Kate, William and the horn of the rhino

Dear William and Kate

It’s getting a bit disturbing, isn’t it? The phalanx of paparazzi staking out the hospital. The Australian prank caller. The fictional royal baby tweeting on behalf of a blastocyte.

I have an admission to make. I can’t stop myself watching it unfold. It’s like watching a morbid accident in slow-motion. In my country, it’s a bloodier drama. Our rhinos are getting murdered. Their disfigured heads, their bleeding carcasses hit the front pages daily, but we don’t seem to be able to do anything to stop it.

And it may seem slightly mad, but I’m starting to see you as odd little English rhinos. Your privacy is held ransom by every news editor, every magazine and tabloid, every drone with a phone. They hounded Diana, and now they are chasing you.

The rhino horns will get ground up into a useless powder, allegedly for medicinal use, but really for the much darker exercising of primitive superstitions: Take this to make yourself more real, more powerful, more immune, more attractive. What is the equivalent primeval power of the endless pictures, the fashion soundbites, every turn of Kate’s lovely head and William’s unfaltering and patient smile? What is the insatiable need that drives the neverending hunt for the next fix of royal powder?

Whatever it is, it’s another delusion, to be sure. The delusion if we look closely enough, we might taste what it’s like to have a life as impossibly easy or luxurious, or beautiful or glamorous, or privileged, as yours appears to be. We suspect it tastes a little tiresome at times, a little unreal, a little exhausting, and sometimes a little lonely. So we look even more closely, for clues of that humanity. Will you ever snap at the press? Will you ever bite back?

I guess not. Unlike the rhinos, you have sanctuaries where you can hide and revive. And those who want to shoot you aren’t allowed to carve you up into trophies. That barbarism is reserved for animals, sadly.

Today a rhino poacher turned himself over to the police in my country. If the media are to be believed, he’ll be locked away for 40 years. For carving a horn off a vulnerable, endangered creature. Or: for catering for the whims of some some deluded Chinese consumers who believe that rhino horn will fix them in some way, make them better.

I have an appeal to you, my odd little overseas fascination. It seems to me you might have first hand experience of how it feels to be hunted, unfairly, in a potentially life threatening way. It also seems to me that you have enormous power to raise awareness. So here it is. An offer and an appeal. Come to South Africa. We’ll give you privacy in exchange for exposing the international media to the insanity of our rhino poaching problem. The paparazzi in South Africa are quite, quite amateur in comparison to those of the first world. Honestly, we leave celebrities alone here. In most of our cities, if you just dress a little dull and don’t make a fuss, you’re unlikely to be noticed, let alone hounded. So, when the nausea has settled, bring yourselves out to South Africa. And start shining a spotlight on the lunacy of the rhino poachers.

I won’t tweet a soul.

Lisa

Travel and returning

I wrote this on my way home from Jamaica a week and a bit ago. I let it settle for a bit before posting it here, but a conversation on the weekend reminded me of it.

Travel and returning

I find travelling brings out many creatures. The adventurous creatures, who sees a new, unexplored road and wants to head up it, wander along, get lost even. Expanding. The so-attached-to-home creature, that wants to scuttle back to my comfort zone, get home as soon as possible. Contracting. The capable animal, who organises months of overdue admin records when facing an imminent trip. Ordering. The incompetent, fluttery animal, that gets panicky, forgetful, ditzy. Disordering. The stoic, resilient beast that can sit out the longest delay, the worst turbulence, the craziest seat neighbours. The querying, critical, demanding creature who gets involved and makes a plan. Detachment, I guess, and engagement – it’s all in the mix.

I dreaded this trip home. It involves 2 back-to-back long haul flights, divided by a day layover getting from Gatwick to Heathrow. I dreaded feeling exhausted, jetlagged, and utterly undone by the onslaught of passengers and airline crew. Here are the tiny paper cutouts from the past few days:

1. A thought-provoking article. Theatre maker Megan Furniss wrote this piece on her return to New York. Megan discovered a freedom in New York that she doesn’t feel in Cape Town, that many do not feel. Freedom from guilt, freedom from the burdens of being labelled and pigeonholed in the many ways that South Africans do to each other. The piece struck a chord with me. I could sense, deeply, what Megan was talking about. Some of her friends commented on the article, that they couldn’t understand what was she was ‘on about’. That made me glad: glad that there are those that are free of this strange burden, of carrying the projections and stereotypes imposed on them by others. But Megan’s piece also struck me as an invitation: is it possible to carry that freedom back home, to practise it through sheer awareness?

