<\/span><\/p>\n Pulika<\/em><\/p>\n My damp palms retrieve Pulika\u2019s most recent letter tucked in my purse, creased from re-readings. The exotic stamp says: R4.60 South Africa.<\/p>\n Dear Suzan,<\/em><\/p>\n I am still well at Sabie, the only thing I had problems, my mum past away and my daughter was very ill. I started to be upminded. That is why I could not write or answer your letter, there was nobody who would stay at my mum\u2019s house. <\/em><\/p>\n <\/em>So few words to convey her emotional double-whammy, and I recall the anguish that runs through the death of a parent. Was her daughter ill from HIV? Did Pulika need someone to stay in her mother\u2019s empty house because of South Africa\u2019s raging crime? Here I go again \u2013 comparisons, stereotypes. I\u2019m baffled: upminded<\/em>? <\/em>The word reminds me of \u201cupbeat\u201d, but that doesn\u2019t fit the context. My eyes drop down to her letter.<\/p>\n I am now back in cooking, cooking for my family and grandchildren because I am gogo. They want marogo and pinuts, my family enjoy it and mealie porridge. I am proud of my friend Suzan, I always think about my friend in Canada. The arrival coming of my friend in South Africa is a greate pleasure to me. <\/em><\/p>\n Yours faithfully,<\/em><\/p>\n Pulika<\/em><\/p>\n <\/em>Another new word \u2013 marogo<\/em> \u2013 another foreign riddle. Gogo<\/em> means grandmother. Pulika has raised five children and now three grandchildren live with her. Surreal to think that in thirty-six hours I\u2019ll be there to meet her. She used the word proud<\/em> \u2013 does she mean prideful, enjoying the envy of her friends? Or maybe she means filled with enthusiasm. Like I am.<\/p>\n Letters<\/em><\/p>\n Pulika\u2019s first letter had arrived eighteen months ago in a batch of twelve sent to our local Grannies \u00e0 Gogo group. Our collection of middling to senior women support a community of South African grandmothers who now raise their grandchildren orphaned by the HIV\/AIDS pandemic. The night the letters arrived we celebrated with a potluck, feasted on grilled BC salmon and Amaretto chicken breasts. Anticipation scented the atmosphere: soon we would read our gogos\u2019<\/em> letters. The twelve of us who would form the letter-writing partnerships read aloud in turn: I am an eighty one years old granny. I live with my two grandchildrens. Muzi 19 years and Liza 8 years. My house has electricity but not water. I like baking \u2026 <\/em><\/p>\n Another read: I live at a 3 room shack have electricity. I like to grow plants spinach, cabbage, carrots, beetroot, and potato. I work at Timber Company as a labourer. I did go to school. I have pass grade 7. It will be nice to be a friend with you in letters \u2026<\/em><\/p>\n We hesitated, tried to interpret, to correct grammar. Letter-writing is unfamiliar to the oral culture of these African grandmothers. English is their third or fourth language, learned after SiSwati, IsiZulu or one of their eleven official languages. Ginny, our volunteer administrator in South Africa, facilitated these new liaisons and had chosen a few gogos<\/em> with some English education to answer our request for personal connections. Ginny had also attached a photo of each to their letters.<\/p>\n We heard: I am sorry I cannot write your language. My language is Sesotho. I asked my grand daughter Mxolisito to write for me. I am not much educated. Our town is blessed with beautiful plantations. I survive by selling fruits and vegetables. May you please send me a photo of you and your family \u2026<\/em><\/p>\n We listened to vulnerable hope extended in descriptions of family, situation and involvements. We leaned forward, faces decorated with grins, and tingled with every word.<\/p>\n My turn: I have a garden, many flowers and vegetables. I do sewing with Ginny at Sitabogogo Centre it is coming fine. Hollydays are over. Thanks God America has a new president. Please pray for us we have elections soon \u2026<\/em><\/p>\n We dithered about how to choose our partners: put the letters in a pot and draw? or comment on which letter and photo resonated with each?<\/p>\n \u201cWhy don\u2019t we each just keep the letter we read?\u201d someone said. A murmur of nodded yeses, a rustle of patted letters that lay in each lap like a newborn. Something had shifted in each of us, a subtle bond already formed. Pulika was mine.