From the Ashes of Burnt Out Dreaming

The exhaust of township taxis scuttling towards the highway like cockroaches intermingles with the smoke of roadside kitchens clustered along the way, and Table Mountain peers down over this
January summer haze. There are cows standing, twitching, in the middle of a round-about.
Goats clop down the streets. A sheep stands with her lambs in the primary school drop off.
There are dogs - mangy, scrawny, with sagging teats - everywhere - their noses darting frantically from discarded bones to colourful empty packets
scattered along the tarmac. There are women in Man Utd jerseys under their aprons pushing rickety shopping carts full of some kind of bloodied animal skins, laughing and calling out to each other over the song
of the rebel wheels that seem to have lost their direction and forgotten they are wheels. The streets are lined with half drums of cooking meat,
haircut shacks, phone charging shacks and dirty mattresses piled up for
sale: 'Sleep bettar tomorow, starting tonite' painted on a slouching queen that you'd guess was the one that was too grotesque to sell.
Amidst it all, there is a high-school; the tin-henge circle where the vivre de youth is audible in all the voices and bodies that pour out of the classrooms - stomping, chanting, slapping, clapping, smacking and
celebrating. The tallest of them is Afikile. He is also the quietest.
Until he stands on the dusty blue plastic floor of
the second portable on the right, where his drama class is underway. Once he stands there, in his own sanctuary, he forgets and you forget, the dogs and
women outside with sagging teats and violent homes.

Other children are congregating by the door, craning their necks through the
barred up windows to watch Afikile's flashing white teeth and bold gestures
transform the space as his imagination starts painting it's picture in all
the colours of his South African pallet.
I can't understand his Xhosa words as his mouth clicks and booms, but his
story is like that of a musical score and is strong through his face, his sharing, his showing, not just his telling. For a moment, I see the kid I used to be; and I see a kid I never had to be. My 29 year old self wants to give this 16 year old what my 16 year old self was given: a chance.
This is where failing my dreams lead me. To a place where gangs and animals rule the streets and to a boy named Afikile who could raise himself up out of it all. Who in an afternoon, raised me up from the ashes of burnt out
dreaming.