Cheers from my flat in Cape Town, known affectionately (and not inaccurately) as " the dungeon." I’ve slipped fairly seamlessly back into my South African life after a little more than a week. I am so happy to be back here!
Cheers from my flat in Cape Town, known affectionately (and not inaccurately) as " the dungeon." I’ve slipped fairly seamlessly back into my South African life after a little more than a week. I am so happy to be back here!
Some of you endured my deliberations last year and know that I wasn’t totally sure about coming back to South Africa. I had such a fabulous and fulfilling time here last year. I thought maybe I should leave it on the high note. Maybe I should try something new. What could I accomplish here anyhow? Maybe I had learned what I came here to learn. Etc.
The book of Esther is in a sense a meditation on the interaction between chance and fate. God’s hand is hidden – events look to be accidents. A lecherous king has a tiff with his wife, and the Jews are saved from extermination.
So yesterday I had one of those experiences that I wouldn’t quite believe if I read it in a novel. I met two friends at a fancy outdoor café, where we drank coffee after coffee. Several hours later, just as we were starting to think maybe we’d stay and order lunch, Jeni’s cell phone beeped. The beep meant that she had a text message (that’s sort of like someone sending you an e-mail on your cell phone, for the Neanderthals like me who don’t know these things…) She pulled out her phone, read the message, and her face went white. It was unsigned and came from a phone number she didn’t recognize. She read it aloud: "I can’t go on like this anymore. You will all be better off without me. Just promise me that you will take care of her." What should we do? Is this some kind of extremely sick joke? What if it isn’t? "Call back!" I said to my friend with the phone. "Here," she said, handing it to me. "You talk."
I had no idea what to say, but the phone was ringing in my hand. Sure enough a woman answered, and she was crying. I said, "I am sitting here in a café with my friends, and we got your message. I don’t think you meant to send it to us, but we are really concerned. What is going on?" She began to talk with me, telling me some of what had brought her to the brink. She had meant to send the message to her ex-husband but had misdialed. "Maybe you dialed just right," I said to her. "We really want you to feel better. We want to help." Meanwhile one of my friends was offering to drive us out to see her.
The other was looking for a phone book to get the phone number of the crisis line. I was trying to keep the woman on the phone talking. I extended the offer that we could drive out to where she is. No, she said, but you could call again in a couple of hours. I must have been talking quite loudly into the phone, because when I hung up, people all over the café started to congratulate us, to ask after this poor woman, to discuss what we had done and offer their good wishes for her.
A few hours later I called her again. She said she would like to meet me the next day for a cup of coffee. "Oh good," I said, "you must be feeling a little better if you’re willing to live another day." She chuckled a little. I talked to her this morning, and she sounds better. I’m not sure if we will meet this afternoon or not. To be continued…
Who knows what is going on with the woman on the phone? Was she serious about suicide? Does she do this kind of thing all the time to get attention? Will she, God forbid, take her life tomorrow?
What if this woman had reached her ex instead of my friends and me? What if I were in Uganda, say, or Hawaii, when Jeni’s phone beeped? It’s hard to see the effects of anything we do or don’t do. But this experience has got me thinking about the interaction between chance and fate, about the large and mysterious circle of causality.
Which I am seeing in a bigger way at Mama Maposela’s house. You may remember that last year I was "given" to Mama Maposela, who was raising twenty-five children in her tiny township house. Nulda Beyers, the amazingly energetic director of the Desmond Tutu TB Centre, has a special place in her heart for Mama Maposela. When I came along with some time to offer, Nulda gave me a list of things needed there which no one had had time to look into. I was supposed to help Boy Boy, the eldest orphan, get a college scholarship, look into welfare assistance that kids weren’t getting, and a couple of other items as well. I batted my head against the wall for ten weeks, found practically nothing they needed, fell in love with the kids, had a lot of adventures and then headed back home to my real life.
Along the way I had gotten an e-mail from a rabbi friend of mine back East, Dayle Friedman, who told me that her kids’ former babysitter was spending some time in Cape Town, doing something-or-other with orphans. Maybe I should look her up.
