The Father

I don't think I've ever encountered so much Catholicism in my life as I have in South Africa.  Not because South Africa is Catholic - it's primarily Protestant.  Rather, because, the Catholic missions in place in South Africa are a source of great wisdom, knowledge and sustainability within the communities where they work.  The pervading issues of homosexuality, molestation and women's rights are far from reach in these mission thresholds.  They are more concerned with the pressing needs of the local population - which include HIV infection, orphaning, child parenting, abuse, and hunger.

It is through the Father here that I have seen an immense love for community and a stellar example of one who has given up their life for the service of others.  I have been to the Father's house several times for traditional Liverpudlian meals, cooked by him, and have been given a tour round his small parsonage.  His room is bare, no less than one would expect from a priest, no pillow, no thick duvet, only a blanket and fitted sheet.  His home is scattered with books and he cracks me up by listening to the Afrikaans radio station - he's trying to learn Afrikaans.  He began his Sesotho studies by attending a Grade One classroom at a Primary School for a year; an impressively tall white man, sharing at a tiny desk with a half pint a quarter of his size.  He is now fluent in Sesotho and presents all his sermons to the black community in their language.

The Father has a terrifically difficult job, for a South African.  He must deliver sermons to 4 parishes on Sunday. Two in townships and two in the surrounding, predominantly white towns.  So not only must he engage with the absolute poorest of the poor, he must also engage with two separate and very different cultures from a place of love without judgement.

I complain it's a terrific sacrifice to only return home once a year.  But the Father only returns home once every three years, to England.  The Father has lived in 3 different parts of the world, serving missions and learning their languages, before landing up here - where he has been 7 years and is now a citizen.

At any given moment while visiting in his lounge, drinking tea that is utterly too sweet (because he refuses to give me a 1/2 teaspoon, claiming it's ridiculous), at least five children will pop round.  To each one he'll caress their little face, pat them on the head and give them an orange or two to take away.  Another few knocks on the door, informal settlers will appear with buckets, requesting a dip into his well.  His little home is a source of refuge.  Even for me - with the appeal of foreign, not local, company and a different perspective.

He has found a niche within each community, however I have been privy to the complaints in the English community.  Yes, this great man has a terrifying fault with the locals.  He stinks.  His hygiene is what one would expect of a hippie, but it's deliberate.  He doesn't wear deodorant and only bathes twice a week, or so I've heard.  The congregation has taken immense exception to this poor protocol and it has often been the topic of the dinners I've attended.  It's difficult to know how this issue is perceived in the Sotho community, considering there are many a staunch, smelly armpit there; yet the Sotho people are some of the cleanest, well-bathed and manicured people I know.  Cleanliness, is the holiest way out of poverty in Africa. One may be poor, but their stoop will always be clean, the sink empty of dishes, the clothes washed daily and pressed to perfection.

Honestly, it's irrelevant how the Father smells.  People in small towns always want something to complain about and in this case it's the priest.  But I am in awe of the Father. He's the kind of priest who will punch someone in the face for raping their niece.  And he doesn't care about the implications of collecting hitchhikers on the road.  I don't know what's in his head and he's probably not a pure Mother Theresa, but in my book, he sure comes close.  His regard for humanity says it all.

Ricki

After almost two years in the wee town of Viljoenskroon, I have started to pick up on some characters.  It's a slow place where most people stick to themselves and avoid outsiders.  It's not a place where you can swoop into the local pub and figure everyone out in 2 seconds flat, simply because so many people are in hiding.  Often you'll find only three people enjoying happy hour on Friday.   It's the type of place where people slowly emerge and their characteristics only become remarkable after witnessing repetitive behaviors, or worse, after hearing the pervading gossip and history shrouding their reputation.

