Friday was emotionally exhausting, yet it concluded with a sighting of a whale!
We spent the first part of the morning working at the Recreation Center in Bloekombos (a middle-range township—not the worst of the worst), preparing both a stew for the children to eat on Saturday morning and sandwiches to distribute on the streets to children returning home from school that day. I actually traveled for part of this session with the director (Tessa, who organizes this simple but important food distribution every day) to shop for goods, while others from our group stayed back peeling, chopping, dicing, and stirring. Then we spent the remainder of the morning with Carol Jooste, the director of the program to help AIDS patients in the township who are well enough to be home, walking through the shanty town with two of her assistants, visiting the shacks of her clients, talking with them, learning about their lives and illnesses, distributing health care packs and bags of food.
That was emotionally wrenching—the powerful illness, the terrible poverty, the heat, street after street. There is a ghastly emptiness in the neighborhoods, a ghastly emptiness of hope and life. We ended the morning distributing sandwiches, with children running to us with their bowls. Several of the children in the neighborhood were bathing in a small pool in front of the house of one of the workers—the only way Tessa (the food provider) could get their parents to agree to allow her to bathe them.
We then headed for the dock and the ferry to Robben Island.
We toured the prison with a man who had been incarcerated there for 20 years—Patrick went in in 1967, at the age of 18. I am four months older than he. He entered prison the year I graduated from high school and was released while I was teaching at my first teaching job, following graduate school. He pointed up a narrow staircase where the dreaded censor reviewed every letter, cutting out what he considered inappropriate communication. He pointed to a room where prisoners were beaten. We stood in the courtyard where prisoners pounded rocks and where they also played tennis, occasionally hiding a written message in the tennis ball and knocking it out of the yard for someone to find and carry to the mainland. Cape Town sits across the water from Robben Island like a magical city, just close enough and just out of reach.
Patrick is a friend of Nelson Mandela (they played chess together, Patrick beating him more often than not) and took us to Mandela’s cell. Mandela spent 18 years of his 27 years if imprisonment there—his eating utensils are still there. It is a stark, empty place. One window looks out onto the courtyard. One can hardly imagine life reduced to simpler terms. Patrick then spoke ever so powerfully about reconciliation and forgiveness, and working hard for the future. A frank, honest, realistic, and deeply inspirational man.
Then, on the way back to Cape Town, a whale arced near the boat. A natural rainbow…
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The most memorable image for me of this day of prison cells of the present and off the past: the limestone quarry where the Robben Island prisoners worked for 8 hrs, five days per week and became sick (some terminally) from the dust. (Mandela’s tear ducts are blocked because of the years of limestone dust, thus the reason why he cannot have flash photographs taken.) In 1995 the prisoners still alive, all free by this time, returned to the quarry and, with Mandela leading, built a cairn on the site, one stone upon another, in memory of the battle they fought there.
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