This is the second installment of a series about my time in South Africa.
In 2008, while Maria and I were still dating (we’re married now) she lived in South Africa and volunteered at a home for AIDS orphans. She stayed for six months. For six weeks I went to visit her. Now, a couple of years later, I think I can finally begin to process the experience and I figure while the memories are still fresh enough I may as well write them down.
Leaving the airport I was struck by both the familiar and the strange. Familiar was the Toyota Corolla that Maria and I piled into along with Ruth, the woman who owned and operated the home that Maria was working in. From what I’d been filled in on by Maria, I knew a bit about Ruth. She was a single-parent who had a sordid and difficult life in South Africa. She was Afrikaans which, outside of Africa, might mean very little but on the continent, it carried with it a lot of history. She struggled to work and manage the children’s home, she had big dreams but was having a difficult go of it.
To me, South Africa had a very strange and compelling history as far as I understood it. The Dutch settlers, ancestors to the Afrikaans, set up trading posts and colonized the continent in a way that’s pretty unusual as far as colonies went. Strange because they did it pretty early on in the scheme of things, and strange again because they stayed and made South Africa more than just another trading port. The Dutch stayed amongst the Black Africans and developed an identity of their own, the Afrikaans. Their accent, a mix of Dutch and British, sounds a bit like Australian but is absolutely unique in the world, as is their language.
Apartheid, the separation of the Black Africans from the white Europeans (Afrikaans, British, etc.) was largely similar to Segregation in the Southern United States but lasted well into the late 20th century. Today, the Afrikaans and the Black Africans exist, along with Indians (who were brought into South Africa as domestic servants), in a kind of strange tandem. It’s a clear three-tier social system: Afrikaans, Indians, Black Africans with each ethnic group serving very specific purposes.
As a result of its interesting and unique history South Africa has a very particular feel to it: European, yet African. I immediately fell in love with the place.
But, from my perspective, South Africa had its problems too. It was violent. Car-jacking, as far as I could tell, happened pretty regularly and stabbings, shootings, and rapes were the kind of mundane things that the papers didn’t bother to even report on anymore. Like many African countries, the more wealthy (or, perhaps, the not poor) had gates around their houses or their communities and private security companies were in high demand. There was also the reason that Maria was there: AIDS. The country is crippled underneath a massive AIDS infection rate and beyond killing mothers, fathers, and caregivers, the epidemic is leaving babies and young children orphaned and abandoned. One of the children in the home that Maria worked in was left, newborn, underneath a tree.
But back to our ride from the airport.
Stinking like twenty hours on an airplane, I was, like I said, struck by the dichotomy. Here we were, Maria and I, inside of what would otherwise be a pretty familiar car. The ubiquitous Toyota Corolla, pretty popular in Canada. We were together, which was pretty ordinary, but then again we were driving on the wrong side of the road, being driven by a woman that Maria seemed pretty familiar with yet I had just met. It was another world.
The truly strange though struck me about twenty minutes outside of the airport maze when we hit traffic. Mind you, this was something like ten o’clock at night and a traffic jam at that hour seemed to me to be pretty remarkable. We soon learned that it was a kind of traffic stop situation—for those in Ontario imagine the R.I.D.E. program on the middle of the 401. For those unable to imagine it was all four or five lanes of the area’s largest highway blocked off for police to inspect cars, passengers, and cargo for anything illegal. As we slowly crawled forward, one car at a time, towards the road block, we witnessed police officers with automatic weapons pulling cars aside and loading passengers into large police vans. While we didn’t do, or have, anything illegal it was still unnerving to be so close to such a potentially violent situation. Several times in South Africa when we encountered heavily armed police or security outfits the first thought through my mind was, imagine how easy it would be for them to fire that weapon.
Still, we managed to slowly make out way closer and closer to the barricade and when we passed through and out the other side we were zooming. Another thing about South Africa is that fast always felt much faster. Maybe it was the fact that the highways were unfamiliar and unpredictable (to me at least). Maybe the mere idea of not knowing where we were going exactly made it seem like we were racing there faster than usual. Certainly in some cases when we didn’t have seatbelts—apparently not a huge hit in South Africa—this in itself lent a little edge to traveling. But, in any case, going places was always an adventure and I remember this first trip from the airport to the farm very clearly.
As we zoomed along the highway I tried to get a look out the windows as much as I could. Later the sights would become pretty familiar and even a bit mundane, but they were new and absolutely compelling in the dark of the night. I remember lights, tons of lights, from what turned out to be a very rich Durban suburb nestled against the coast of the Indian Ocean. We passed near the enormous Gateway Shopping Centre, the mall that would become all too familiar to Maria and I—a mall that easily rivals Toronto’s Eaton’s Centre. Imagine that.
Soon the paved roads began to degrade in quality as we passed outside of the city limits and eventually we found ourselves on a stretch of very, very dark dirt roads on our way to a tiny community called Oakford.
I wouldn’t call it an orphanage because that isn’t what it is. It’s an organization called Sinakekele, but it’s really too small to even call it an organization either. In a nutshell, it’s a woman, Ruth, who takes in children orphaned by AIDS. At the time of our visit the “family” consisted of Ruth, her two children (in their teens) and four children she took in, then legally adopted, who were orphaned by AIDS. In an interesting bit of scheduling I arrived for my six week stay on the same day of a major move. Ruth, Maria, and the children moved from a small house in the middle-income suburbs near Durban to a kind of farmhouse somewhere near the middle of nowhere.
In the pitch dark it seemed like we’d arrived at the edge of the world. As the remote-controlled gate clanked open the car was immediately assaulted by a pack of children, two dogs, and a lot of noise. All I really remember from the first night is being overwhelmed by bouncy, excited children who spoke in an accent that I couldn’t even begin to decipher at the time, and boxes. I surely hadn’t come at a good time, in the middle of moving and trying to unpack. But I don’t think I really thought about how inconvenient my arrival might have been, I was exhausted and although everyone wanted to visit I just wanted to sleep. When I did find my bed it turned out to be a bunk bed with an impossibly thin mattress, a pillow to match, and an old comforter. After checking the room thoroughly for bugs (I would remain paranoid for the entire six weeks) I piled up my suitcases in the corner and collapsed to sleep. In hindsight, it didn’t matter how uncomfortable it might have been—in reality it wasn’t all that bad—I was far too tired to notice. That night, I knew, was just skimming the surface. When I woke up everything would be different.
Thank you! I am going to enjoy every word of your adventure.