Friday Night Refugee Meeting
The second set of stairs led down to another mezzanine floor with multiple rooms. One of them, Minor Hall, was filled with piles of clothing, suitcases, cardboard boxes, and plastic carrier bags. The many mattresses on the floor shared space with small stoves, plastic buckets and crawling babies. “This is the main women’s sleeping area,” said Ambrose. It was crowded and very hot, with no ventilation. Ambrose told me that during the xenophobic violence that had gripped South Africa in May 2008 there were over 3 000 people living in the church. “You couldn’t move up or down the stairs without stepping on someone,” he said. “It was difficult for security in those days. Traumatised, stressed people are always the first to overreact. There were lots of fights, lots of domestic violence. Now it’s quiet. The numbers are below a thousand, I’d say.” I tried to imagine it. The building as it was right now appeared to be brimming with people and poverty and resilience. Three thousand inhabitants seemed impossible. I looked down the passage, made narrower by several mattresses on the floor and a few people sitting on them, listening to a radio and chatting. At the end of the passage was a door with an Emergency Exit sign on it. I didn’t want to think about what might happen if there was a fire in the building, especially at night. By the end of the day I was worn out, and I thought I had seen all there was to see. I didn’t know that I had missed the vestry, an area behind the sanctuary, as well as another area that led from the vestry up into the airconditioning ducts. I learned later that the space around the air-conditioning ducts was the base of one Godfrey Charamba, the man who the Bishop had said was involved with stealing from The Blind Association. We had also missed another area called “Soweto”, which was down in the basement and where a gang of South Africans was purported to live. Perhaps, as Ambrose was head of security, these two places might not have housed his best friends and he’d deliberately left them out of our tour.
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2013/02/14 10:52 AM