African Nights

[This entry has nothing to do with children or HIV. It does have to do with travel--lots of travel--5,300 miles of travel.]

When our Johannesburg flat was sold two months before we were to leave for overseas, it seemed like a good time to pack the car and visit theological schools in Southern Africa associated with our organization, SIM.

We left Johannesburg for the Zimbabwe border-town of Beitbridge, taking our own pillows in an effort to make the many beds feel a bit more like home. We were armed with a guaranteed internet reservation from Holiday Inn International. Zimbabwe is disintegrating as anyone who pays attention to African news knows. (We saw last night that they are now out of toilet paper. Fortunately we did not have that problem.) There was no guarantee on the price of dinner however--US$30 per person for the buffet. No options. As Steve said, with 1500% inflation, they have no concept of what thirty US dollars means.

I don’t think Holiday Inn International knew about the air-conditioner in their Beitbridge hotel. If the rattling had been constant, we could have lived with it, but it kept going on and off. Every time the banging stopped we woke in the sudden silence. Every time it started up again, we were jolted back to consciousness. Steve turned it off, and we slept in our sweat.

Nights two and three of our trek were at Rusitu, a Bible College an hour off the asphalt in the Eastern Highlands overlooking Mozambique. (See the entry “Zimbabwe.”) We slept the sleep of exhausted travelers, only vaguely aware of roosters and of RJ boiling water at four A.M. before the electricity went off so we could have hot water from a thermos flask for morning coffee.

Nights four and five found us in a guest flat at Theological College of Zimbabwe in Bulawayo. A few years ago they were able to buy a former hotel for a very decent price. How many theological schools do you know that have dance floors in their auditorium? I think they are still using the old hotel sheets, most of which were about 18 inches shorter than the beds if not rotted through. Our second night we spent more than four million dollars on a pizza and three cans of Coke with a friend. The friend had to go home to get more money because he hadn’t brought enough. Of course, that was Zim dollars. The pizza was surprisingly good. (Now if they can just solve the toilet paper problem…)

The next day we waited an hour and a half in line to cross into Botswana. The little border post has its hands full trying to cope with crowds of Zimbabweans crossing daily to do their shopping. (I hope the Francistown shops have stocked enough toilet paper.) Nights six and seven we relaxed in a comfortable hotel in Maun on the edge of the lush Okavango Delta. The air-conditioner worked without banging, and the bill for dinner did not run into the millions.

Steve didn’t need much convincing to take a small detour to see game, but he regretted my encouragement to follow the signs to the giant baobab tree in Namibia’s Caprivi National Park when our Toyota Corolla got stuck in the sand. It took two lots of German tourists to pull us out. At least we didn’t spend the night. Do you have any idea how hot and dry that part of Africa is in October? Let’s just say we didn’t need any of that toilet paper Zimbabwe doesn’t have.

In Rundu, Namibia, we spent nights eight and nine in the house of a retired school teacher from U.K. who has come out to teach teachers. She has a PhD in education and is no doubt turning Namibian education up-side-down with her creative methods. One evening we ate dinner and watched the sunset at a restaurant overlooking the river that divides Namibia from Angola.

Night ten. Etosha National Park. We should have stayed five nights. We saw nineteen lions--more than in all our twelve years in Africa put together. Our home away from home was a short walk from the waterhole overlook. The bed was heaped with a white, feather-filled duvee and surrounded by gauzy white mosquito netting. It was all very romantic by candlelight when the lights went out. Somewhat less than romantic was the incessant beep of the air-conditioner resetting every time the current flickered as they tried to get the generator going.

In Windhoek we had twelve-year-old Caitlin Gunning’s room. The walls were plastered with magazine cut-outs and photos of her friends. The house was lively with five children plus a cousin studying for exams.

Our thirteenth night was definitely not bad luck. We relaxed in a room filled with antiques, and enjoyed a private dinner of bobooti and roast vegetables on a vine-graced veranda overlooking a river valley in Western Cape. I wondered about the choice of burnt orange for the sheets and towels until I opened the tap in the claw-footed bath and saw the iron-rich water that came out. Burnt orange. Good choice.

