Pension Day

We continue to fill our remaining time here with various activities, and this past weekend was no different. Leaving on a bus at 6am Saturday, we went to town to spend a day and a half helping our good friends Stephen and Jolene move from their rented house in Onverwacht to their newly built house just a few kilometers away. Then, after picking up pizza and groceries on Sunday afternoon, we headed out to Ga-Seleka where we spent the following couple days catching up with Paul and Jess on their busy lives and ours since we all traveled together to Cape Town in July. We even had the privilege of helping them with the Palala North Girls Club on Monday after school.

With the arrival of Tuesday morning, however, we needed to head back to our site and resume work in our own village. On this particular day, the work was decided for us as we quickly realized that it was going to be pension day in our village since the community of Buskop was setting up for it on the tar road and our village was always next in line. Now, there may actually be a systematic way of knowing when pension is going to come around and visit the village, but after two years of being here, I still feel that it is a guessing game of which day at the beginning of each month the large armored trucks will drive through and dispense government money to the elderly women and men and young, single mothers. The only real way that I am ever certain of pension is when our Koko (Grandmother) gets all dressed up and follows the crowd of elderly down to Salim's shop where the village has been momentarily transformed into a huge bazaar of live clucking chickens, pick-up trucks selling vegetables out of the back, women sitting on plastic with an assortment of clothes spread out flat on the ground to sell, and finally the line on the right side of the fence which is all elderly men and the line on the left of the fence which is all elderly women waiting for the truck to arrive and divy out their pension.

Last year, I had the Palala Girls Club members selling crafts they had made at pension and it went very well, but this year, I chose not to have the girls miss class to do this. That is why this year we have done a couple sporatic selling days after pension by walking around the village door to door. Now, for all of you in the States reading this, I can only imagine that you think this to be a very annoying method of sale, but here in South Africa, it is a way of life. There are constantly sales people passing through the village selling various goods either by walking from house to house or by riding their bicycles. We have the advantage of selling in our village though because we can time it to coincide with pension when everyone still has their pockets loaded until they can get to town the following weekend. Also, we can brag that the money is for supporting the local school programs that teach the children after school. 

So, while Brandon stayed home to wash clothes that had piled up from the last couple weeks, I headed to school to begin preparing the crafts to sell and complete some other smaller projects. By long break (lunch), the PGC Council members came looking for me in the media center and I asked Clementine if she saw that it was pension...and she replied (without me even hinting at it), "I think we need to sell today." She and I proceeded to plan it and then Clementine ran off to tell the other 3 girls. And we were off!...after just a couple more periods of class.

It was another hot day that was defined more by the dusty wind than the temperature. The girls were happy to wear the bandanas I gave them to model since it provided protection for their newly braided hair from the dust that flew through the air. The bandanas were a treasure I found while in Cape Town this winter where I purchased them for only R2...I bought them with the intent that we could raise the price to R5 and sell as a fundraiser among our other crafts. As we left the school grounds, we headed first for Susendale (the farthest side of Klip from my house) and went straight for the back row of house where we would start and work our way forward. 

The first house we came upon was a zinc home with several residents. The unusual thing about the residents was that they were all about my age which is rare to see in the village. Aside from their age, they were all sitting around drinking beer while their kids ran around half naked. This didn't deter the girls from entering though and testing out their sales skills. The girls quickly used their sales suave to convince the young mother that her two children would love bandanas and then I worked my persuasive side to convince the drunk man who had just proposed to me that he needed to loan his girl friend the money she needed to buy the bandanas since all she has was R100 and we had no change yet. Success!!

We continued to move on going door to door and for about 10 houses straight, we sold something at every single house. The afternoon continued this way with very few houses refusing the girls a sale. By the end of the afternoon, as the sun set, we had only visited one-fourth of the entire village and had sold nearly everything! 

My favorite part of this afternoon though and the reason why I choose the sales event to talk aboutin a journal entry is because it reminds me of how much I love our village and working with the girls here. It was hot outside, the girls were tired from a long day of school and then also selling, but they kept smiles on their face and remained polite as we entered compound after compound selling goods. They laughed with the residents of each home as they looked at earrings and even tried them on before buying (Mmatema was the designated member who helped the Kokos put their earrings on). At one point, Clementine looked at me and gave me her school sweater telling me that soon I would turn red without it from the scorching sun! Halfway through our sales, one of Brandon's boys club members joined us also and found humor in almost every situation and house visit. There are just so many things about this afternoon that will make me miss Africa and our friends in this community!

Walking back to school just after the sun had gone down, the girls were extremely tired and talking much less. However, once we got inside the media center where the girls had stashed their school bags, the girls excitement was evident as we all sat down with Maam Tema and counted the money they had brought in. Once I began counting past R200, the girls chimed in with me counting in unison all the way up to R305! They were thrilled! As a reward, they know that sale days for the girls club means that they each get a small profit from doing the work. So I divided up a good portion of money for each of them and then further rewarded them by allowing them to keep their bandanas that they chose to model.