I don't mean to make fun.  Nor do I mean to make nice. I have observed a lot and feel it's time to take some stock in these characters on the page.  What I write in the coming month (or months, depending on how quickly I deplete my small town stock) will derive from my interactions, but not necessarily a deep or thoroughly researched knowledge.  I won't pretend to know someone I don't, but rather engage my inner-voyeur through probing the presenting elements and facts surrounding their "plain view" personality.  These portraits may be short, but altogether they should provide a more complete mural of this Viljoenskroon town and farming area.

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First up is Ricki*.  Rail thin, she works the internet counter.  A bit apologetically Afrikaans, she doesn't fit the mold.  Her 19 year-old peers all seem to be wearing bright flashes of red or turquoise with fingernails to match and well-maintained, over-zealous blonde highlights.  Ricki wears shirts with designer razor slashes and almost exclusively black, white and silver.  Her midriff tends to peer out a lot, suggesting her lean body is too long for most apparel.  With morbidly pale skin, I can't help but wonder if she's trying to look like the wanton medieval victim in the video game ad printed on the side of the hard drive.

Rwanda

I never posted this and feel I should share the photographs and thoughts of my few days in Rwanda.  Rwanda still lingers with me and is a beacon of hope, whilst also glares a flare of warning for future generations.


The Rwanda of 2011 offers so much more than the drama of "Hotel Rwanda" would allow your mind to anticipate. Seventeen years post-genocide. Rwanda. Seventeen years democracy. South Africa. The visit to Rwanda allowed me many reasons to compare the complex state of SA to a place that has found a positive groove post-conflict.  It's not really fair to compare the two, but that 17 mark is inevitable.  Rwanda is small and whilst it experienced an absolute wretched, traumatizing horror in one year - South Africa is many times the size in area and people and cultural diversity and she had over 40 years of slow, debilitating, and deliberate oppression and overhaul.

But for the eventual tourist, Rwanda escapes the African cliches.  Dirty.  No.  Unsafe.  No.  Untimely.  No.  Full of beggars.  No.  Chaotic.  No.  It was clean, well-ordered, traditional, deepest dark at night and still, safe and filled with the spiritual warmth of good people.

But the funny thing that still remains: prisoners dressed in pink serving out their sentence from local tribunal, Gacaca court hearings for certain genocide contributors.  It's a thin waft on the air, but they are there.  And the ghastly historical museum full of skulls...  Not to mention the issue of avoiding any attributions to the past "faux" cultures of Hutu and Tutsi.  Because if you know anything about Rwanda, you will know that the cultural divide of Hutu and Tutsi was based on colonial Belgian artifice. A brief understanding from Wikipedia states: 

The definitions of "Hutu" and "Tutsi" people may have changed through time and location. Social structures were not stable throughout Rwanda, even during colonial times under the Belgian rule. The Tutsi aristocracy or elite was distinguished from Tutsi commoners, and wealthy Hutu were often indistinguishable from upper-class Tutsi. When the European colonists conducted censuses, they wanted to identify the people throughout Rwanda-Burundi according to a simple classification scheme. They defined "Tutsi" as anyone owning more than ten cows (a sign of wealth) or with the physical feature of a longer nose, or longer neck, commonly associated with the Tutsi. A person could change from Hutu to Tutsi by obtaining enough cows to acquire the status. Full article here.

Now, to avoid future conflict, students, children, and youngsters, no longer reveal (or even know) their cultural identity.  This erasure of the past could come to haunt.

For now, Rwanda is on the up and up.  They are training their varsity students overseas and building their nation from the ground up.  They have resources and they are applying them to the correct channels, at least it seems for now.  It is stunningly beautiful and hilly.  They have the sweetest tea and most toxicly sinful hot sauce imaginable.  To plan for 2012 touring, certainly.  But for 2020, I'd say keep watch on the Truth and Reconciliation in this country.  It is not popular to present a dissenting voice in popular politics and I imagine that will take a long time to improve.

Vaginal Room

My mother has begged.  The internet has forgotten.  Blogger has an updated interface.  And all but 2 followers remain.  What can I say? I have a little steam in the Engine again and feel like writing.  Writing may be a practice, but it also requires a certain amount of stamina and perspective to be worth anyone's time reading.  As this is a blog and not a personal diary, it's worth writing something worth reading.

