshops on “What makes a good children’s story?” and another on “Plotting your story”, and we didn’t quite get through all the material, but they were excited about what they got. They want to meet again in two weeks, and it sounded like they plan to recruit new members to our group. So we will probably do a lot of repeating, but have a core who knows where we are going and will come prepared with the exercise I gave them.

This is something I have wanted to do in South Africa for a long time, but it has never quite come together before. I want to ask, why now, Lord? Our visas expire in two months, and we are looking at moving back to the U.S. But we plan to take chunks of time back in South Africa, and I have to trust that the Lord has his own timing.

Fairy Tales in Tembisa

I have never been a fan of Disney retellings. Well, maybe when I was ten. I do remember enjoying The Sleeping Beauty although LeAnne the Literalist even then was very aware that the little boy at her christening could not possibly have been the prince who woke her if she slept for a hundred years. And LeAnne, the Lover of Literature, strongly disapproved of the Disney Company completely changing the ending to Hans Christian Anderson’s “Little Mermaid” and refused to see The Hunchback of Notre Dame. But my aversion to such things is not necessarily shared by the children to whom I read.

This week someone gave me two boxes of used books. Although we are in Africa, the source was white, and I carefully sorted the books into stacks of appropriate, inappropriate and questionable. One of my goals is to offer the children positive images of themselves. I look for books that show children of color and African settings, and avoid books about little white children in America or Europe. Animal stories are popular, but ‘wild’ works better than Old MacDonald’s VERY non-African farm.

I put into the trash the books that were so fragile they would undoubtedly fall apart in the first set of eager hands. There was one about clothes whose author didn’t seem to realize that not all his readers had blond hair and blue eyes. Into the ‘too white’ stack went the European fairy tales with their fair-skinned, blond-haired princesses. I was about to bundle them into the box with the lily-white rejects when I remembered how popular the library’s copy of 101 Dalmatians in Zulu had been last week. I’m not sure where the children have seen them, but they seem to be familiar with all the Disney characters. Several of the fairy tales were in easy-to-read versions. Reading practice is a redeeming value, isn’t it? I put the fairy tales into the bins I carry to the centers.

Tuesday I read aloud the newly-donated, highly-illustrated book on Different Kinds of Snakes. As expected, the boys fought over it afterwards—that and the board book in the shape of a truck! But three little girls of about ten years of age, pulled their chairs close to the book bins, and read Disney’s Little Mermaid, Sleeping Beauty and the other fairy tales one after another, carefully sounding out the words. Wednesday a girl who looked about fourteen, pretended to tuck the worn copy of Disney’s Cinderella into her jacket to show me how much she loved it and wished she could keep it.

What is the attraction of European princesses? Part of it is no doubt the familiarity of the TV images. There is a certain satisfaction in being able to read for yourself the story you have already seen. The fairy-tale world has no more relationship to the reality of the children of Tembisa than to my reality growing up in Indiana. It is as unreal as the world of talking animal stories.

The children’s enthusiasm was fun to see. I went back to my reject box and pulled out another half dozen books. Hopefully I won’t warp their little psyches with the beauty=blond myth by letting them practice reading on a Disney fantasy.

[Although I hear from various people that they are reading my blog, on-line comments are rare. I guess I don’t write much that is controversial. Maybe some of you have some input on the appeal of European fairy tales to people of color, or why including them in my Tembisa book boxes is, or is not, a good idea. I’d love to hear your thoughts.]

The Lord is My Shepherd

Today I read Tim Ladwig’s Psalm 23 to my children in Tembisa. The text is straight out of the Bible, but the pictures show the inner city of Newark, New Jersey—not so very different from the inner city of Johannesburg.

When the Psalm says, “Your rod and your staff, they comfort me,” the painting shows a crossing guard with her stop sign on a high pole, helping the children to get safely home from school. My favorite is the view through the window into a lighted kitchen where the children are having dinner with their grandparents. Outside in the darkness lurk the dangerous-looking characters we saw on the ‘valley of the shadow of death’ pages while the text says, “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.”

Last night there were riots in some of the informal settlements (i.e. squatter camps, aka shanty towns) of Tembisa and other townships around Johannesburg. Foreigners were targeted. Not white, American-types like me, but Mozambicans and Zimbabweans, fellow-Africans who are political or economic refugees. In tough times it is easy to blame outsiders for your troubles, and right now the seven million Zimbabweans illegally in the country due to Mugabe's election antics make good scapegoats.

I called Tembisa before I went today. “No, it is fine,” Flora said. So I went. I don’t know what these children saw or heard last night. I can’t guess what they might experience tonight, but the message of Psalm 23 seemed especially apt.