With more than five thousand kilometers under our belts, Cape Town seemed awfully tame. We stayed, as we always do, with Brazilian friends in Parow. Five nights in the same bed felt like luxury. Steve thought he was going to get all his reports written. Yeah, right. He and Lucio spent more time talking than either one of them spent writing. The night South Africa played the rugby World Cup final Steve stayed up to watch. It was past my bedtime, but I followed the course of the game with the rising roar from every house in the neighborhood, and there was no doubt who had won when the car horns and fireworks began.

On the twentieth day of our journey we loaded the car and headed across the southern strip of the continent to Tsitsikama National Park. I was a bit hesitant when Steve announced that the only accommodation available was forest huts with shared ablutions. They did have toilet paper, and the toilets flushed, so I can’t complain. The huts were tiny A-frames tucked under a tangle of vines with only room for two beds, a built-in table and counter, and a little braai/barbecue grill on the front porch. The rain held off while we cooked our boerwors and warmed our can of beans. We turned off the lights by seven thirty and were lulled to sleep with the roar of the surf a hundred meters away.

We made an early start. Good thing. South Africa is a large country. It is a long way from Tsitsikama to Kokstad, KZN. The national road is narrow and curvy, and stops for construction were frequent. The needlepoint canvas I had stitched across Zimbabwe’s wide-open spaces, sat untouched in the back seat. Eleven hours later we arrived exhausted at a little farmhouse surrounded by flowers and filled with antiques. The spring water ran clear and cold, and a large dog slept on our porch as though our security was his job for the night.

Tonight we stay with friends on the hill above Pietermaritzburg. Their garden, bright with lilies and bougainvillea, looks very civilized after the deserts, mountains and rolling pastures we have been through on our trek. Tomorrow we are off to Johannesburg and after that...

I won’t be able to take my own pillow to Wales while I research a sequel to my novel Glastonbury Tor (Kregel, 2006), but I do intend to sleep every night in the same bed.

Namibia

What is successful learning? Is it being able to parrot back the information on a test or does it imply something to do with understanding?

This afternoon I read stories at an after-school program in Windhoek, Namibia. The elementary school children were enthusiastic about So That’s What God is Like and Lulama’s Long Journey Home. They asked for more and more until my voice was scratchy. A dozen stayed, looking at books and reading them for themselves after others had gone outside with a rugby ball. When they were ready to put the books away, I moved to the other room to help with homework.

A twelve-year-old girl was studying for her sixth grade social studies test. The three types of marriage are monogamy, polygamy and polyandry. A family is a group of related people usually sharing a common home. In some cultures you become an adult through gradually assuming responsibilities. In others, like the Namibian Herero culture, a girl cannot wear the traditional Victorian dress until she has been through the ritual at age 20 of being introduced to the sacred fire and the ancestors.

The twelve-year-old in front of me could tell me all about what would happen when she turned twenty, but she kept reading ‘international’ for the word ‘initiation’ in her notes, and it was difficult to coax meaning from her rather than a series of sounds that represented her memory of the words she had copied from the board at school. “Prevent egone independent” was her remembered version of “provide economic dependence” in the list of social values of the family. I’m not quite sure what that meant either but it seemed to have something to do with the family providing for children who were not old enough to work and earn money--age 14, according to Namibian law, as I learned today.

Brazilian education used much the same rote memory teaching methods when we lived there. I remember our foster daughter, Queila, being indignant when she didn’t get any points for her answer on a test. She was convinced she should at least get partial credit for her word-for-word quotation from the book. After all, the only word she had left out was the word ‘not.’

“Will you be here tomorrow?” the Namibian girl asked me today when it was time to go home. She was a lovely little girl, eager to do well, committed to memorizing everything in that notebook. But no one has ever taught her to think, to question, to integrate what she is hearing with what she already knows. No one has given her experiences that will fix what she has learned in her mind to remember beyond tomorrow’s test.

