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August 11, 2004, A Very Special Clinic, by Jim
There was a clinic today in Underberg. It was for people with all sorts of disabilities, physical, mental, emotional. We had just learned of this special rehab clinic, the second last of the year, with the next and last in October, and we knew that we had to get the people of Ndawana there.
So we covered the hills and back roads and picked up 28 people in two bakkies and one car that Tim and Albert brought with them from Cape Town. I was driving the blue bakkie, which has only one passenger seat but a long box. In the passenger seat was Petrus, a former policeman of the apartheid era and in some eyes a thoroughly bad character. We left his wheelchair along the way as the bakkie filled up. In the back were 14 or 15 people, all crammed together, with one or another sort of disability. Old men and women, a young woman whose child seemed to have cerebral palsy, a man who seemed mostly to be blind.
As the last person climbed in, with much help from me and others, I thought of how sad they were, riding in a cold, hard bakkie with their various infirmities. And then someone began to sing very softly, and others joined in. It wasn’t the strong, powerful Zulu singing; it was soft and somehow sad. But they were singing. And I realized it was like the slave chorus from Nabucco.
As I moved behind the driver’s seat, the singing began to swell, and as we drove away along the dusty road, I could hear the singing, and my eyes filled with tears. There are still tears 12 hours later as I write this and think of these courageous people, in pain and unable to do so many things, sitting in the cold singing together, these people of Ndawana.
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