Spiral

The slower pace of life in South Africa is, generally speaking, quite nice. Minutes are never used to describe time here. South Africans use now, just now, or now-now to estimate how long something might take. I still haven’t figured out exactly how to interpret these phrases, but I know never to think “This will just take 5 minutes” anymore. It won’t.

But as the end of the school year approaches, this relaxed pace is no longer suitable. Many of my international friends are attempting to jam-pack their final weeks; I have a million things to do to prepare for the next two phases of my life here.

It has all been escalating since South Africa’s spectacular victory at the Rugby World Cup last Saturday night. Since that eruption of national pride and wild celebration, I’ve attended my last day of classes at UCT, aced my Afrikaans oral exam, and took up kickboxing. I’ve hiked up Lion’s Head by moonlight with my housemates, went on a daytrip to the winelands to get to know the interns that I will be living with downtown, and dressed up for an American Hallowe’en party as Angelina Jolie’s identity crisis.

Jenna as a cat; me with Maddox.

Most significantly, I’ve reversed the order of my post-graduation plans. I now expect to leave for Philippolis, the tiny town in the Karoo where I will be researching rural development, in about three weeks. I’ll return to Cape Town for the months of February and March to intern with the Treatment Action Campaign. In order to legally stay here longer, I’m applying for a visa extension. One requirement is showing intention to return to my native land – so I’m even in the process of booking a flight home for early April.

There are several reasons why this last-minute reversal makes more sense. For one, I’m ready to be shaken out of my Cape Town comfort zone, and change the scenery, the company. The beach would have been a nice place to spend Christmas, but they are swamped with tourists in the summer anyway, and the Karoo offers me Christmas with my professor’s family. Finally, I was offered a fantastic internship with the hugely successful Treatment Action Campaign, an HIV/AIDS NGO whose work I greatly admire, and they advised me that there would be more work for me in the New Year. I immediately agreed, and began the great switch.

Just as much is happening here, I’m becoming more and more aware of how life goes on without me at home. I don’t recognize any of the songs – not even some of the artists – on Billboard’s Top 100 Songs anymore. I try to keep abreast of political developments, like the Liberal landslide in the Ontario election, but most of the jokes and references are beyond me.

My dad even changed careers over the course of my Afrikaans oral exam. Unable to tell my professor that my father was the owner of a company which rents and sells construction equipment (How do you say that in Afrikaans? You don’t!) I turned him into ‘n dokter (a doctor), a vocabulary term that I did have.

As much as I’ve enjoyed my classes here, I won’t be heartbroken to leave UCT. I have mixed feelings about the school. I haven’t always been impressed with the student body. In my sociology class, the professor showed a video on the second-last day. It was a short documentary, made for TV, showing life in the townships through the eyes of an 11-year-old resident. It was a great piece, but the reaction of my classmates was slightly troubling. Very well-intentioned, I’m sure, they thanked the professor at the end for “opening our eyes as to what living conditions still persist in South Africa 13 years after democracy.” This astonished me. You can’t drive from the airport to downtown Cape Town without seeing what living conditions still persist in South Africa. There are ample opportunities to go into the townships, with school activities or for special events. They are not inherently dangerous places and residents are largely welcoming. Why don’t South Africans know what is going on in South Africa? I asked my professor about it after class, and he tried to explain that when you grow up in the midst of poverty, it is normalized, and disregarded as a fact of life. I’m still trying to wrap my head around that.

To end on a more positive note: When I attended a church service in one of the townships last Sunday, I was encouraged by the presence of quite a few white people in the congregation. The church, between Mitchell’s Plain and Guguletu, would only be the local church for black and coloured people. The white people present undoubtedly drove out to the township from the city or a suburb in a conscious effort to cross the racial barrier. Christianity is so pervasive in South Africa; I think it could make for common ground between all South Africans.

The brand-new Khanysa Church Centre building, built between the black Guguletu area and the coloured Mitchell's Plain area to bridge the communities.

The victory parade for the Rugby World Cup is another place for common ground, which I’m going to head out to just now.

Family

“This one time, when we got stopped by the police in Zimbabwe,” is just one of the many anecdotes that my family’s visit has given me to share at parties for the rest of my life. “Ten minutes later, when we were stopped by the police in Zambia,” is how I’ll follow it up.

I was well-fed, well-dressed, and spectacularly entertained for the past two weeks by visitors from home – my Mom, Dad, Uncle Boyd, and Aunt Lynn. I wanted to make sure that their first trip to the African continent was a positive one; I hadn’t even thought about how much I would get out of their visit.

