Wanda's story: the gift of breaking and building

So I'm aware of the fact that my life isn't often all that exciting. But that's okay, because thankfully I'm surrounded by people who are FASCINATING! And their stories are worth telling. Like my friend, Wanda's.

Earlier this year we met over honey nut lattes in the corner booth of Woolworths. For two hours she told me her story and made my mascara run. She asked me to write it down for her. I don't know if I did it justice, but I think it's important enough to pen down, no matter how wonky my words or filters may be.

Wanda Rous is one of those women I hope to be half of some day. Seriously, she's amazing. Here's her story...

For some reason the shoe polish stood out for me. The two jars were placed in front of the neatly-folded clothes in the cupboard - their labels facing perfectly frontward and neatly aligned to the edge of the shelf. Yes, I thought, yes. If there is shoe polish here, there is hope here. I glanced up at the corner where the cornices awkwardly overlapped. They hung skew, but it didn’t matter. They hung. Marika, Thabo and I never claimed to know what we were doing that morning when we stood on tiptoes and secured them to the ceiling. Anyway, those misaligned edges were sacred to me. Their crooked margins clashed against the neat brickwork and tidy interior. But somehow they were exactly what the room needed. A reminder that it wasn’t professionals who built this house, but a strange and brazen bunch who googled their way to the end. We were definitely more heart than skill, and that was exactly what their mismatched edges seemed to celebrate. One year later - we were finally there. One year of hauling supplies and recruiting friends and “Mommy, not another Saturday in Hammanskraal!” One weekend that seemed to spill into another, blurred by sweat and messy concrete. “We are doing this, my sweetie,” I would find myself saying to Lulu when her tired eyes begged a break. Sometimes those pep talks were just as much for me as they were for her. There were many times when I wondered if I had really heard Jesus - times when dear friends even questioned whether this was all worth it. Saturdays lingered in my lower back on Mondays, with next weekend’s appetite for new bricks and mortar in the back of our throats. School holidays came and went, and we stayed. The December beach house deposit was redirected to a dusty corner of Hammanskraal. The kids knew, even if Mom and Dad seemed to have lost their mind at times, there was no getting out of this thing - not until the paint was dry and the cornices hung skew. In October of 2013 I first saw the old lady sitting under a tree. Children - too many to count - kicked dust and plastic bags into the air. Mama Moletsi’s husband had passed years ago, and she just lost her fourth child - the baby of that child was the ninth grandchild to move into the house. The tin shack sagged behind her. Its condition was unbearable - even for these weathered eyes. The walls hardly stood, but leaned into one another, suspended by precarious hooks and cable ties. Where the roof should have touched the sides of the walls, there was a sizeable gap left between the edges - enough to let rain and dust and icy winter days inside. The floors were just dirt, where the children sat and played and slept in the evenings. A half-empty bag of maize meal sat in the dust as the only evidence of food. “They are living like cockroaches”, I couldn’t help thinking. It was terrible. A local NGO had wanted to help for some time, but they were always at a loss. They would walk away overwhelmed and paralysed by the depravity. In the end, they just decided to keep them alive. But somehow for Pete and I, those Woolies vouchers just didn’t seem enough. They needed dignity, and bread and formula would never give them that alone. If we were going to give them something beyond just staying alive, we would have to build them a house. But first, I needed a sign. A green light. A heavenly thumbs up, because this was not exactly something I was in the mood to do. I decided to write an email. And if someone replied, I’d consider it my ‘sign.’ It came in the form of one lonely email from one lone pastor. “I’m in,” he wrote. No pledge, no promise - other than being ‘in.’ But it was technically all I asked for. So with that, we started. And now one year later, we sat down around a freshly laid table to break bread and celebrate all that those crooked cornices represented. A finished work. A home. And a family finding new depths and definition. We ate pap and dipped our spoon deep into the pot of stew that friends and I brought for the occasion. It was a sweet moment in which the lines of culture and race became slightly more blurry, and the Kingdom took on skin and smiles over crumbs and a soup stained tablecloth.

