INCULTURATION ON THE VAYA

On the cusp of Louis Botha Avenue, not far from where one of the major Rea Vaya stops will be located, an unusual form of cultural assimilation is occurring.   
 

Charles Nyathi, a security guard for a block of flats, has transformed the very basic hut used by the security personnel by nailing an ornate, brass, embossed cabinet to one of the prefabricated walls.  He uses it to store food. 

The flat owner who gave the cabinet to the security guards apparently once used it to store religious texts.

RECALIBRATING THE GROVE

“…Sound is heard not only through our ears but through every cell in our bodies. (It) can redress imbalances on every level of physiologic functioning and can play a positive role in the treatment of virtually any medical disorder.” Dr. Mitchell Gaynor, director of Medical Oncology and Integrative Medicine, the Cornell Cancer Prevention Center in New York

Well-being and goodwill have surfaced in extraordinary ways in the inter-religious, multi-cultural melting pot of Orange Grove.  Picture a barefoot, ex-King-David boy in a white kurta, playing  Tibetan singing bowls in the Masonic Lodge in 13^th Street.  Jason Katz’s twice-monthly sound journeys, sometimes with support from his 15-year-old son, Gabriel have become an imperative for many looking for healing, relaxation, meditation and revitalisation for an hour and a half on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon.

For those who stay for tea, delicious cakes made by his wife, Robyn, and his mother-in-law are on offer. 

Jason’s personal odyssey as a healer and mystic (my attribution) began in childhood when his mother told him he had “healing hands”.  His understanding of his purpose and his gifts have been shaped by teachers and by life experiences, including a painful couple of years when he accompanied his older brother through an agonising process of illness and death from Lou Gehrig's (motor neuron) disease.

He grew up in Fairmont and has happy memories of traveling to town on a tram with his mother, stopping at the OK Bazaars on the corner of 10^th Street, where his father, who had a particular gift for selecting clothes and sweets that would sell, worked as a buyer.

After being told about the Oneness University by the transpersonal psychologist Pam Roux, Jason went to India to deepen his meditation practice https://youtu.be/tFGtl55LvGQ .While there, he realised that although he does not consider himself dogmatically religious, his Jewish education as a child is rooted deeply in his psyche. 

To receive the deeksha (Oneness blessing) an initiate is expected to kneel down before the person imparting the blessing. 

Jason was told he could sit rather than kneel because Jewish Law forbids a man to kneel down before any person or idol. There is only one ritual in the year during Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) when a man kneels before the Torah and says the words of the Shema.

Originally trained as a hairdresser, Jason is qualified to offer shiatsu, reflexology, sound journeys, and his own particular brand of D-Stress massage. He was mentored by Alice Hoehler for two years before facilitating his first sound journey and the collaborative relationship has continued. Some of the bowels Jason uses belong to Alice.

In September this year, a brutal armed robbery forced Jason to reconsider what was most important and where he needed to focus his energies.  He was working for a company in Buccleuch, selling hair extensions when four armed robbers attacked him and others in the shop before tying them up and escaping with a fortune of hair pieces.  Jason was left with physical scars, including a pistol mark on his forehead that somebody subsequently mistook for a bindi (the red dot worn by Hindu men and women), possibly because of the spiritual ambiance that seems to hover around him. 

The incident has left Jason remarkably free of anger or animosity. He beams with gratitude now that the path ahead is clearer than ever before.

Jason offers sound journeys in Orange Grove and in others Johannesburg suburbs. He takes bookings from individuals and small or large groups. He also gives one-on-one sound journey sessions and D-stress massage at his rooms in Senderwood.  Hourly individual sessions are R 600. Payment for sound journeys at the Masonic Lodge are by donation (recommended contribution is R 100 per person).  All Jason’s services are portable and fees are negotiable depending on travel costs and the number of people involved.

