The school grounds and Alex: Woke up to the sound of birds chirping…always a good sign. The grounds at the school are very nice, with several fields, one used for soccer, one had been recently burned but had previous been the location of a garden, and another with a dilapidated barn and 4 beautiful horses who occasionally graze there. The barn is used for storage and is full of all kinds of materials that Sarah is hoping to use for the recycling project coming up next week – old tires, orange bean bag chairs, bricks, metal, etc. After our tour of the grounds, Sarah took us to the grocery store nearby called the Pick and Pay, located on the top floor of the local mall. The grocery store was pretty typical with a few noticeable differences – the biggest is getting used to pricing in the rand – the conversion rate is about 7.5 to 1 right now so it’s not unusual to find things priced in the 30-50 rand range or higher – for instance a big bundle of toilet paper cost 85.79(or about $10).

After lunch, we headed for Alexandra. The boys we had met yesterday, Partsen and Thandenani (his name means “love everyone”) accompanied us and acted as tour guides. The best word to describe Alex is hectic…from the get-go…just driving down the streets is an adventure. The streets are narrow and in need of repair with cars randomly parked at the edges of the street and people regularly walking down the middle. It is a very dense place, full of houses (though more like shacks most of them, constructed of a patchwork of wood, corrugated metal, tarps), cars of varying quality (a Mercedes or land rover parked next to an old chevy like sedan or little Volkswagen rabbit), beautiful, friendly colorfully dressed children in most yards/driveways/ sidewalks, beauty salons, people just hanging out talking, trash littering the streets or piled up outside of buildings. I never felt in danger, but I did feel like I was intruding to a degree, or maybe that was just my own self-consciousness -- not wanting to be voyeuristic, viewing other people’s difficulties and struggles.

We walked for a while up and down hilly, narrow streets past home after home, apartment after apartment and then stopped in at a care facility for ill or very elderly people. We walked into the building where 30-40 people sat around a huge table in preparation for their evening dinner, many in wheelchairs, one woman that we passed sitting on a chair apart from the table with a scarf covering her face as if she didn’t want to be seen, with a world cup game on the television up in the corner. We crammed into a small room around the corner where a wonderful woman named Priscilla, the administrator, worked. She may have been a smaller woman, but she was a giant in my eyes – she truly had a heart of gold, so welcoming and so kind and so funny – her smile lit up the room. Even as she told us of the struggles of the facility – with so many patients and not enough workers – she was able to smile and joke with us. She said something really important that will stick with me. She talked of how because some older people didn’t have family, the authorities would dump them off at their facility – and she said “People should NOT be dumped!” A pretty obvious statement for sure, but it was how she said it – so fiercely – that really stuck with me and made me think of other less physical instances of people being “dumped” – by their government, for one. Fortunately, this was one of the places where students from the LEAP school performed their “social responsibilities” – volunteering several times per week at local organizations that were trying to help or improve the Alex community.
After we left Priscilla, we walked to Tandanani’s home where his poor mother had been waiting since 2 (it was now 4:30). She had coffee and “scones” (actually muffins) waiting for us. Her name was Grace and she spoke very good English, acquired during her time as domestic help. The father sat, very regally, in the corner and said nothing, obviously knowing very little English and just letting his wife do the talking. Two things struck me about this visit. One came from a question that Marc had asked her after she had shared her frustration at not being able to work and how boring/tedious that was. He asked her, if she could do anything in the whole world for work, what would she do…and she couldn’t even imagine anything other than being domestic help – couldn’t even imagine something beyond being someone else’s hired servant. Orel said that the mindset of apartheid was still prevalent, and I think of this as an example of that. She’d been put in “her place” by years and year of oppression and she couldn’t imagine herself worthy of any other view. The other thing that struck me was hope she had for her son -- though obviously worried about how (monetarily)he could go to college even if he passed the exams.
It was dark by the time we headed back, winding through streets lit up with trash fires. I had thought that this visit to Alex would be emotionally draining, but it wasn't, due, I think to the hospitable, kind people we encountered...and because through schools like LEAP, there is hope.