Holding Up the Sky by Sandy Blackburn-Wright Page B

not to have broken a bone but I was bruised and the worse for wear for many days after that.
    From the Drakensburg we drove to Port Elizabeth, or PE as it is known, my dear brother agreeing to take me to see Msizi on our trip down the coast. Msizi was in PE for work, so we met up for lunch at the beachfront. Despite my heartbursting excitement at seeing him again, it was a little awkward to be reunited in public and in front of my brother, whom he had never met. After an inadequate greeting we found a place to eat. Msizi asked if he could choose the table, my brother recalls, one at the back of the room facing the door, so Msizi could see anyone who entered. Over lunch he told us that things had been quite tense in the last month or two, with many detentions and a lot of harassment. He suspected he was next on the list; one of the reasons he was working in PE at present was that he felt too visible and accessible in the small town of Grahamstown. My brother later told me how surreal this all seemed to him whereas I seemed to be talking it all in as naturally as my next breath. As he cast around for appropriate lunchtime conversation Jon was struggling to see what Msizi and I had in common.
    We stayed overnight in PE, with Jon making himself scarce that evening to give Msizi and I a chance to talk. As wonderful as it was to see him, essentially nothing had changed. We still felt as strongly for each other as we always had but saw no way to take the relationship forward–couldn’t go forward, couldn’t go back. We didn’t know when we would next see each other, living so far apart, so it was another heavy-hearted farewell.
    The next day, Jon and I headed down the garden route towards Cape Town where we stayed for a few fabulous days. From Cape Town, I few back to ’Maritzburg and Jon few on to London. I was so grateful to Jon for visiting me in South Africa–it was hard to explain what my life was now like and why I had chosen it to be so, without being able to show him around. I now felt I had had that chance. He had met some of the important people in my life and our road trip had given us time simply to be together.
    Back in ’Maritzburg, I soon settled down into the workshops we were running. They were a combination of youth leadership programs for young black teenagers and dialogue and development programs which brought together black and white high school groups, one from town and the other from the township, to meet and work together. We also had a constant flow of families with us who had been displaced by the violence in the area. We would feed and clothe them temporarily while assisting them to find more permanent accommodation and new schools, and generally help them to begin the long process of rebuilding their lives. The week after my return from Cape Town a family of six showed up one morning, their home having been torched by a mob the night before. The children, in particular, had been shocked into silence by the experience. Amazingly, their hair began to show patches of grey from the trauma. The situation in the township of nearby Howick was deteriorating and given our involvement with the township’s high school in Mpophomeni, we would become the first port of call for many feeing the area in the weeks to come.
    The first dialogue and development program I set up and co-facilitated with Robbie was between Hilton College and Smero High School. We had invited eight boys from each school to join us for the weekend. On Friday afternoon, Robbie and I went to the township to fetch the group from Smero while Steve waited at Phezulu for the bus from Hilton College to arrive. We returned an hour later with a kombi full of nervous lads who had never stayed in a white area, let alone bunked in with white boys the same age. We parked the kombi in the carpark by the gate and began to unload. Each of the young men had brought very little with him, some holding only a plastic bag with a change