Suspended in Memory

In my seat in terminal B, this non-place suspended between one reality and another, thoughts of South Africa overwhelm me and I shift incessantly, denim jeans sticking to plastic, searching for a comfortable spot where these punching-gut feelings will flow magically from solar plexus to fingertips to laptop screen in the form of adjectives, verbs, and nouns. They don’t want to translate, but I try anyway.

Let’s see…there’s transformative. Challenging. Defining. New! Thrilling! Brilliant! There’s to educate, to learn, to understand. To stretch. To love. Classroom. Robot. Braai. Lekker. Cheers. Pleasure. Haibo!

Are these strings of letters not wholly insufficient to capture those eight weeks in Cape Town? Why even try? Why not just sit with these feelings of transformation and gratitude, breathe, and let them move freely through my released muscles and affect my actions as they will? Why this desire to organize and define my experience?

Stuck at this logical stalemate, my fingertips lift in pause over the keyboard and my mind comes to a screeching halt. I know what must come now. I close my eyes, take a big, deep breath—and floor it, veering off the logical superhighway. Suddenly I’m in the LEAP Quantum Van, rattling down the left side of Bhunga Avenue into the bright land where Table Mountain is always in sight and words aren’t the whole smiley on the braai but more like the Thai Sweet Chili to our Original Lay’s potato chips. They’re not the core of what we do or feel, but they do remind us where we are, where we’re going, and how to get there. They help paint the richness of the experience.

Free-flowing, my inspired mind arrives in the LEAP canteen on that first morning in Pinelands. The sky is vibrant and the air crisp, but I am foggy and nervous after a lonely red eye and the abrupt realization that the southern hemisphere really does exist and is rather far from New Jersey. I can see my feet trod over the worn grey carpet that leads into that cold, bright room, and I can feel the white plastic chair wobble tentatively underneath me as I sit and turn my head to digest the roomful of chocolate faces all silently, but eagerly, welcoming us into their reality. And then they stand up and sing. The wide-eyed Americans marvel as the canteen fills with that palpable, passionate life force we later came to know so well during our time at LEAP. In that moment, floating in a sleep-deprived lucid dream, music and voices floating in and out of our pores, we all knew Something Real was going to happen to us in sleepy Pinelands.

I jump back in the Quantum and 30 minutes down the highway I’m in the dusty living room of a tiny home in the township Kalkfontein, which in haunting irony means “good farm” in Afrikaans. I am sitting opposite 22-year-old Zanele who, out of desperate passion and necessity, runs a support and performance youth group in the township. Zanele’s quiet demeanor melts away as, over two hours on a sunny Thursday afternoon, she pours her heart out to me in descriptions of the negativity sent her way from members of the community in response to her group, the pain she feels when she must take care of her sick brother, and her broken relationship with her stepfather. Her delicate, puffy eyes communicate a need more intense than I have ever experienced before in my life. She confides that she has few friends her age, and I observe—no, feel--her need to tell her stories, to connect openly. The air around me is thick with the awareness of what she fights daily just to get up in the morning. We are the same age and my intent listening sets something alight in her—perhaps my hungry ear offers hope, or simply the opportunity to have the momentary peace that comes from letting pain out of the body as words. I get lost in her story, in the juxtaposition of her sadness and vibrant passion, and wonder feverishly how our lives could be so different, and yet this connection so basic.

In the next moment I exhale Zanele and Kalkfontein and inhale directly to TWA’s final LEAP 2 community meeting where my students Philasande, Shelly, Sbahle, Thabiso, Zanele, and Asithandile present a short play, which they wrote, directed, and performed under my guidance. Smart and curious but extremely shy Thabiso speaks at full voice in front of 150 peers and teachers. Energetic, wildly smart and motivated Asithandile stands up after the play is over and says with unmasked pride, “What you just saw, I directed that.” Inspired Shelly runs to me with open arms to celebrate her performance and asks me not to leave, to do another play. I step back and observe the adrenaline in the group, and their special connectedness in those thrilling moments reminds me of the production of “Grease” I joined at camp when I was eleven because all my friends were doing it. It was the most fun I had ever had and after that little taste of what a theatrical community can accomplish, I knew I had found a home. Eleven years later, I see a mirror in six Xhosa-speaking South African 14-year-olds.

The Quantum revs its engine in the parking lot, beckoning me. But, without warning I hear, blaring, “AirTran flight 510 with nonstop service to Milwaukee will now begin boarding awl rows,” and the LEAP Van and all that it brought disappear in a puff of smoke. In a flash, I’m jetted back across the Atlantic, to this sticky plastic chair, this transitional moment. I hear the New York accents around me and I know I’m home. I grab my boarding pass and peel myself off the disagreeable seat. Moving towards gate B7, I reflect in a daze on the precious moments I visited.

All of us need to tell our stories. We need words, we need art, we need body language to put a frame and context around what we experience. The frame allows us to relate. And it is in that relating that individual suffering like Zanele’s becomes human connection. There, we can begin to imagine and dream, the first stepping stone towards a better future—in the collective voice they found as an ensemble, my group of six students rediscovered the tools for communication and change they were born with: voices, bodies, minds, and hearts. When the LEAPSAs sang for us that first, foggy day, it was an open invitation into a world, their home, that so highly values spoken word and direct communication. And to anyone who wonders what all that means in the day-to-day LEAP world, let me remind you to always: Be kind. Be honest. Be healthy. Be punctual. Look good. Work hard. Never give up. Admit mistakes. Confront issues. Be open to change. Work together. Share as much as possible.

Asserting it with words is the first step—those strings of letters may look like shallow representation, but with a little faith and passion, they become a vital vessel for connecting and motivating individuals into communities, no matter what—oceans, barbed wire, or a school desk—is between them. All it takes is that initial LEAP.

-Sara Lyons