You can contact Jason at: Email: dstressjk@gmail.com or cell: 084 378-7377, or find him on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000999543557.  It is a good idea to get onto his mailing list to receive a monthly newsletter giving the dates of sound journeys and other inspirational information. 

Sound Journeys are held twice a month at 

75 13th Street between 8th and 9th Avenues Orange Grove.  Parking is available next to the hall.  Bring a yoga mat or something to lie on, a pillow or cushion and a light blanket to pull over yourself.

FROM HILLBROW TO TWEELING: A GALACTIC ODYSSEY

I meet Mano Christelis in his office in the Orange Grove house where the Galaxy Muzeum factory is based.  Every surface is overflowing with an exotic array of strangely shaped, multi-coloured beads and jewellery in the making. The lyrics of the 1960s Beatles song come to mind: “The Magical Mystery Tour is waiting to take you away…”

Mano has been commissioned to create the headdresses and earrings for George’s Bizos’s grandson’s wedding. He shows me a picture on his cell phone of models wearing red, crystal dresses and red, crystal crowns.  While we speak, he is putting together ear-to-shoulder length red crystal earrings, each pair with a different Greek Orthodox saint in the middle, for the 17 bridesmaids.  “He’s marrying a beautiful Lebanese girl,” he tells me.  Now she wants huge red tassels hanging off them as well”, he chuckles.  “It’s going to be spectacular!”

Son of the pioneering, ‘Lucky Packet King”, Lefty Christelis, Mano began making his “galactic jewellery” from lucky packet charms as a boy of eight.  “My father had mountains of lucky packets in the sweet factory in Germiston. There were corridors of all these Hong Kong toys…little charms…” He describes the scene with child-like excitement, fuelling my own reminiscences of lucky packet exuberance. 

“My dad had the machine that made all those little pink sweets and he had lollipop machines and he used to make marshmallow fish and rocket sherbet. His sherbet lines were the biggest success.  And my dad’s twin brother used to sit at the machines and every 20 to 30 lucky packets he used to put in a 50 cent coin.  So sometimes a kid would get a lucky packet with an extra 50 cent piece. It was like a big thing. He supplied the whole of Southern Africa, right up to Zambia and Zimbabwe and Mozambique. All the kids of that generation went for lucky packets.”

When his father got a consignment of beads after the Richelieu factory closed down, Mano incorporated the beads into his designs and started to cultivate an exclusive customer base.

In the eighties he set up a shop in the basement flea market in Pretorius Street in Hillbrow: “It was the time of the Café de Paris and the Three Sisters…and all the trendy shops were there…” 

The performing artist, Steven Cohen used to visit the stall with his mother:  “He used to come, dressed like a nice Jewish boy, with his mom.  And he used to like my stuff. He loved all the plastic toys.  And his mother used to say: ‘Oh come on Steven, this stuff isn’t for you!  Let’s move on!’ Meanwhile, he has become so way out and eccentric that this is like, mild, you know…“ We laugh.

Prominent designers like Peter Soldatos and Chris Levin used the Galaxy jewellery in their fashion shows and his customers included people like Linda Goodman, Winnie Mandela, Marianne Fassler and Brenda Fassie . 

Together with the ceramicist Tina van der Walt, Mano was one of the first to set up a stall at the flea market opposite the Market Theatre.  “Every week we had a different theme. One week would be Egyptian, the next week it would be ancient ruins, and we would do a hellova production…That’s how I started. Then I got contracts with boutiques and started supplying Stuttafords and others.”

Mano’s interest in extra-terrestrial life; good and bad aliens; baroque architecture emanating from Venus; lizard people; giant snails on Neptune; parallel governments on Mars; teleportation and jump rooms, like lifts, has grown alongside his career as a trend-setter in the jewellery business,  “I’ve always been interested in extra-terrestrial life, and I’ve had experiences of different galaxies on the astral plane,” he tells me, showing me pictures of new developments on Neptune, stored on his cell phone.  

