Adapting for hope
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 35: Surviving
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Doug Hendrie
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Doug Hendrie’s biography and other articles by this writer
THERE is a single large tree on the wind-whipped salt-lake flats, the most marginal of marginal land. There are rivals - low scrub across the ground, bent by wind, introduced agave succulents with king-shard stems extending into the dust-filled sky, a few short and spiny trees - but only one tree. How do you create shelter against the stinging dust, the biting wind, the bulbous red-jelly sun that burns from near-dawn to dusk? You can build it out of scrounged wood, tin and plastic, but no one can stay indoors all day. The tree offers free shade beneath its spreading limbs, a patch of cool outdoors, a place to meet, mingle, talk.
This tree is the centrepiece of the founding story of Missionvale, an informal settlement of 120,000 people that has existed on unwanted land at the outskirts of Port Elizabeth, South Africa, for over a century. A new influx came during apartheid, when the coloured township near the wealthy white enclave of Walmer - a township of servants - was forcibly relocated in 1965. The land was too desirable; it could become suburbia. And so eight thousand people were uprooted and moved, their shacks bulldozed, and an entire new township deposited on the saltpans twenty kilometres away. After apartheid, new water pumps were installed and the population ballooned, as blacks and coloured began circulating, seeking a better life. Many found Missionvale and a Xhosa influx took the township to its present size.
No one has paid much attention to it; the middle class of Port Elizabeth drive past on the road to Uitenhage without noticing the timber-and-tin shacks thronging the salt lake. On the tourist map, a giant picture of an impala papers over the shadow city. But a diminutive white Irish nun wandered into this poorest of black settlements one day in 1988, in the last bitter years of apartheid, and knew this was where she wanted to be.
When Sister Ethel Normoyle first saw the city cobbled together from wooden slats and rusted tin she knew she would stay. ‘It was like the founder of my order, Mary Potter, said to me - you do not go any further. It was like a spiritual experience for me.' Sister Ethel is tiny, a shock of grey hair fanning out above her like a nimbus, her Irish accent slightly tinted by thirty-eight African years, and surprising strength in her grip.
Sister Ethel found the single tree. Diane, its owner, offered it to her, and Sister Ethel accepted. Beneath its limbs, she began teaching curious children and befriended people from the settlement. ‘People knew I had nothing too, so it was a sharing of lives,' she says. ‘I went house to house, and at first I did not want them to see that I was a nursing sister, because if I told them, they would think I was just a nurse. But then I saw a woman with her legs swollen and the skin all shiny, covered in dead layers. I peeled back the layers and her legs were crawling with maggots. For six months I collected spoonfuls of maggots from her wounds and put antiseptic on, and finally she said that she had been able to sleep a night for the first time in years.' Word got around and soon there was a long line of people clutching sore bellies, legs and heads.
The Afrikaner authorities didn't take kindly to a white nun looking after blacks, and threatened and harassed her most days. The harassment intensified when she moved to a black area close to Missionvale. She was once picked up for breaching the morality laws: hugging a black woman. The police dumped her in a remote, dangerous settlement, hoping the worst would happen to her.
Linda van Oudheusden, Missionvale's office organiser, says that Sister Ethel hoped and longed for the end of apartheid. ‘She really believed in South Africa, in Nelson Mandela,' she says. ‘She used to write to him when he was locked up at Robben Island, telling him to keep waiting, that he would be out soon.'
Apartheid collapsed in 1994 as the triumphant African National Congress (ANC) took power with Nelson Mandela at the helm. Over the next fifteen years, Missionvale grew as the ANC ended the hated laws restricting non-white movement.
By the late 1980s Sister Ethel had persuaded business donors to build three small rooms for a school and a clinic. ‘I was fortunate,' she says. ‘A company came round one day. They really put me on the map. They said it was disgraceful that someone had to come from Ireland to do the work they should be addressing. So, they built the clinic we have.'
In 1988 Mother Teresa visited the small centre. Sister Ethel asked her if she could spare any nuns, but as she tells it, Mother Teresa paused for a long time before finally saying, ‘No. The people of Missionvale have Sister Ethel.' And so Sister Ethel persevered, creating a microstate in the dust. By 1992 the care centre and clinic had grown. In 1995, Sister Ethel's centre had two new pre-primary classrooms and a visit from the Queen, who mentioned Missionvale in her Christmas message. The instant media attention and comparisons to Mother Teresa made Sister Ethel squirm. She begs that the comparisons to Mother Teresa be stopped, but to no avail. ‘You have met Sister Ethel', exclaim South Africans, white and black. ‘That woman - she is the Mother Teresa of Africa!'
MISSIONVALE IS ANOTHER world, parallel to the one the middle class inhabit. It's five minutes drive from Port Elizabeth's industry, docks, malls, freeways and beaches. Off the main road, the housing becomes less solid, fragmentary. Colours intensify, leaving behind the modern greys - here there are shacks of cement or tin, painted in lurid blues and yellows. Children are everywhere, extracting fun from nothing. They play cricket on rubbish-strewn ground, screeching at every hit. A snotty-nosed kid holds a kite made from plastic food wrappers and twigs. Many of the shacks are informal shops: hairdressers, shebeen bars and traditional restaurants serving ‘walkie talkies' - chicken heads, beaks and feet.