“No,” I replied, as disappointed as she was. “I am only visiting.”

Zimbabwe

[We have been out of internet range for several weeks, and internet access (and therefore this blog) will continue to be sporadic for some time.]

My children grew up in Mozambique where in the beginning I went every day to the government store that sold in foreign currency to see what we would eat that day. The wide streets of the capitol were practically empty of traffic with so few functioning vehicles in the city. “Functioning” might mean having to push it and pop the clutch to get it started, but hey, it works!

In those days Zimbabwe was a delightful place for holiday with its gracious hotels and state-of-the-art game parks. And then Mugabe dismantled the vast commercial farms. Now Zimbabwe must import wheat from Zambia raised by the same farmers previously driven from Zimbabwe. With inflation at upwards of 1500% and fuel rationed, we saw more ox-drawn plows than tractors and more donkey carts and wheelbarrows than cars in the five-hour trip from the boarder to Rusitu in the Chimanimani Mountains of the eastern highlands. Zimbabwe still exports electricity from the Caborra Bassa Dam for precious foreign currency, but her own citizens live with rationing and sporadic cuts. In Rusitu the lights come on from about 11 P.M. to 4 A.M. Our host cooked super on an open fire. He rises regularly in the night to do photocopying for the school, use the computer, bake bread and boil water to store in a thermos for morning coffee. The seminary students got up at midnight to enjoy a video.

In Bulawayo we had dinner with a family from the Theological College of Zimbabwe. Dinner was made from canned goods brought by family from South Africa since the local grocery stores are as bare as ours were in Maputo in the 1980s. Their children attend a private Jewish school although there are barely enough Jews left in town for the minimum needed for formal prayers.

Many whites have left Zimbabwe, but those who remain are staunchly committed to their country. It is a commitment difficult to maintain in the face of foolish decisions on the part of a government that seems more intent on plundering the country than taking responsibility for its future.

It seems to me that our friends would have every right to complain about the situation and lament the world their children will inherit (if they are not disenfranchised altogether because of their skin color.) Instead, they rejoice in the marvelous opportunities their children have to learn lessons that couldn’t be learned any other way. “Our children are so lucky,” is their attitude in the midst of the trials. They read with the four of them every night and discuss history, biography and culture. Their children will grow up educated regardless of the state of the schools. May they be prepared to live for Jesus in whatever kind of world they find themselves.

Potchefstrom Children’s Literature Conference

There are no children here. We are scholars, teachers and librarians meeting at one of South Africa’s historic universities to discuss children’s literature in South Africa. The group is more multicultural than I expected, although white mainstream academics dominate the sessions. At least they aren’t all male. I have been struck by what this country has in common with the post-colonial experiences of Canada and New Zealand—small markets, multi-cultures, lost in global markets dominated by U.S. mainstream culture. It takes courage to invest in letting local voices be heard.

One session dealt with books on HIV. I was familiar with most, but got some new titles that I want to track down to read and review. Issues brought up included balancing dire warnings to avoid HIV and offering hope for living with the disease. Unfortunately, research doesn’t show the dire warnings having much effect on behavior. There is a desperate need for books in general that show children of the majority population—black—but how do we then avoid implying in our HIV-related books that AIDS is a black problem?

The most valuable part of conferences like this is undoubtedly the relationships—finding others who are passionate about books for modern African children and hearing what they are doing. The Family Literacy Project started out to empower non-literate women to prepare their children for reading success by teaching them to talk and interact with their pre-schoolers, not a traditional part of African culture. Too often the non-literate see themselves as helpless and inadequate. The project convinces these mothers that they are the first teachers with a significant role to play in their children’s school success. Of course, the emphasis on reading has led moms and grandmothers to want to learn to read themselves. We saw a delightful picture of a pot simmering on an open hearth and behind it a five-year-old and her grandmother each leaning against a post engrossed in a book. Another project, Stories Across Africa, is collecting “text-lite” stories with African contexts and producing tiny, beautifully illustrated book sets in multiple languages.