His fascination was the inspiration behind the Galaxy Muzeum in the small northern Free State town of Tweeling, where he owns several properties, including the old post office.    “Tweeling is an energy point in the Free State,” he says. “People living there have seen triangular craft and all different craft moving across the area…”

I visited Tweeling with friend and photographer, Stan Sher. 

The display in the Galaxy Muzeum , consists of a series of vitrines depicting a variety of galaxies, dimensions, portals and life forms, including instructions on how to get there from Planet Earth. The first vitrine depicts a secret location in Mozambique where transport through history is conducted.  “Civilization: humans in military operations using time door to change history”, the caption reads.  The second, named ‘Planet Blueploy’ depicts “humabian aquatic people living in structures above oceans” accessed through a time hole in a magnetic field in the Free State area 86. Cement blocks and circles and brick-like structures, similar to the beads used in some of the jewellery appear in the various planetary constellations.

The exhibition includes the planet Jupiter, which is “three years by earth ship from planet earth’ ; Planet Oberroi, in the Zacacia Penticula Galaxy, which is 14 light years away from earth on the electronic transport field on Easter Island, inhabited by a hunter-gatherer community that is “peaceful in nature.”  Another planet is reached by means of eighty light years through wormhole and the civilization here is "of human origin through intelligent manipulation.”

“Just like there are all different kinds of birds, there all different kinds of people,” Mano explains.  “There are bird people, with feathers like birds, and there are half animal, half human people like the Egyptian hieroglyphs. “

Back in the Orange Grove factory, I ask Mano about the pictures of Greek Orthodox saints on the walls. “I’m Greek Orthodox. I was born in the realm of Jesus and that’s what I’m sticking to. I pray to God and Jesus and all the saints because that is my realm…The Greek Orthodox Church is quite open. I don’t think they would mind about reincarnation and different galaxies and things.”

I had a lot of laughs with Mano Christelis, and with Stan Sher on the trip to Tweeling. The vast array of images, resonant of the magic realism of a Marquez story, have been spinning around in my head and turning up in weird and wonderful ways in my dreams ever since.   

The end of the world on a sunny winter day in Johannesburg

 

It’s the first sunny day after a week of unremitting, unseasonal downpour.   The change in mood in the block is palpable. Balcony doors are open and those with pot plant gardens are out inspecting the remains of their plants in their pyjamas, strangely liberated from the pressure of public opinion about their personal habits or the shape and stripe of their nightwear.  There is an air of gratitude and relief, as though spring has sprung, although it is still winter. The air is free of the insidious haze of carbon monoxide that typically shrouds the Louis Botha Avenue side of the building and the first hint of a rainbow emerges like a halo over the notorious ‘death bend’, on the cusp of Orange Grove and Houghton.

 Despite the climatic transition, I am engrossed in a book about a ship’s doctor in the Antarctic. Extraordinary weather conditions have caused the ship’s pipes to burst as frozen water thaws. The hospital floor is flooded and water is raining through the dining room ceiling. I am about to turn the page to the part about the doctor and a nurse sloshing around the hospital trying to salvage essential equipment, when I become aware of a mild and then persistent current of water dripping onto my balcony from somewhere upstairs. It is not rain; it has quite a different tone as the water hits the terracotta tiles.

Standing on the balcony, I strain my head upwards and notice water flooding onto the balcony of the upstairs flat where the rabbi’s son, Elijah Nudelman lives.  It won’t be the first time that Elijah has left a tap running. It is common knowledge that he is not quite right in the head.  “He doesn’t have a full box of chocolates”, my next door neighbour Rachel Levine would say.  I tend to agree since I am frequently awoken in the night by Elijah’s turbulent dreams. His bedroom is one floor above mine and I hear him crying out in his sleep, either in Yiddish (generally towards the early hours of the morning) or in a stream of expletives shortly after midnight, almost certainly an extension of the ‘grunge’ music he plays relentlessly until he turns in. Leaning over the rail of the balcony, I shout up at the flat above: “Elijah! Elijah!” Silence. I run up the fire escape and ring the doorbell of Elijah’s flat, then pound on the door. Silence.

