Hand to Mouth

Today was not a good day.

I'm back in my room now, and that's about as far as I can get with it. But that's not good enough.

We were picked up in the morning. We take a road I have never been on, and a few hundred yards down it we pick up two men in faded t-shirts and jeans. They were waiting outside a corrugated tin trailer; a sign above the open end reads High-Class Hair, and inside there are two girls waiting on stools and the shadowy movements of a hairdresser attending a third. Across the road is a blockhouse shop with no windows, covered with a peeling mural for Cadbury's Dairymilk. It looks abandoned, but it's not.

The men direct us onwards, through streets lined with concrete one-storey houses. They are about twice the size of my bedroom.

The road becomes a potholed dirt track, but the houses continue, multiplying. Some are just patchwork contructions of tin in varying shades of rust, canted to one side. Some are made of dried mud and knarled sticks. Goats and skinny, high-bellied dogs are picking their way along the edges of the yards.

A series of images:

A pair of elderly women selling pineapples from a battered bus shelter.

Three boys playing checkers in the shade at the back of a house doubling as a petrol station, sitting on upturned plastic crates.

A line of clothes hung out along the wire fencing around a house, red-orange-yellow-green-blue, carefully rainbowed in order.

Dust. And scrub yards. And more goats.

This is Extension Six of the township. The unpaved streets are numbered, not named; easier for the planners. I'm trying, but I can't begin to describe what it is like.

We are there to visit a small plot of scruband that will be turned into a nursery for tree seedlings. Under the supervision of the two men with us, who both live in the township, the seedlings are to be sold locally. It sounded like a good project, but now that I am here, I wonder.

Trees. I look around. It seems an odd place to start.

But then where do you start?

On the way back, the woman taking us on the trip stops at the house of her gardener. He hasn't come to work for the last few days, and she is worried. He has no phone, so she couldn't call.

While she unwinds his chickenwire gate, I sit in the car and watch as a woman in a torn blue shirt fills a basin with dirty water. There are other basins in front of her house, for washing clothes. She comes out of her garden and tips the water out onto the verge, a long brown sluice in the midday sun.

Our driver comes back out to the car. She has tears in her eyes. Her gardener is very sick. She thinks he has tuberculouses. She is sure he won't be back to garden for her again.

I knew it would happen one day, she says. He is very old.

We leave him and his little house. I don't say much as we leave the dirt roads and goats behind, and out the window things slowly return to order. We stop outside our driver's office at the university, under the shade of an oak tree.

Students are milling around, calling out greetings. A miniskirted girl in front of us is blowing up a striped beach ball. I blink.

Are you okay? our driver asks.

I'm sorry, I say. I'm just very tired.

She gives me a hug.You just saw another world, yes? She says. It's hard, but it's good you saw it.

Yes.

Maybe it was a good day.