Mother-tongue, cultural pride, community participation, gender respect and the spread of HIV are complicated cultural issues with long histories and patterns of thinking behind them. This week I met some dedicated people who are struggling with those issues on behalf of a new generation.

Teaching the affluent

Last week I taught creative writing to fifth through eight graders at a Catholic girls’ school in one of the wealthy northern suburbs of Johannesburg. I can hardly condemn their isolation when I myself graduated from Tudor Hall School for Girls in Indianapolis. Saint Brescia’s has a lovely campus with lawns and gardens watered by an automatic sprinkling system. The girls stood politely and recited their welcome and their thanks to me in unison. Their green blazers and straw hats reminded me of old sepia photographs of Cambridge and Oxford University students a hundred years ago. Most, but not all, were white. It was hard to imagine that they lived in the same city as the kids in Tembisa or at Saint Francis. As far as their experience goes, the girls of Saint Brescia’s are as far from Tembisa as the children of Indianapolis, even though I could drive the distance in forty-five minutes. (Make that an hour and a half in Johannesburg rush hour.)

We had a fun time talking about showing the setting and characters instead of telling the reader about them. The teachers were enthusiastic. The girls eagerly bought autographed copies of The Wooden Ox. The war in Mozambique in the 1980s is as distant to them as the Holocaust was to me at their age.

At the end of two days I spoke at a dinner meeting of librarians and English teachers from similar schools. “How can we get children from affluent white homes to be concerned about the problem of HIV?” one asked. (“How can we get affluent Americans to be concerned?” I wanted to ask in return.) Story is the best answer I have to offer, short of coming here and meeting people personally—something affluent suburban South African whites are often terrified to do. Whether it is accounts of real people or fictionalized representations of what real people go through, stories show readers that the people they have read about or seen on the TV news are more than statistics. Their pain doesn’t go away when the TV camera is turned off. Their hopes for the future, their dreams of love and hunger to be valued are similar to the reader’s hopes and dreams. What does the boy whose face lit up when I read Just Me and My Brother in a dirt yard at Arebaokeng have in common with a girl in a crisp uniform or with a child riding the school bus in Webster, Wisconsin? They are all made in the image of God. When one part of the body hurts, the whole body hurts. The question for me is, how can I use story to show that reality to all three children?

Maputo, Mozambique

6- 7 September, 2007

“A luta continua” was the Mozambican political slogan during the civil war. “The struggle continues!” It was written all over this city when we lived here in the 1980s. Seventeen years have passed since we moved away. I remember sitting on the plane ready to take off, making a list of things I wouldn’t miss: potholes, garbage in the street, the sound of gunfire at night, etc. After filling a couple pages in my notebook, I felt guilty and made a short list of things I would miss—a very short list—mostly people. Many of those people have scattered in the intervening years, but we had lunch with André and Adelina Malombe, our closest Mozambican friends, and shared the ups and downs of both our ministries and our family lives.

How the city has changed since peace came in 1992. In our day 97% of Mozambique’s food was imported. Every two or three months we went grocery shopping—in the neighboring country of Swaziland. Soon after we arrived in Maputo we were excited to see a restaurant with a big sign: Pizzaria. But when we went in, the waiters didn’t know what ‘pizza’ was. I don’t recall whether they had any food that day or not. It wasn’t uncommon for a restaurant to have nothing but bread and broth to serve, not even butter to put on the bread. Communist laws didn’t allow for the dismissal of employees just because there was nothing for them to do.

Today the city is full of restaurants catering to South African tourists come to enjoy the beach. Shops and markets overflow with fruits and vegetables, blue jeans and athletic shoes, instead of the few carefully arranged items they used to hold, marked “Sample only. Not for sale.”

The sand road to the seminary at Laulane has been paved. The training school we helped to set up is undergoing a face-lift in preparation for a new group of students arriving in January. Our SIM colleague, Mattias Hoffmeyer, now lives in the mission house. The cushions of our old couch could use recovering. We slept in what was once our daughters’ bedroom and ate at the dining table we used to race each other around, making a game out of collating Theological Education by Extension materials. Even one of the German shepherds Mattias keeps could be the twin of our Snoopy.