My apologies for the 10 month delay!  My new blog, www.thepiedkingfisher.wordpress.com, has kept me happily busy and inspired and has little demand on my brain, enabling more freedom and creativity.  Food is just easy like that.

But the past 10 months have not passed without incident.  They have not been boring, nor have they been the most fun.  This 29/30th year in my life has me feeling the consequences of being on the cusp of adulthood and wondering when life will ease, and still I know I have yet to meet the darkest place.  May 1st passed this week and it was the one year anniversary of something unmentionable that happened last year.  Perhaps that was why writing felt impossible.  Perhaps that is why, one year later, I feel I am emerging to a better place.

It's not really worth recalculating the past year.  I know that one of my biggest personal hurdles in life is letting go.  It's hard when you have such a great memory!  But it's a burden and it's time to stop adding it up for some irrelevant subtotal, just to feel worse.  So here's moving on. A very short story - "Vaginal Room." At which point, if you know me, you may choose to stop reading (although this is not sexual, but medical!):

To top an off-year, I suppose it was time I encountered some, well, let me be subtle - female problems.  I'm sure you may have known from the heading.  But it was high time.  I have had few complaints for my cogs and chambers since reaching puberty over half my lifetime ago.

I had taken out the trash. Which, to most urbanized, citified folks would mean "taken it out to the curb."  But since I live on the veld and there is a wide expanse of rubbish heap 20 feet away (luckily on the windowless/road-less side of the cottage), it really meant taking the trash, neatly tied in a grocery-size parcel, to the front door.  So that Johannes could walk it the further 20 feet.  I hate taking out the trash.  Maybe it's because I always associated that duty as my brother's responsibility.  It's absurd, but I'd rather clean a toilet.

My little children neighbors being the restless creatures that they are, stumbled over to our house at some point mid-morning to help with the endless weeding and tying up of bean vines.  Before I knew it, they were into the trash bag, searching for goodies.  And that lurch.  That gulp of a golf ball in the throat.  The paling of the face.  The evil knowing that they might find my baby pink, discarded "cream" applicators.  In Afrikaans "room" applicators.  And knowing there was no way I could explain it in the lightning-speed seconds before they were discovered. Immediately, upon alighting her hand to the so-called reinvented gem, 10 year-old Mammekie was playing with my medical tools.  Disaster.  What could I say?  The shock upon my face melted into complete horror and absolute bewildered embarrassment.  The saying "One man's trash is another man's treasure?"  She ran off into the horizon pumping that ridiculous little baby pink tube into the air with shrieks of laughter; unbeknownst to her, the heart wrenching sound of my own sighs disappeared into the ether.

I promptly called Danielle.  Only a woman could know.  Absolute horror.  I'm so glad Johannes has taken to burning the rubbish as his second calling in life.  "Room" saviour.

The Pied Kingfisher

Early morning, late evening; God's happiest partners make two dots of love on the wire fence along the banks of the shiny vlei. Long beaks, a black and white collage of feathers, these kingfishers are one of my top varieties of South African birds. They offer furtive glances to one another. When one picks up to fly, the other follows. You know where you see one, there must be two. It is an aberration of nature for kingfishers to fly solo. For as much as I've been alone, I still want my kingfisher to be on the next tier of the fence, glancing over at me, morning and night.

Drop in the Night

The moon was a miracle to behold in the wintery African sky yesterday evening. At 8pm, the full moon was busy exposing the whole farm in a spill of silver glow. And then. The earth's shadow intercepted the sun and a haze of dark spread slowly over the full orb. For over three hours, a group of us sat entertained at the Botha's house.

