A child catches my attention out the window of the box-house where I am spreading a miniscule amount of peanut butter or jelly on a slice of brown bread. The children coming for "the breakfast club" are in uniforms and getting a free bit of food and tea before they head off to school. Their uniforms are torn at the seams and littered with holes, the fabric often threadbare at the seat of their pants. Their freshly polished shoes and their well-sunned faces are the only things that glisten in the room. But the child outside is barefoot and wearing a dirty red t-shirt and shorts. His nose is runny, his eyes are covered in a thin white film, and he appears to be alone.
We spread peanut butter or jelly on hundreds of slices of bread, communicating in partial English with the women who are working for the Ubuntu Foundation, not understanding the clicks of the Xhosa language. We are instructed to place barely a spoonful on each slice and spread it thin, rubbing it into the bread. With each spread of peanut butter I struggle: everything in me wants to spread a nice thick layer on the bread but I know that if their stores run out, they will have nothing tomorrow.
As the children come in and out at their own leisure between 7:00 and 8:00, I feel uncomfortable, smiling at the ones who will smile back and making a few of them grin. The older ones are understandably cautious... how often do they see young white volunteers come in and then just leave, heading back to their privileged lives?
When the children are gone I spot the red-shirted boy and another child (wearing a dirty light-pink sweatshirt and white sandals) playing together in the dust outside the make-shift houses of one of Guguleto's informal settlements, Barcelona. The pink-shirted child seems interested in me, the boy is cautious. I try to talk to them, but my foreign tongue only made them shy away. Only my grins make them smile. I play peekaboo with them from behind the side of the house and slowly win them over. After nearly twenty minutes of trying to approach them and having them move away, the pink-shirted child runs up to me and stops short, examining me up close and smiling when she finds something she likes.
I learn later that children are both around three-years-old, that the red-shirted boy is named Zake and was conceived through a rape. Our guide, a Dutch woman from the Netherlands, Cobi, did not know the name of the other child, and referred to her once as "he" and later as "her" (my struggling to determine her sex was stopped short when I suddenly realized it did not matter). This child is cared for by her seven-year-old sister, and is alone during the day while her sister is in school. It is this child that I bond with.
Before we leave the breakfast house to walk through the informal settlement with Thandokazi, a lovely woman with a baby tied to her back in the Xhosa way and mother of Zake, I try to get the child to give me a high five. She watches my hand with curiosity but refuses to touch it. I stand and say good bye, holding out my hand one more time as I start to walk away. She slaps it hard, grinning. Zake still won't touch my hand.
After our walk (complete with many smiles, greetings, and a stampede of dogs chasing two cattle) I look under a line of drying clothes hoping the children will still be there as I climb into the back of Cobi's truck. Seeing them playing, I wave and the pink-shirted child waves back. Just before we leave, once situated in the truck, the children come running and stand looking up at me through the window.
"Bye!" I say, reaching out my hand. The nameless child grabs it, situating each of her fingers between my own in a handshake marking my own personal moment of experiencing Ubuntu. That little hand between my fingers makes me laugh in a way that is near tears.
"Can I take your picture?" I ask, holding up my camera. They nod.
As the truck starts up I reach out my hand once again, grasping her hand. I reach for the little boy and he gives me a thumbs up. I copy him and he touches my thumb with his own. I have won them over.
As we drive away, waving goodbye, I feel something lurch back towards them (is this what they call tearing at your heart?). It is an emotion I don't recognize. I thought, how many white women do these children meet? How many women give them moments of joy and then leave them? How could I have even attempted to "win them over"?
Of course, in writing this, I feel like I am the one that can't quite let that hand-grasp go.
Ubuntu: "I am because we are."
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