22. Hard Times

In September 2001 I went to the States for three weeks to visit friends and family. On my return to Cape Town I went through a series of hard times over the next few months.
I had just happened to be in the States during September 11th but it was actually pretty funny because, in my absence, there were all sorts of rumors going around Cape Town about me. Some of the kids thought that I was in one of the planes that had crashed into the twin towers.
The other funny rumor branched out of me getting a TB test while I was in the States and testing positive to being exposed to it.
I did have the test, and during the time that it took to get the chest x-ray results back, I had told one of my friends back in South Africa about it, and he told some of the kids and the rumor was out that I actually had TB.
Well, I tested negative but the talk going around Cape Town was that I had TB and wasn’t going to be able to come back. Some of the kids mixed up the two stories and thought that I had died from TB.
Anyway, I had a warm greeting when I walked back onto the streets of Cape Town. Kids ran up to me, almost as if I was a ghost and excitedly screamed, “YOU’RE ALIVE!!!!” It was very funny! I had to explain over and over again that I WAS NOT in the airplanes that crashed into the World Trade Center and I DID NOT have TB.
The funny thing is there are still some kids that still believe that I was in the airplanes and I just managed to survive somehow.
One day, two years after the whole thing, a kid proudly told a friend of his that I had never met before, about how I was there during all that stuff and how I was in the airplane, but I managed to escape. I guess they have pretty active imaginations!
With all of that said, I was happy to be back and it was nice to be so warmly received.
Near the end of September, I came into contact with a kid named Jonathan. Jonathan was about eighteen years old but he looked like he was about fourteen. This was mostly because he was extremely sick with a terrible case of TB that he had endured for years.
His biggest problem was that he had started and stopped the medication without finishing it so many times that he had become immune to the medication.
When I met him, he was living on the streets and was at a very bad stage of the illness. He was extremely weak, skinny and would get out of breath at the slightest exertion of energy. Because he started and stopped the medication so many times, most of the clinics and hospitals knew him well and were not too keen on taking him in.
His health got worse and worse and finally I decided to try and find some place for him to stay.
He said he had family in the Cape Town area so we decided to go and ask if he could stay with them. When we made contact with his family they told us that he didn’t care about himself and he didn’t take care of himself and it was his own fault that he was sick.
They would not let him stay there.
They even went as far as to tell me not to contact them if he died because they don’t even care.
With nowhere else to take him, I decided to let him stay at my place until we could find somewhere else for him to live. He lived with me for a little over two weeks and in that time I got to know him really well.
He was really an amazing kid that had experienced a lot in his life! He had the most peaceful and gentle disposition.
I remember the first night he was at my house. I had put a mattress out for him, in front of the TV and I went into my room to go to bed. Right as I laid down, I heard him start to cough.
The coughing soon turned into violent hacking, which then turned into terrible gagging noises. It sounded like he was dying!!
I jumped up and ran into the room and he was laying there as calm as ever, with beads of sweat all over his face. I asked him if he was okay and he said, “Yeah! I am fine!! This happens every night if I eat anything after 6:00.”
He smiled and then laughed at me for thinking that he was dying or something and then went on coughing and hacking, until he eventually threw up.
Then he was able to peacefully sleep. That was pretty much a nightly routine.
Because he was so weak, he would get out of breath at the slightest thing. We tried going for a walk around Muizenberg one day to kind of “get out” of the house a bit and he had to stop about every five steps to catch his breath. I finally just put him on my back and carried him around.
Needless to say, our walk was cut a little short that day.
He was incredibly weak and would get totally out of breath just walking up the short flight of steps to my flat. He was just like a little old man.
He had a great sense of humour though, and I teased him about how he was like a grandpa; his wisdom and life experience for his age only made him seem all the more older. That is when I started calling him “Madala”, which is the Xhosa word for “old man”.
From that day on he would tease with me in return and call me “my son” or “my boy”. It was pretty funny.
I really enjoyed Jonathan’s company and I loved listening to his stories. He told me about how he used to be a runner for one of the biggest gangs in Cape Town. Not only that, but he was one of the few people that could actually call up the infamous leader of the gang and talk to him.
The gang leader knew him by name.
He told me different stories about when he was a runner and showed me his scars where he had been shot several times. I can still hear him graphically describing how it feels to get shot and the sensation of having a warm bullet going through your body.
He also told me about the point when he decided to change his life. He said he asked Jesus into his life and that is when he decided he didn’t want to be a gangster anymore. He got out of the gangster life, and stayed out.
After almost three weeks of Jonathan staying at my house, we finally found a hospital that was willing to take him and he went to stay there.
I was glad that he was finally in a hospital where he could be properly looked after but I questioned how much longer he was going to live.