2. A moment of praise. In Kingston, before our workshops began each day, participants joined hands in prayer. They prayed for health and guidance, they expressed gratitude, humbly and joyously. A few years back, when I was more intensely involved with the work of Art of Living, moments of praise were plentiful. It was usual to pause before a meal for a moment of shared gratitude. I remembered this practice. Outside of the workshops on this trip, I ate almost all my meals alone. The moment of thanks was a reminder that no person, and certainly no piece of food, exists without a whole world of interconnected life.

3. Breath. I was quite ill before I left for this trip, with a chest infection that did not want to clear. It came after a solid month of non-stop overwork, during which I repeatedly found myself holding my breath from stress. Two days before flying, I went to the doctor and came home with prescriptions for a battery of drugs. By the time the workshop began, I’d spent a week on antibiotics and cortisone meds, and I still sounded horrendous. I’m not sure whether it was the infection, or the ongoing work stress, but I kept noticing the breath-holding. I had to start consciously reminding myself to breathe. I still feel there is a weight on my chest, fighting against my breathing reflex. I still have to remind myself to get the air in there.

4. Unexpected generosity. The rhythm was punishing: eat, sleep, work. Writing commenced at 8 am each day – and even when I arrived at 7.45 am, I was never the first to arrive – and we continued until 5 or 6 pm each day. By the end of it, everyone was exhausted. The team would head off as late as possible without hitting rush-hour Kingston traffic, and I would collapse in my hotel room, marvel at the lack of anything to watch on 100 channels of American TV, and eventually order room service. At the end of my third day there, one of the writers looked horrified to discover I was seeing nothing of Jamaica, and that I’d even forgotten a ‘swimsuit’. She offered to drive me to a nearby mall to find such a thing, so that I could at least unwind in the hotel pool. And after that outing, she looked at me and said, now, ‘What would you like to do in this city? Would you like to put those toes in the ocean? Or just take a walk? Or get some ice-cream? Come on girl, she said, let’s tear it up a bit!’ So off we went, driving around the island, pointing things out, walking along a local beach among the beach shacks and bars and families out swimming and Rastas trawling for tourists. Part of me just wanted to retreat back to the safety of the hotel room. And the rest of me was exhilarated by a simple drive around a place far from home. But especially by the generosity of someone who had been working just as hard as me, offering an extra couple of hours to show me around her island.

5. Pain. After three days of writing workshops, my body seized up completely. I could not sit or lie down without pain – my back and neck, hips and legs seemed to turn into one contiguous spasm. Movement helped a little, stretching helped a bit, applying ice helped temporarily, and hot water. I had to start moving almost continuously – standing up, walking around, swinging my arms and legs, rolling my head and shoulders. Eventually I resorted to Ibuprofen, scarily administered by the pharmacy in a tiny ziplock packet with handwritten instructions. There is nothing quite like physical agony to push you into the present. Every single moment, every single breath demands attention, attendance. I had no choice but to be present and breathe into each moment of pain.

6. A word of advice – and laughter. On the way to the airport, Lawrence, my taxi driver, was talking to me about the local foods. He was trying to explain a local pastry called bulla – a kind of hard cinnamon-spiced bread. And blackies – little mangoes the size of plums. We had a bit of extra time en route to the airport, so Lawrence stopped at a local supermarket to show me these things. I was bracing myself a little as we got out of the car – for more staring and calling and whistling. As a tall white girl, and clearly a foreigner, I’d drawn a lot of attention in Jamaica, and often felt that people were staring and scowling, as though I were an unwanted intruder. Lawrence laughed at my self-consciousness. ‘Nah, man,’ he said. ‘Let dem talk. If people talkin’ about you, it mean you famous.’ He laughed again when I expressed self-consciousness about taking photos in the supermarket. ‘Nah, man – you live your life an be happy, girl.’ Live your life and be happy. Yes, I thought, live your life and be happy… that sounds like a good thing to do.

Lawrence bought a bulla at the supermarket, and we broke it and ate some on our way to the airport.