Finally I plucked up the courage to ask what I had been wondering all these months: “Mama, tell me…your husband worked. Where did the money go? Did he not leave anything behind for you and your children?” After all, if he drew a salary for so many years, why were they living in such abject poverty? “Oh no,” she said. “He was a good man and he brought home all his money at month end. It was enough to buy some food to feed the children. After that, the money was finished.” I asked where he worked. He answered. My heart stopped; the hairs on the back of my neck literally began to tingle. “Who was your boss?” “Meneer de Vries,” she answered. In that moment I unraveled. I could see the face of Meneer (Mr.) de Vries in front of me, the smell of the office, the scuffle of the metal chair in which I sat five days of the week for so many years. “What was your husband’s name?” I was asking the question, but I already knew the answer. "Jan Moletsi” rolled off her tongue in a casual tone, but it landed sharply on my undone frame. Tears surfaced quickly, and I excused myself from the room. I needed to make a phone call. “Pete!” I said frantically, “It’s Jan Moletsi’s wife!” “Are you certain?” he asked. Go ask a few more questions just to make sure.” I handed the phone to my friend, Patrick, and went to get my answers. Eventually I returned, breathless. “Yes! It’s her! It’s really her!” When my weeping had subsided to manageable whimpers I went back inside. Now Mama and her son, Thabo, were arguing about something. “It was Wilma….no, it was Wanda….” They were evidently not in agreement about the name of the woman who worked with Baba Jan. “She drove a Mazda….no, it was a Suzuki”… While they argued I pictured my little white Mazda bakkie. I could see Jan in the passenger seat, where he took his place every afternoon at 5 and I drove him back home through the dusty township roads. I knew how thin that little brown envelope was, because I was the one who stuffed the cash inside at the end of the month and handed it into his callused hands. Jan Moletsi was Meneer de Vries’ right-hand man - quiet, loyal and dead-on faithful to the business for decades. He ran the ship there - without him, there would have been no business as usual. Baba Jan was indispensable. And yet, I often wondered why the envelope was so thin. When I spoke to my boss about it, the answer was always the same. “It’s enough. It’s fair pay. It’s what they get.” Something along those lines. And so I left it, because….after all, I was just the PA and he was the boss. I was simply doing what I was told. And quite frankly, I had already gone above the line of duty by offering my own time and petrol to drive Jan home every afternoon. It wasn't fair pay, but it was also true - it was the going rate for men like Jan. I waved a hand to stop their conversation. “Her name was Wanda,” I choked up. “I know that because…I am Wanda…and it was a Mazda.” I’ll never forget the fallen face of Mama Moletsi that day. It was as if her jaw detached, and the only utterance that managed to escape was - “aah”. The hour that ensued was full of laughter, tears, shaking heads and strolls down memory lane. We left later that day, closer than all those hours of bricklaying had cemented between us. Still tender and weepy, I promised to come back and deepen the ties that we miraculously discovered that day. Two days passed. Two days of crying, crying, crying. I couldn’t put my finger on it. I couldn’t find the right words to make sense of my shattered nerves. Tears overtook my tongue, as sorrow swept over me in waves. Lord, I am so sorry. I was just as much a part of that system. I can’t just blame my boss. I too am to blame. I handed him the envelope. I knew it wasn’t enough for a family to survive. I turned the blind eye - wrote it off as ‘the way it is here’, figured my small good deed made up for everything else. It wasn’t the government or the outspoken agents of apartheid that did evil; it was me. I’m not above it. I am part of it. Even now, in the dark recesses of my heart, I am part of it. I was weeping for something deeper and bigger than even my own state of the heart. I was crying about something more long-lasting than a political institution that dissolved twenty years ago by the grace of God. I was mourning for today. For the racist that still lives within me. For the woman who drops her eyes from the tattered man at the robot. Or the boss who underpays her painter. For the moments when I smile and listen, but within I am cold and hardened to a broken woman’s plight. I was crying not only for myself, but for the state of us all. The racist within each of us. The ways in which we perpetuate the system every day by what we do or don’t do, pay or don’t pay, see or choose not to see. I was broken because I didn’t even see the cracks in my own heart.

My silence kept them behind rusty corrugated iron walls all those years.

And then I understood. I needed to not know who she was. I needed to have nothing more than a “I’m in” one-man confirmation to take my first step in obscure obedience. I needed to fumble in the darkness and slog my way to the end, often wondering why? why this house? why this family? It had to be this way because it had be stay free. If I had known this was the house of my friend who suffered under an unjust system, I would have never known whether it was guilt or God who motivated us. We had to be moved by nothing other than compassion. And then I realised - that is how restoration works. That is what true healing looks like. If we’re going to remove the rubble of apartheid’s foundation from inside our hearts, we will need something more than a sense of obligation and remorse to motivate us. We will need honest love, with a no-strings-attached plan of action. We are all still broken: the generations that suffered under the crushing blow of a heavy-fisted institution, the so-little they can pass onto their children and children’s children. But also the people like me - the people who are poor in sight, who fail to see how our ignorance can still raise the heavy fist over the poor - time and time again. God healed me that day. He used some brick and mortar to do it. But as it turned out, the house was never the building project. I was. They were. We were. God help us, we all are.