<\/p>\n But a sense of disparity settled in my diaphragm. As a child of the 1950s, I\u2019d been born into booming Western prosperity. My concept of Africa had been shaped by photos of glossy-breasted women in National Geographic magazines placed on our coffee table, testament to my parents\u2019 newfound worldliness. But Pulika\u2019s photo shows a crone\u2019s wise face, skin the colour of whole almonds, unblanched. Her technicolour smock and head wrap would make a peacock jealous.<\/p>\n Africa was a twenty-five cent Saturday matinee, images of fetid jungle and Tarzan. But the landscape behind Pulika looks much like my own BC Interior \u2013 dry grasses, forested hillsides. In my see-saw teens and twenties Maclean\u2019s magazine reported rebellion in the Belgian Congo and starving Biafrans. Throughout the next twenty years of my immersion in child-rearing and career-making, \u201cSesame Street\u201d usurped \u201c60 Minutes\u201d while Belgian Congo reincarnated as Zaire, then as The Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Biafra re-absorbed into Nigeria. Rumblings of problems in South Africa were eclipsed by peewee hockey tournaments and drama rehearsals.<\/p>\n Those events had occurred in an obscure other-world outside my consciousness. But these letters from African grandmothers rustled dry and frail in our hands. They were real. Tangible evidence of big differences that continue to exist amongst the world\u2019s citizens. Between Pulika and me. I felt our separation\/apartheid \u2013 of economics, culture, race, geography.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Up<\/em><\/p>\n A flight attendant offers champagne flutes. Feeling like an imposter, I tilt back in seat 2C, play with the seat gizmos to prop up my feet, lie flat, sit again, shoes tucked into the cubbyhole, airline socks cozied on my feet. The wine dozes my eyes, pampered for a price. Thought-swarms buzz around questions of luck and lack in life, around the accidents of birth: why me, silver spoon in mouth, and Pulika, apartheid stone in hers? A tenuous notion niggles, an archetypal thought not yet ripe for words. I feel upminded.<\/em><\/p>\n Our polarized differences unnerves me. The Johannesburg newspaper online is full of rampant crime in their country, often simplistically attributed to a backlash when democracy was hard won. Other black Africans \u2013 not Pulika \u2013 might project their loathing of the apartheid-era white South Africans onto me. My champagne-skin looks like theirs but my heart is not like those of the abusive land-owners and employers reported in the media.<\/p>\n At thirty-five thousand feet the attendant drapes a starched placemat, brings salmon carpaccio, rosemary tenderloin, mini glazed carrots with leafy tops, followed by cr\u00e8me brul\u00e9e, port wine, fennel tea.<\/p>\n Morogo,<\/em> Pulika had written. My mind goes into her kitchen \u2013 delicacy or staple? Likely a staple, as these gogos<\/em> in the rural township near Sabie are a part of the world majority of have-nots. \u201cSomeday I\u2019d like to taste your marogo and pinenuts<\/em>,\u201d I had replied.<\/p>\n I\u2019ll stay awake on this ten hour flight so I\u2019m able to sleep at the Frankfort airport\u2019s Sheraton during the twelve hour lay-over before our long flight to Johannesburg. I\u2019ll read, watch a movie or two, my head an uppity helium balloon. Pretend to be nonchalant like my husband who is<\/em>. The shine wore off for him with repeated world travel for business \u2026 and frequent flyer points accumulated for me. Feeling like an imposter, I\u2019ll savour this elite treat \u2013 thirty-six hours to teeter out here on the precipice of privilege. Insulated. Separate. Then jump off the high end into Africa.<\/p>\n My thoughts sweep wide around the women in our Canadian group, women cruising in life\u2019s fourth gear with an abundance of love or time or wealth. What motivates us \u2013 guilt? atonement? altruism? Essentially, we subscribe to the power of one, to make a speck of the world better. So clich\u00e9. But so true. Since that first session we\u2019ve forged strong connections with our African gogos<\/em>, and when one of us receives a letter from her gogo<\/em> partner, she flashes the news like a lottery winner to the others.