Back in my own flat, I phone Alfred, the gardener/caretaker. He arrives within minutes. A huge Zulu man, well over six feet tall, Alfred is permanently dressed in blue working overalls with a ZCC star pinned to his chest, and a bus conductor’s hat with the peak turned to one side of his head. He crouches and awkwardly contracts his large body to get through the door.

We try phoning the rabbi and then the chairperson of the Body Corporate, privately referred to as “the Body Cobra”, without success. The water continues to flow and then to gush down from the upstairs balcony as a newsreader on Classic FM announces a national emergency. I change the station and turn up the volume. Rede Thlabi is interviewing Acid Mine Drainage activist Mariette Liefferink on Talk Radio 702.  “I have been saying for years that the crunch is just around the corner,” Liefferink pronounces. “The central basin has decanted and the city’s water pipes have exploded from the pressure. As we speak, enough acid water to fill 50,000 Olympic swimming pools is flooding the city of Johannesburg”.

 Within hours the picture has changed. By now a vast lake of water has surged up from ground level and Alfred and I are boarding a small wooden rowing boat steered by the Body Cobra. Spluttering with a dog hater’s contempt and outrage as Alfred hands me my two small dogs, Green Tara and Kuan Yin, the Body Cobra takes a small notebook and pen from the inside pocket of his jacket, and makes a note, no doubt with the intention of imposing a special levy on owners with pets.  The antagonism between the dogs and the Body Cobra is mutual.  They growl at him. I smile inwardly.

Rabbi Yudelman, wearing full Lubavitch religious trappings, and Elijah are already in the boat. The Body Cobra steers the boat past 112, where Rachel Levine climbs in, clutching a bag of Israeli jewellery in case she meets any customers on the way. Then we pass 108 to collect Noah Abramowitz.  Noah, referred to by Alfred and other staff as ‘Omdala Oyinqaba’, the old eccentric, is best known for singing an eclectic repertoire at the top of his lungs in the underground parking garage at odd hours of day and night.  As we arrive at his balcony he is singing, ‘The times they are a changing…”  “Oh get in, Noah!” Rachel Levine snaps with irritation.

 After one more stop at 113 to pick up Hymie and Beulah Lazarus and their parrot, Lennie, the boat is quite full.  “Get back inside? Get back inside!” Lennie shrieks as the boat lurches hazardously towards Louis Botha Avenue. 

 

With despair, I notice that “Orchards Wheel and Tire”, “Jay-Jay's Car Wash”, “Mashi Rose Tombstones,” “E&W Steel Design”, “Burgess Plumbing”; “Vintage Clothing”; and “Tonino's Pizza and Pub” are almost entirely submerged.

 

Noah sings, "He aint heavy, he's my brother," as I beg and bargain with the Body Cobra to make a stop at my brother’s shop to see if he needs help.  Finally he agrees and we sail up the ramp to the old warehouse, where my brother’s eccentric second-hand bookshop is located. A plastic sign reading: “Men working overhead” that I anxiously recognize as one of my brother’s collection, floats by.

 All the shelves on the lower half of the wall are under water. Richard and his assistant, Liberty, are huddled together with dazed expressions on the narrow walkway assembled from steel, wood and hemp rope, that runs alongside the upper part of the shop. They are surrounded by boxes and crates of books labelled in thick black ink: Peter Cheney; Howard Spring; Denis Wheatley; Frank G. Slaughter; Stephen King; Taylor Caldwell; Dornford Yates; Medical Romances; Shakespearian Studies; Crime Fiction; and Judaica.

 

The boat rocks and dips precariously as Richard and Liberty squash themselves in between Hymie and Noah on the central plank.

