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.