<\/p>\n Pulika\u2019s photo shows a lined face and, though we\u2019re the same age, mine appears younger. (I\u2019ll wear no make-up). I\u2019m still anxious about comparative wealth\/poverty issues. (I\u2019ll dress down). Images of our arrival drift the hours away, a world away \u2026 music of multi-languages babbled uptempo; waves of humidity to smear my January-dry skin; syncopated movement of sun-bright humanity, close and glossy. I will clamber out of this dream and, during the four hour drive to Sabie, transition from 35,000 feet through equilibrium, try not to bump down with a thud.<\/p>\n Turning into a single lane, I dodge potholes and chickens and kids. They pause an instant to gawk at my rental car, foreign phantom on their turf. Not malevolent, just curious. Pulika\u2019s place is only a few more twists through streets lined with board shacks and brick houses. No zoning bylaws here. My fingers tremble.<\/p>\n This morning Ginny and I had met and hugged like two separated sisters, a relationship born of our two linked groups and nurtured through emails. Before meeting the African gogos<\/em> group I\u2019d wanted to meet Pulika on my own. Ginny\u2019s map was a scribbled embroidery leading me through the warren of the black township.<\/p>\n The engine competes with my heart pistons as the car stops outside the chicken-wire fence around her house. A paralysis sets in, prevents me from switching off the engine, and time sticks to the roof of my mouth. There\u2019s an old car up on blocks and I\u2019m self-conscious of this late-model Nissan. Chickens scratch in the dirt yard \u2026 I think of my manicured flower beds. Her concrete-block house is tin-roofed \u2026 I think of my tile-topped, ranch style home. If she hasn\u2019t seen me I could drive on unnoticed. Towards the rear, through a flapping camouflage of laundry, the corner of my eye snags on a teeter-totter as it lurches, erratic like a rock-and-feathers weigh scale.<\/p>\n Aiyaiyaiyaiyaiy<\/em> \u2013 a high pitched trill like I once heard in a Moroccan club after a belly dance performance. A tall woman in a turquoise and emerald traditional dress and head wrap poses erect on her stoop, arms fanned open to me.<\/p>\n My shabby sneakers stumble toward her. I curse my choice of white T-shirt, faded denim skirt with the droopy hem, and hope she\u2019s not offended by my lack of sense of occasion.<\/p>\n \u201cSuzan, Suzan, Suzan, you are come. Praise God.\u201d Her hug swallows my intended handshake, and her laugh is deep like a lake. I\u2019m a bit off kilter, swirled in a hint of wood smoke, and wonder if her laugh is at me.<\/p>\n \u201cSawubona<\/em>, Pulika,\u201d I greet her in one of my few Zulu phrases. I say how thrilled I am to finally meet her, then crouch to greet the two little ones who\u2019ve dismounted their teeter-totter and materialized, barefoot, eyes dubious.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Balancing Act<\/p>\n Pulika has made tea, thickly black the way I like it, the way no one back home ever takes the time to do. Her muffins are dense and I\u2019m perversely pleased. Baking is not my favourite sport \u2013 I often over-mix muffin batter with similar results.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve memorized her family\u2019s names, ask about each in turn. She laughs often, tells me about Jabulani\u2019s promotion to vice-principal. Five-year-old Nstwaki disappears outside with a backward glance, skeptical. The younger grandchild, Johanna, scrambles onto Pulika\u2019s lap with a scrap of paper and draws looping circles. It makes me think of Venn diagrams.<\/p>\n Pulika\u2019s voice liquefies. \u201cPinky, she very-very sick for long-long time. Hospital, too. Ooowwee, we so worried, pray and pray. This one,\u201d she squeezes a big hug around Johanna, \u201cshe is Pinky\u2019s baby.\u201d<\/p>\n The HIV question that crowds my mind, but I dare not ask. \u201cHow is Pinky now, was the doctor able to help?\u201d My heart-mind reaches back thirty years to my month-old baby\u2019s pyloric stenosis<\/em> surgery, to my panic that hinged on his survival. I know that terror like a fist through a mother\u2019s ribs. I confide to Pulika the agony of my newborn\u2019s illness. She touches her fingertips to my blonde-streaked grey hair and we fill with mother-merge.<\/p>\n \u201cPinky, she is better now, praise God.\u201d The tea stews on the wood stove; she fetches it and pours. She updates me on another son\u2019s involvement as a municipal worker in the recent strikes, on another daughter\u2019s new job as book-keeper for Spaar Foods. I tell her about each of my children scattered from Toronto to Vancouver, about my granddaughter who is close in age to Johanna.