Tuesdays are always crazy, I don't know why I ever expect anything else. The day was spent on my feet, cutting up plastic bottles and threading them, along with large wooden beads, onto pieces of fishing wire to form a curtain, and stapling huge lengths of donated white fabric to wooden beams.
We left work late, and the bus home didn't come for 45 minutes. When the buses here are good, they are very good, and when they are bad they are awful. Fearing that Mildred my collegue would not make it home before dark, and tired of freezing in the chill, chill wind, I jumped on the bus to the hospital and sat next to a male nurse, who looked tired before even starting his shift.
The journey took me through half of the townships of Cape Town. Shacks lit by a golden haze littered my vision, and I watched people going about daily life as the bus sped by. Children played in the street, young couples held hands, old ladies gossiped on corners. The many stalls cooking meat on open fires, the fried chicken take-outs and the endless Coca-cola vendors were getting busy. The mountain looked incredible in the evening sky. I read my book and held back the tears of sadness and despair which it provoked.
Getting off about a mile from home, dusk setting in, I phoned my roommate and called in a favour. Other than a private taxi there was no other safe way home. I walked around the small supermarket as I waited for her to come for me, contrasting in my head the rasta fruit vendors stall at the bus stop, selling some sad looking pears and small deformed onions, and oranges, 'five for two rand my love', with the organically farmed, 'top quality', perfectly ripe, imported fruits, herbs and vegetables in their chiller cabinets. I could feel people starring at my face, which was burning bright red, the way it always does when I've been very cold for a long time, then finally warmed up.
When we got home at seven thirty, I felt as if I was entering a sanctuary. Within minutes, potatoes were in the oven, the wine was uncorked and the chocolate unwrapped. I set about the task of reorganising my book shelves, catagorising books together, binding them together with ribbon, then stacking them on top of each other. Though it were coincidence, the colours all matched and look beautiful. I poured over the covers of favourite books, and found poems that I had forgotten. More than anything else in my house, the books on my shelf display and define who I am, expose the essense of the way I look at the world. They are divided into catagories like 'my favourite author', 'South African poetry', 'stark, difficult accounts of Soutb African history', 'protest songs', 'radically liberal theology', 'beads'. The truly beautiful books, the big, hardback 'coffee table' books are allowed to stand alone, unbound.
All this is done whilst I try and prepare myself for the difficult task ahead of me tonight, that of writing a letter to the board of my B's home, highlighting the malpractice and neglect I witness in their institution on a daily basis. It is something that I have avoided doing for the past year, trying desperately to come to terms with my helplessness in the face of such evil and sadness. But another volunteer has chosen to take a stand, and the only right thing to do is to support her, to do what needs to be done for the children.
