Travelling Shoes

Today some of the refugees that we have been feeding are going home. Large luxury buses with huge trailers arrived at the Germiston City Hall at noon to repatriate them to Mozambique. Some want to leave, others do not. South Africa was a chance for young foreign families to make something of their lives; Mozambique has the highest infant mortality rate in the world and Zimbabwe’s humanitarian woes are well-known. Eager as they are to flee from the personal violence that they have experienced, none of the migrants want to leave empty-handed. They had hopes of returning home with money, possessions and dignity and it’s hard to feel dignified when you don’t even own a pair of shoes.

In Twist in my Sobriety Tanita Tikaram says that ‘all God’s children need travelling shoes’. When the foreign residents were forced to flee from their homes in South African townships over the weekend they left with the clothes on their backs and some managed to keep the shoes on their feet. It is common for feet to shrink during times of trauma and for shoes to be lost.

As line after line of dispossessed people shuffled past our supplies table, all we could glimpse was their feet. The peak caps we wore kept out not only the sun, but the sight of the desperate faces. Faces mapped the emotional state of the people, but the condition of the feet that trundled past us charted the journey of the displaced people over the last few days.

There were boots without laces and trainers with mismatched laces. There was one-shoe-on-and-one-shoe-off who shuffled around for three days refusing to relinquish his single scuffed shoe or the bloodied sock that covered his other foot. When you literally own only a shirt, underwear, trousers and one sad shoe, you cannot afford to surrender anything; owning even those meagre possession makes you feel less dispossessed.

Children scuffled by in their sandy bare feet or in broken-strapped sandals with buckles that tinkled against the uneven pavement. Toenails were broken or dirty or both. Fifteen year old Zimbabwean Foreman asked me for soap but I thought he said ‘soup’. When I finally understood I asked,“Where will you wash?” “In the river,” he said, and I wondered where in Germiston he imagined he might find such a geographical oddity.

Queen looked like a fashion model for Vixen, her honey-coloured eyes lit up like a magpie’s every time a sequinned or shiny shirt or skirt was lifted into the air for the hands to seize. “Size 32, size 32!” she cried, and when it came to handing out shoes her hands grabbed as quickly as anyone else’s. “Size 5, size 5!” It’s best to avoid getting in the way of grabbing hands, if two hands grab, neither one will let go unless they have something to show for their expended energy, even if it’s a half a pair of tracksuit pants each.

 “I only came to South Africa on Friday, I don’t want to go back now,” Arturo said with a miserable lip quiver as he turned up unwanted belts and unnecessary ties to find a matching black rubber-cast sandal. Relief workers jobs would be so much easier if donors tied shoes together because invariably there are single shoes left at the bottom of the box that don’t have mates and this causes enormous and understandable frustration to the desperate who are barefooted.

A huge man tried to slip a pair of dainty gold silk slippers into his stained pocket, the crowd roared with disapproval then laughed as someone mimicked him wearing them, shamefaced he tossed them to Queen who was delighted with her windfall.

We were returning to our car to leave when Ali spotted a barefoot mother and child crossing the dusty car-park, he retrieved the pair of trainers he’d brought for someone who didn’t have a pair of shoes. He ran across the parking lot and we turned the car around just in time to see her crossing the road in her spotless white sneakers.

As we drove away in silence we all knew that some people never got anything and that some people took more than they needed. As a relief worker it’s impossible not to feel frustrated, but what you cannot show is judgement. Mozambique is 469km away, Zimbabwe is 977km north and Malawi 500km further than that, it’s far to travel and that extra orange might just be the sunshine you need when you find yourself in a pocket of despair.