Rose Abroad: Weekend Away, Part 1: Youth Talent Show

FRIDAY

Two weeks ago I set out for a long weekend visit to two PCVs’ sites near Weenen Town and Tugela Ferry. Three uneventful taxi rides landed me in Ezintendeni, a small township outside of Weenen. The township was covered in dusty roads and cinderblock houses. Just beyond the hilly township, the well-irrigated fields of white South African-owned farms bring meagre seasonal employment and abundant produce to the area.

I was there to calm Allie’s nerves and lend a hand in her first event as a PCV—a youth talent show designed to re-introduce the community to one of the youth development organizations she works for.

The event was a huge success. Loads of kids and youth (18-35 in South Africa) paid r3 to come into the community hall, gobble down snacks and perform. In true South Africa fashion, the event was supposed to begin at 10am, but did not get going until around 1pm. Flip-chart covered windows kept sneaky youth from peeking in. A few local police attended not to police exactly, but to join the throng of tiny community members in the audience.

The first act was probably my favourite—four tiny girls dressed in their finest outfits walked slowly from one end of the hall to the other with their hands on their hips. Although they had no real talent to judge, they were pretending to be models and it was adorable. The girls were followed by a slew of lip-syncing acts set to rap songs. All in all there must have been six separate duos that came up to do pretty much the same act. Two traditional Zulu dance troops performed, with lots of singing and traditional dance numbers in between. Unlike American school or camp talent shows, it was common place for a group to perform more than one number at a time. Each set of amateur lip-syncing rappers performed three songs, one after the other. How strange and hilarious, right? Another key difference was that no family members came to watch their kids perform. In the States I remember talent shows would mostly be attended by parents with video cameras and bouquets of flowers for their kids. Here, most of the audience also performed. No parents or adults came.

I was on concession duty at the back of the hall during the show. Little ones came again and again to buy sweeties (lollipops), nik naks (small bags of corn puffs that turn your mouth violent shades of red or orange), flyers (perfectly round flavoured “popcorn” puffs) and 50 cent oranges from local farms. By the time the show ended at 4pm, the flour was littered with r120 worth of peels, wrappers and bent lollipop sticks. A tiny horde of children helped me clean up the evidence and haul away the trash.

Although I didn’t perform, helping out was oddly exhausting. After we cleaned the place up, Allie, Melinda and I retreated to Allie’s one room house for chockiets dipped in high quality instant coffee (yes, Nescafe is the good stuff) and Melinda’s homemade pizza.

The next morning we packed up to visit Kathleen’s site, a bumpy 1 hour taxi ride through Weenen and up into the mountains.