{"id":10680,"date":"2012-07-12T22:47:02","date_gmt":"2012-07-12T21:47:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/?p=10680"},"modified":"2012-07-12T22:47:02","modified_gmt":"2012-07-12T21:47:02","slug":"memories-from-south-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/?p=10680","title":{"rendered":"Memories from South Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Visakha Priya dasi<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWhen I was a very new devotee, my first temple president, His Grace Tulsi dasa Prabhu, summed me up as follows: “You are very independent” he said, “but there’s nothing wrong with that. You can use your independence for Krsna.” And so, within two or three months of my joining ISKCON, I was given a car, some paraphernalia, and the devotees’ blessings to go wherever I pleased. Initially I stuck to Johannesburg and its surrounding areas, but gradually I ventured further, sometimes staying one night out, sometimes two, sometimes three. I did my early morning sadhana as best as I could in whatever dwelling I found for the night and survived mostly on avocado pears and “Maas,” an African version of thick buttermilk.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tBefore joining the Hare Krishna Movement, I wouldn’t have dreamed of selling anything. Our father brought us up in a proud way and would never allow us to get even a summer job, what to speak of peddling cheap items. He would have died of embarrassment.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe first few weeks at the ashram, I went with the devotees on the “bhoga run” in the Durban market. That wasn’t so bad because we were wearing saris and dhotis and most of the merchants were Indian. But then, I was sent back to Johannesburg to help a couple of senior devotees open a new temple (the one Srila Prabhupada visited in 1975 closed down when the devotees bought the farm in Natal). In the beginning there were only four of us: the TP and his wife, one bhakta and one bhaktin (me). We would do harinama and distribute BTGs in devotee dress, but as we moved on from BTGs to incense sticks to sandalwood and rose soap to perfume to Indian dresses to button fasteners—and, finally, to oil paintings, it was decided that Western dress was more convenient. Of course, South Africa was not only mostly Christian, but the apartheid system was still in full swing at the time, and anything Indian was considered second class, Colored and Chinese third class, and Blacks fourth class. In such an atmosphere, it was a little difficult, both for us “white devotees” and for our “Indian devotees” as well. Actually, we weren’t even supposed to live in the same areas, but somehow the secret police left us alone because they could see that we were completely apolitical.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPerhaps in 1980, we were selling fake French perfume in cheap little bottles. The bottles were so fragile that they would burst sometimes, especially during the hot season, and the austerity was to continue throughout the day, reeking of the conflicting fragrance of two different brands of so-called French perfume. Somehow, perhaps because I was born French, I became expert at selling those nasty little things, which couldn’t have been worth more than fifty American cents. One day, in one small town in the Transvaal, I walked into a butcher shop. It was a dreadful sight. So many dead bodies were hanging from hooks. The butcher came up to me, wiping his blood-stained hands on his apron, and asked me what I wanted. I showed him the bottles and he looked like he had no use for them. But I told him we were helping young people recover from drug abuse and he agreed to take a bottle. “How much?” he asked. I wasn’t sure what kind of donation a butcher would be prepared to give, but Krsna inspired me to say, with a knowing smile, “Well… why don’t you just give the equivalent of the price of a good<\/em> bottle of whisky?” He immediately agreed. And one or two years later, after we had switched to paintings, he also took a painting.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAfter Jayatirtha dasa left in 1982, we gave up small paraphernalia and concentrated on selling paintings. Srila Prabhupada had visited in 1975 and instructed that a beautiful temple should be built in the main “Indian area” of Durban, and somehow our leaders decided that selling paintings would be the quickest way to raise the funds. In 1982 I joined that collecting team, which included elevated souls such as His Holiness Bhakti-Caitanya Swami, His Holiness Partha-sarathi dasa Goswami, and His Grace Ramanuja Prabhu. At that time, all three of them were brahmacaris and they each had their assistant. Sometimes I had one and sometimes not. So, for the next three years, we went out day after day, week after week, and month after month, driving out to distant places, selling Hong Kong and Korean paintings, and even framing them. In fact, we all became expert at framing an oil painting in ten minutes on the bonnet of our cars in whatever back street we found. It was very hard work but we did very well financially, and I kept myself fired up thinking that each painting sold meant so many more bricks or bags of cement or—as time went one—slabs of marble for the temple construction.