MY GUIDE IS Sister Muriel, Ethel's young offsider. She tells me that the soft-spoken Irish nun is creating something from nothing. ‘Sister Ethel is raising a village. That's how I see it,' she says. ‘If your skin wasn't white enough during apartheid, if you were coloured, you had to be here. But it's the same these days - people are still here and it's growing.'
A nurse by training and coloured by skin tone, Sister Muriel has a permanent bedside manner. She moves adroitly through groups of people, distributing tut-tuts, advice and sympathy in small doses, pausing to speak quietly to a very thin young girl robbed of flesh by AIDS. Muriel tells me she's in the late stages. The virus has become embedded in the membranes around her brain, making her confused. There is not long to go.
I help with food distribution. Women in colourful cloth stand gossiping and for a while I wonder where the need is. Then I spot the sick: gaunt, waiting uncomfortably, eyes on the food. Babies slumber, expertly tied onto mothers' backs, woven into their fabric. Purple dresses, yellow, red. Afrikaans, so hated during the apartheid years, is still the lingua franca here, though these are Xhosa. The women stand out - laughter, chatting, teenage mothers sourcing tips from older mothers. The men are sterner, seemingly resentful. They do not laugh. No one looks thin from hunger - it's the hollowness of HIV. The food we dish out is a mishmash of supermarket leftovers. The statements on the packets are cruelly ironic. ‘Great with your steaks,' proclaim gravy sachets. ‘Here's probiotic yoghurt to boost your immune system. Add two hundred grams of mince and stir.'
Another day, Muriel takes my parents and I out into the great expanse of the township proper. We are flanked by six laughing caregivers, local women who know this place intimately. They know who is sick, who has just died, who has just become an orphan.
Missionvale is a bleak salt flat, set against a backdrop of powerlines, metal monoliths and plastic bags flapping on thorn bushes in the ever present wind, living up to Port Elizabeth's nickname - the Windy City. Township residents sit and watch us.
An Irish volunteer, Rose, has come along. She's recently lost her husband to cancer - fresh from grief, rebounding from her role as carer, she's here, throwing herself into life anew. She hovers over each scrawny child she finds, pressing marshmallows on them. Tin shacks, holes papered up with yellowed newspapers. We enter one. A woman, Olga, lies on a bed, dank sheets over her, her face sagging. A stroke? Or one of the minor ailments that grow, disfigure and disable? Her eleven-year-old grandson sits in a once-plush armchair and preens a little under our praise - ‘what a wonderful grandson, to look after your grandmother as well as you do'. But it is awkward: poverty tourism. Rose utters a faint ‘Jaysus' and dishes out vast quantities of marshmallows, as if this ritual will stave off horror, survivor's guilt. Mum asks Olga if she's okay. ‘Yes,' she says. ‘I'm just shocked at all these people.' My mother begins making plans for rehab; Dad assesses her for sciatica. I'm proud of them, though our intrusion makes me uncomfortable.
THE VAST SALT flats are dotted by shacks and rough roads, but everything is obscured by clouds of topsoil. How do people find their way? Are there maps? The caregivers laugh. One taps her head; they're up here. She points our way to the next place, where the rough-voiced Jackie lives in a sprawling tin-and-fibro house. The roof sags and aged lino sits on bare earth. Near her, a baby boy swaddled in a dress sleeps on a couch. ‘He was left at our house', says Jackie. ‘The parents left him here, and one of the other women who lives here took him in.' Her asthmatic voice sounds like it's constantly catching on something. I ask how long she's lived here. This shack looks timeless, unable to decay further, unable to improve, a liveable place. She mishears me, thinks I've asked her what I like about it. ‘It's got a good view,' she says, gesturing with a reed-thin arm to the salt lake twenty metres away. ‘There's no industry, so there are no fumes. It's good for my chest.'
We all take photos: huts, people, dogs. It's demeaning, but I do it too, trying to hide the camera in my hand. A tiny girl sings to herself as she half-skips past. One shack has a TV blaring out state programming, drawing power from a car battery. Two men sit watching it. One stares impassively at me. His gaze is without anger, but it's clear he does not want us there. ‘Can I take a picture of your house,' my mother asks. He fixes her with the same gaze. ‘No,' he says in a treacle-warm accent. ‘I would feel ashamed of who I am.'
A kid feeds two puppies from his bowl outside a nearby hut. Our procession moves past a young mother with two babies. There is weariness in her, despondency at odds with her sportswear and gold shoes. As we pass her, Muriel tells us her husband recently committed suicide. She has the bleak look of a survivor who must go on only for others.
I ask Nadia, the caregiver, ‘What is this place like to live in?' ‘You are visiting, so you like it here. It's different,' she says. ‘But we grew up here. We are sick of it and we want to leave.' That's a universal hope, but escape is near impossible. Vista University, a squat wooden structure, sits on the hill above Missionvale. Nothing advertises its purpose and perhaps that is a kindness. Sister Ethel sees the university as a promise, a possibility, but then she is filled with hope. Linda tells me later that early excursions taking teenagers six kilometres to the Indian Ocean had to be abandoned. ‘Outside Missionvale is outside their world. Most had never seen the sea, and Port Elizabeth is a seaside city. Some became ecstatic when they saw it, but others were teary and distraught.'