The Wish

It’s Christmas Eve Day. I don’t have an evergreen tree in my living room or snow outside my door...but a ripe plum tree and a fresh rain make pretty nice alternatives.

Some things can even be duplicated. I have my favourite Christmas pop songs to listen to – Calista Flockhart’s “Santa Baby,” Mariah Carrey’s “All I Want for Christmas,” Jessica Simpson’s “Baby it’s Cold Outside.” I have Christmas crackers to distribute so that Mark, Doreen, Emily, Dodi, and I can wear those goofy crowns with dinner.

Some things can’t be duplicated. I missed the always memorable Bell family Christmas gathering yesterday. I don’t get to savour the sound of my mom wrapping gifts tonight. There will be no homemade apple pie for dessert tomorrow night. And at no point this holiday season did I get to exasperate my dad by repeatedly playing Hanson’s Snowed In CD.

I know and appreciate that this is a unique opportunity for me to experience a South African Christmas with an entire South African family. An entire South African town, for that matter! Tonight we’re dressing up for a neighbourhood costume party. The chosen theme is “Asian Fusion.” (I don’t get the connection either, and have been calling it “Asian Confusion.” ) Tomorrow morning, I’ll wake up to a church service in Afrikaans, then a gift exchange in the sunroom with my pseudo-family.

Furthermore, if I weren’t here, I wouldn’t have a puppy to spoil. Naartjie got her Christmas gift a couple of days early, actually. Over the weekend, she chased a rooster – literally ruffling his feathers – and destroyed a pillow - with much gusto - clearly indicating that she needed the new toy I had been keeping for her sooner rather than later. The animals and inanimate objects of the household are as pleased with her new cong as she is.

But paralleling this entire experience is the fact that my family, my friends, the ski hills, and the Boxing Day sales are a whole hemisphere away. Sigh.

I wish I could be in two places at once.

Doreen and Mark having dinner on the back porch.

Doreen is celebrating her birthday today, on Christmas Eve. We hosted a birthday party on Thursday night - here are the girls and I with the two "TV"cakes we created for the event.


Naartjie attacks her new cong!

Gingerbread

The Christmas holidays compound with the summer holidays down here, creating the ultimate vacation environment. It is generally accepted that no one works from mid-December until early or mid-January. There is a note on the door of the doctor’s office with an in-case-of-emergency number, because he too is gone. The guesthouses in Philippolis are booked every night with vacationers in transit from Joburg to the coast. They arrive in the evenings, stroll past the Christmas lights that decorate our main road in their flip flops, and are gone the next morning. I’ll join the migration in a couple weeks, when I head out for a 10-day road trip along the Wild Coast with my friend John.

The vacation spirit, however, has already hit me. I’m still getting up at 7 am most mornings, but the ensuring hours are not necessarily spent on my research project…

First, there was the family trip to Bloemfontein to do Christmas shopping. At a real mall! A day in the big city, I deemed, was occasion for wearing a watch and earrings. But I drew the line at mascara, which I haven’t put on since Cape Town, and don’t miss.

Then there was the morning that Emily, Dodi, and I spent in the Coloured township to help with the renovations being made to its nursery school. We played with the little kids, got covered in paint, and washed off with a swim at our neighbour’s pool in the afternoon.

On December 12th, Emily celebrated her 15th birthday. We baked two cakes - an E and a butterfly - and packed off to VanDerKloof Dam, on the Orange River, for a day of picnicking and swimming. The dam is a 2-hour drive from Philippolis, across into the Northern Cape, and we listened to Shania Twain’s Greatest Hits CD whenever we hit stretches of paved road.


Emily and Dodi with the birthday cake(s).

The very next day, my neighbour Jane asked me to come along with her to Colesburg, a larger town about 60 km away from Philippolis. A black woman she had once employed as a housekeeper passed away of AIDS a few months ago and Jane wanted to take her two orphaned sons on an outing to buy clothes and have lunch. I was really impressed by her initiative. The traditional fostering system among black families has been exhausted by AIDS – there are far too many orphans and far too few healthy adults to care for them – and new relations between whites and orphans could alleviate some of the burden, I think. The boys, in their early teens, spoke some English and I asked them about school, living with their grandmother, and their Christmas celebrations. We all ordered milkshakes at lunch.

