A glance out the window after the 7.30 alarm (“Time to get up - it´s 7.30”) didn´t provide a promising weather report. Solveigh was sitting on the couch working on bills and so on. I made some coffee for both of us. Everybody else was taking his/her time getting up. As usual the bathroom was the most busy place in the house with about three people showering, not simultaneously of course. When we finally started walking toward the site it was already after 9 o´clock. By this time the sun had managed to come out and the clouds were on their retreat.
Today – Tuesday - was a day of complications. The first one was: who will go to the site by car, who will walk? First everybody walked except the late people. They were – lo and behold – suddenly sitting in Moritz car and simply drove past us with great grins on their faces. Then Zoleka stopped and picked up a few of us. Now we really had a problem. What about the rest? Well, if I remember correctly, Zoleka did some phoning on her handy to solve this one. And they did get a ride to the site as well. it wasn´t clear in the first place why we needed a ride to the site.
The site: With a burst of energy all got busy with the pile of stones we had created the day before. Now came the next complication. Should we throw them over the fence into the neighbouring empty lot or not? Well, after deliberating over the pros and cons we decided to go ahead with throwing them over. To placate our guilty European consciences about throwing garbage on somebody else´s property, we started fabricating plans to rid not only the neighbouring property of all the different kinds of garbage, but to do this on other “empty” lots as well. Soon we were finished with the stones and got into our next quandary. What shall we do now? It wasn´t long before we had become totally engrossed in two new big jobs: 1) the sorting out of the puzzle “Jungle Gym/Jim” (i.e., playground bits and pieces) and weeding and digging out the overgrown circle beside the blue shed. It was a circle of grass, stones and rubbish circumscribed by a circle of cement. The first job took some puzzling and then we decided to prepare and put up only the parts that made sense to us and either leave the remaining poles or find a different idea about what to make out of them. The second job turned into a biggee. It was a semi-archeological task going through the various layers of Manenberg garbage. When we finally reached the big stones and two old carpets, we also reached what appeared to be water level. This brought us to a new idea. Why not make a sand box? When we´ve dug down to water level, we can put the dug up stones back in and a layer of sand on top. So now we got busy with digging and sorting of stones. In the midst of all this a dozen or more children from the street suddenly appeared on the lot. They had about the same energy level as we had had when we started work in the morning. They were all over the place wearing our gloves, using our tools and sorting stones. Busy as bees. For a while we let them be but when we couldn´t stand being unemployed any longer - and, of course, we were concerned about their safety as good Europeans always are - we decided to let them know they had finished their jobs and thanked them for their help. Deep down we were scared they would/will come back, bringing along about 10 more each.
It was our first full day of work. That means that we were now confronted with the question: when do we quit work? There were several criteria for this decision: before it gets dark, before it gets too cold. Well, the perhaps most important criterion turned out to be a rather pragmatic one. We couldn´t really make out heads or tails of some of the Jungle Jim parts and standing around trying to figure them out simply made us feel more cold. Consequently we ended our first full day of work about 5 p.m. Solveigh, however, stayed on with 2 people to do some measuring in the house.
At home we had our first township evening: cooking, showering, playing cards, greeting diverse guests who dropped by and last but not least eating supper. Before we retired we had a planning discussion led by Solveigh plus a “Tagesrückblick”.
von Carol Baerg
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