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd your youngest, Celeste,\u201d I ask, \u201cis she in Johannesburg with her husband and two children?\u201d<\/p>\n Pulika scoots Johanna outside to play with Nstwaki. Her mouth tightens like a walnut, her head twitches, a guttural noise rolls in her throat.<\/p>\n \u201cIs not good for Celeste. Her man is bad to her. Ooowwee. She wants to divorce him.\u201d Her voice slides up an octave, \u201cI say no<\/em>. Who will pay for food, for rent, for school fees? Celeste, she is not having a job. No, Celeste must try harder.\u201d<\/p>\n Her hand, worn like a leather glove, is in my anemic hand. \u201cPulika, I didn\u2019t say this in my letters, but I was divorced many years ago. My wonderful man now is not my first husband.\u201d Her eyes hook mine. I tell her my story of Cinderella hopes, of realities and delusion and pain, with dual responsibility, without blame. I talk of self-respect, and the pressures of an upended world since those days.<\/p>\n She nods her head, eyes varnished wetly. Then her deep laugh ruptures the moment, opens the door of her face. \u201cSuzan, thank you my friend. I am loving you.\u201d<\/p>\n I laugh, too, startled. Fears drown in the lake of her laugh, in the clasp of our two pink palms. We like black tea, we don\u2019t bake. We nurture, we worry, we love. There is a oneness.<\/p>\n She smoothes her dress like settling feathers. I compliment the design, the colours. \u201cI make expert sewing. Come.\u201d She tours me through her sparse, but exquisite, peacock\u2019s wardrobe hung on spikes on the bedroom wall. Sewing had been a pastime of mine long ago and I praise her plackets, seam finishes, and designs.<\/p>\n On a makeshift table hunkers her sewing machine. \u201cYour stitches is come loose little bit.\u201d She points to my floppy hem. \u201cI want to mend your skirt but my machine, it needs a fix. And no car to take it to the city.\u201d<\/p>\n Words spurt before my thought forms. \u201cAfter the grandmothers get together tomorrow I\u2019ll be driving to the city \u2013 come with me.\u201d We make a plan. I will ask her then about marogo<\/em>, see if I can finagle a cooking session.<\/p>\n A howl sounds, the siren of a child\u2019s 911. It presses the same granny-response buttons in Pulika and me, and we bolt toward the cry. Behind the house the amethyst glitter of a blooming Jacaranda vacuums my breath \u2013 the incongruous beauty of it. And under its glow the teeter-totter is anchored at one end by an upminded<\/em> Johanna, blindsided, her legs splayed in the dirt. Nstwaki stands behind the raised end, hands clasped over her mouth. We\u2019ll probably never know if the surprise in her tea-cup eyes is because she carelessly got off without warning, or because she jumped off for the impish effect.<\/p>\n It is<\/em> clear that their teeter-totter balancing act \u2013 the give and take, the transitions, the communication \u2013 needs practice. Relationships are like that. After a few words Pulika leaves them to sort it out. Once more, a niggling in my back-brain begs attention, this time to questions of parallels and convergence and the parts of a whole. I reach for transcendent meaning in the shaded space of our Venn diagrams. I walk alongside Pulika to the house, her arm slipped through mine. The ease of our connection tingles light on my skin, dissolves the weight of my in-flight fears. I commit to memory the teeter-totter image until my thoughts ripen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Upminded Pulika My damp palms retrieve Pulika\u2019s most recent letter tucked in my purse, creased from re-readings. The exotic stamp says: R4.60 South Africa. Dear Suzan, I am still well at Sabie, the only thing I had problems, my mum past away and my daughter was very ill. I started […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":782,"parent":193,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-207","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=207"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/207\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":690,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/207\/revisions\/690"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/193"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nDown<\/p>\n