Adventure Time: Addo's shining light

I have previously written about an inspirational young Baha'i girl named Asanda who's efforts as the only Baha'i in Addo blew me away. In my post Inspiration I mentioned the children's classes that she was running and the amazing influence that she has in that area. Bayan and I took a trip down to Addo to stay with Asanda and help her out with some of the work that she is doing and again I was so inspired by both this inspirational girl and with Addo itself.

Bayan left for Addo on Thursday and I was supposed to go with her but I was waiting to hear from a landlord about whether he would rent his place to me and so I stuck around incase I was lucky enough to get it. By the end of the weekend I had given up on finding somewhere to live and so on Monday morning I took the trip down to Addo to join Bayan. I was physically and spiritually exhausted. It had been days since I had been able to finish a whole meal, the night before I left I had some corn for dinner and even then my body was rejecting food. I was drained, unmotivated, confused, upset and any other adjectives you can think of that describe a general state of depression. I barely had the energy to pack for this little trip and I was anxious as I was awaiting test results from the doctor aswell. To get to Addo without your own car you have to take a taxi from Motherwell so Olinga who had recently rescued me from homelessness, dropped me off at Greenacres before he went to work, then I got a taxi to town, a taxi from town to Motherwell and then got into the Addo taxi there. After sitting in the taxi for 20minutes waiting for it to fill up we finally were off and on our way. I arrived and got out to meet Asanda and Bayan and together we walked to a place that I will never forget.

Langbos is an informal settlement of about 500 people. The houses are all mud houses or shacks, there is no electricity or clean water and the settlement is plagued with the very common issue of excessive alcohol consumption. This community has been overlooked by the council, propper housing has been promised but again and again the commencement of its construction has been delayed, the excuse as always is lack of funds. We can only assume that the money has been drained into the pockets of those overlooking the projects. The families living in this area do seasonal work, picking oranges and working in farms and some of them receive monetary support from the government but many of the families are unable to receive money as they do not have an I.D or birth certificates and to attain these documents they have to travel to Port Elizabeth and many do not have the money to make that trip. The reason I will never forget Langbos is not because of the deteriorated state of the shacks that people call their homes, or because of the knowledge that during a heavy storm 2 people were killed when their mud house collapsed on them, or the sight of kids either almost naked or in torn clothes calling out to us and begging for food. The reason I won't forget Langbos is because of Inkwenkwezi Creche and what this pre-school teaches us about the power of the individual.

When a resident of Addo, Muffy Miller, saw children playing in an illegal rubbish dump in Langbos she decided to work towards establishing a safe haven for these neglected kids. After 5 years of fundraising she was finally able to fullfil that dream when in January 2006 the Intsikelelo Creche/Playschool opened offering supervision, food, clothing and most of all love to approximately 50 children a day. This facility is beautiful, everything from the paintings on the walls to the playground radiates with the love that it was established with. In the middle of this squatter camp where donkeys, goats and dogs wander freely and the community and the animals share the same dirty water stands this sanctuary. The community call it a safe haven for kids because that is exactly what it is. In communities like this unfortunately abuse and neglect are very common and the playschool offers a nuturing environment for these beautiful children.

The reason we were visiting Langbos and the Creche was because our own model for the power of the individual, Asanda, had approached the staff at the Creche who are also local residents and asked if they would be interested in being trained as Baha'i Children's Classes teachers and the staff had accepted so Bayan and I were there to complete their training. The Creche is managed and supported by three local churches and yet the current manager was so grateful that we had come to offer this service to the staff. To me that shows a genuine desire to work for the betterment of the community because she was willing to accept help regardless of where it came from, even another religion. So Bayan and I ran the sessions with two wonderful women Princess and Nomthandazo who will now incorporate the Baha'i lessons into the children's daily routine. Each lesson teaches a different theme and then uses prayers, songs, stories, art and games to emphasize and demonstrate each theme. The theme of the first lesson is unity and Nomthandazo loved the song that comes with this lesson so much she made us sing it at the start of every session we had together. The most wonderful thing about the Baha'i understanding of children's education is that it is the role of the teacher to help each child find their own talents and capacities and to bring those talents out. There is a bond that each teacher should create with each child, that no child ever be labelled as bad or misbehaved, no child should ever feel humiliated or under valued, children are not considered as empty books which we have to fill with our own knowledge. Instead we are asked to

"Regard man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value. Education can, alone, cause it to reveal its treasures, and enable mankind to benefit therefrom."

(Baha'u'llah, Gleanings from the Writings of Baha'u'llah, p. 259)

Doing this course with these two wonderful women was so uplifting for me. Although getting to and from our accomodation at Asanda's house to the Langbos settlement was a mission as there are no taxis in Addo and we did not have a car and as hot as it was I still looked forward to our little trip to the Creche everyday where I could marvel at what a wonderful gift this Creche was to the community. I loved seeing the kids everyday and lighting up with each of their gorgeous smiles. This was definitely the medicine I needed to recover from the awful state I had been in a few days earlier.