7. The Dalai Lama. On my last evening in Kingston, I came back from a swim in the hotel pool (in the new, lovely swimming costume Lillia helped me find), and again marvelled at the non-content of American TV. Then I remembered that because I was in US territory, I could probably watch old TV episodes using the streaming Internet. I missed Masterchef Australia last year as we don’t have TV at home, so I did a quick search for some online episodes. The one that came up was an episode in which the contestants cooked lunch for the Dalai Lama. Surreal and made-for-TV as it was, the episode made for lovely, moving, feeling-ful viewing. The highly competitive must-be-the-best idea suddenly had to expand to make room for the idea of food as source of spiritual and physical nourishment, something fun and delicious – and also merely material. The competition was dwarfed by the special moment of meeting the great man, and no one was immune to his sense of humility and compassion and fun.

There were other paper cutouts that have fluttered gently into my awareness the past few days: the suffering of an elderly woman who was in such pain and distress on our flight from Kingston, that we were almost diverted to some islands I’d never heard of. My own awareness of the contradictions of travel – excitement and homesickness, patience and impatience, curiosity and exhaustion. Wondering about how we carry love with us when we are far away from those we love. I’m not sure how they all converged, but somewhere between Kingston and London, I found an intention, a certainty about the convergence of all these things. A practice that requires less apology and more, well, practice.

And it may sound utterly far-fetched, but a magical thing has happened. It’s a difficult thing to explain, but in the space of two days, the world has become full of people I can see, and people who see me back. Everywhere I have gone, there is a mutual curiosity and interest, and warmth. It still feels slightly unfamiliar, and every now and then I remind myself to sense my way back to it, to find the clear, warm place that this springs from. One of my teachers called it the Buddha’s smile, and taught us to wear that smile no matter who or what seemed determined to knock it away. Another calls it a sense of belongingness. I imagine His Holiness the Dalai Lama might call it compassion or lovingkindness, or perhaps he would just laugh out loud at all these words.

Whichever way it is, the journey I dreaded has turned into something astonishing. I write this on my way home, in so many ways. June 2012.

What Kolya said

me: What colours are the rabbits?

K: (pointing to white rabbit) This one is white… (pointing to brown rabbit) this one is brown… (pointing to dark grey rabbit) this one is dark gross.

What Kolya said

“Today is a day of my life. And no one must icksturb me ever on a day of my life.”

“Mom, you know you must never compovise.”

 

 

What school are you sending him to?

One of the worst things about being a parent is the ubiqitous “What school are you sending your child to?” question. It starts when your child is around 3 months old (I kid you not), and it doesn’t let up – I suppose – til they’ve crossed the finish line to matric.

There are lots of reasons I don’t enjoy the question. It’s a loaded question. It’s loaded with all sorts of other questions. It means a whole lot of things. It means: What are your politics? How liberal or conservative are you really? How much do you earn? What kinds of aspirations do you have for your child? What are your religious inclinations, if any? How smart do you think he is? Some of the time it means: Are you making the same choice as me? Are you going to validate the choices I’ve made, by making the same ones? It means loads of things. I don’t enjoy any of those questions. But, more than that, I don’t enjoy defending my perennially unpopular answer.

Truth is, in an ideal world, I would rather not send my child to school. I would rather home educate. People shudder and quickly frame this answer. I watch them quickly place me: quack, misfit, loony. Off on the far side of alternative. Possibly off on the far shores of creationist Christianity. Or just too anti-establishment for sanity. Something. They shake their heads and declare, “What about socialisation? Don’t children have to learn to deal with the real world?”

I’m usually so busy trying to backpedal myself out of the conversation that I just don’t have it. I don’t answer the questions (or objections) that I hear raised about home education. Even though it’s obvious to me that home education is a significant, real, important option, and one which too many parents simply do not consider. So in this post, and those following, I will deal with several issues about the matter of home schooling. Today I will write about issues around socialisation and interacting with others.

1. What about contact with other kids?

Home educating is not the same as locking your child up at home. It’s not the same as leaving your child to play unattended while you carry on as if they weren’t there. And it’s not the same as setting up a fake classroom for one (or two or three) in a spare room of your house, with the local park as the playground. Home educating parents generally network with other home educating parents, so that children can meet up for activities together sometimes. There are places outside the home called sports clubs and swimming pools and music or dance studios – all the places for what schools call “extra-curricular”. There is no reason that a home educated child shouldn’t have contact with other children. It may not be in groups of 5 or 10, rather 20 or 30 at a time, but as far as I can see, that’s a benefit, not a disadvantage.