The Body Cobra steers the boat towards Maryvale Convent. The historic mural of our Lady of the Wayside is almost entirely under water. The water is lapping at our lady’s chin and above her head, two nuns clinging to the church steeple wave frantically, but there is no room for them in the boat. The Body Cobra shrugs his shoulders and shakes his head sadly.  On we go towards Killarney, passing the mosque on Central Avenue, Houghton, with its imposing minarets. I imagine that Na’eem and Fatima would have fled here and wonder whether they are still in - or on - the building or whether they have been rescued by a helicopter or a boat. Since Na’eem always has strings to pull, I am confident that he would have made a plan.

 
“How long will we be here?” Rachel Levine laments, her arms folded across her chest. “Until the ijuba calls,” Alfred volunteers.  “Until we reach dry land,” Liberty adds. “Get back inside!  Get back inside!” Lennie protests.

The acid water swirls and sways against the sides of the boat. The rabbi is praying, rocking back and forth over his huge stomach. Richard closes his eyes and mumbles a few empathetic words from the Anglican liturgy.  I remove my mala from my bag and count the beads, quietly chanting the Om Mane Peme Hung.  Noah sings: “The holy dove was moving too, and every breath we drew was Hallelujah, Hallelujah, and Hallelujah…”

43 years of gardening on the Kensington Koppie

“This is Robben Island and if you come this way from the Cape, you see Africa in front of you…and that’s West Africa there…”  Phillip O Pirie walks me through his extraordinary garden that extends beyond his Ferret Street property onto the famous Kensington koppie.  He has been cultivating this garden for 43 years. 

 It all began when Rita O Pirie wrote to the Town Planning Department of the Johannesburg Municipality in 1971:

“Dear Sirs,
…I am interested in purchasing or leasing the piece of ground surrounding the stand for the following reasons:

1.   To beautify the area which is in a sad state of neglect – broken glass, refuse from dumping, rusty tins, etc.

2.   As I have three young children, our grounds, which are mostly terraced, are inadequate for them to play on. They are inclined to play on the piece of ground described above.

3.   The ground situated behind the house is used by Bantu males and females for drinking parties and urinating. My husband is away for considerable periods and when requesting the abovementioned Bantus to leave they use foul language and become aggressive.

4.   We have no privacy at the rear of the house and such passing persons can see over the low wall into the house.

 The Council agreed to the encroachment provided the costs were covered: R 10.50 for the plans; revenue stamps to the value of R 2.10; and a nominal fee of R 1.00 per annum for an initial five years. 

After more than 40 years of encroachment (the law says 30 years), the property belonged to Phillip and Rita O Pirie when I  met them last year. The property was on sale at the time and they had received a good offer from a Muslim family.

O Pirie’s interest in gardening began when he was a child at Holy Cross Convent in the Transkei. He grew up there: “Let’s just say I was one of the war orphans of the time," he says.  Two nuns taught him the basics of gardening: “There was Sister Florence in the flower garden and Sister Veronica in the vegetable garden and they both had green fingers.”

Over the years gardening has helped O Pirie balance his working life. He joined the SA Police Force when the Rand Daily Mail called for English speaking cops to join up in 1956 and was based at "the old Marshall Square" from 1956 - 1966. In 1967 he met Nelson Mandela at the Drill Hall, near the Noord Street taxi rank in Joubert Park. The initial stages of the Treason Trial happened there.  

After ten years as a policeman, O Pirie started his own company in the security/investigatory field. His work has taken him to many countries and brought him into contact with dignitaries around the world. 

His clients who were initially all white became “from across the racial spectrum” and include several notorious South African millionaires. O Pirie says he has considered writing a book entitled: “The ten multi-millionaires and one billionaire.”  The billionaire is a more recent client.

