Sylvia's Journal

I found my way to an informal Quaker worship group in Pretoria, not that far from where I live. It was at a private residence – the official Meeting House is in Johannesburg, some 55 km away. To avoid long drives every Sunday the Pretoria group meets at people’s homes every two weeks.

The house was lovely, old, with tin ceilings and old doors, the ones with the top and bottom part opening separately – a feature you find in old Dutch homes – so you can hang over the bottom and chat with your neighbor without opening you house. Unlike the area where I live, with its high walls, electric fencing and people inside being tightly shut out from the outside, where security companies making fortunes from fear, this house was in a neighborhood that appeared to be without fear: gates were missing or open, doors to the street were open, no electric wires nor placards posted in the grass on or in the walls that indicated which security company was in charge. It was in a place where one could imagine the existence of a community.

Inside was also neat. It was refreshing to be in a house without electronics, no sign of TVs, computers, iPads and such. There were two comfortable couches, a table made from a traditional African resting bed with several unmatched vases filled with garden flowers that were picked by kids I imagined.  It was a joyous and happy place.

I was warmly welcomed by a small group – maybe there were 15 in all, five of them kids. There were other visitors, a retired couple, from Concord Friends Meeting in New Hampshire, on a two year Peace Corps stint as teachers in a primary and secondary school in a village some distance away.

A young African woman, who accompanied her partner to the silent meeting from time to time, had noticed, as I had, that there were lots of grey hairs in the room. I also noticed quite a few Birkenstocks or look-alikes, very few painted toenails (mine and the hostess), and mostly white folks in comfortable and sensible rather than fashionable dress.

It was mostly a silent meeting and I liked it; not quite the feeling of weightlessness of yesterday in the salty spa pool, but a feeling of being in tune with the universe. A few people spoke but I didn’t get the messages the words behind the words and so I let them pass like riverboats coming into sight and then disappearing from sight, without a trace.

I commented on the excellent coffee we were served afterwards, with real speculaas cookies, and was promptly given a bag of coffee to take back to my apartment that doesn’t have coffee making equipment. I protested to no avail.

Two people had Dutch roots, one had left Friesland with her family when she was nine – going on a four week journey to the other part of the world in 1954. I told her I used to read books, when I was about that age, about kids emigrating and how jealous I was, living in the house and town of my grandparents, something I found very boring. One book I remember as if I read it yesterday, ‘the boot vertrekt zonder Claartje’ (the boat leaves without Clara) about a family moving to Canada.  The funny thing is that this 9 year old is now a very root-bound pensionada  (‘retired spare part’ she called herself) who hasn’t moved much since long ago while I, feeling so root-bound in my youth, are travelling around the world as if there is no tomorrow.