2. Schools teach kids to socialise in groups. How do home educated kids learn this?

This is a perennial question. Apparently it is beneficial for children to be herded into a large institution where the day is structured into 40-minute intervals, usually marked by the ringing of a bell. For each interval they’re expected to share a room with around 30 other children of the same age, and submit to the authority of an adult. They are regularly and publically tested and graded. Twice daily they’ll be let loose in a playground with several dozen (or up to several hundred) other children, to work off any pent-up energies and frustrations built up during the periods of intensive concentration. A lot of this time is spent lining children up, getting them to sit down, stand up, listen and repeat.

I do not believe (most) schools (necessarily) teach socialisation. I believe schools (more commonly) teach conformity and submission to authority. I believe (most) schools teach children that it’s dangerous to challenge the norms (you may be punished, humiliated, teased, embarrassed or reprimanded). I believe schools teach that hierarchies are prevalent, and that you should do what you can to gain power over others. Even in the short time Kolya has been at pre-school, he has learned to bite, kick, spit, point an imaginary gun and declare “I will shoot you!” – none of which came from home.

The educator John Holt writes: “If there were no other reason for wanting to keep kids out of school, the social life would be reason enough. In all but a very few of the schools I have taught in, visited, or know anything about, the social life of the children is mean-spirited, competitive, exclusive, status-seeking, snobbish, full of talk about who went to whose birthday party and who got-what Christmas presents and who got how many Valentine cards and who is talking to so-and-so and who is not. Even in the first grade, classes soon divide into leaders (energetic and – often deservedly – popular kids), their bands of followers, and other outsiders who are pointedly excluded from these groups.“

3. But how will your child meet children from other backgrounds?

Truth is, children will not necessarily meet kids from other backgrounds at school. More often than not, schools end up clustering kids that are from similar backgrounds. Everyone I know is getting flustered about getting their kids into the “right” school for them: the school with the kind of demographic mix that the child will fit into, where there’s a mix of academics and sport that feels “right” for the child’s inclinations and abilities – and where the school’s price (whether public or private) fits the parents’ income bracket. More than that, schools create their own subcultures. Michael Oak becomes a marker for alternative; Bishops becomes a marker for highly privileged.

As South Africans, we’re all very sensitive about diversity. But it’s not something that can be forced, and I certainly don’t think schooling is a way of enforcing it. If anything, schools become places where kids form in-groups where they stick together with others they perceive as “like me”.

4. You can’t just keep your child at home and shelter him from the real world.

This is a curious notion – firstly that there is a “real world” and secondly that school is an introduction to it.

I encounter the myth of “the real world” quite often because I’m self-employed and work from home. I’m frequently told that this means that I do not either work or live in “the real world.” I’m not sure what constitutes living in this real world. A daily commute? A 9-to-5 schedule? A corporate dress code? Office politics? I concede that I may be fortunate to have escaped those dramas, but I don’t think it makes my world any less real.

I remember when I was at school; it felt like the real world was something we read about in books, something beyond the windows of our classroom. I pondered it in the library, or in art classes, where books and artworks seemed to offer some glimmer of the big world beyond the school building, and beyond the tight constraints of the 1980s, where we seemed to be stranded without any dynamism or excitement. I relished the occasional day on which an exceptional appointment or family commitment gave me an excuse to skip school. Trailing around the city with my mom felt much more real: here were people working, driving, moving, doing things. There was so much HAPPENING outside the school. So much not governed by bells and assemblies, uniforms and cycle tests.

5. But you’re not a teacher. How could he learn everything he needs to learn from you?

Think back on the most memorable lessons you learnt at school (if you can remember any). Maybe there was a project that stood out. Or a topic that got you particularly fascinated or interested. Perhaps there was a teacher that you connected with, that managed to see past the mass of faces in your class group, and saw you as an individual. Chances are that whatever you learnt didn’t come directly from that teacher’s knowledge, know-how or special qualifications. Chances are, it was a kind of alchemy that comes into play when you encounter a subject that resonates with you; a teacher that allows you the space to get interested, without feeling appraised or scrutinised; perhaps a light push of encouragement and plenty of being left to your own devices.

