4: Pretoria Soer-Afrika (Ruth)

22.06.2007

Now we switch our blog language to english since we get many friends where we come and they are interested to follow our journey, too.

It is our last day in Pretoria, South-Africa. We intend to meet Maski, the ethiopian young woman and her mother Tezara for lunch in a shopping centre called Brooklyn Mall. We planned to walk the 45 minutes over there. In a local cafe we asked in which direction we should walk, but the female owner tell us not to do so. She explains that some serious crimes were done along this road during the last months. Instead she asks her son to drive us, which he does, and he refuses to take any money. On our way he tells us about crime statictics in South Africa. During the last three years 18.000 persons were killed in the country. We are chocked and happy to be driven to the shopping center.
Inside Brooklyn Mall we are relatively safe, but we guard our values very carefully. During the lunch Tezara and I have a lot to talk about. She works for Unicef, running some parent and children projects and schools in Ethiopia. She is interested to hear about the music groups I run for parents and children i Norway. I start asking her about her use of music in everyday life. She is in Pretoria for chemotherapy because she has cancer. Normally she likes light african rhythmic music a lot. After she got the illness her need for calming music is very strong and she has started also to listen to western classical music and some meditation music. She expresses a strong wish to learn how to use music in a self-healing process with guided instructions. She has reponded well to chemotherapy, but wants to work every day with her own process strengthening her immune system and listening to music at the same time. We quickly understand that here is an important connection and I offer to give her a free therapy session combined with teaching her to work on the method on her own. Within two hour later we are in her lodging. Our daughters provide som dinner while I work with the mother. It becomes a good process for Tezara and an important experience for me as well. When we say heartly goodbye after the dinner I tell her that I will bring her into my daily meditations.

Later the same evening we attend a huge drum circle outside Pretoria together with Riana and some friends, among them Maski. Thanks to information provided from Neill Jourdan, a South african music therapist that I talked to on the phone we were informed about the event. I turns out to be some vitalizing hours, drumming together with a mass of people, perhaps more than 200 men and women. There is a huge roof over us, and under it a big fire. There are no walls. The leading drummers are in the inner circle and all the other people surround them. The drumming rhytms are everywhere and we happily join in. Outside of the "tent" roof some fire acrobat dancers unfold themselves waving their burning "material" in all kinds of formations. It looks beautiful in the dark and I am certainly not tempted to try it.

For a while it is nice to be part of the mass drumming. At times the tempo rises to a big crecendo where the puls is dissolved for a moment until a new puls emerges. At times the tempo slows down. For a period of time a different rhythm with subdivisions in triplets is put on. This is cool. Suddenly one single drummer is heard in a call-and-response pattern. This rises the energy. I cannot see who is calling, sice it is dark underthe roof except from the fire light in the middle. To be part of such a big drumming mass without a visible leading person after a while gets somewhat boaring to me. It isn't really a group feeling, and you cannot influence such a big mass in any way either, so I think one can easily feel rather unimportant with ones contribution. But I join and observe and learn a lot from being there. One thing is most surprising to us. We see almost no people of colour drumming with us. They are all white south africans here. Why is that? Upon asking we are told that this is ment to be a low treshold event where everybody is welcome even if they never touched a drum before. It seem that the idea of african music is becoming a mass phenomenon among the white people here. And where do the really skilled drummers of black colour go? Certainly not here.

However Riana, our couch surfer host and her friends that have never done anything like this before are most exited about the event. Riana tell us that by hosting couch surfers she learns a lot about her home town. Each surfer has some spesical interest and looking how to find ways to meet these interests widens her horizon and gives her new possibilities. When we leave the drum circle we watch the satrs and moon on the dark, clear sky. How funny!! In this part of the world the moon is lying down and looks like a boat!!!!

The next morning 23. of June we get up very early. Riana drives us to the airport and we are on our way once again. We both feel relieved to get out of this country, where being in a kind of fear atmosphere and in a prison-like surrounding is so salient to us. We feel happy to come from Norway. We have however been told that Cape Town is nicer than Joburg (Johannesburg) or Pretoria. Still we are not shure if we want to go back here again. The best thing about South Africa we agree is the kind of solidarity that has deveoped among people to help each other conteract the criminal situation. We were touched by many peoples generousity to take us safely around. And of course Rianas huge generousity was the most wonderful gift to us. Together with Maski we gave her an air mattres for future couch surfers to sleep on. While we were in her house she insisted giving us her bed and she slept on the floor herself!! That was a bit too much, we think. We would have felt better if she took as good care of herself as a host as she took care uf us during our stay.