(Honestly, most of what I’d thought about was how quickly my dad was going to whisk me out of the country if anyone mugged us….thankfully, the only thievery we experienced was this one time, when my mom tried to shoplift in Zambia.)

Sure, there were some close calls. When our frightened driver in Zambia tore down the road away from a wild elephant, he was missing the passenger who had jumped out with his camera - my dad. We nearly lost my aunt to a fight that she seemed to think she could win with a woman four times her size at the Waterfront. And we all nearly became permanent residents in Zambia, when my uncle ran out of money and the airport ran out of fuel.

View of my dad as we drove away from the wild elephant.

But largely, everyone was kept safe and happy, as I had planned. And it was truly rewarding to share the country I love with people that I love. Their travels started out with me in Cape Town, took them out along the Garden Route while I spent a week at school, and then reunited us at Victoria Falls for two nights before returning to Cape Town. I enjoyed my role as a quasi-tourist, quasi-guide.

The biggest reward was a return trip to Victoria Falls, which is in such a different part of Africa, and one that feels all open and country-ish as compared to Cape Town. There were several tour highlights – a river cruise where we saw hippos, a visit to a village, Victoria Falls itself. The social highlight was meeting a white couple from Zimbabwe, who were more than happy to share everything they know and have experienced under Robert Mugabe’s brutal dictatorship. We monopolized them for at least five hours, and soaked up more information than any newspaper could have given us about the history of the country and daily life as it currently stands.

Bell Family Reunion at Victoria Falls.

It was fun to embrace a tourist role back at home in Cape Town, and see some things that were still on my to-do list – touring Robben Island, climbing Table Mountain, seeing the gardens at Kirstenbosch. Our tour of the infamous Robben Island prison was led by a former political prisoner. It was surreal to hear someone speak in the first person about the brutality experienced at the hands of the guards, the secret means of communication between the prisoners and the outside world, and the advice that Nelson Mandela offered to fellow prisoners. I will personally never tire of South African history and politics, and it was wonderful to have four brand new people interested in learning about them.

Our breakfast spot at the Waterfront in Cape Town.

Cape Town, I’ve come to see, is a fantastic city. But I’m the only Bell here now, and it’s a bit lonely.

Older and Far Away

It’s my 23^rd birthday, and it’s Spring! I ate strawberries with breakfast and wore a skirt to school in celebration. I do of course miss my cowgirl hat terribly on this special day, but, as birthday luck would have it, when my friend Sara and I stopped at a clothing store on our way home from school, I found (and purchased) a t-shirt that reads “I (Heart) Cowboys.” Fair compensation.

My friends Kate, Leo, and I were all born within 24 hours of each other and so threw a massive joint birthday celebration on Saturday night. We hosted our friends in Kate’s backyard for an appropriately South African and springtime activity – the braai. Not to be confused with a mere barbeque, a braai features exotic meats (or tofu dogs, as you like) slow cooked over a grill or fire. To emphasize how seriously the braai is taken here – there is actually a National Braai Day. Lots of people came out on Saturday to wish us well and a good time was had by all.

The birthday kids!

In a season of new beginnings, it seems appropriate to unveil the plans that I have worked out for my post-graduate life in South Africa.

On December 1^st, I will leave behind the nice little life that I have cultivated in the University of Cape Town suburb and move into an apartment downtown. I am in the process of finalizing a journalism internship with a human rights organization, with more details to come. I am really looking forward to moving downtown, which I imagine will be more like the city life I enjoyed in Montreal. The apartment building even has a pool, which will be a relief when Cape Town is weighed down in summer heat. And the work, of course, is a perfect blend of journalism and international development, my two academic interests.

On February 1^st, I will do an about-turn and re-locate to small-town South Africa, to begin my first post-graduation someone-thinks- my-skills-merit-remuneration job! A wonderful professor that I met through Rhodes University in July is hiring me as a research assistant on three development-related projects that she has underway. More details to come on those as well. There will also be lots of volunteer projects, such as HIV/AIDS work in the townships, to occupy my free time. I can’t wait to begin storytelling about my inevitable (mis)adventures in this tiny Afrikaans-speaking town.

I haven’t booked a flight home yet, but I approximately plan to trade in a South African winter in favour of a Canadian summer, and start grad school in September.

My oh my, look how the time flies

Look how the world changes in the blink of an eye

My oh my, look how the years have flown.

Turning around, before you know it, up and gone.

The birthday celebrations will continue presently, as we head out for Mexican food...and then some more when my parents arrive in Cape Town on Friday. Yay! It will be nice to be taken care of for a little while. I see myself as something like an adult now - but in other ways, I'm not aging at all.