I’ve read the testimonies of dozens of families that have home educated their kids. There’s a recurrent theme: the less “school-like” the environment, the more interested and engaged, and self-directed, the kids’ learning is. Most parents seem to learn as they go along that less is more, and that they do not need to “teach” as much as lightly guide, offering enough stimuli along the way for kids to keep exploring and finding out for themselves.

The funny thing is that we see this as normal for pre-schoolers: the investigation and play and exploration is clearly a source of immense learning in the first three to five years. But for some reason, after that, we lose faith in the individual’s power to learn.

Obviously there are some specific skills that call for some formal teaching; from the reading I’ve done, it seems that many home ed families set aside an hour – maybe two – for more formal studies in the morning (maths, science and so on), and leave the rest of the day for informal learning. Another strategy is to network with other families, so that a collective of parents gets to share the responsibility for this teaching time. That would also ensure that if one parent is, say, uncomfortable with some subjects, they could get some teaching support (if necessary) from another family.

So what school are you sending him to….

Yes, well. The one thing I haven’t quite worked out is how working parents can home educate. I think there’s a massive gap – in general, but in this country in particular – for working parents who wish to home educate. The networking idea is one: say, five families with similar approaches could network and share the responsibility of home educating across their households collectively. That would mean the home educating parent could still work four days a week, and be present for the group of kids one day per week.

I’d love to see an organised web resource set up – something like what http://www.freshloaf.com offers for breadmakers; what http://www.allotment.co.uk offers for allotment holders and home gardeners; what http://www.mumsnet.co.uk offers for UK moms. The key to all of these sites is the possibility for networking via forums. At present, SA home education sites are clunky and underresourced, with too little possibility for networking. A comprehensive forum would help a lot.

So, no, we’re not home educating… not in the forseeable future anyway. But I’d love to see it as a possibility that more parents entertain as a realistic choice.

 

Challah

Last week, the bakery boys let me make a dozen or so challahs in their bakery. Which was fun (and nervewracking) but also a big learning curve: doughs do different things when you’re mixing them in a giant mixer, proofing them in a warm bakery and baking them in a big professional oven. It was also really interesting to get a pro baker’s input about the texture, colour, and taste of the bread.

So with many pointers from the lovely Martin, we re-did the challah yesterday, with a totally different dough: more egg, less water, less sugar and oil. It was almost a yeasted pasta dough. It wasn’t ready for baking by the time I had to leave, though, so I went home and tried the recipe at home. Loving the results:

Yesterday’s challahs… a touch underproofed, and possibly too tightly plaited, but still pretty:

I made four and put the other two in the fridge to proof overnight (largely because I ran out of baking time). Took them out this afternoon when I got back from the bakery – and then forgot them on the counter when I went to have a nap. Which turned into a four-hour nap (gloriously).

Despite considerable overproofing on the counter – and rubbish photograph below – these were delicious: sweeter than yesterday’s because of long overnight retardation, and also a much more brioche-like long, strandy crumb.

Passion fruit

Two years ago, when Kolya and I moved to this house, we received a housewarming gift of a little granadilla plant. It was about 30 cm high, and had a little card attached that said “Here is a passion fruit plant, so that your passions may bear fruit! Love Kathy and Peter.”

I procrastinated about planting it (as I often do) but eventually chose a spot next to the white gazebo structure that stands in our garden. This is where it got planted (shot is of garden a couple of weeks before I planted it).

This is what it looks like now:

And this is what’s on the table:

(32 granadillas from tree. 8 lemons from Woolies. Passion fruit cordial and curd coming soon. )

Thank you Kathy and Peter!!!

SA4QE 2012

Yellow paper day today.

Along with the dream life there is the life of ideas and half-ideas, of glimmerings and flashes and indescribable atmospheres of the mind. What we actually do in what is called the real world depends largely on how we live this unseen life in our inner world of words and images, songs and bits of poems, names and numbers and memories and dreams remembered and unremembered. Whether the song in our heads is Michael Jackson or Franz Schubert it is fitting itself to and reinforcing something in us that comes forward to meet it. That’s how art affects life; we use it to be more what we are and to become what is in us wanting us to become it.

from: The moment under the moment

http://www.sa4que.blogspot.com

He was almost on the point of crying, but he began to laugh.

