Durban - Contributing, being grateful, adapting and being considerate are values the world needs to uphold.
This emerged from interviews with elderly people ahead of today’s International Day of Older People, voted into existence at the UN General Assembly in 1990.
Ruth Hall, at 105, having recovered from a moment of not feeling well, looks forward to joining a group that sings hymns on Sunday afternoons at her retirement home in Howick.
“I want to get more involved. We have so much to contribute,” she told the “Independent on Saturday”.
“Don’t give up but trust in the Lord and he’ll see you through. I think that’s what has got me through,” said the former schoolteacher and farmer’s wife before gently hitting the keys of a piano with some of her own compositions, such as The Amberfield Waltz, named after her residence.
She also has in her song book Croc on the Umfolozi, which she composed and named after the area where she first lived as a child, having been born a Leisegang, her grandparents coming from Norway as missionaries. Later she moved to Umzinto “with my mother and me in a sidecar”.
Hall composed one of her latest works Oscar the Hadeda at the request of a local choir and with the help of two musical people in the town, John Tungay and Fiona Bull, when children in a local choir requested a song about the birds.
“I said ‘I can’t bear them but I’ll do my best’. I feed one called Oswald every day but I changed its name to Oscar.”
Hall’s favourite memories include getting married to her husband, Donald, an Estcourt farmer with whom she had three children, who are now in New Zealand and Cape Town “and about 17 great-grandchildren”; and the royal visit in 1947 during the time she was teaching at her alma mater, Ixopo High School, where author Alan Paton had been her teacher.
“I think the Queen Mother smiled at me as she walked past.”
She recalled working in Durban at Gordon Road School during World War II, where two of her former pupils are now fellow residents in Amberfield.
“They were putting dark curtains up at night (to make sure enemy planes could not see anything). There were incidents of people being arrested as spies in the hotel where I lived. They were sending Morse code messages to the Germans. Someone thought he had heard Morse code being tapped. Then he came to breakfast one day and said this man and the housekeeper had been arrested.”
In Durban, Mina Buthelezi, at Tafta on the Ridge, The Association for the Aged’s Overport old age home, also has a musical past but in dancing – ballroom and Latin American – as a professional. She is possibly 18 years younger than Hall.
“When we went to get reference books, the woman in front of me was asked – how old are you? She said 18 and I came behind her, so the clerk said I was 18 as well. I don’t think 87 is my real age but it’s fine,” said Buthelezi.
She grew up in Cato Manor and was a domestic worker for a family for 40 years. Their children now support her, she said.
“I am blessed with that.”
She and her late husband, Zebron, did not have children.
She said she sometimes watches dancing.
“But not for long. It makes me sad. It’s what I used to do with my husband.”
Buthelezi remembers the Cato Manor Riots of 1959: “a big fight”.
Also in the Overport Tafta residence is 84-year-old Naomi Mowers, a former schools inspector and teacher, focusing on special needs children, who believes people should be grateful for life.
“God gives us life in all its fullness and sometimes we don’t appreciate it,” she said, handling newly-knitted beanies for a non-governmental organisation.
“I don’t even know who I am making them for but I know someone will smile. I don’t like to waste time and be idle. My hands must be busy.”
Mowers said she was grateful to still have the energy to go to the shops and to attend services at the nearby St Thomas Anglican Church in Musgrave.
Originally from Knysna, she said she grew up poor, so she appreciates things.
“At primary school, I always went to the principal’s house after school. Maybe my teachers saw something in me, an aptitude for maths. It just carried on from there.”
Mowers enjoys putting words to the tunes of birds that sing near her window. “Like, Read the Mercury.”
She follows the news.
“I have no time for soapies but I like the news and watching programmes about nature because we can learn so much from animals.”
She is upset that people suffer because of the greed of some.
Ranjeni Chellan, 64, who is also in the Tafta home, said as she gets older she sees the significance of feeling important.
“I always go to meetings and give my opinions,” the former credit controller and furniture shop manager said.
Widowed 18 months ago, she added that she had adapted to living in the home in Durban while her daughter, who is in the medical field, lives in Cape Town.
“I chose to go this way. That age group has a different way of living. I did not want my daughter to be obligated to me. It’s better for our relationship.”
This way of life is not the only adaptation Chellan has made.
“I was Hindu. My husband was Christian. It was a big debate how we would marry and bring up kids. I converted to Christianity and I am happy I did it.”
She said one of her happiest memories was her daughter graduating; the worst, last year’s rioting and looting.
Jo Ann Wood, 62, who is happy that her only child is in New Zealand because of the opportunities it will offer her grandchildren, said she would like to see old people’s families helping them more financially and visiting them more often.
She said that in her career as an area manager for Clicks, she always had free make-up.
Now, in her retirement, she has to pay for it.
“But it’s worth it.”
The Independent on Saturday