She had carefully packed her brown cardboard suitcase, it contained two sets of clean underware, her neat sunday dress, a pair of socks, a jersey. and a slither of green soap that she had saved and dried so that it could travel with her. Now she waited at the train station. The old people always spoke about the trains, and it represented a connection to the rest of the world, a super big organisation, not like the individualistic cars and trucks flashing by on the road above. At least with the railways, there are rules and schedules. People and things moving with purpose from one place, to another busy place. When the old people worked for the railways, life was good, they said.
She had been planning this trip for a long time, and had carefully and frugally saved some money. The seventy three Rand was tied into a corner of a little plastic bag. Her plan was to go to a big city, maybe find a live- in- house cleaning work. She could live and work doing something similar to what she had always done, dressing and cleaning younger children, sweeping and dusting the home, helping and preparing the food, but she also knew that she had the ability to learn to do any other work, and to do it well.
She had a thirst for knowledge, always being the top pupil in her class, now she had a coupon, carefully clipped from an old magazine. She read that she could study and do her matric through a postal correspondence course, and if her marks was good enough, maybe she could earn a bursary to study to be a teacher at the teachers training college. She could see herself teaching children, but her real goal, her highest wish, was to eventually to to university and study to be a social worker. She had written her name and surname in small neat handwritting on the correspondence course coupon, it's just the address that was blank, because she didn't know where she would be staying.
The hours dragged on, and the train did not come, her ears strained to listen to any distant rumbling that would represent the coming train.
She started to bargain with God, she would always go to church, she would never sin, she would be nice to people, and give to the poor. If she could only get a good job, if she could get a place to stay that didn't cost too much money.
The afternoon sun glinted off the rusty train tracks, and after the sun dipped under the hills, and it started to get dark, it started to get very cold. She had to take out her late mothers jersey from her suitcase, and put it on. A jersey too big for her 12 year old frame. She felt a sadness envelope her, and she could not help it, but she started crying softly to herself. S33 26 161.
Late that night, her uncle found her sitting cold and forlorn at the train station, took her suitcase in his one hand, and her wrist in the other, and he led her back home.
'Look what I found!' He shouted, when he dragged her in. Her suitcase was roughly upended onto the floor, and her possessions and the little plastic bag of coins fell with a heavy clunk onto the floor. The adults grabbed and fought each other for the coins, as the thin plastic bag ripped apart and money rolled around. The correspondence course coupon cut-out was soon discovered, and everyone jeered at her, running away to be a school teacher, they jeered. The people laughed at her, and shouted at her, that people in the towns would take her and abuse her and do terrable things to her, they said, and they all laughed, while the little worn piece of paper with the correspondence course details was torn up. Even the little children that she had given so much of herself and had looked after and protected laughed at her.. On the ground, a thin dried piece of green soap was trampled to pieces and then into dust, as the adults quarrelled and fought over the contents of the little brown cardboard suitcase. E25 16 235.
She would later be curled up into a foetal position in the corner of the rood, crying and sobbing, not because of the beating that she had then received, but because of the pain that she had in her heart, a terrible, and incredible intense pain in her heart that she had never felt before, while the adults shouted and argued till the early hours of the morning.