Foundations for three houses showed just above ground when our team arrived at Orange Farm Township outside Johannesburg. I was assigned to help build House #143 from a stack of concrete blocks and a pile of sand sitting in front of the new owners’ tin shack.

As we drove up in a van over rutted clay, William and Naomi came out to greet us, their daughter Mbali riding in a cloth sling on Naomi’s back. I was excited about being in Africa, of being able to participate as a volunteer six months into retirement; the hands-on of concrete block and nails recalling for me summer construction jobs I had while in school. I had been blessed living all my life in America; now it was time to “give back.”

We wheelbarrowed dusky yellow sand, mixing it with cement powder poured from brown paper bags. Mounding the mix in a circle, we made a lake in the middle with water from the neighborhood spigot. Caving in the edge a half-shovelful at a time, the plan was to run out of lake and shoreline at the same moment. Then stepping in shoes and all, turning over shovelful after shovelful, we had mortar.

The local workers liked their mortar pretty wet, to fill spaces between block sizes that didn’t match up. Depending upon which machine they came from, the blocks varied, pressed two or three at a time out of portable electric equipment filled with concrete mixed by hand. The few Americans on the crew with masonry construction experience shared a belief, based on sound engineering principles, that the wetter the mortar, the weaker the wall. We discussed this among ourselves, shaking our heads. But we were working guests in a local culture sustained by hand labor, so we did it the African way. Besides, the house next door built this way seemed to be standing just fine.

We had brought work gloves from home for handling the blocks and mortar. I gave an extra pair to William during a break.

“The lifestyle in your country must be very different,” he said as he put them on. He was facing partly away from me, working his fingers into the stiff canvas and leather.

“Americans depend on machines; we’re not so used to handwork,” I replied. It was a cop-out; I didn’t really know how to respond. It felt embarrassing, pointless even, to talk about American addiction to cars and videos, standing in front of his 100 square foot shack with no plumbing.

On the second day, William invited me into his shack. Besides the gesture of hospitality, he had seemed to want me to appreciate the magnitude of change he and his family were experiencing. He volunteered he was embarrassed his wife had to live in a tin shack and that he was glad to be getting a house.

William is a gentle man, soft-spoken, with light brown eyes and quiet determination. Before being laid off at a Johannesburg plastic foam factory, he commuted four hours one way to a ten-hour job. Now he sells kitchen utensils he makes from sheet metal. Our crew ordered pots to take home. Making them at night and still working with us on his house each day, he got them done before the project ended.

One day, exhausted, he just sort of melted in a heap right in front of the mortar pile. I went over to where he lay on his back, eyes closed. As a physician, I figured people would expect me to do something.  Kneeling next to him, I thought he looked healthy, just completely spent. He needed magic, not medicine; I touched him lightly three times in the middle of his chest. It seemed like a good number. Anyway, he got right up and went back to wheeling sand.

William wore his work gloves to the dedication of the nearly completed house built for Louisa, some blocks over. Rain fell during the ceremony, shortening speeches and clattering on the new metal roof.

Louisa’s house was packed with people eating pizza and drinking warm soda pop. William was inside, looking out a window; no glass yet, just the brown painted metal frame mortared into a rectangle of absent block. Of all the people there, he seemed to be someone I needed to talk to, a person with whom I needed some kind of closure. I took some pizza and leaned against the wall alongside him, feeling through my T-shirt the roughness of concrete block, damp from drying mortar. I noticed he was still wearing his gloves. Maybe he had already eaten. Maybe he didn’t care and just ate pizza with his gloves on.

Without warning he looked at me and said, “I will never forget you.” Here it was: thanks and a separation statement, said in words that could never go back, words that dug deep into the spongy terrain of my uncertain feelings, and stuck.  I was new at volunteering, and I was never very good at thanks. Really thanking somebody puts you both on the line, like telling someone you love them; high stakes.

Besides, there was the way William said it; very quietly, very seriously, very finally. It transcended thanks. He had blessed me. In five words, all I had brought of myself and all to which I would return had been encompassed in a single benevolent gesture. As we stood there by a window in his country, in his township, in a life as distant socio-economically and politically as could be from mine, he had acknowledged without reserve the whole of me, my return air ticket to Chicago in a safety pouch under my belt.  He did it easily, as if no one else were in the room, as if we stood outside at the red dirt crossroad preparing to part for good.

I wasn’t ready to be blessed. In fact, I was pretty much pumped up with my own contribution to this project. I had gained new insights and made new friends during an intense experience. I felt myself to be a blessor, not a blessee. I had a stack of blessings stored up, more than I needed, and I was coming to Africa to give back, not to get blessed.

But with William’s blessing came forgiveness. He was telling me as the voice of my incomplete cross-cultural journey that it was acceptable to him, even expected, for me to feel confused, for each of us not to see each other again, for our lives to pick up later where we had left off. His words meant to me that despite the naïvely altruistic slant I came with, the flow of working together had carried us both along; that each of us had been given this time; that truly experiencing this moment is what life is about.

While we worked alongside William, Naomi and their friends, I had not been able to really connect with why I and not someone else had come; why certain people in our volunteer group seemed more immediately able to immerse themselves in the experience; why some people wept at circumstances which seemed to me to be merely confusing.

And then William blessed me, and I knew. He just went ahead and did it, in a little sacrament of five words with pepperoni and orange pop, in a five hundred square foot building full of the smell of curing concrete and the noise of children with pink and yellow beads in their hair. Rain dripped off the metal roof into red dust along the side of Louisa’s house. William waited, no apologies.

“Thank you,” I said. “I will not forget you either.”  He slowly removed his gloves, and we shook hands.

 

In The Lutheran, online edition, 2003.

In The Lutheran Digest, 61, 1, 2013.