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.
Read the rest of this article »

This article begins a new series recounting my trip to South Africa in 2008. I travelled there, then, to visit Maria, my wife, as she worked with a small orphanage-type organization in rural Durban. We were dating back then. With the World Cup and all that I thought this would be an excellent time to give a little peek into my, and our, time on the African continent. Enjoy.

Just getting there was a pretty intense experience. Since flights out were about $600 cheaper flying out of the States than out of Canada, I bummed a ride off my parents to the airport in Buffalo, New York. It wasn’t a early morning flight, but I had been up late the night before, scrambling to copy DVDs and CDs to add to a collection I had been creating for Maria, and to do some last minute packing. I didn’t get much sleep, so even an early afternoon flight out, after the long drive from my parent’s house in Newmarket, I was already beat by the time I got to the airport.

Read the rest of this article »