Watch them fly, Sundays

Sundays we have off. Well…almost. A lie-in means up at 8 instead of 6, and by 9 you can already hear the tapping of keys as people desperately try to cram in that extra hour of vital work before they half-reluctantly surrender their computers for beach shorts and head off to the ocean for the day. These are the efficient ones that make a downpayment in order to secure the afternoon off. Others take the morning more slowly, mortgaging precious free time on the promise of repayments with interest in the evening, falling asleep gently as the sun sets over the papers and sticky notes and pens strewn haphazardly across the table on the verandah.

This week Sunday brought glorious sunshine – the type you can lie in and feel your bones get warm. Sunshine is my sustenance and my nutrition. Some small part of my mind has grasped firmly onto that mantra of childhood – nothing can go wrong when the sun is shining – and has refused to let go of it. Days feel longer, my body feels lighter, everything is more peaceful and bittersweet for the knowledge that each hour takes you farther from the hard work of the week before, yet draws you closer to the sharp shock of Monday morning. I appreciate the rest. I appreciate the stillness. We swam, we talked, we ate, we laughed, we sunbathed, we dove, we sang. We walked, we slept, we read, we snorkelled, we took photos, we played, we ran. It saved me from myself and I was grateful.

Still Monday knocks impatiently and we must answer. E-mails, phone calls, papers, printing, visitors, coffee, meetings, interviews, schedules, proposals, work plans – much of our work is not dissimilar to that of any other office. Except for the field trips. These are the moments I work for. The points where I get to see aid in practice, changes before my very eyes, contributing to making that dire situation in an IDP camp incrementally, and often drastically, more bearable day by day.

Nowhere else have I seen that more than today. Today, I visited a dumpsite. That’s right -  a horrible, dirty, smelly, waste, faeces and debris-ridden dumpsite.  Pigs were eating the rubbish, getting fed off the grease and fat and muck that overflowed. It was the least glamorous place I have ever visited in my life. And here, in surely one of the inner circles of hell, the organisation I work for was making a real, tangible difference. Our mission? To spread out biodegradable bags of enzymes which break down solid sludge into liquid waste and improve the bacterial oxidation of the dumpsite. In other words, to make the mounds of poo smell less foul.

Sometimes your mind plays tricks on you. Sometimes what you see takes time to register its truth. Out of one eye I saw our beach from yesterday: I saw windbreakers set up for families to have picnics, I saw kids playing, I saw them throwing beach balls around. I saw mums and dads  dozing contentedly in the sunshine. I saw barbecues and campfires. I saw dogs playing the the sand. I saw people collecting shells and holding them up to the sun to see the colours gleam off the surface.  I saw sandunes stretching into the horizon.

And out of my other eye I slowly took in the scene around me. The windbreakers were shelters, made out of scraps of tarpaulins and bed sheets. The kids were moving barefoot among the waste, throwing old shoes and bits of broken appliances to each other, hoping to find anything of value. The mums and dads were exhausted  searchers who had been hunting all day in the burning sun and were now sleeping on top of the mounds of rubbish. The barbecues and campfires were smouldering piles of debris which were being burnt to clear waste. The dogs were pigs. The people collecting shells were in fact collecting glass and holding it up to the light to see what it came from, how thick it was, and how useful it might be. And the sandunes were in fact miles and miles of sewage heaps stretching as far as the eye could see.

There are people in this world with so little that even a nasty, polluted dumpsite offered the chance to find better than they had. I understood why those enzymes could make such a difference.

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