Africa Time

What a day. Man alive I am narked off. I went to Mthatha. And I came back. Except it took about 9 hours in total. Achievements to hours ratio was extremely low. I do have 4 new tires on my car but totally failed to get all the pre-school stuff i wanted, so... I am going back to Mthatha tomorrow.

Mthatha is a hole. Leaving anything of value in a car is asking for trouble so shopping, if you have to go to more than one shop, becomes a logistical nightmare. As it is an hour and ¾ away, you need to plan well in advance and get a lot done when you are there, or it means 3 and a half hours another day.

Today we wanted to scope out some of the building materials so me and Brian (the builder from the UK) went in. We were the best people for the job because we know nothing at all about shops in Mthatha and we don’t speak isiXhosa. I won’t go into the details but it was frustrating and the dodging of the potholes on the way home was not great craic.

Sorry it has been a while. Life here is hectic. It takes ages to get stuff done because of the slow speed my brain is working at and ‘Africa time’. The ratio of achievements to hours is extremely low and that pisses me off. (But if you want to see how Africa time effects people worse off than me, watch the movie Yesterday. It is very good and gives a good idea about the lives of some of Kim’s customers. )

Africa time is a hilarious phenomenon that means it takes a long time to get things done here. For example, the community meeting I held on Friday about the pre-school started 50 mins after it was scheduled to. I did get a chance to top up my tan though, because the meeting was in a field. The furniture was two chairs that me and Thandeka, the preschool teacher, brought. Everyone else sat on the grass/dung.

Meeting went well for the most part until some teachers from a nearby existing school came and were like “you are going to take our kids from our preschool into yours”. This seemed like a real risk to me as the parents who are switched on enough to have their kids there will also be the ones switched on enough to arrive early and register their kids with us. Not exactly what we were going for so I was like “we don’t want to do that, so we will only take kids not in a nearby preschool for this intake and the Jan 2010 intake (academic year start is different here. We are starting at the start of term 2) will be more of a free for all, depending on catchment area and who comes first. They were okay with that. It is all about consensus here, apparently so we thrashed it out at a bit of length.

The other thing was about age. We had a little bit of pressure to take kids of 3 or 4yrs of age. I was expecting that one and we did a good job of explaining that a pre-school is not a crèche and we only have 20 places and one teacher and the educational experience needs to be focused on preparing them for school. Actually part of me thinks the educational experience should be about messing about learning new words for poo, but I wasn’t gonna tell them that!

So all is ‘well’. Tomorrow I have to go back to Mthatha to smash my head against a brick wall repeatedly, before coming back home later than I want to. Then the next three days are enrolment and who knows how that will go. We have put the word out that we are going to be strict. The good thing is that if the Chief comes and says his 3 year old needs to go to pre-school, I will be like “Hey there, I am foreign and I don’t know anything and no.”. It might not happen.

Meanwhile Brian (who is the cousin of Taryn Gaunt, founder doctor, and is also working for free, thank goodness) is going to start building work. We loaded the Boesman with 45m2 of floor tiles and fixer today and crawled home with it. Then, this evening, we negotiated with the Minister about were to put the fence so the kids don’t fall into the pit of eternal poo and cuts. I will put a photo up sometime soon. Big ‘long-drop’ loo, or was one before getting disused. When I was a kid and went to a farm they were clear that we should stay away from the slurry pit. So I am pretty sure that a human slurry pit is even worse. Anyway, long story but the Minister (Mfundisi – read ‘Cry the Beloved Country’) is an awesome guy called Joseph and is well switched on and agreed to our proposal.

Now I am writing this, I feel like we achieved more than I had thought. So I shall go sleep and stop moaning to Kim.

Lovely to speak at the weekend and sorry if I seemed pre-occupied. Trying to do 100 things at once.