No Stress

David, Maite, and Letebele makin' a plan
MmaDiapo is gone for the week and it's been really quiet around here, everyone misses her. The last couple of nights, not shockingly, I've only gotten a few hours of sleep. I'm not sure if it's stress, but I'll fall asleep around 10:30, wake up around 1, and then, because Mabu is here watching over everything and sleeping in the next room, I'll sit on the floor with my iPod and headlamp and crochet granny square after granny square. I do, eventually, get tired again, and climb back into bed only to wake up at some ridiculously late hour for the village. Today that hour was 8:30. I opened my eyes, rolled over, and groaned. 8:30 is when people GET to work. I have a lot of things I'm trying to do all at once... and some days none of them get any attention because I'm not sure where to focus. I cleaned my room to wake myself up and walked to Kodumela around 10:30. By 11, I was in a bakkie delivering filing cabinets to 3 drop-in centers, at 12:30 I was on my way to town to get quotations for building materials for a grant proposal I'm almost finished with. In town, Letebele, Kodumela's driver, dropped me off at CashBuild to get my first of 3 quotations (you get 3 and then pick the best deal..best prices and best materials). I walked into CashBuild and had a nice and informative conversation with a guy by the name of Solomon. I thought I could just bring in the building plan, he could look at it, make a list of things we needed, and then we'd walk around the store together pricing things. It's a little more complicated than that. It turns out that for each quotation I'm going to need to give the store an hour to an hour and a half... and that's only if there are no other customers in line in front of me. Ok, cool. I thought about making copies of the plan and dropping them off at different locations to cut down on the time factor. Each copy would cost about R60 (about 6 US Dollars) and well, that's one round trip fare to town and back. That Solomon, though, the smart cookie that he is, he hooked me up. He told me he would keep the plan, work on it and get his quote done today, then he would head over to BuildIt across the street and drop it off there for their guy to start working on the second quotation. "That way, my friend, you save R180, and you'll have 2 quotations ready and waiting for you by the time you arrive in town tomorrow morning. I'm just trying to save you some money." Yes, Solomon, my good man, you are. And did I mention that this building is for a drop in center? Uh huh, you're doing your part to help us get some kid's a place to play and eat. It takes a lot of little baby steps. I then walked to the mall to get some food and headed over to the parking lot where I was meeting Letebele, Maite, David, and Cedric so we could head back to Metz. We left town around 4:30. We sang Peter Tosh and listened to the news on the radio and talked of the election that's coming up next month. When we were passing the new shopping complex in Rita I asked Letebele if we could stop to check on the bed I had bought last week. If it was ready, I thought we could bring it back with us. After finding out that bed wouldn't be ready for another week... Letebele disappeared in the ShopRite for groceries and Maite, David, Cedric, and I all talked in the parking lot. I was telling them all about how my stress levels were not near what they used to be because stress is just viewed differently in South Africa... in the village. People do what they can in a day.. and if something doesn't happen, there's always tomorrow. This is both freeing and frustrating... it depends on your mood and what you're trying to get done. Things do always manage to work out. Every time I've gotten REALLY stressed out over something here, whenever everything was all over, I've looked back and thought "Really?! I really didn't need to expend such energy. What was the big deal?". So in the parking lot everyone had different opinions... David believes it's something you can control, it's all in your mind. Cedric kept talking about how you could reduce stress. Maite kept telling me that I just shouldn't worry so much. At one point, I leaned in the backseat to get my water and "Coming in From the Cold" by Bob Marley and the Wailers (yep, on the album "Uprising".. my favorite) was on the radio. I got really excited and we turned it up. When it was over, David put "Three Little Birds"on his phone and we all sang along to that. Letebele came back and we started the trip back to Metz. On the road in between Ofcolaco and Trichardstal, (about 25 minutes from Metz) in the bush basically, we slowed to a stop and pulled over on the side. The fan belt was shot. The smell of burning rubber filled the cab.. and we all got out to stand on the side of the road. We stood there with people driving by for 20 minutes. We all leaned against the back of the truck and talked about our options. Maite kept saying,"Well, Mmapula, this is the time to stress, this is not good, no, not at all. It is late, and we're here on the road!" I was fine. I knew it would work out. I knew we weren't far from a petrol station (it was a couple km's down the road), we were all together, we were working with an organization that had the means to fix such a part, and we had airtime. Cedric flagged down a taxi and headed back to the office. David and I talked soccer until he decided he couldn't wait any longer either, he had a long ride home and didn't want to do it in the dark. Letebele talked to some local men about leaving the truck on their property, behind a fence for the night. Maite called her boyfriend to come pick us up in his "mortuary vehicle", though he never came. In the end, we stood on the side of the road with bags from town and flagged down a man in a really nice VW Passat, who gave us a ride back to the office. When I walked through the gates of my yard the sun was just slipping behind the mountains.
"In this life... this oh sweet life... we're coming in from the cold."