Quintessentially Umphumulo

Tuesday was a great day.

I woke up somewhat reluctantly at 5:30 am.  One of my friends wanted to join me on my morning run, and requested that we meet at quarter to six.  I was unreasonably grumpy, considering it was only 20 minutes earlier than I usually wake up to go run in the mornings.  Still, I was excited to have someone to run with, as running the same out-and-back route by myself can be a little monotonous.  Since my friend was running for the first time in about 8 months, we only ran together for about 10 minutes before parting ways: he went right on the main road, and I went left. 

Forty minutes and 37 seconds later, I arrived home happily tired and continued with my morning routine: a cold bath to cool off, breakfast while watching the headlines at 7, and chapel at the church center at 8.  After chapel, I listened to what I’m told was a lecture about working longer on Friday afternoons and smart financial planning in isiZulu before heading down to the office to start the day.  There wasn’t much going on at the church center, as the office had only returned from its Christmas vacation the day before, so I spent an hour or so sifting through the piles of paperwork that had accumulated on my desk over the past months and years.  “My” desk was a bit of a sore subject in and of itself: I recently inherited it from a friend and co-worker who took a job outside of the church center.  As happy as I am for her to have a new job, I certainly miss having someone to talk to and work with.  Sorting through her old paperwork left me feeling bored, tired, and a little bit lonely, so I decided to walk over to Amaphuphisizwe, the local secondary school, and see how I could be helpful there. 

I arrived at Amaphuphisizwe at the start of the fourth period, and most of the teachers were in class.  I chatted with the school clerk for a while, and she informed me that Mrs. Makhaye, the math teacher, was in a meeting with the other head of department (HOD) and the principal.  She suggested I wait for their meeting to finish, as most of the work I do is with math and physics students.  Somewhat disappointed, I sat down in the tiny office the two HOD’s share and waited.  To keep busy, I started skimming through a 10^th grade life sciences book.  After reviewing my plant biology, I moved on to a 12^th grade physical sciences textbook.  After reading about how lasers work, I was quite excited to find an entire chapter on stress/strain graphs, ductile and brittle failure, elastic vs. plastic deformation, the motion and growth of molecular dislocations in metals, the difference between strength and toughness, creep in high temperature metals, and the modulus of elasticity.  The mechanical engineer in me was thrilled. 

As exciting as reading textbooks was, after an hour I decided to spend some time waiting for the HOD/principal meeting to end by observing the 11^th grade physics class.  The students were learning about applications of Newton’s 3^rd law: how the force of gravity on a book is balanced by the force from the table it rests on.  I had worn out my inner nerd for the day, and stepped out of the class after a half hour.  Much to my chagrin, the HOD meeting still wasn’t finished, so I said my farewells and started the 20 minute walk back to the church center.  I was frustrated; I had spent my entire morning and early afternoon doing nothing. 

As I walked, a car pulled up next to me and the driver asked me how he could get to Mapumulo.  I was a little confused at first, because the only way he could have not arrived in Mapumulo was by turning onto the road he was now on.  After making sure he wasn’t trying to find the hospital, I told him he needed to turn around and keep going the way he came.  He thanked me, and backed up to turn around.  As I continued to walk, I heard an unmistakable scrape-crunch-profanity combination from behind me.  Apparently the driver had vastly misjudged the location of the driveway he was hoping to back into, and backed straight into a three foot deep culvert.  His car was completely stuck: the back right wheel was suspended two feet off the ground, the back left bumper was smashed, and the chassis was bottomed out just behind the two front wheels. 

I walked back to the stranded car and started talking to the driver about how to get the car out.  Neither of us had any spectacular ideas, so we began gathering logs and rocks to put in the ditch under the rear wheels.  After a few minutes, another car and truck stopped to help.  I explained the situation to the newcomers; they didn’t have any better ideas than we did.  Meanwhile, the driver of the car was off looking for some more logs and rocks.   When he had been gone a few minutes, the newcomers collectively decided that he didn’t care that they were here to help and drove off again.  I was somewhat put out by this decision, especially since it started to pour a few minutes after they left. 

When the rain stopped 15 minutes later, the driver and I collected enough debris to try and push the car out of the ditch.  I pushed from behind, while he got in the driver’s seat.  As one might have expected, after a couple tries the car hadn’t moved and I got covered in mud.  Fortunately, another car with three guys in it stopped to help push, as did a pedestrian who was walking the same direction as me.  Amazingly, the car popped out of the ditch in seconds.  It was like magic!