To add to how wonderful this trip to Addo was I had the pleasure of facilitating a junior youth group established by Xola (a Baha'i from Johannesburg) when he had been visiting Asanda the week before I arrived. Asanda lives and works at the Elephant park with an entire community of other staff members and their families. There are so many children and junior youth living in this community who are yearning for junior youth groups and children's classes. Asanda would readily jump to offer these classes but as she already has 2 classes of her own and works full time it is too much to ask of her (although she has already offered). The kids that were attending the class were just so wonderful that being with them completely healed me from all my previous anxiety. Together we taught them prayers and shared stories with them which all had a moral that they had to figure out as well as playing games together and organising a service project. There was one young girl, only 7 years old, who astonished me more than any of the others. Her name is Camaron and she has a maturity and understanding that is far greater than her age. If you didn't look at her or hear the tone of her voice and only listened to the words she spoke you would think you were talking to a 14 year old. She just showed so much wisdom for someone who has only been around for 7 years. At one point she spoke about her school and how one of the teachers was still using Apartheid mentality and separated children in her class by race having one table for black kids and one for coloured...etc. She told us how she didn't think this was right and that everyone should be together and that she plays with everyone regardless of their colour. At another point she told us that people shouldn't fight, they should instead talk about their problems with each other. My goodness I just wanted to squish her, and I did. All the kids that attended the junior youth group were lovely and showed so much potential and their parents were so happy with what we were doing that on our last night before heading back to P.E the parents threw us a little goodbye party where we danced and ate chicken. There were these 3 gorgeous boys who had smiles that made your heart light up. Morgan is only 3 but the boy can dance and he does this cute little pouting face when he dances as well and his older brother Kevin had these eyes and smile that reminded me why I want to deticate my life to children's education.

You know that a place has touched your soul when regardless of the fact that you have no clean clothes left, your body is aching from all the walking you've had to do and the fact that there was a scorpain in the house amongst a variety of other insects that don't knock before entering you don't want to leave. I have decided that I will try to spend one or two days a week in Addo helping out with all the wonderful things that Asanda is doing there as well as seeing to the needs of these communities who have so much to offer and so much potential.

I left Addo feeling reinvigorated and with my strength and motivation back. I can also say that being with Bayan added to my regained state of well being. Being with her always makes me happy and I love how she will go along with all of my retarded suggestions like pretending to be blind while walking along the road and then crying from laughter when Bayan walked into a bush and when I would go along with her crazy ideas like running down hills with our hands in the air and screaming all the way. Also every morning we would check the map of the nature reserve to see what animals people had seen and everyone had seen the lions. Being vehicleless we weren't able to do a game drive but we would take walks around where we could and sit and watch one of the water holes. Every day we would pray to see a lion, instead we got one of those dear things, a buffalo, some birds and a few tortoises. We saw the funniest tortoise fall into the water hole and then struggle to get out because it kept falling in again. Eventually it got out and waddled away to everyone's relief. Oh and the scorpian which should have one an Oscar because it played dead so convincingly that I really thought it was dead. Asanda being the bravest of us all got some tissue and picked up the scorpian to take it outside and when she put it on the ground it just got up and started running again, amazing actors they are really.

On Friday morning we packed our bags, had our lsat session in Langbos and then walked along the road towards the location (township) where we would need to get our taxi to P.E. We walked along sticking our hands out and hoping a car would give us a lift and every time they drove past I would make a comment about the car and how we didn't actually want them to stop anyway. At one point I started singing Michael Jackson's "They don't really care about us" and me and Bayan changed the lyrics to suit our situation. We walked for about 20 minutes, I was walking infront of Bayan, when she yelled out to me put my hands up. I assumed she meant in the same way we would put our hands in the air to run down the hills so I put my hands up and waved them around, when she burst out laughing I realised she meant to put my hand out to signal to an oncoming car to stop. Thankfully the car did stop and a nice man gave us a lift to the taxi rank. This nice man turned out to be the councillor of Addo Mr. Vuyo Thambo and immediately I started drilling him about the state of Langbos and asking why they still hadn't received propper housing. I realised however, that he had just stopped to give us a lift and saved us walking for another hour and a half so I backed off a little and I ended my questioning by asking him if he thought he had improved people's lives in the 10 years that he has been serving as councillor and when he proudly and assuredly said yes and explained that the area we were driving through used to all be mud houses until he came along I left it at that. As he drove off in his fancy car through a township where most people's only form of transport is their legs it confirmed to me exactly where alot of the money designated for improving people's lives ends up going. He also managed to avoid being fined by the police when we were stopped for random checking, he wasn't wearing his seatbelt and his side view mirror was mirrorless.

I have decided that part of my plan for the next few months will also include Addo and so I will try to get to Addo maybe once a week to find people who would like to become teachers and junior youth facilitators to run classes and take some of the strain off of Asanda.

The Langbos Creche also has a Facebook Page if you would like more information