Saturday

The air was thick with moisture as Kristal navigated the combi, our 8 passenger van, through the washed out, red dirt roads of Masoyi. The community of 250,000 live with their chickens and goats huddled under tin roofs. Every hut, large or small, humbly asserts its own claim to the breathtaking view of the valley around Legogote where the voluptuous hills are punctuated with mango trees straining under the weight of their ripening fruit. The clouds hung low over the mountain tops making the sky simultaneously intimate and ominous. The beauty somehow absorbs the real state of things; somehow it blooms around the sadness of the passing funerals.
After successfully manipulating the combi around impassable corners and over roads so puckered “pothole” seems laughable, we arrive at Mxolisi’s. Following the expert example of Lacey and Kristal I make a beeline for Mxolisi’s gogo. I give her my bravest impression of SiSwati pleasantries: a South African handshake and a lame sauobona!, all the while awestruck by the easy way my other two traveling companions can move the words around their mouth without spitting or choking. We then sit down and engage this lovely babushka-clad gogo in a language free conversation: we nod and smile and point and look around, Mxolisi too shy to say much.
Before long we’re drinking tea and eating mangos (skin on!), slurping and grinning with Mxolisi’s aunt, as orange juice splashes on our skirts and sticks to our cheeks. Gradually family members drop by and the house is buzzing with aunts and babies and cousins and uncles. “Grrrrreeet them, each and every one!” the aunt says firmly to a shy cousin as she pats and rocks this brand new bundle of baby in her lap. “My first grandson!” she tells us proudly.
The smiles are easy and quick; the laughter robust and genuine. It’s hard to believe that out of the same smiling lips and jovial mannerisms we will also hear about the pain.
“AIDS is alive!” she tells us somberly.
And it’s true. In this family Mxolisi was orphaned at age 12 and now lives with his gogo (grandmother) and aunt – who has watched 4 siblings die. “We are dying!” she tells us. “I must teach these kids to cook and clean now, because who knows what happens to me.”
Never have I seen death and life woven together into the picture of what they actually are: one whole, a cycle. The first inevitable upon initiation of the latter. No one is seeking a handout or a cure. Or perhaps they are. Regardless they see clearly the correlation: Death is life.
I’m not sure what to do in a place where to die in your twenties is not considered young, in a place where cholera kills, in a place where the future is assuredly a painful place. I’m not sure what to do in a place where people find such courage and bravery in the face of such scarcity. I guess I’ll just slurp my tea, thankful for patient teachers. Teachers who will reveal the mystery of colliding worlds: mine ripe with potential, mango juice on my face; the other wise and joyful, loss etched into hers.