The driver went on his way, and I continued my wet, muddy walk home.  As I walked, I started talking with the other pedestrian.  I learned his name, that he was staying a few kilometers east of me off of R74, and that he was heading to the hospital.  I told him about my role as a volunteer, about the ELCSA/ELCA partnership, and a bit about my family.  I really enjoyed the conversation; it was somehow incredibly uplifting to have a 15 minute conversation with a complete stranger, even if most of the things we talked about didn’t get into much depth.

This series of events left me in a great mood, despite my general feelings of uselessness, boredom, and loneliness in the morning.  In some ways, this gets at the essence of what Umphumulo is like: as often as I feel useless, bored, lonely, tired, frustrated, or confused, I stumble into an experience so uplifting that it completely makes up for it.  Spending an hour in the rain pushing a car around in a ditch and talking to a random guy on the side of the road was exactly what I needed to make Tuesday a great day.

Stephen Eric Mabaso Dladla Gwamanda Buthelezi Odegard

For the first time in my life, I spent Christmas with complete strangers. 

I take that back: two days before Christmas they were complete strangers, but by December 25^th they were family. 

Perhaps some back story would be appropriate.  Back in October, one of my friends and co-workers invited me to spend the holidays with her family in Bergville, KZN.  I was delighted to accept, and was looking forward to visiting.  About two weeks before Christmas, however, I learned that my friend would not be able to join me in Bergville, as she needed to spend Christmas in Durban with another relative who had recently lost her mother.

Somewhat apprehensively, I began the trip north for Christmas a few days later.  After taking five different taxis, I made it to Estcourt, where my friend’s mother was waiting to take me to Bergville.  When I arrived, I found myself in the midst of the largest family homestead I had ever visited.  I soon learned that the cluster of buildings I was staying in was the home of three brothers and their families.  The brothers had moved back to their childhood home after retiring, and had reestablished their families in Bergville within 200 meters of each other.  Each home had around 3 buildings, so there were people everywhere.  In addition, more family members lived in homes within 1 km of homestead.  Like many places, there was an influx of family members for the holidays, which added to the confusion.  Between crying babies, excited kids, students returning from boarding school, and their various aunts, uncles, and grandparents, I was overwhelmed.  I didn’t even learn the surname of my hosts until the second day I stayed with them: it turns out my assumption that they would share the same surname of my co-worker was incorrect. 

The notion of family in South Africa, or at least near Umphumulo, astounds me.  Sometimes it seems that everyone I meet is a member of half a dozen families, all with different surnames, homes, children, and stories.  My hosts introduce their family members to me as brothers and sisters or mothers and fathers, not as step-brothers, cousins, nieces, sisters-in-law, friends, neighbors, or co-workers.  Any time I meet a new family, my brain feebly struggles to connect the dots.  As much as I try to figure out whose gogo is whose and who is a baba and who is a bhuthi, within a few minutes I’m lost.  When I ask questions, it often takes my hosts a few moments to trace someone back to his or her parents or children.  Like I said, families astound me. 

After spending a little less than four months in South Africa, I have been welcomed as a son by at least four families.  I spent a weekend with the Dladla clan, celebrating the wedding of one of their daughters.  The Gwamanda family welcomed me into their home for the Christmas holidays, and the Buthelezi and Mabaso families have made me feel at home in Umphumulo since the day I arrived.  All told, this network of people who have embraced me into their family fold easily tops 200. 

Much has been written about ubuntu, the principle that shapes communities here in South Africa, and I think that I have begun to realize why it is such a popular topic.  Ubuntu, which can be interpreted “I am because we are” or “A person is a person through other people,” is at the very core of the South African sense of family.  A family is defined by all its members, and is made unique by each of their contributions.  Each person in that family is, in turn, formed as much by the family itself as his or her own individuality.  As a result, it’s incredibly important for individuals to belong to a community.   Perhaps this partly explains why so many people have gone to great lengths to make me a part of their families here in Umphumulo.  That and the fact that so many of my hosts are quite simply incredibly generous and hospitable.  Either way, I’ve been greatly blessed to be in the presence of so many brothers, sisters, mothers, and fathers during my time away from my own.