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Published: June 18th 2008
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PYROTECHNICS IN THE KLEIN KAROO
AND
THE GAMKA SCHOOL GETS FLEECED
It looks like the Grand Finale of a botanical fireworks display; only it’s frozen in time. Bottle rockets are being launched simultaneously from the center of every huge aloe in the Klein Karoo. Flame orange showers of sparks seem to emanate from the heart of the thick fleshy plants. They look like Las Vegas fountains designed by a Garden Club that serves peyote buttons with their tea.
Selma Nel lives in this paradisiacal place called Matjiesvlei. Her husband Bennie’s family settled here almost two hundred years ago, trudging up the valley in ox wagons, along the Gamka River. He and Selma still run a dairy farm deep in this valley, about seven kilometers off the paved road. We met Selma here several times before. The first time was purely serendipitous. The second time was intentional (EASTER, ALOE, AND SELMA’S KIDS). This time we have come not only to sit on the porch built by Bennie’s uncle in 1876, watch the malachite sunbird, listen to the baboons, and hike in the surrounding mountains, but also to see where Selma works - the Gamka East Primary School.
CLOETE HUIS SWALLOWED BY ALOE
Our humble residence in Matjiesvlei We drive into the town of Calitzdorp and then head off on an old cement road into the surrounding farmland. We pass irrigated vineyards, the vines now skeletal and leafless in their winter form, and past the scattered block homes of farm workers. The road turns to gravel. There are gatherings of ostriches behind fences and they come running towards our car, expecting to be fed. But we are no ostrich farmers. The sun is bright, the air warm, the color of everything a khaki tan. We turn left at the sign: GAMKA-OOS PRIMER LAERSKOOL. The landscape is a wide sweep of wire fence, dust, and electrical lines strung from pole to pole. Not much else.
Since I first mentioned the Gamka School on this blog, and talked of the shocking disparity of resources that the young students here have to put up with, there has been an amazing response from friends. Outer Cape Health Services, Saint Mary’s of the Harbor Church, and the weekend team from the VNA of Boston, have pooled together a significant amount of money to buy clothing and school supplies for the children of the Gamka East Primary School. A local woman in
GLOWING ON THE INSIDE
The old kitchen in the Cloete Huis Calitzdorp has been contracted to make hooded fleece jackets for all of them. Their parents have been asked (in a conscious move to promote individual responsibility) to come up with slacks and shoes. For those families who are indeed too destitute, the slacks and shoes will be provided. Up until now Selma has been using her own money to buy supplies and hire her own assistant teacher. She transports kids to school from her valley in the back of her bakkie (pick-up truck). She has actually been making her own workbooks on a photocopy machine. Hunger is another problem. Selma has bought food for them too.
“On Mondays,” Selma tells us, as she stands in the sun-drenched yard surrounded by the pre-fabricated classrooms, “I can see which ones don’t look right. You can just see it. I take them out of the line and ask them what the problem is. Always they just start to cry, and then they tell me that they are just hungry.”
A government scheme provides food to the students from Monday to Friday. But for some reason that has to do with allocation of resources, two slices of bread is the meager ration
SELMA'S CLASS
Selma Nel, Mr. Dyssel, Kristen, and the kids on Mondays and Fridays. The headmaster, a dynamic and resourceful man by the name of Mr. Dyssel, decided that this would just not do, and by using some creative juggling has managed to provide a more substantial meal on those days.
“He always tells us, when we have our weekly meetings,” Selma mentions to us, “that we must always remember what life is like for some of these children at home. There is so much alcoholism here, and sometimes when the parents are drunk the children just do not have food.”
It’s coincidental that, as I write this, it is Youth Day here in South Africa. This is a holiday set aside to commemorate the children who were massacred by police in the township of Soweto in 1976 while protesting the forced use of the Afrikaans language in their schools. It took eighteen more years before the apartheid system eventually fell.
Children born after 1994, the date democracy was establishment in South Africa, are often called “Born Frees,” a moniker used to indicate that they have not suffered the terrible oppressions of the past. But some strongly dispute that connotation.
One such man made this powerful
statement in a radio interview: “Born Frees. What are they free of? Free of the legacy of apartheid? I don’t think so. Free of the legacy of our past? I don’t think so. There is no social disconnection from the past. The problem is that there is continuity and it is not positive continuity.”
We enter the classroom. It’s a wonderfully bright and busy place with posters and letters and numbers tacked up all over the walls. The children, all around five and six years of age, are a beautiful mélange of skin colors. The smiles are electric. Selma introduces us in Afrikaans. The kids will learn English in the third and fourth grades. We ask if we can take pictures and when we pull out the cameras there’s a rush like the incoming tide in the Bay of Fundy.
Selma tells us another story as we click and laugh and shoot video.
“One boy here, when I told him what a good job he did with his work, he smiled such a great smile. It was so different from any other smile I have seen. And then I realized that maybe no one has ever told
ALOE LEAVES FROM THE PAST
The lower layers of the aloe plant where the old leaves have dried and remained him this. I sometimes am so busy saying that, this or that thing, numbers or letters, is not done correctly. But I must remember that the positive words are so important. I have never seen such a smile.”
After about half an hour we say our goodbyes and Selma translates our well wishes to them in Afrikaans. They singsong, in a beautiful and classic first grade chant, “Baie danke,” and we step out into the sun.
Selma wants to take them all to “the sea’ because most of them, maybe 90%, have never seen it. The headmaster thinks it’s best that they go in the winter, when they would be less tempted to go into the water! The hooded fleece will come in handy on the beach in the teeth of a southeast wind.
“They don’t even know what a wave is,” she tells us.
We promise to send pictures of the ocean, and tell then that we live in a place surrounded by the sea. They laugh.
Back in Matjiesvlei we unlock the door to the Cloete Huis (Cloete House) with a huge old skeleton key that looks more like a Hollywood prop than
a real key. We step outside again and stroll among the exploding aloes. Their long flowers catch the afternoon light and glow like lanterns. The hill behind us is covered. The greens and oranges and reds look like the little painted dots on a Matisse canvas. The late autumn sun dips behind the mountains across the valley and the temperature drops immediately. We light the lamps and candles, and the Cloete Huis takes on a buttery warm color. There is no electricity here. I prepare a fire in the old kitchen, in a fireplace that is hip-high and set deep into the wall. We get ready to brai the lamb chops.
Later that night Selma shows up, climbing the hill in her dusty bakkie. As a gift she brings us her homemade jam and a beautifully tanned ostrich skin. She apologizes, saying that she would have come a little earlier, but her sons were watching the rugby on the television and asked her if she could do the dairy for them.
“I don’t mind,” she says smiling.
I’m not sure if I’ve met a person with a bigger heart.
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Kendall
non-member comment
A balanced report
It is so difficult to write truthfully about South Africa, catching the nuance and the imbalance, respecting the hardship and the transcendence without glorifying, exaggerating, minimizing, or sentimentalizing. I know. I've been trying to write about it for years. You do a terrific job here. You get it all. Yes.