O Pirie relied on cheap labour (workers were paid a standard rate of between R2.00 and R5.00 per day in the early years) and inexpensive materials (cement cost R9.50 per packet) to construct the stone walls surrounding and separating the different levels of the garden.   “Most of the labour was carried by me and blacks,” O Pirie says.” It was a question of almost having four blacks Saturdays and four blacks Sundays clearing the stand and building this colossal stone wall. I had a boy from the Northern Transvaal, Limpopo area… Hell, what a good worker that was…”

I would not get into a discussion on apartheid history with Phillip O Pirie since it is unlikely that we would find much common ground. Nevertheless, he is a modest, courteous man, sensitive to people and the natural world. It is interesting to me that although he clearly has a sense of connection to plant life, his approach to gardening is quite severe and regimented: “My style has more of a military base. I like straight lines and uniformity.  I like different colours but they must blend.” Looking up towards the koppie I can’t help thinking how untamed and unordered the terrain is and what a struggle it must have been to impose structure on it.   

The next challenge for O Pirie is his daughter’s 1.8 hectare property in Lonehill: “My daughter’s garden is not straight lines. It is more circles.  I am going to try and make it conform”, he says.

The House of Dreams and the Red Diaper Brigade

“When I first came to England, after my parents went into exile, I was 13 and extremely unhappy at being uprooted and transplanted…I would have long travels in my mind around the garden at 154 Regent Street, re-living childhood games, the corners of the garden where they were played, which  flowers, trees and bushes were where. It was one of the most comforting things I had…”

(Frances Bernstein in an email to Johanna Kistner).

In the aftershock of the xenophobic violence in Joburg’s inner city suburbs in 2009, Johanna Kistner and her team launched an urgent search for premises that would allow them to expand their “Suitcase Project" for refugee children. 

 

It took several years and a change of principals before Observatory Girls Primary School gave Sophiatown Community Psychological Services the go-ahead to occupy the house at 154 Regent Street in Observatory rent-free, provided the project carried the costs of rehabilitating and renovating the property.

In the intervening years, the project had established a vibrant venture combining gender activism, art and psychological healing at 20 Derby Road in Bertrams.  Interestingly this is where the Chinese hero, Chow Kwai For lived in the early 1900s.  I wrote about him in 2011 in a blog post entitled ‘Suicide for conscience sake – the story of Chow Kwai For". (http://melodyemmettsbezvalley.blogspot.com/2011/10/suicide-for-conscience-sake-story-of.html).

 

The abandoned Regent Street House, originally built in 1918, was a sad place when the school handed over the keys. Destitute people had built shacks attached to the front and back of the house and young sex workers were using the place to hide from the police. “It was horrible: walls not only bulging with water from a burst geyser, but also conveying a profound sense of... misery…Broken furniture lay strewn around, electrical wires hung unconnected, every tap had been removed for illegal recycling, and downstairs in a basement…the ceiling had collapsed and a wide crack surrounded the natural rock…”

 After a long process of reconstruction, community worker Thabo Sepuru stood in the street in front of the transformed building and commented: “It’s the house of our dreams”. Today The House of Dreams is a place of restoration and healing for children from crowded inner city slums and women displaced by war, disease and abuse.   

 

Thotho (Senga Wabulakombe), a project worker who lives on the property, tells the story of a middle-aged man who arrived unexpectedly and asked if he could look around, explaining that he had lived in the house as a child.

 

A few months later, the Johannesburg Heritage Foundation announced that the house had been declared a national heritage site.

The unexpected visitor turned out to be one of four children of the courageous Communist Party stalwarts Hilda (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilda_Bernstein) and Rusty Bernstein (http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/lionel-rusty-bernstein) who lived in the house between 1946 and 1963.  In these years of fragmentation, harassment, arrest, detention and solitary confinement, Rusty Bernstein is said to have drafted the Freedom Charter.

Finally the family fled to England.

In the weeks following the revelation about the house’s history, Johanna made contact with some of the adult Bernstein children and with Barbara Harmel, a family friend who spent much of her childhood in the Regent Street house. Barbara coined the phrase “The Red Diaper Brigade” to describe the children of communists who grew up in inner city suburbs in the 1950s.

