This is the story of how we begin to remember

The people of South Africa have an unmatched flair for life. Their world is a captivating melody of sights, sounds and smells. Their unfathomable needs are masked by their strong faith and infectious love for one another; a love I have been blessed to witness first hand every single day.

The Kloof parish donates food for 10-12 food parcels each week and Baba Benjie has graciously let me assist him in delivering the parcels to families in the valley.
Every Friday we load up the back of the car, turn the music up and we’re off….deep into the valley. Our first stop: Matta (age 13) and Sma’s (age 21) house then down the road to pick up Andile and Zoleka (both 11).

The four strikingly beautiful Zulu children help us each Friday and I have fallen in love with them at an indecent rate. They have easily become my stand-in cousins. Their giggles are infectious and the more and more time I spend with them the more I realize that despite all the homesickness, all the challenging and exhausting days, just how much I love living in South Africa.

Our journey through the valley takes our car beyond traditional civilization lines, through paths that pedestrians would have a hard time navigating to roads which have no name. We go up wild dirt paths which barely constitute as a roads and down steep inclines to a place unlike any I have ever been before. Abject poverty surrounds us.
As scattered structures woven together with mud and sticks, passion, grief, sweat and tears begin to appear so do little bodies.

Running, racing, battling to be the first to reach our car. Their faces put an explanation behind the powerful pulsing of love in my veins. The red dust which is immeasurable taints everything from the clean clothes on the laundry line to the smirks on the children. Chickens and goats scamper to make room for our car, a luxury that will most likely never be a reality for the faces starting back at me through the glass windows.

Although many wear the duress of their lives in the lines on their faces and their broken hearts on their sleeves an impressive veneer of resiliency encases them. The reality of life is so different than that of my own and I feel so lucky to be afforded the chance to cross the barriers… to reach out and touch those deemed untouchable.

The Gogos, the mothers, the uncles and the babies fill my Friday afternoons, my life and my heart with such love.

I leave the valley at a crossroad of thoughts. Somewhere north of rhyme and reason, just south of details and structure, slightly west of convention and customs and east of old and new. I leave the valley remembering what it is to love, to hold hope so close to the heart and to feel passionate.

I leave the valleys on Fridays full.

Full of understanding that this world will never be what I want it to be, but though kind actions it can be transformed into a world where love flows freely and friendships are not bound by limitations of money, status or skin.


My food parcel route babies....




I do what I do because of theses faces