I first met Crystal Warren when she presented a paper on HIV&AIDS in South African children’s books at the Potchefstroom University conference on children’s literature in 2007. Although I was in the process of leaving South Africa at the time (I had literally moved out of my house, but not yet made it to the airport), I knew we were kindred spirits. When I discovered I would be traveling through Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape recently, I determined to stop and visit her and the marvelous collection at the National Literary Museum where she works.
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One of the things I most love about the family of God is friendships that last over decades and generations. More than twenty-five years ago the Guimaraes family showed up at the door of the house we had borrowed for two months in Maputo while we looked for a permanent place to live (a challenging enterprise in a communist country as Mozambique was at the time.) They were a Brazilian family with two little girls the age of ours, and since ours had just come from Brazil the four were soon dancing and squealing like long-lost cousins. (Okay. Priscila and Eunice had a little brother, Gerson, but he hardly counted at the time since he was only three.) As my daughter drove me to the airport, I was suddenly reminded that I was leaving my comfort zone. What have you forgotten? my cramping stomach asked. What all-important detail have you let fall between the cracks? Usually my husband takes care of travel logistics; I am notoriously bad at them. But he was already in Africa. And he would not be meeting me in Johannesburg to pick up the pieces either. This time I would be the one to pick him up when he arrived at Oliver Tombo International from Mozambique on Saturday. I was on my own to pick up the rental car and find my way to the mission guesthouse. Kisumu, Kenya, looks like a peaceful city. It hugs the shore of Lake Victoria, the largest lake in Africa. Sometimes called “the eye of the rhino,” the lake sits on a plateau in a split of the Great Rift Valley between Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. When I visited in August, I saw no signs of the violence that swept the city following the December 2007 elections when the Luo candidate for president lost under questionable conditions to the Kikuyu candidate from Nairobi. But the pain has left deep scars. Ethnic violence wasn’t confined to the city. I came to the village of Awasi, an hour east, to teach a workshop on writing for children affected by the violence. Every morning empty trucks rattle over the dirt road out of town. They return each afternoon, loaded with cane from local farmers. Children chase the trucks, hoping <!--more-->for something to fall off. It usually does. Life goes on despite the horrors of the past. My passion is for school-aged children, but who can resist the little ones with their wide-eyed curiosity and readiness for books and learning? When I arrived at Tembisa Baptist Church on Wednesday, they lay on the floor in tightly packed rows looking like nothing so much as giant fleece-wrapped enchiladas. Each child was dressed in multiple layers against the Johannesburg winter and rolled in a brightly colored blanket. The floor beneath them was spread with crumbling mats of yellowed foam rubber covered with a blanket of doubtful hygiene. Here and there a canvas shoe stuck out from a bundle. A few heads raised and bright eyes stared at me. Most slept on, oblivious to the chatter of the aids who looked after them. Slowly more and more woke from their nap, and I invited them for a story. How I wish that someone would read to them every day! I started blogging in 2006 to have somewhere to share my experiences reading with orphans and vulnerable children in Tembisa Township. We were living in near-by Kempton Park at the time. (To read some of those early blogs see Lindiwe's Friends.) We have since moved back to the United States. I return to South Africa once or twice a year and always make it a point to get to Tembisa. This has been one of those weeks, wedged between our retreat in George and teaching next week in Kenya. Despite the temptation of the beach on a summer day, I’ve been revising teaching notes and handouts for a writing workshop I will give in Kisumu, Kenya, in August. Kisumu is a port city of 400,000 on a bay of Lake Victoria, which lies between Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. It was the center of violence following the disputed December 2007 elections. The city’s center was burned, the economy devastated. Nearly 1000 people died and 600,000 were displaced across the country. The international community brokered a power-sharing deal in March 2008, but there are rumors of arms entering the country in preparation for the planned elections in 2012. The after-school program at Tembisa Baptist Church doesn’t have the sponsors that Arebaokeng has. They aren’t even sponsored by the church, which charges rent for the use of their old building and office space in a converted house on the property. But they run a crèche and feed a hundred children a day. This week I returned to St. Francis Nursery School. I used to read there regularly back in 2006 and 2007. I turned the project over to a colleague when I went to the States for a few months. That colleague has now returned to U.K. so I thought I would stop by to see if anyone would like a story or two. The children were in the yard when I arrived. As I approached through the garden, Teacher Ruthie burst from the door, squealing like a three-year-old and running to greet me. “Why do we read?” I asked the combined fifth-grade classes at Rose-Act’s Saturday’s Cool. This supplementary educational program for grades five through twelve serves the desperately poor township of Alexandra, near Johannesburg. “To learn new things,” a boy said promptly, and I knew this was going to be a fun class. “To find out about the world,” another said. |
AuthorLeAnne Hardy has lived in six countries on four continents. Her books come out of her cross-cultural experiences and her passion to use story to convey spiritual truths in a form that will permeate lives. Add http://www.leannehardy.net/1/feed to your RSS feed.
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