Holding Up the Sky Read Online Free Page B

Sweetwaters and the other in a peri-urban area called Edendale township. Steve and the team had been constructing a new creche building in Sweetwaters and providing education materials and volunteers to assist at the creche in Edendale.
    Sweetwaters is utterly picturesque in its physical beauty but also desperately poor. People live in small mud huts scattered over the green hills, connected only by dirt tracks created from years of use by families and their cattle. There is one tar road that runs from Hilton, a leafy white suburb in the hills, through Sweetwaters to the main road in Edendale township below. Sweetwaters was technically part of Kwazulu, the homeland reserved for Zulu speaking people, and not part of South Africa.
    We all piled into the program kombi, drove down Nonsuch Road, turned up into Hilton and out the other side. Instead of staying on the main road back to town, we turned right and entered another world. We drove along the tar road for about a kilometre before turning onto dirt. I wasn’t sure that the kombi was built for this type of road. It wasn’t just dirt, it had ruts and hollows that rocked us from one side of the kombi to the other. I suspect this was Steve’s favourite part of the journey, fancying himself as a driver in the Paris to Dakar rally.
    Finally, the dirt road gave out all together and we left the kombi to continue on foot. After fifteen minutes of wishing I had worn more appropriate shoes, we arrived at our destination. The creche, which doubled as the teacher’s home, was built of mud like all the other dwellings surrounding it. Wattle trees, which were fast growing and in plentiful supply, were cut down and the branches stripped to create a series of poles. The larger poles were sunk into the ground at intervals and the narrower, more supple branches were then woven in and out of the poles until the structure of a wall was built. A small gap for a window was cut into each side of the house and a larger one for the door and frames fitted into place. The women, who do all the building, would then collect mud and slap great clumps of it into the woven wall structure until it was about twenty centimetres thick. Tin sheets were then placed on top and secured as a roof and the structure was complete. If there was enough money, the outside wall would be thinly rendered with a watery concrete mix.
    The tiny creche appeared to have been built many years ago, as it was now crumbling away in parts. Lucy, the teacher, and the twenty tiny preschoolers in her care spent the day inside the two-room structure, or playing on the grassy area outside. One room was much larger than the other, the smaller of the two acting as a kitchen and the larger as the classroom itself. On the wall were coloured pieces of card with words and times tables written on them. About twenty metres away from the building was a pit toilet, a hole in the ground surrounded by rusted sheets of corrugated iron.
    The children were clean, but dressed in hand-me-down clothing, some with holes, some too small. When we arrived, they were inside sitting in a large circle on the mud floor, which was covered in a variety of patterned blankets. Having no phone, Lucy had not known exactly when to expect us, but was very pleased we had come. The children, on the other hand, looked horrifed and started inching towards the far wall in an effort to get some distance between us. Lucy, clearly embarrassed, explained that the only white people they ever saw were the police and they were afraid of them. As we sat down on the ground, she assured the children that we were not the police, but people coming to help build them a new school. From the looks on their faces, they didn’t believe her.
    Tshidi came into her own at this point. Having some early childhood education training herself, she suggested that she take the kids outside and play some games with them. Before long they were singing and dancing in a circle around her,