“And that’s funny to you?” said the father.

“You don’t know what I’m laughing at,” said Boaz-Jachin. “Nothing is smooth and easy for me, and my life isn’t one girl after another — it seems to be one father after another. And how would it help you if I had a wrinkled face and clouded eyes and short hair? Would your daughter then become a nun?”

The father’s face relaxed behind the beard and the glasses. “It’s hard to let go,” he said.

“And it’s hard to hold on,” said Boaz-Jachin.

“To what?” said the father.

“The wheel,” said Boaz-Jachin.

“Ah,” said the father. “I know that wheel.”

from: The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

http://www.sa4qe.blogspot.com

British Airways: taking appalling service to new lows

British Airways never fails to amaze me. Even when I think I’ve encountered the worst of the worst, and lowered my expectations further, they continue to lower the bar. It’s quite something. Note to self: never, ever book with this airline again.
There was the time I approached the three staff members at the check-in desk with a question. They exchanged irritated glances among themselves, then glared at me collectively, until eventually one spat, “What do you want?”
It’s that irritated, imperious, who-the-F%#!!-do-you-think-you-are?! tone I’ve come to expect from BA staff.
There was the time that a 3-hour delay turned into a 24-hour delay that turned into a 48-hour delay. When the staff sneered and snarled at passengers – when they weren’t ignoring them totally. Where I watched them phoning around for hotels – 4- and 5-star hotels near the airport for staff, 1- and 2-star hotels an hour away for passengers. I got shouted at for booking an additional night at the hotel I’d been staying at – because it was one of the “better” ones that they were trying to reserve for staff rather than passengers.
My Christmas present from BA was that my 60,000 so-called Executive Club miles expired on the 25th of December last year. It had been impossible to use them; you can’t book less than 6 weeks in advance, but in fact anything less than a year in advance and there are simply no seats “for that class” to be had anyway. And you can’t use them to upgrade to a different class unless “there are seats for that class” available anyway – and in the ten years I’ve been traveling for publishing, there simply never have been.
But today takes the cake. Today I sign in to check in online, and discover that they’ve introduced a pricing system for choosing your seat from the seating plan. R316 for a standard seat. R379 for a “twin seat” (that’s just a normal seat sitting next to one person instead of two). And R632 for an exit seat.
Previously, you could choose a seat for no extra cost. Because, let’s face it, having the seating plan online and allowing passengers to make their own choice costs the airline NOTHING. They are not providing any special service here. They are not incurring any cost. Those prices are arbitrary, and are based on nothing more than what they think (or know) they can squeeze out of customers desperate to make a horribly unpleasant experience a fraction less uncomfortable.
Astonishingly bad, British Airways. Just nasty.

Potato bread, and a lovely soup

My potato bread for the ITJB challenge came out so unphotogenic that I can’t show you the loaves here. It would just be mean and unfair on them. They’re sweet and chewy and light, all the lovely things that potato bread is (that its name simply doesn’t convey).
So instead, here’s a lovely soup for this weird bit of summer where it’s hot but rainy but hot but still rainy.

Tomato and sweetcorn soup
A bag of tomatoes (italian), washed and halved
2 onions – I used red. Chop each into about 8 pieces
3-4 cloves garlic
about 60 ml olive oil (I didn’t measure; you just need enough to drizzle over generously)
salt, pepper and sugar to season
2-3 cobs of corn (or a tin of sweetcorn)
1-2 cups milk (or vegetable stock)
fresh basil leaves
extras for serving: some nice pesto and/or harissa, some nice bread

1. Preheat oven to about 200 deg C.
2. Put onions, garlic and tomatoes in an oven dish.
3. Pour olive oil over.
4. Season with salt, pepper and sugar.
5. Roast for about 45 to 50 minutes at 200 degrees Celsius. Mix it around every now and then.
6. Cut some sweetcorn off the cob. Add the kernels to the oven mixture and roast another 10 to 15 minutes.
7. Transfer it to a pot or bowl and blitz it together with the milk or stock. Season again to taste. Stir in the chopped basil leaves.