 

"This is Lovely," Tony says...

A vague smell of cooking oil wafts through the air. I am on my way to the Denver squatter camp with Tony Lopes, who runs his bakkie on rancid cooking oil instead of petrol.  We are going to visit Nomsa Ximba. Tony wants to take measurements and check out the possibilities for building one of the small geysers he constructs from two liter coke bottles and tetrapak cartons. The tetrapak cartons absorb the heat and the coke bottles retain the heat, “like a car when you leave it in the sun,” he explains.  Cold water sinks and hot water rises and goes into a water container at the top of the system.

Nomsa meets us on the Malvern side of the railway track and we drive together into the industrial area where the Denver squatter camp is located. It is not clear how many people live there. Nomsa estimates 5,000.

Water is gushing down the slope leading to the shacks, apparently from a burst pipe.  “The good thing about this,” Tony says to Nomsa, “is that vegetables love this water. You can plant vegetables, Nomsa.”

Two municipal workers are cleaning refuse from the river of water. We make our way down the slope, past the metal pit toilets, towards Nomsa’s shack. I have the impression of going down into a pit. Children gather around, touching my legs, clutching my hands.  We pass women washing in plastic buckets and unemployed men sitting around in groups.

Nomsa’s shack consists of two rooms constructed from planks of wood and chipboard, with a metal door and a thick, black plastic roof.  A painted sign on the door proclaims that the occupants are Shembe followers.

Inside the shack is meticulously neat and clean but dark and airless. There is one stool to sit on. The walls are pasted with  advertising inserts from newspapers and  magazine pictures.  “This is lovely,” Tony says. Outside he walks around the shack inspecting the movement of the sun and the possibilities for supporting a water container on the side of the shack. 

For over two years Nomsa has worked as a volunteer two mornings a week in the Rhodes Park Library organic vegetable garden, which Tony started a couple of years ago in collaboration with the librarian.  Large bags of vegetables from the garden are donated to Noah’s Ark, an NGO based in Malvern, that offers after school support to orphaned and vulnerable children from the Malvern, Denver and Kensington areas.  Nomsa works at Noah’s Ark as a Child Activity Coordinator for R 1,100 per month.  Her work  involves cooking for the 128 children aged between 8-18 who come to the centre every week day, and then helping them to develop skills through play.

She worked as a volunteer for Noah’s Ark for a year and a half before getting a salary.  A large part of her work at that time was to comb the area to identify needy, orphaned and vulnerable children.  All the children suffer from hunger and malnutrition. A spread of other problems emerge during play, including rape, sexual abuse, violence in the home.

Tony helped Noah’s Ark to start a vegetable garden first, then when the Rhodes Park garden was started, Nomsa came to help him there.  They make a very vibrant, dynamic team. Tony arranged for Nomsa to do a permaculture course at the Siyakana Food Gardens, and through Noah’s Ark she completed a six month course in Victim Empowerment.

Sadly, Noah’s Ark will be closing down at the end of September due to lack of funds.  Nomsa is not sure what she is going to do.  Tony is looking for another partner to donate the produce from the Rhodes Park vegetable garden to. 

When we speak about this, there is a sense of sadness and regret and some worry about the future.

Nomsa gives Tony R 200 for the materials to build the geyser.  “It costs more than this,” he tells me. It is difficult because there is such poverty but I have to take some money to cover the costs”.

On the way back to Rhodes Park, where my car is parked, Tony shouts a greeting to a woman handing out pamphlets at the traffic lights.  She is an emaciated looking woman and it is evident that life has struck her a cruel blow.  “She is an amazing woman from Zimbabwe,” Tony tells me.  “She has a bit of a drinking problem, but I learned so much from her.  When she helped me in the garden, I noticed that she ate everything that everyone else threw away. I asked her about it and she taught me that nettles and even the leaves of black jacks and other weeds are very, very nutritious.”