First Half of a Busy Day

This was an incredibly busy day. We got up at 7.15, got to the office by 9.40, and didn’t really stop all day. First we helped to cut vegetables and meat for a meal for the children at Old Naledi (the smell of chunks of beef stayed on my hands for ages yuuuuck). Washing several kilos of rice without a sieve is hard, I discovered. Then we were told that we would be taking a class of 25 children from Old Naledi that afternoon! So we quickly went and brainstormed what to say to them, with help from the people here. We were told this group of children would be young teenagers, mainly twelve to fourteen (in fact they turned out to be between nine and thirteen). Once this was done, we corrected a couple of letters that Martha had composed to some Chinese contractors and American churches (she is fluent in English but phrases such as ‘we help the children through nutritious food wellbeing’ and ‘we ask your help for the upliftment of the community’ can do with a bit of tweaking). It’s actually very difficult, trying to correct someone’s letter without just completely rewriting it, without being patronising.
At lunch we had an odd assortment of crumbed chicken bits, white bread and guacamole – supermarkets donate bits and bobs of food that is about to go off and this is what feeds the volunteers (who don’t get a salary) as well as the children. I saw Ann put a prepackaged ‘Italian salad’ with lumps of cheese into the vegetable stew for the kids – I guess so long as the food isn’t wasted that’s the main thing! We had a long talk over lunch. One thing that I found very shocking was some of the things Lee said. For example, she said that she thinks “African people are dishonest, more so that white people”. Even though this was qualified by saying she didn’t mean white people were ‘better’, it’s still implicit in what she was saying. Given that this came entirely unbidden from the mouth of a black Zimbabwean woman, it really saddened me. How do these horrendous vies seep in? We hastened to tell her that British people were also dishonest sometimes, that they cheated and were unfaithful as well, that there are sexual diseases in the West as well. Then, a bit later, when talking about how Botswana is the country with the highest HIV rate in the world apart from Swaziland, she started saying that she thinks it is because the King of Swaziland still adheres to these old, ‘primitive’ ways, setting a bad example for his country. Now, every year all the young nubile girls of Swaziland dance topless for the King (who runs the country), and every year he chooses a new wife from them. I don’t think it’s doing much for the rights of women, respect, etc. But ‘primitive’? There’s so much colonial history, so much ‘evolutionary’ bollocks and stigma attached to that word. Even typing the word and remembering makes me wince. We British, we really did a good job of fucking up these countries and these people’s perception of themselves, didn’t we. Jesus. Even now you can see the scars. I hate it hate it hate it.

(I will write the rest of this day and post is asap, to be continued...)