So I had coffee with Ellen Rosenberg. Ellen was twenty-three at the time. She had come to Cape Town for a college year abroad the prior year, and while there had visited a place quite like Mama Maposela’s in another township. The story she tells is that she asked Rosie, the Mama there, if she could volunteer there sometime. Rosie handed her a baby and said, "Here, change his nappie." So began Ellen’s engagement with the homeless kids of Cape Town. Returning home to the USA, she and another friend formed a non-profit called Children of South Africa (CHOSA), raised an impressive amount of money, and Ellen had returned. She was doing remarkable work at Baphumelele, the household in Khayelitsha that she had first fallen in love with, helping them to transform from a hungry, chaotic place to a real orphanage with funding, a building, staff, volunteers and more. I was blown away by Ellen’s work.
I took her once to Nyanga, to the home of Mama Maposela and the kids. It was the usual bedlam there. Ellen asked a lot of good questions, which made me realize how little I actually knew about the children and their circumstances
As the end of my stay grew near, I wrote a little report for Nulda on my efforts. It had six or seven headings, and under each the various ways I had flailed around and failed to find a scholarship, welfare payments, food assistance etc. I wasn’t in despair or anything. I had no delusions about my capacity to change the world. I was happy with all I had learned and tried. But I was sorry that I had started turning over these various bits of the garden, and no one at the TB Centre was going to have time to dig any further.
During my last coffee with Ellen I gave her a copy of report. And, to my amazement, she said, "I’ve been thinking that I am actually looking for another challenge. I think I’d like to explore taking on Mama Maposela’s."
So a big part of the naches and delight of my current visit is seeing the truly brilliant and transformative work that Ellen and CHOSA have done there this past year. Some of it is evident in the tasks that Ellen and Nulda have both asked me to work on this year: Siyabonga will be joining the soccer team at Baphumelele, and he needs someone to organize his taxi fare and teach him how to get from Nyanga to Khayelitsha. Some of the kids have been tested for TB, but no one has been tested for HIV. Can I arrange for a nurse to come from the Nyanga clinic to the house to test everyone? While I am at it, could I check with the Amy Biehl Centre to see if one of their Life Skills counselors could come teach a class at Emasithandane (the proper name of the home, now that it is a bit more than Mama Maposela’s house)?
All of this is a far cry from when I would show up last year and there was no food in the house, and kids were not in school because they didn’t have shoes. Ellen feels discouraged by how slowly it is going at Emasithandane. I see it totally differently. Maybe that’s another good thing about returning to Cape Town, that I can reflect a little bit of this back to Ellen.
It is still bedlam at Emasithandane – more than ever, in fact, since Mama has been unable to say no, and there are six more toddlers living there. But there are three bunk beds now, and two prefab shacks outside the house. And a lunch menu posted by the stove. And the wonderful Hazel, who used to volunteer there each day before taking the train to her nighttime janitorial job, now gets a real salary and has learned to keep Emasithandane’s books and to use a computer. And a trained group of college-age volunteers comes three times a week to tutor kids and help out. Meanwhile Archbishop Tutu has seeded a fund to build a real home for Emasithandane, and one of my jobs this year is to dog the Land Affairs Department about donating a piece of property.
Ellen said the other day that she wouldn’t have taken on Emasithandane if I hadn’t written my little report and handed it to her. Even my failures, she said, gave her enough of an idea of what was needed to imagine taking next steps. I take no credit – I am just amazed at the circle of causality, how wide it is and how unexpectedly it all works. I suppose in some way this is a Purim story…
I miss all of you very much (and Mickey more than I can possibly say!) I am especially sad to be away this week immediately after the untimely death of David Berent. My heart is with Tami and Gabe and Eli and all of you. But it is nice to stop and think for a moment as I am writing this to you, about the mysteries of where we find ourselves and why and the great web that causes and affects us all. Have a freilich Purim, my dear pirates, and God willing I will be back to cross the Red Sea with you very soon.
© 2007 Rabbi Margaret Holub
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Updated 03/01/2007(rge)