Being in Blikkiesdorp

Every Saturday we head into Blikkiesdorp to spend a greater part of the morning and afternoon with some of the children who live there. Preparation begins at the beginning of each week, using the lessons we have learnt from the past weekend. I build the lesson-plan for the following Saturday, and on each Saturday, things never go exactly as I "planned". Each week is something different. I find that I am exhausted and often quite spaced-out because I am challenged both physically and emotionally.

On a physical level, I have to manage the lessons and try and ensure that each of the 6 children are not too distracted by their external environment. Essentially there are only two of us who are trying to accomodate about 50 other children AND work specifically with 6 children. I am constantly aware of keeping calm and energised despite the sometimes overwhelming action around us. In one scene, some young people were playing soccer about 10 meters to the right of our tent, a volunteer working with us was playing with about 25 toddlers directly in front of our tent, and to the left of us, about 3 meters away, two women were physically fighting each other whilst several other children looked on, their faces and bodies frozen in the heat.

I remember allowing my eyes to perform a panoramic mental picture. There was sound all around us. Young boys engaged in team sport, children laughing, two women shouting at each other, the thudding sound of fist on flesh, and then the silence of the children watching the violence unfold. This scene to me remains a haunting reminder of the myriad realities that are constantly unfolding.

On an emotional level Blikkiesdorp not only challenges me because it is one of the starkest, barren pieces of land I have ever seen, which saddens me deeply but also because the obvious injustice of its existence brings to the fore massive socioeconomic cracks. There is a fissure in Delft (Blikkiesdorp is situated in Delft) and it exists somewhere between nowhere.