Finally, I have been distracted by the necessity of picking up my new Jack Russell Terrier every 5-ish minutes to tell her that she is the cutest dog in the whole world and that I love her to pieces. (!!!) I think this picture says it all.


My tiny African dog, Naartjie.

Naartjie, as I’ve re-named her, is actually one of four dogs belonging to my neighbours. They have graciously allowed me to foster her for the duration of my stay here because I was looking for some company in my house at night. Naartjie (pronounced ‘naar-chee’) is the Afrikaans word for a clementine and one that I thought would make a cute dog’s name when I first came across it. Naartjie is so smart that she already responds to it. She is brave enough to bark at dogs ten times her size and silly enough to bark to her own reflection in the mirror. I want her to emigrate back to Canada with me!!! (Please, Mom?)

Back in October, one of my reasons for postponing my internship with the Treatment Action Campaign until February was because they would, of course, not be operating from something like December 17 – January 12, and I really didn’t think I’d want a month-long vacation. I still don’t think I need it, but I’m nevertheless happy that the vacation spirit has followed me up here to the Karoo...


Philippolis under two (two!) rainbows.

Living Conditions

The night sky is fiery with stars and I wish upon every single one that I could write for a community paper in this town. Here is what I would gleefully report…

This Week in Philippolis:

1. Goats took over part of the main road, the church grounds, and the newly-opened coffee shop for the duration of Friday afternoon. No one paid them much mind and their owner retrieved them before sundown.

2. The village’s grocery stores are running on empty. Basic goods such as milk, yogurt, and rusks (biscotti-like biscuits eaten with tea) are nowhere to be found. When, if, they’ll restock is uncertain.

3. The annual Christmas concert at the Dutch Reformed Church was held on Sunday evening, featuring a song freshly composed in Afrikaans about the joys of a summertime Christmas. The concert’s only hitch was the power failure caused by a surprise thunderstorm, corrected by a generator within 15 minutes.

Alas, a community paper is hardly necessary in my tiny new home, where word of mouth travels faster than a paperboy ever could.

More personally:

The most exciting part of my week was a visit from five UCT friends! Leo, Neil, Nikki, Kate, and Aukelin have been road-tripping across South Africa since the end of exams and spent a night at my place enroute back to Cape Town. We caught up over dinner at one of the town’s two restaurants. (Reservations and meal preferences were required one day in advance, so that the owner knew to open and to purchase the requested food.) I delighted in showing them the town and explaining all the maddening politics behind it – how white parents pulled their children out of the local school when integration began and it eventually closed because of low enrolment, how the town is still divided between black, white, and Coloured areas, clearly distinguishable from the tops of the country roads, and how if we were to go to the local pub my Chinese-American friend Leo might find himself unwelcome in what is customarily a place for whites only. The geographical set-up of Philippolis really is like stepping back in time to pre-1994 South Africa. And in my conversations with some locals, it is made clear to me that not everyone has accepted the end of racial rule.

In terms of work, I’ve now interviewed more than 25 people for my project on reverse urbanization. I can greet many people on the street by name. And when I had trouble with the VCR over the weekend, I knew of two people who were willing and able to help. The working atmosphere with my professor is fairly relaxed, and if I want to spend time between interviews on some of my favourite summertime activities – reading, cycling, running, sun tanning – then that’s just fine.

My desk

And finally, national news:

As desperately as the right-wingers want to deny it, this is in fact 2007, and the African National Congress is set to choose their next leader this month. This is a very important event, as the new leader will undoubtedly be elected the next president when South Africa goes to the polls in 2009. Yesterday I heard the distressing news that Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma are thus far the only candidates running. Mbeki has already served two terms as president and is not constitutionally allowed to run for a third term. A break from this tradition, I worry, would be the start of a president-for-life mentality. On the other hand, Zuma, with a record of corruption, a rape charge, and an infamous declaration in court that he took a shower to avoid contacting HIV can hardly be considered presidential material. No. I love this country as if it were my own and don’t want to see it left in either of their hands.

“The transformation this country is undergoing is fascinating,” said one of my neighbours, “But I wish that, like you, I could watch it from afar.”