I don’t travel much. In the past ten months, the furthest I have travelled from my house is to the mall in town, which is, at most, twelve kilometres away. So, unlike most people, when I first found out I was going to be travelling thousands of kilometres to get to my destination in the Eastern Cape, I was not excited. Instead, I was anxious, which, it turned out, was not out of stupidity.
To:
I woke up on the morning of my trip to a silent darkness left behind by an unexpected loadshedding. My house was dark, but when I looked out my window, I found the houses in the street in front of mine glowing with mocking lights. The first joke of the day had begun, but I managed to soldier on in the darkness and leave the house with enough time to catch the bus for the two-hour journey to the airport in Johannesburg.
On my way to the bus stop, the gods played another joke on me and, without warning, the car I was in broke down four kilometres from my destination. I laughed at my predicament, thinking the universe did not want me to travel such a long distance. But since fate is something, a person makes instead of receives, I decided to run the rest of the distance with the hope of convincing the bus driver to wait until my bags reached the bus. It came as no surprise, I reached the bus stop minutes after the bus had departed, and I walked the distance back to the car already planning how I was going to sulk the rest of the week away in my bed.
But the joke had not ended, and during my slow trek back to my uncle’s still-broken car, Theo Kemp, to whom I had been relaying my misfortunes since they began that morning, managed to find a way for me to get to Johannesburg. Admittedly, I spent the trip there with a new sense of optimism growing inside of me. Only to be reminded later of the joke I was currently the subject of when I got to Park Station.
I now had to find a cab to the airport.
For those of you who have never been there, Park Station is a melting pot of tired-looking people travelling between different destinations. From the moment you get off your taxi, you wade through rivers of people looking for taxis, cabs, trains, and buses going to places most of us will never get to visit, and I found myself following one such river with the ease of a seasoned traveller. I then walked around the station for almost ten minutes looking for the cab that was supposed to take me to the airport, and when I finally found it, I had less than an hour to get to the airport, check in for my flight, and get on the one-hour-thirty minute flight to Gqeberha.
Luckily, the gods had decided to take a break from the comedic antics they had been directing towards my travels since early that morning, and I managed to get to Gqeberha with little-to-no struggle. There, I found Theo waiting for me and we made the two-hour trip to Paulet House, where I would be spending the next three weeks of my life.
And:
Arriving at Paulet House, I walked into a house filled with laughter and joy. The cheerful air of the house had already infected the other mentees and the mentors there, and it took me only minutes to share in the laughter and joy they were passing around the table. My body might have felt tired from all travelling I had just put it through, but my spirit, while I sat listening to the people around the table, was already beginning to rejuvenate. I knew from that moment that I was beginning a journey that was going to change my life, and that I was lucky to be in the house I had just walked into.
But it was more than just the guests in the house that made me feel this way, it was also the people we found there. It is rare for me to feel at home anywhere, and the fact that they made me feel that way will forever stick with me.
Writing is a solitary act, so it is difficult for writers, more so myself, to find spaces where they can speak about the joys they experience from the act of writing. This is because human beings are thought of as social animals, so when one of them speaks about the joy they experience from being alone, they are seen as an anomaly, something that should not exist. But Paulet House, I found while I was there, is one space where writers can meet to share in the oddities of their nature. For three weeks, writers get to sit there around a table and speak, laugh, and share stories with other people who understood the words they speak without requiring further explanation. It is a little heaven for writers, a place where they get to be who they are without feeling bad about it.
During my three weeks there, the work I spent hours writing by myself found its way to people who understood what it took for me to write it, and I received feedback on it that helped me grow as both a writer and lover of literature.
The first week was the least active. Many of us were still trying to find ways of sharing our work without seeming strange to everyone else. But once we all realised that we shared in this strangeness, that the thing that usually made us different in the spaces we spend our time in at home was the very thing that had brought us together, we began writing and sharing our work with ease. Before long, we started becoming the writers the judges at the Jakes Gerwel Foundation knew we could become when they read the stories we submitted to them, and we started believing in the work we were producing and the skills it took for us to produce it.
Personally, I had started my journey to Paulet House knowing that, even though I wrote stories, I was not yet a writer. But when my journey finally reached its end there, I no longer just saw myself as someone who wrote a story every now and then, but I was a writer. I might not be the best writer I can be right now, but the work that the mentors put in to help me improve my writing has placed me on a path leading me towards being that writer. I just hope that when other writers get the chance to go through the programme, they understand how much of a privilege it is to be there as much as the group I was with did.
Fro:
On the last day of the programme, the gods once again reminded me of the anxieties travelling causes me. An hour before I left, one of the mentors made me aware of another joke they had played on me. As it turned out, the bus that was meant to pick me up at the airport and take me home was scheduled to leave while I was mid-air. It was a mistake I had not seen until that moment, and I spent the next few hours on the road to the airport in Gqeberha worried about whether I would be able to reach home before it got dark.
Luckily, the joke ended as quickly as it had begun this time, and thanks to Theo, I managed to find a cab back home as soon as I got to the airport in Johannesburg, and my journey back home was both smooth and without fault.
Now that I am back home, looking back at the eventful journey I took to-and-fro Paulet House, I realise how important every aspect of that journey was. I now realise that I would not have been able to appreciate the calm air of the mountainous town surrounding the house, or the warm smiles of the people in it, as much as I had, had I not gone through all that trouble getting there. My time at Paulet House was one of the best I have ever spent anywhere, but to borrow from a popular saying, the journey there was just as important as the destination.
Alfred T.M. Rossouw (1991) is a South African writer and editor with over five years of writing, editing, blogging and book reviewing experience. He has worked across many industries in both the public and private sectors, including in the arts. He currently works as a freelance editor and writer, most notably as a freelance editor for FunDza Literacy Trust and Geko Publishing. Under the penname Thato Rossouw, he has authored articles for publications such as News24, Mail & Guardian, Africanah Magazine, Art State, Huffington Post and Sunday Times.