From the bottom right, the moon was slowly stained grey and then red, as though a rooibos tea bag was bleeding onto a papertowel. At the height of the evening, the moon hung like a cherry-on-top, conjuring up sugary delights in the mind of my tastebuds. Orange liqueur. In-season blood oranges. Gumdrops. James and his Giant Peach. Gooseberries. Candied rose petals.

Gravity and winter's chill pulled a huddle of youngsters and grownups alike into the centre of a large trampoline, our bodies covered in sleeping bags and immersed in giggles; from here we watched the magic take over as the moon shone a bit more dull, steeped in the orange of the sun's bent rays and coloured a bit deeper from the sulfur deposits of Chile's recent volcanic eruption.

The moon travelled through the center of the Earth's shadow and I savour this moment for my mouth to remember. Orange drop.


Photo Credits:
ALAIN JACQUET of Johannesburg, South Africa, top and bottom
Derek Keats of Johannesburg, South Africa - middle photo.

Ponies and Circles: Part I

A 60 kilometre road takes 3 hours to drive at an approximate speed of 20 km/hr (12 mi/hr), cobbled with loose stones, potholes and drinks of water. Thick lines of water trickle from every orifice in the hills' crevices, bubbling out into the roads and larger tributaries, gurgling across bridges. Mist fingers through mountains, sweeping around snow caps and edgy rock faces, dripping into valleys, eventually merging with the drifts of smoke leaking from every hut. Pools of sun highlight thatch rooftops and striped balaclavas, atop bounding, medieval horsemen cloaked in woolen Basotho blankets. Shimmers of white flicker across mountainsides as angora goats gloat and bleat. My little white "Twinkie" shines and rattles through the morning, rousing laughter from the shepards, children and horsemen at the size of the smallest car to ever challenge the rough roads of Lesotho. Our trip, barely starting, was already historic in the fresh Lesotho landscape.


Ten days and 9 nights marked my longest camping trip ever, shared with my ardent Johannes. After eight months in Belgium, Johannes' request for his time in South Africa was to spend as many waking moments outdoors as possible. We strutted across some of SA's worst pot-holed roads to land our first night in Maseru, the capital city of Lesotho.


Maseru begs for love from the first sighting of the border post; litter is strewn across muddied roads and throngs of people bust forth from Taxis and alight the stands of magwenya (fetkoek) and pots of steaming pap and cabbage. Nestled amongst some pretty sizable hills, Maseru is a bubble of the usual African chaos that South Africa tends to lack: cacophonous honking, insidious overtaking cars, blacked-out traffic lights, overloaded trucks with pieces of wood and furniture threatening to topple, and hoards of people walking home from work - bags of maize-meal balanced overhead and hips wagging to the speed of Africa-time.



We arrived in Maseru a day early, realising that heavy rain-fall might impact the drivability of the roads. We camped one night in a soggy spot, overlooking a mid-sized dam - we were the only campers as the rain fell and the mud froze into thick cakes. Even amongst the rain and the cold, there's nothing quite like making a fire on a cliff to the sounds of sangomas delivering the souls of customers through the beating of drums and a chorus of chants.



Our picturesque drive to Semonkong was easier than expected, although slow and, at times, a bit treacherous. Lesotho has a very limited system of tarred roads and it took us an hour on tar and 3 hours on dirt to reach a location only 100 km (62 miles) away. The dirt roads steadily decrease in quality the further they are from Maseru. The traffic we passed was limited to a couple of Taxis, a bus and a few bakkies - nary a small compact car to be seen! The majority of our passing roadsmen were actually men on horses and donkeys, as the "Basotho pony" is the mainstay in Lesotho Department of Transportation. It's a chicken and an egg scenario; which came first the bad roads or the ponies? Well, most likely the lack of roads encouraged equestrian development and with the introduction of horses to Southern Africa in 1653, the paths and trails running across the Maloti and Drakensburg mountains have been etched into the geography for hundreds of years. With the majority of the population surviving off subsistence farming, a greater infrastructure of roads will probably never be a possibility, considering the severity of slopes and passes throughout the rippling mountain ranges.

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