Our Greatest Talents

At the end of last year, after a friend of mine started writing for Die Matie, our campus newspaper, I decided it was time to pluck up the courage and send them my CV. Now this can be really intimidating, especially seeing as I like to believe that writing is one of my greatest talents, but after several days of editing and re-editing my CV I finally sent it in.

I was so excited when I got an email saying I could join the team and thought that writing for a newspaper would be amazing. I of course didn’t realize that to write newspaper articles means that you have to keep your opinion out of the story completely and this makes it extremely difficult for me to convey the true emotion behind the story.

So a couple weeks back when I asked my editor if I could do a story about a development underwater hockey team that my dive club has organised I thought it was going to be such a special story. I thought it was really going to be my turn to shine as not just a writer but a journalist as well. It turns out that I was horribly, horribly wrong.

The first part of writing this story was getting the relevant information. I therefore asked the man in charge of the entire project, Jack van Blerk, if I could interview him. Well, what an amazing interview. By the end of the interview I wasn’t sure whether to burst into tears or song. The story about how this project came into being is really beautiful and I’d really like to share it.

Jack has been involved in the Maties Underwater Club since 2000, when he started playing and coaching underwater hockey. He has coached many teams since then and has started his own club in Strand since then. He still coaches for Maties though and in 2012, whilst coaching in the indoor pool at Coetzenberg he started noticing that a black guy was swimming lengths every Tuesday evening both before they got there and once they had left. “It looked like he was drowning more than swimming and he was struggling to stay afloat.”

Jack soon learnt that Andile was training to join the South African Navy and started giving him tips and pointers to improve his swimming and this is how he met Andile Zondi. During one particular practice Jack allowed Andile to watch videos of underwater hockey matches on his computer while the rest of the guys were training. After the session Jack asked Andile what he thought and all he said was that it looked difficult.

A week later at practice Andile approached Jack and told him he wanted to learn how to play underwater hockey. Andile has since learnt how to play underwater hockey as well as learnt how to SCUBA dive (in the hope of becoming a Navy Diver) all thanks to Jack and The Maties Underwater Club.

With the help of The National Lottery Fund the duo has also started a development underwater hockey team for eight boys which Andile selected out of Kayamandi. They have taught the boys how to swim, entered them in tournaments and given them the opportunity to travel to Johannesburg (on their first ever plane trip) to compete.

After hearing what Jack had to tell me, I was amazed. It seemed to me that he was single-handedly trying to teach the entire world how to swim and I thought the story was beautiful. Jack’s passion and commitment to these causes seemed incredible and I wanted people to know the story immediately.

The problem was that I couldn’t write it. I couldn’t possibly convey his emotions in words. I couldn’t put his passion into a news article and after hours and hours of fighting with the article I finally gave up and sent it on to my editor as it was, knowing that it wasn’t going to be my best work but that it was certainly decent enough.

This morning this article was printed and I finally got to see it on paper. I was up early and made a beeline for campus so that I could get a copy. I opened up the paper and my heart dropped. The article had basically been cut in half and shoved into a forgotten, forlorn corner. I was heart-broken. I had been so convinced that other people would feel the way I felt that I had assumed that all of my 600 odd words would have been printed.  

So to Jack and all his hard work, I know you don’t want praise for it but I hope that my short little article at least made some people see what you’re doing. To The Editor who put these cute little boys in a corner, I apologize that my story wasn’t good enough. And to all of you amazing people out there who are willing to do the things you love even when people tell you you’re no good at it, well done, because sometimes our greatest talent is knowing what we love and being able to do it regardless.