Meet Patrick

[Note to friends/family: for some reason the dates on my pictures have been corrupted (and have jumped ahead by a month). I'm trying to sort it out, but for now please check out the April entries!]

This is Bongani's uncle, who made our trip truly special. I was a little taken back when this little man 1200km out into the real South Africa stuck his hand out and said, "Patrick" - at first I thought Bongs must have told him my name ahead of time - but we learned that during apartheid the Afrikaners refused or were unable to pronounce Xhosa names, so they gave all blacks English names and made them use those whenever they were around (some have Afrikaans names too). That he immediately used his Christian name made me sad at first, and I wanted to learn his Xhosa name, but before long it became really fun to call each other Patrick back and forth, something neither of us had ever been able to do.

He built this house himself, with help from family, out of mud and sticks. It has many beautiful rooms, all with high ceilings and open doorways between them, and each room is painted with incredibly bright pastel colors (made with a paste of pigment sort of like chalkdust and water). The floors, like the floors of the two uninhabited houses at Bongani's place, are made of cured manure, which acts as an insulator and helps keep the house warm in the winter...itis not gross at all! Between all the mud and poop, though, there are almost no perfectly flat surfaces or straight angles in the house; everything is curved, slanted, uneven, organic, and welcoming.

Patrick is a janitor at school for deaf children, and as such is one of the more successful people in the village. He speaks a good bit of ISL and Xhosa sign language, never wears shoes, and although one leg is fairly crippled, he walks 6 km back and forth every day on his homemade cane. He's calm, well adjusted, very grandfatherly, and although he could't stop giggling about his Umlungu guests (oom-loong-goo, meaning white person, or in a more broad sense, native English speaker) he welcomed us into his home as if we were family. He was the only one in the house who spoke Enligh, but as his house was also home to kittens, puppies, a baby cow, a sow, a baby pig, and his baby granddaughter, Nlala (Lala for short), we spent as much time with this big family as we could.

The notion of Ubuntu is an important component to African philosophy, and one of Mandela's explanations goes something like a "the stranger arriving in a village need not worry about food or shelter," and Patrick embodied that spirit. Like everyone we met in the village, he lacked a drop of cynicism, and genuinely opened up his home to us, not to mention the fact that instead of asking, he and the others we met spent the whole week trying to give us gifts.