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tOne time, I set out with a senior woman devotee for a two-week trip to the Eastern Cape. For some reason I forgot, she had to go back to Johannesburg and I remained alone in the town of Graaf Reinet, one of South Africa’s oldest and most picturesque towns situated in the middle of “The Great Karoo,” a vast expanse of desertic plains punctuated with hillocks and encircled by layer after layer of mountains. The main business in Graaf Reinet is sheep raising and trading. So, after spending the night in a cheap hotel, done my solitary mangala arati and chanted my rounds, I set out for the main street—door to door and shop to shop—with a roll of paintings under my arm and samples of frames in my bag. Sometimes I made a sale, and sometimes an appointment for later during the day. I met a sheep trader who told me to come to his house in the evening so that he and his wife could look at the paintings together. He lived in an area called “Valley of Desolation,” a few kilometers from Graaf Reinet, and he described his house as “the one standing on the hillock on the left after you pass a certain ford”—or something like that. So in the evening, after eating something, I set out for the Valley of Desolation. And sure enough it was a desolate area surrounded by mountains. Dusk was setting in. Thinking that if I got a flat tire I would really be in trouble, I started singing the prayers to Lord Nrsimhadeva. After some time I found the man’s compound on the hillock he had mentioned, parked the car, grabbed the paintings and a few ready-made frames and climbed up the steps to his front door. The place was typical Cape Dutch architecture and furniture. After exchanging a few words, I opened up the roll of paintings. The man then told me that they were about to eat dinner and that I should join them. I politely declined, saying I had already eaten, but he would not take no for an answer. In fact, after he had insisted and I had refused a few times, he flatly declared: “Well, if you don’t eat with us, I won’t even look at your paintings.” I felt a bit discouraged that I had driven all the way to this place after a whole day’s sankirtana to hear this. But of course, I wasn’t about to partake of the diet of a sheep merchant. So I rolled up my paintings and got ready to leave. Just then, the man’s brother-in-law walked in and saw me and my paintings. “Hey,” he said, “I want to have a look at these.” And of course, by Krsna’s mercy, he did buy some paintings.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAnother sankirtana story I remember took place a few months before the grand opening of our Temple of Understanding, in the city of Bloemfontein, the judicial capital of South Africa in those days. My younger godsister Ajita and I had set up a table in a shopping center in the middle of town, and we were raking in the rands. So we thought that it would be a good idea to extend our stay until the Christmas season, which is in the middle of summer in that part of the world. The shopping mall managers had no problem with us. The only thing was that the place where we were staying, a holiday resort, was probably booked for the summer, which was just a couple of weeks away. So that evening, when we got back to the resort, we asked the manager if we could extend our stay for another month. As we had anticipated, she said everything was booked but that she would watch out for cancellations and inform us.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tEvery few days we would check with her, and every time her reply was the same: no cancellation yet. Our last day came. With a lot of trepidation we did our morning duties, which included making “Simply Wonderfuls” for distribution in the shopping mall. Having loaded the car with all our paraphernalia we drove off and, for the last time, stopped at the manager’s hut. Our anxious questioning met with the same answer. So, in total desperation, I whipped out the bowl of sweetballs and handed it to her. “Here, take one of these.” She did. And as she bit into the sweetball she said, “Ah! Now I think I can help you.” Without another word she assigned to us a cabin twice as large as the one we were about to vacate for the whole festive season. We couldn’t believe it. Of course, we theoretically knew the power of prasadam, but we never expected such a result.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAll glories to Srila Prabhupada!<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tYour servant,<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tVisakha Priya dasi<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Visakha Priya dasi<\/strong><\/p>\n

When I was a very new devotee, my first temple president, His Grace Tulsi dasa Prabhu, summed me up as follows: \u201cYou are very independent\u201d he said, \u201cbut there\u2019s nothing wrong with that. You can use your independence for Krsna.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10680"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10680\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}