Advertisement
Published: March 27th 2008
Edit Blog Post
EASTER, ALOE, AND SELMA'S KIDS
RETURN TO MATJIESVLEI The Groot Swartberg mountains rise all around us. Easter morning is stunningly bright, already hot, and we hide in the shade of the front stoep (porch). Across the valley a baboon barks. The mountains are covered with a forest of aloe. These are not the living room variety of aloe, soft little potted plants that one finds at the florist. These are muscled tree-like creatures, robust, with spined “leaves” that are as thick as a Schwarzenegger bicep. They are layered in an impenetrable pattern, but appear luscious and fleshy. In June they flower and the Groot Swartberg are awash in magnificent aloe bloom.
Our little Easter house was built in 1872 by an Afrikaner pioneer and sits on a hillside that looks down into a cultivated valley as well as up into the severe mountains. It has no electricity, so at night we light all the lamps and candles, walking around in a wash of honeyed light, a balm for our eyes after a day of African blaze.
The walls here are almost a meter thick. The floors are wooden, unfinished, and worn so that
the knots stand up a bit from the blond grain. We are sequestered off in this quiet valley, about 10 kilometers in on a gravel road. The old post office, once the center for an Afrikaans community of about 25 families, is now falling in on itself. The wooden wall phone, once the only means of communication in the valley, is now missing. Next to our little house sits the old school for the coloured (mixed race) children, now converted into a fine home. Closer to the Gamka River, about three hundred meters down the road, sits the old one room school for white children. It is now a guest cottage. Bennie and Selma Nel, who own a large tract of land here, still run a viable dairy farm. Bennie’s great-great grandfather came into this valley on an ox wagon in 1820.
On Easter Sunday, the sky deep blue and the sun desert-like in its intensity, we walk the final two or three kilometers of this road to where we see its terminus. Before us the mountains close in and narrow, pinching the valley floor and giving the farmer no more room to graze a cow or plow a
field. There is a lone low white home backed up against the hills and it fairly sparkles in the sunlight. Above it there is the last dramatic green field plowed in the cleft of two smaller hills. It looks like a remarkable gem, an emerald placed by a mad jeweler in the roughest of settings.
The Gamka River winds next to us and on our way home we stop at a wide bend and dive in. The water is a wild mixture of warm and icy cold. Currents below the surface strike our legs and take our breath away. The water smells the very essence of plant life, an extraction, a tincture of the local flora that now flows by like a living distillation of everything green that surrounds us. We emerge with this smell clinging to us.
We walk on. Refreshed is not the word for it.
Soon after we arrive home Selma motors up the steep driveway in her bakkie (pick up) to pay us a visit. The afternoon African sun is mercilessly baking our front stoep so we come inside. Selma bends her six-six frame to pass through the doorways. We sit in what
was the old kitchen with its huge built-in open cooking space. We sip cold Chenin Blanc as Selma tells us more about this valley, about her dairy farm, about her other job as first grade teacher in the coloured school of Calitzdorp.
Every morning she drives out of this valley, and takes five local children with her in the back of her bakkie. She has forty-two children in her class and mentions that she is the only white person in the school. She paints a penetrating picture of the poverty these children face. Many arrive at school without shoes, in the winter their feet red with the cold. Their clothing is often torn and in tatters. Fetal alcohol syndrome is evident in a few of her students. She buys them pencils and pens with her own money, but students in other classes sit with no pens or pencils. We envision children sitting in quiet rows learning to read and write, with no pencils! Selma tells us of the very promising students, the ones for whom there is a striking lack of opportunity. This clearly causes her some anguish. She knows she can only do so much, and she clearly
foresees the potential waste that will occur here. She would love to be able to buy simple clothing, tracksuits, shoes, for all of her first graders, a uniform of sorts to give them some sense of pride and warmth. And of course pencils. Pencils! We ask her what she imagines it might cost per student to do this. She ponders for a second and says, “Two-hundred rand.” That’s about thirty dollars American. We tell her we’d like to help. ***
She tells us more stories about this beautiful valley, about her husband Bennie walking to school in his youth along the river, of her own son who detests going away to boarding school, preferring to stay here and fish and wander the hills, of how Bennie’s ancestors would take their trade goods of dried fruit out from the valley once a year to Port Elizabeth - a three month trip by ox cart. Eventually Selma mentions that Bennie and her son are expected to be returning home soon from a festival Oudtshoorn. They don’t have a key and they might be waiting for her outside the house. She laughs mischievously as she hands us back the empty wine glass.
She disappears down the driveway in the red bakkie, dust swirling behind her.
After she leaves we rub lamb chops with garlic, then build a wood fire in the front yard. The sky darkens as the wood turns into glowing red coals. Stars emerge. Orion stands above us. The promise of the Easter full moon glows in the eastern sky, then a crescent slice emerges from behind the high jagged rock. To the west, across the valley, the tops of the mountains are splashed in moonlight.
As the moon climbs, its light washes down the surrounding mountains, and the aloes take on a silver color. We can see them standing like sentries, thousands of them, all so quiet and still.
We must return in June, we say, on another full moon night. The aloes will all hold flowers then. Maybe there will be a breeze and we will draw closer to the fire at night, warming ourselves here south of the equator where fall will be turning to winter.
Maybe Selma’s kids will all have shoes by then.
***If you think you would like to help Selma, reply to this by clicking on “Private Message,” and letting me know. That might give me an idea of what I can tell Selma. I’ll be talking to her and we will put together a plan to put money directly into the school’s account, dedicated to clothing, pens and pencils. When that happens I will let you know. I hope to have pictures from Selma soon, and then upon returning to the U.S. continue correspondence and send them pictures from our side of the world.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.213s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 12; qc: 73; dbt: 0.1166s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb