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 10th grade life sciences book. After reviewing my plant biology, I moved on to a 12th 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 11th grade physics class. The students were learning about applications of Newton’s 3rd 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!
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.
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