On the way to school, the children in Ladwig’s book pass a church with a big stained-glass window of Jesus as the Good Shepherd. When the last verse says, “I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever,” the picture shows a similar window over the children’s bed. This time instead of a lamb, Jesus holds the children, and instead of trees and streams in the background, there are the streets of the city that we have seen throughout the book.

We talked a little of God’s protection in Tembisa. I don’t know how much the children understood. It was a particularly chaotic day with no adult but me. Some of the boys were loud and rambunctious, but they seemed to identify with the details of Ladwig’s paintings. We read the psalm aloud together. I pray that tonight they will remember.

Sindiwe Magona’s Passion

“You can’t infect someone with a disease you don’t have,” says Sindiwe Magona, author of The Best Meal Ever (Oxford University Press, 2006) among many other books. She isn’t talking about HIV, but about a love of books.

Sindiwe is a spry little Xhosa woman. (She told me someone was tall, then admitted with a wave of her hand, “To me, everyone is tall.”) She is passionate about books; she’s passionate about the importance of fathers; she’s passionate about not leaving litter behind. She used to produce anti-apartheid radio programs from New York City, and I can’t imagine her being less than passionate about that.

Sindiwe is a marvelous storyteller who throws herself into her tales from African folklore and from modern life. The Best Meal Ever is about children on their own with nothing to eat. The oldest sister puts on a pot of water, and one by one the younger children fall asleep, their stomachs filled with hope rather than actual food. In the morning a neighbor arrives with a bag of groceries, and the little ones wake up to a satisfying meal.

“How can teachers who don’t read teach children to love books?” Sindiwe Magona demanded at a recent retreat of South African children’s writers and illustrators outside Cape Town. “You can’t infect someone with a disease you don’t have,” she said again.

I think of my children in Tembisa, running to help carry the box of books from my car. I hear the murmur of their voices as they sound out words, and see the ones who linger even when the cook calls that the food is ready. I can’t solve South Africa’s housing problems. I have no comprehensive plan to stop crime and violence in this country. My activities are only a drop in the bucket in the battle against HIV/AIDS. But there are two ‘diseases’ with which I would like to infect these children: a love of God and a love of books. With these two passions they can change the world.

[The above picture was taken on a hike at the retreat. Sindiwe is on the right.]

Alexandra Township

“Our gran is beautiful.” So are the children of Alexandra township. Thursday I accompanied a team from Rosebank Union Church to Alexandra, a crowded slum with an estimated 34,000 shacks about 20 minutes from my home.

I read stories in two crèches. (The French word for ‘crib’ is used here to designate a day care center or nursery school.) Susan Binion and Kathy Haasdyk’s Our Gran was a big hit. (See my review in the previous entry.) Unlike my afterschool programs in Tembisa, these children knew virtually no English. I read the book in English and showed the pictures. Their teachers read the Zulu version and elaborated with enthusiasm. I told, more than read, Pamela Duncan Edwards’ Roar! A Noisy Counting Book because I knew the clever poetry would be lost in the translation. The children counted fleeing animals in English and roared enthusiastically along with the little lion cub who scares all the animals off although he is only looking for someone to play with.

The team from Rosebank includes three young women who are HIV positive and keep an eye out for those in the community who need help. They visit during the week and assess needs. When the nurse comes on Thursday they are ready to direct her to the most critical needs. From their own experience of recovering health because of ARVs (anti-retrovirals) they can be a great encouragement.

The first home we visited the patient had died that morning. She was so afraid that someone would find out she had HIV that she refused to be tested and get help. We stopped to pray in the home of the neighbor who had told us about this woman and found she had a 22-day-old grandbaby. Both the granny and the baby’s mother are HIV+, but determined to live healthy and productive lives with medications. Everything possible has been done to protect the child, but it will be another six weeks before testing will show whether this precious little girl has the Human Immunodeficiency Virus in her blood or not.

Our guides directed us up a narrow alley, through a courtyard to a 9’x9’ shack nearly obstructing the way to more houses beyond. In this tin cube lived a grandmother with her severely handicapped grandson and his 10-year-old sister who, according to neighbors, does all the housework. We left a blanket and a stuffed toy as well as a food parcel, and the team made plans to research day care for the handicapped in the area and look for a push chair (stroller) so the child can get outside. Given the way the Lord has brought what is needed at exactly the right time in the past, I thoroughly expect someone to show up at the church this week to donate a push chair.

In the novel I am currently working on, my character Mboti, who lost his job when his HIV status became known, does the kind of work these young women do. He is intended to be a model of living positively with HIV. I went along for the home visits as well as to the crèches in order to research my character, but in the process I grew in my respect for the incredible work these women are doing and the tremendous difference that churches, partnering with local communities, can make.