Dead dogs and hope

Today was disappointingly unproductive, though we got to site quite late after finishing our preparations in the CAD lab. We met our volunteers on site and talked through our ideas, but didn’t have a firm plan of action. The bodies of two dead dogs sticking stiffly out of checkers bags disturbed us. Ultimately we did use the time constructively, though, to explore the beerhall surrounds, introduce ourselves and our project to whomever we met along the way and exchange information with our ‘business-card/info-collectors’. These explain briefly what we’re doing and have a portion for people to fill in which gets torn off and kept by us so that we can later on contact people about the launch or for help. We met a dynamic woman called Lizzy at the take-way in the nearby row shops who bubbled on about making a difference and was generally very supportive. In the same shops, Guy and I also found a tyre supplier, Nelson, who will sell us old tyres for R10 each. We met up for lunch at the library with Hannah. The exciting breakthrough is that we seem to have found a youth councillor at the council offices, where we went to book a venue for next week’s presentations, who is able to get our site cleaned. Elmah promised us that she knew the right people ‘on the ground’ and that in a week the beerhall would be unrecognisable. This will hopefully remove one of our biggest hurdles and will mean that we can give up on trying to get help from Ekurhuleni and actually start on site when the programme specifies – which is in a week! While the others glued up the week’s newspapers, Kasia and I walked up Job Maseko Street distributing the flyers we’d made for our paired project. Our flyers (which, because of a wrong letter, read in isiZulu ‘Thandi the Tree’ rather than ‘Love a tree’ until they were corrected!) ask people to contact us if they would like to take care of a tree on the portion of pavement outside their homes. We want to plant one tree on either side of the road, creating some kind of zone of difference (and thus combining our two research topics, trees and pavement zones). Gratifyingly we immediately got an sms back from someone called Kibas who said he’d like a tree next to his stall – hopefully we’ll get some more over the next few days and then we’ll have to pick two ‘lucky’ tree lovers. Kasia and I also managed to sell an advert in next week’s newspaper to Pinky’s Fruit and Veg where I bought some beautiful ripe tomatoes before we met up with the others who had found some mural artists, Nico and Veli, painting at Ekasi who may well be able to help us.