Sho't Left... Touring my Eastern Cape
Home for me is Mahikeng. Its in the North West Province, approximately 1100kms away from Grahamstown. The only travelling I do within the Eastern Cape is either on my way to PE airport or on the late night bus trip going home. I don’t have a car in Grahamstown but I also don’t have time to travel during term time because of all the work that I have, I can honestly say in the four years that I’ve lived in the Eastern Cape I only know three towns which I find myself a little embarrassed about. Travelling the Eastern Cape is one of the things I always wanted to do but never got the opportunity to do so but that all changed with Umthathi.
Umthathi expanded their training radius and included all towns and informal settlements within the Eastern Cape, no longer just training the Grahamstown area. This is because their programs have been in high demand and many people need their help. This is the one aspect that I enjoyed mostly about Umthathi, the travelling J Every week I would travel with Lumka and the Facilitators Lakhaya and Kolela aka Mam Khaya and Sis Kosh. The facilitators are the ones who spend every week sleeping in different communities because they are there to train the various groups. They are more hands on than everyone in the organization because they live amongst the people they are training and they bond with them and they see sides of the communities that the rest of the people in the organization can’t see. Since Lumka is still new at her job, she travels with the facilitators when they go back to the communities for monitoring and since she is my mentor that I meant I got to tag along to all the different places.
Now I can say I’ve increased my knowledge of Eastern Cape towns, adding four more to my list being King Williams Town, Alice, Fort Beaufort and Middledrift. All of these places are unique and have their own wonderful stories but I found that they have many things in common as well. We spent a lot of time in the villages in Middledrift and that is when I saw similar these places are. Village life is simple, I would know my grandparents live in a village, I grew up in one. You go to school, come home and cook, maybe go to a school disco or to the dam to keep you entertained. For the old people its all about food and funerals. The food part being the most important, these grandmas that I spent time with during the monitoring love using their hands to occupy their time, be it by sewing or making beautiful bead work or by growing food in their garden or cooking it. There was a day I was so full because of all the food these communities had fed us.
11 August 2014 I will never forget that day, for breakfast we were fed two of the biggest fat cakes I have ever eaten in my life. It wasn’t just for us, the Sihlangene Community Project made breakfast and lunch for all the grandmas and grandpas while they were all working at the centre either gardening or sewing. For lunch on the same day we were in Tyutyuza and they cooked chicken, rice and veggies for us. Mind you I’m still full from breakfast, I had one fat cake and now I must tackle a drumstick which looks like two drum sticks in one. I have never been as full as I was on that day because you can’t refuse their food or tell them you are on a diet, that is how they show love and appreciation, they are very welcoming. Even though I had the itis the whole way home, I could not help but think about how at home I felt while I was with these people. Having them embrace us and hug us so warmly and talk to us like they had known us for years was really comforting. This showed that the staff who work at Umthathi gave bits and pieces of themselves to these communities, they actually care, this isn’t just a job for them, it’s something bigger, it’s who they are.
The appreciation shown by these communities was overwhelming, I was not sure how spending one week teaching people about gardening and money management and hygiene could have a big effect on their lives but I started to see what sort of a difference Umthathi was making these people. They had something to look forward to everyday, they didn’t have to stress much about what they were going to eat that day, they did not have to spend lots of money for medicine because they knew how to use plants to make them natural medicines, they stressed less and lived just a bit more. Due to these trips I started liking Umthathi more and the work that they do… maybe it was also because I got to travel.
