ABSTRACT
She was lost. It had been a week since she’d arrived and she was still finding her way around. She seemed to have wandered to a place that looked like a cemetery. A group of people were sitting under a tree to the side of it; it looked as if they were having some kind of meeting. It was hot. Her clothes were covered in red dust. She was thirsty. Sweat was pouring down her back. As she walked closer, she began to recognise one or two of the people in the group. Vanessa was there. She was one of the women from the informal settlement – as they called it here. To her it looked more like the images of a squatter camp that she had seen on the news at home. She had met Vanessa earlier in the week; she was the organiser of the women’s quilting group. The NGO, with which she was volunteering, worked with the women in this settlement but she wasn’t sure yet what it was that they did with them. She had really warmed to Vanessa and her commitment to her group. She noticed Samakhab sitting under the tree. She had bought things in the spaza shop that Samakhab owned. When she first arrived in South Africa she had no idea what a spaza shop was but now she knew it was a little shop that seemed to sell everything. She knew that Samakhab was a foreigner, from Somalia she’d heard, but she didn’t know how he came to be here. She wasn’t sure how she came to be here for that matter. It had seemed such a good idea last year, given everything that had been happening in her life. The ending of her relationship with Paul. A new head teacher at school. Significant changes in her own role. More responsibility. The idea of taking some time out from work suddenly became very appealing and the new Head was agreeable to her doing so.
