WINTER 2003Margaret Wood
Towanda MM
These e-mail messages are a small sample of the early messages from some sixty pages’ worth that Margaret Wood of Towanda MM sent from the Republic of South Africa over 2002–03. She, husband Larry, and children Max and Rosie, spent a year there—Larry as part of a team installing affordable Internet access in some of RSA’s poorest schools, Margaret working to help local artisans export crafts to the United States at fair prices, the children attending a convent school in Eshowe.
Margaret, who grew up in Kenya and the UK now lives with her family in Wayalusing, Pa. She’ll join us at our December Quarterly Meeting in Salem. She’ll be talking not so much about what they did, as about her perceptions of the country in the post-apartheid era. Please join us
—Ed.Subject: Our plans
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 2002 14:19:51 -0400
From: Margaret Wood
To: undisclosed-recipientsIf you are getting this, you are on an e-list I plan mailing news to from our year in South Africa. Please e-mail me soon if you don’t want to be on it. I plan on mailing at the most once a week but more likely once a month. We would love you to visit us too! We shall be settled in, more or less, by September.
We will be in Eshowe at latitude 31.35 S, longitude 28.48 E. It is on the East coast of South Africa just north of Durban.
Eshowe is in Zululand, plenty of traditional African living, and with its hilltop setting is uniquely situated around 350 hectares of indigenous tropical rain forest. The Dlinza forest has a walkway above canopy height, hiking trails and abundant bird life. Tropical weather. Beaches, sugar cane, red dirt and rural living. ...
Subject: Arrived in Eshowe
Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2002 00:36:32 +0200
From: Margaret Wood
To: undisclosed-recipientsAfter a week in the UK visiting family and friends, the kids and I met Larry in Zurich airport. We missed the patisserie rendezvous but made it at the gate. After ten-plus hours’ flight over one depressingly politically unstable or war-torn chaotic country after another, we arrived in Johannesburg. The last time I did a similar flight was thirty years ago and it was a different world, but with notable hot spots. Idi Amin’s Uganda (Zimbabwe of today?) Suez/Palestine/Israel (only a hardening of lines there), and the IRA in London were what I was aware of at the time. South Africa was a place that was beyond the pale, but (like Ireland), is now in many ways a beacon of hope and opportunity though with enormous challenges—and a singular policy blind spot HIV/AIDS, even more obvious now to me than it was in February.
In Jo’burg the Earth Summit that Bush refused to attend is under way, welcome signs and special lines at Immigration for delegates. We got picked up in short order by our backpackers’ “combi,” a VW minibus that is ubiquitous in RSA. Smaller than most US wagons let alone minivans, but seats eight plus. Don’t bother to stay at the Airport Backpackers in Jo’burg, it is dusty and in a lunar suburbia, even without the construction. But it did fine for our 10 pm arrival and 5 am departure. We were taken back to Jo’burg airport by a taxi driver with traditional two top front teeth removed. His wife was asleep in the front seat, and I assumed they practically lived in the taxi. He was very cheerful though late, he offered to drive us to Durban if we missed our flight, we made it anyway. Once in Durban we got a VW Polo, jammed our 8 bags in the back and drove past the sugar cane harvesting trucks to Eshowe. ...
Subject: 2 Weeks
Date: Wed, 04 Sep 2002 16:18:50 +0200
From: Margaret Wood
To: undisclosed-recipientsWe have got a lot under our belt in just under two weeks. Yesterday we bought a car, a small Toyota, smaller than a regular US compact but seats five tight, and about the same size as the VW Polo we rented. Very satisfactory we hope, it was difficult to find something reliable that is not a carjacking opportunity and also within our budget. We still are not in the cottage, and though I have never had any objection to people doing housework for me, I find that while we stay in Meg and Graham’s house we are surrounded by too many servants and too little privacy, or thinking time. I find it hard to think when somebody is cleaning and polishing around me, but it’s really nice to have laundry done, ironed and put away. We have set up a temporary office in one of the cottage bedrooms for during the day. ...
Tuesday night I was invited to an evening out with a women’s book club. It was hands down one of the most hilarious evenings I have had in a long time. The book club has no intellectual pretensions, it was a tradition begun when white women were stuck on farms with little money, social life or entertainment. Books were (and still are) “hellava expensive,” so a book club is a system in which twelve-plus women get together and alternate hosting an evening once a month. The evening is mostly social but everyone pays R25 into a kitty to cover the cost of buying books. The hostess has bought whatever new books she feels will be enjoyed by the group, about three, depending on cost, and everyone takes turns taking the first pick. At the end of the year everyone takes home the books they bought.
The books on offer were mostly on African topics, and overcoming adversity. A lot of post-cancer survivor books (Eshowe has a high incidence of cancer). This group has been together for twenty-one years and has held together through some incredible times and events. I am one of only 2 “newbies” to the original group, who have a definite “Ya-Ya Sisterhood” feel with an African rather than Southern flavour. Widowhood (2), carjackings (2), babies (maybe 25?), children’s deaths (4), political imprisonment (at least 2), divorce (1), bankruptcy, house robberies, farm and business troubles, plus children, husbands, members themselves gone off track, in major or minor ways. Amazing upfront humour in the face of some incredible stuff. ...
Subject: Aids, Blood supply, Conference etc.
Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2002 21:02:01 +0200
From: Margaret Wood
To: undisclosed-recipientsThis is rather grim, so be caffeinated and insulated before continuing!
AIDS, as you must know, is the single most threatening issue that faces the South African people. So far everyone, especially the President Thabo Mbeki, has bungled the issue in almost every way possible. Until the South African government fires the current Health minister, and creates a position of Minister for HIV/AIDS, accepts unequivocally the connection between HIV and AIDS and undertakes massive education and an unambiguous national policy, the disease will continue to spread rapidly. It is said that there will be zero population growth in South Africa by, or before 2004. The people dying are the future of the country, the young and wage earners; the elderly are affected mostly by knock-on effects.
A few real life instances of what lack of AIDS prevention is doing here, shaping the future:
We are told that in ten years it is projected that one fourth of South African teachers will be dead of AIDS. If teachers don’t get how to protect themselves, how will kids?
A Cape Coloured friend (the labels still live—I use them because it still works, they shorthand a paragraph of background ) chose to send her kids to a good Black majority school because she figured that it would be best if her kids had peers that were of the majority. She now thinks that maybe she made a mistake and should have sent them to a top drawer white school (English descent majority) because maybe blacks won’t be the majority any more, Coloured people may become the new majority and really good English plus international connections (most young English descent South Africans are leaving South Africa) is the ticket. She is not Muslim but has a brother who converted (she has nothing but vitriol for Muslims, I can’t get any real specifics as to why, just blanket statements), and though she identifies herself as Coloured she sees the political implications of a Coloured majority South Africa as being a Muslim majority South Africa.
Another friend who lives an hour away from Eshowe in deep country rents her cottage to a schoolteacher. He is the only teacher that consistently shows up to teach in a poor Zulu school where 3 classes share one blackboard. Many students show up hungry because they didn’t get on the list for food aid through government inefficiency. Anyway, he comes by my friend’s house one evening to ask her what a homosexual was—he thought a homosexual was some kind of hermaphrodite. This is the man who is teaching AIDS awareness, or trying to. ...
Orphans everywhere. Some of you have seen the little embroidered greeting cards, part of the Dinkuiyana Upliftment project here. The boy who designs them supports his siblings and family on them. Every church has an AIDS orphan project. It seems every grandmother is raising her grandchildren and nursing her children to death. ...
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Thursday, March 11, 2004 at 09:44 PM
