I’m trying to limit my blogging to pictures and short stories for a while, but today there was a typical “this is Africa” event.
Remember how it was our day off?
I went back to bed after Crossfit, had an interesting nightmare about being kidnapped in a township, woke up with my heart racing, then went back to sleep. The next thing I knew was the thunderous sound that strikes terror into my heart when awake, and something akin to “run, an atomic bomb is about to hit” levels of paranoia when I’m awoken out of slumber. In other words, Matt was at the window.
“Rick just called. Remember that BCX day Thursday?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s tomorrow. They’re not going to deliver the stuff so we need to go get it – preferably with both cars.”
“Okay, so we need to do that today?”
“We need to do that now. Like a couple minutes.”
Lol. (I didn’t actually say lol. I just lol’d.)
“Okay.”
The backstory, briefly: A brother in our ecclesia, and a COPT member, is a higher-up at a company called BCX. Companies in South Africa have to give a certain amount of money to charity each year, and the COPT gets some good donations this way. BCX donated a significant amount of money to make 500 food parcels. The food was going to be delivered to them, we were going to go assist the employees in packaging it up, and then we would take the packages and deliver them to families in one of the townships we work in.
The problem? We got the date wrong. There’s a big white board downstairs in the hall where we have all our events written. A few weeks ago one of the kids (hopefully) walked by and smeared out a bunch of dates. The date that got written back in was apparently wrong. The delivery truck wasn’t able to take the food on the newly-rushed schedule, so it was up to the volunteers.
Matt offered to drive the Corsa and let me drive the Avanza, but the Corsa and I have come to an understanding and we’re quite good friends now. I’m still much more hesitant to drive here than in the US – because of the wrong side of the road thing, the stick-shift thing, the not knowing where I’m going thing, and the crazy African driving thing (actually I like that thing), but I’m no longer worried about the “I don’t feel competent driving this car” thing.
We got to Makro, which is like Sam’s Club or Costco – but without the extremely cheap pizza. My first thought upon arriving and seeing the sign was, “of course they spell ‘Makro’ with a ‘k’ – of course they do.” (Correct spelling is discretionary here – seemingly self-respecting stores are known to have labels such as “Supa Store”.) We ended up with six volunteers and six vehicles – including a backie (pick-up) with a small trailer, and a huge Land Rover. Whether it would be enough, we weren’t sure.
After standing around for a couple of hours, dealing with the issues that always arise with these types of things, we loaded up and headed to BCX. We had a six-vehicle caravan and most of us had no clue where we were going. I stuck to Sonya like glue, including when I “had to” cut off two cars at the same time. It’s a proud moment when you get honked at here – South African driving is so crazy that people just accept it and rarely honk. But not today.
When we arrived, we were happy to find trolleys available to help us unload. It took an hour or so of heavy lifting. The hard part will be tomorrow, when the bulk packages will all be separated and sorted into 500 smaller packages that will then have to fit back into our cars to be taken to a school in Lamontville. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. My suggestion was to make each employee load their own parcels as they pack them so we’re not stuck with 500 for the 6-8 of us to load.
Each parcel includes something like this: a bag of mealie, a bag of sugar, a bag of morvite (one of those things I don’t really wanna know the ingredients of), a bag of dried beans, and a chocolate Easter egg – which will undoubtedly be melted upon its arrival. We’ll take them to the school tomorrow, then go back on Friday to pass them out. It’s a lot of grunt work for us, but it’ll be a nice surprise for 500 families.
Four hot-and-sweaty hours later, we’re all done. It wasn’t what I had hoped to do with my day off (still no eye check and no lesson planning – but the lessons have been canceled anyway since we have to pack parcels tomorrow), but it was a productive day. I was surprised at how little serious complaining we all did (none of us wanted to make the person responsible for the error feel bad – stuff happens). I’m pretty sure I overheard a “do all things as unto the Lord,” and we remarked several times how glad we were this wasn’t an everyday thing. I concluded to Matt on the way home (we consolidated some cars to leave there till tomorrow) that I would never want to have a job that included regular sweating as part of the description.
[Here are a couple of pictures of most of the food – the largest crate wasn’t yet in the line. That guy at the door hated me for A. trying to sneak in through the small opening he had made, B. trying to bring a Coke can in with me, and C. standing on the furniture to take the second picture.]
Next Comes Africa 