Our years in Mozambique were undoubtedly the most difficult of my life so far. (See my novel The Wooden Ox to get a feel for the stress of those days.) But there were good times, too. The black paint of the chalk board we used for school is still on the wall of the garage although it is flaking, and the girls’ last math assignment can no longer be read. The mango tree still towers above our roof where Katie used to terrify me by hanging by her knees three stories above the cement yard. The sidewalk where Erika learned to ride her two-wheeler still circles the house although the branches of the lemon tree have grown low, and she would have difficulty riding under it even if she hadn’t grown taller than her mother.

As I walked down the hall to leave, my eyes grew moist. How easy it is to focus on the difficulties of those days and forget the taste of passion fruit from our vines, the brilliant magenta of the bougainvillea hedge, or the sound of children’s laughter in the back yard.

The neighborhood children no longer shout “Mae da Catarina” when they see me. The ones who played with my girls have grown up and moved away. Undoubtedly some have contracted HIV. The political war ended in 1992, but a spiritual struggle for the people of this land is still going on. “A luta continua!”

Library Relationships

“Hello. How are you?” a little girl in a blue cotton school uniform greeted me as I came into the Tembisa township library.

“I am fine. And how are you?” I replied. Whether she had exhausted her knowledge of English or was simply overcome with shyness at that point, I’m not sure, but she giggled and turned away.

I am becoming a familiar figure at various community libraries. The librarians at Kempton Park, the old establish “white community” library, have grown accustomed to my search for picture books with children of color. They presented me with some appropriate books from the ‘withdrawn’ shelf. I read them at Saint Francis, at Tembisa Baptist, and at Arebaokeng After Care. The books found a home at Arebaokeng since those children are the most enthusiastic readers outside the libraries.

Dondo is the lively children’s librarian at Tembisa West. He has been writing stories of his own little girl, an unusually brilliant, curious and creative child, according to her doting father. Located near the community college, Tembisa West Library has a large study room and a special collection for the use of students. It is the newest of the three libraries in this area with a collection much more geared toward African users. That makes it the best place for me to find picture books that aren’t about pink-skinned blonds. It is a favorite after-school hang out. One afternoon this old librarian (me) was delighted to watch little boys racing across the vacant lot to see who could get to the reading room first.

Yesterday when I stopped by to return my last batch of books, Portia greeted me. I had met her at Dondo’s young readers club. She wanted to show me what she was reading—a giddy story of American eighth graders. There are some things kids have in common the world over even if the Southern California setting is a far cry from a Johannesburg township.

I stopped at the main Tembisa Library yesterday as well. I hadn’t seen Poppy, the children’s librarian, since I posted pictures drawn by the kids in her readers’ club on my internet site. She had gotten my note with the URL and said the children were excited to view their pictures on the library computers. She has decorated the wall of the children’s area with the originals.

Poppy once took me to read stories at a local pre-school. As a thank you the children sang a song for me. “I want to know, do you love my Jesus?” I was able to assure them that I do love their Jesus very much. In the car afterwards Poppy and I talked some more and discovered that we are sisters in Christ. “You mean you are born again?” Evidently she expected only a superficial Christianity.

It is frustrating just as these relationships are beginning to blossom to be leaving for several months. Poppy asked if I could help with a special reading celebration next week, but I will be away. She introduced me to a young man, Martin, who is an aspiring writer. I gave him information about the writers club I belong to (mainly white female retirees), but I can’t take him with me to introduce because I won’t be there again until February.

Living in more than one world can be frustrating when I feel like I am never fully a part of any. But it is also enriching. This week we will be with former students and Mozambican colleagues in Maputo. Later in the month we will visit Brazilian friends we have been close to for nearly thirty years and missionary friends we met in Ethiopia in 1976. Heaven will be a fun place when all my worlds come together in one with all eternity to enjoy the relationships.