The Ice Cream Tub That Collected a Congregation's Broken Gold

Our church hall in Benoni has a flat roof, which is the original sin of South African buildings, and after eleven years of being patched it finally gave up during a highveld storm in November. The water came through the ceiling boards over the kitchen, over the little stage where the children do their nativity, and into the cupboard where we keep the urn and the good cups. By morning the hall smelled of wet plaster and the quote from the roofing man was more money than our small congregation sees in a year.

I am not the dominee. I am the woman who runs the kitchen and, by a kind of accident that happens to people who are good at lists, the fundraising. We had done the usual things over the years. The pancake mornings, the second-hand book sales, the raffle where the prize is a hamper that somebody's cousin donated. These things raise a few thousand rand and take a month of Saturdays. They were not going to put a roof on the hall before the next storm.

The idea that came from a tangled chain

The idea came to me while I was untangling my own jewellery box, which I do once a year with the same hopeless patience my mother had. I found, as I always do, the knot of broken things. A chain with no clasp. One earring whose partner left this world decades ago. A ring that had belonged to my aunt and had never once fitted any finger I own. A charm bracelet with two charms missing. Gold, all of it, real gold, sitting in a knot in the dark doing precisely nothing except make me feel guilty once a year.

I sat there holding this useless little handful and thought, if I have this, everybody has this. Every house in that congregation had a drawer with a widow's wedding band in it, or a dead mother's chain, or a christening bangle from a baby who is now a grandfather. Gold that nobody wears and nobody can bring themselves to throw away. What if, instead of pancakes, we asked for that.

I took an old two litre ice cream tub, the kind every South African kitchen uses for leftovers, and I wrote GOLD on the lid with a koki pen, and the next Sunday I stood up in front of three hundred people and made the most unusual request of my life. I asked them to go home and look in the drawers they never open, and to bring the broken gold they would never wear again, and put it in the tub. We would weigh it, we would sell it properly, and we would turn it into a roof.

What people brought

I did not expect what happened. I thought I might get a few chains. By the third Sunday the ice cream tub was too small and I had moved to a biscuit tin with a lock.

People did not just bring broken gold. They brought stories, folded up inside the gold, and they could not help telling them as they dropped the pieces in. An old man brought his late wife's wedding ring and held my hand while he did it and said she would have hated the leak in the roof, she had cleaned that kitchen for thirty years. A young woman brought a bangle from an engagement that had ended badly and said she would rather it became something good than sit in her flat reminding her. A widow brought a man's signet ring and did not say anything at all, and I did not ask.

I understood, standing there with the tin, that I was not really collecting metal. I was collecting grief that people did not know what to do with, and offering it somewhere to go. The gold had been stuck, the way my own tangle had been stuck, because selling it felt like a small betrayal and throwing it away felt like a crime. Putting it towards a roof over the children's nativity made it a resurrection instead of a loss. People needed that permission. I had not known that when I picked up the koki pen.

Learning how it actually works

Then came the part I knew nothing about. I had a tin of assorted broken gold of every age and quality and I had absolutely no idea what it was worth or how one even turns it into money honestly. I am a church kitchen woman. I was terrified of being cheated, not for my own sake but because this was three hundred people's grief and I had promised them a roof.

So I did my homework the way I do everything, with a notebook and too many phone calls. I learned the difference between a pawnshop and a proper buyer. I learned that reputable Gold Buyers weigh the gold in front of you and test the carat and show you the figure before anything is agreed, and that this transparency is the whole thing you are looking for. I learned to ask about the gold price per gram on the day, because gold moves like a living thing, and a fair buyer will explain exactly how the day's price feeds into what they offer you.

I took the tin to a proper Gold Exchange rather than the first shop with a bright sign, and I made our treasurer come with me so there were two sets of eyes, and I wrote down every number. They weighed each piece, separated the nine carat from the eighteen, set aside the two items that turned out to be gold plated rather than solid, and talked me through all of it slowly because they could see I was carrying something that mattered more than its weight.

The number that put a roof on the hall

The cash for the tin of broken gold came to more than four and a half times what a year of pancake mornings had ever raised. I sat in the car in the parking lot and phoned our treasurer and read him the figure twice because he did not believe it the first time. When a congregation turns its forgotten drawers out into one tin, the quiet accumulation of all those unworn years adds up to something that can hold back a storm. The arrangement to turn that gold into Cash For Gold was the most grown up piece of business I have ever done, and I did it on behalf of the dead as much as the living.

The roof went on in the autumn. It is a proper pitched roof now, not another flat one waiting to fail, and the first rain that came after it was finished fell on the hall and stayed outside where rain belongs. We put up a small wooden board in the kitchen that does not mention gold or money. It just lists the first names of the people whose jewellery is now, in a manner of speaking, keeping the children dry at Christmas.

I kept one thing back from the tin, with the permission of the woman who brought it. A thin chain with no clasp, too far gone to mean anything to a buyer, that an elderly member had given in memory of a daughter. I had it repaired, and it hangs now on a nail by the kitchen door, and I touch it on my way in like some people touch a mezuzah. My own tangle of broken gold went into the tin too, in the end. The aunt's ring that never fitted is part of a rafter now. I think that is a far better home for it than my jewellery box, where it waited forty years to be useful.