Running for the bus

I took a bus tour of Cape Town today, one of those where you can hop on and off at several stops. I got off at the District Six museum, which commemorates this multiethnic, multireligious community that thrived peacefully until the government decided it was a whites-only area in the 1960's, razed it and displaced all the residents to townships. Oddly, they never built on the site, just leaving a scar on the land. There is a large map in the museum where former residents can come in and write down where they used to live. Now the government is considering moving some of these people back in. There's considerable support for it; one of the most striking things in the museum is a large wall where former residents have written their thoughts, and over and over is the refrain "I would love to return home." But I wonder if they can. They can build homes, but they can't rebuild that community, where people worked and worshipped and sent their kids to school all within a few square blocks. What they want back is their community, or even their sentimentalized memory of what their community was in the 1960s, and you can't get that back. Any reconstructed neighborhood will be subject to the same gentrification and property values and market forces that every other neighborhood contends with. Sometimes you can't recover what was lost. You just grieve it and start building again.

Then I left the museum and realized I had missed the bus by five minutes and another one wasn't coming for 1 hour 15 minutes more. I start heading to the next stop to meet it there, except we all know my sense of direction, and it is faltering. And then I see it, down the road: the big red double-decker bus, stopped at a traffic light. And I break into a light jog. And then a dead sprint. I am hauling tail down the street, and it is raining, and apparently American girls chasing down a bus are not a common sight here because I am the show of the boulevard. Cars are honking, people are laughing and yelling, I am yelling; I am bumping into fruit stands and women with babies; I am vaulting barricades like an Olympian and crossing six lanes of traffic as people hoot and clap, because I will not...wait...for this...bus.

And do I catch the bus?

People, I think you know that I do not. I am tempted to lie and say of course I do, I am victorious, but after a mile I was winded and the bus was pulling away from me and I gave up. When I finally gave in, flushed and breathless, the spectators cheered and applauded. I did all I could do: I waved, and took my bow. And spent 30 minutes relocating the original bus stop. I stopped for a minute at the court house, because there was a covered pavilion where I could duck in from the rain. A 12-year-old girl was a few feet away, watching her little brothers and sisters while her mom was inside. In her hooded sweatshirt and sneakers, she was like my 12-year-olds at home. Her sullenness was universal to 12-year-olds everywhere. I put on some lip gloss, and held it out to her wordlessly: the unspoken girl code that transcends race, culture and age. She took some, smeared it on her lips, and we chatted about school and parents and little sisters. I am a bridge-builder, a bridge-builder with MAC lip gloss.

This evening I went to St. George's Cathedral for the Feast of the Assumption, which commemorates Jesus' assumption into heaven. It includes the reading from Acts in which he tells the disciples they will be witnesses for him "in Jerusalem, and in Judea, and in Samaria, and to the uttermost parts of the earth." And in this multiracial church, in this country, where I received communion from an African priest, it seemed so appropriate to be reminded that for all humanity has done wrong, all the ways we have degraded ourselves and the Imago Dei within us, the Assumption tells us that God will receive us into His divinity for eternity. In the church where Desmond Tutu preached against apartheid as archbishop of Cape Town, it was about perfect. So I close with his words, engraved on the wall of the church:
Good is stronger than evil
Love is stronger than hate
Light is stronger than darkness
Life is stronger than death.
Victory is ours through Him who loves us.