May
23
Wow! What a fantastic weather-weekend it was. Summer has finally arrived. It’s like the weather over here knows exactly when it is meant to change. Not too soon and not too late. It’s almost as if it can read the calendar and it gives us just what we are meant to have. We bought a Weber-braai this weekend so that we could have smokey charcoal fires, in real home-grown SA style and we finally got to sit out in the garden in the baking hot sun.
This week Mitchell heads off to France on a school trip. He is having an understandable mixture of excitement and trepidation. He will be visiting Sacre Coeur Basilica, Disneyland Resort, Champs Elysees, Arc de Triomphe, Palace of Versailles, Louvre museum, Notre Dame Cathedral and the, Eiffel Tower, They will be taking a boat trip on the river Seine, visiting Calais, as well as lots of French restaurants and shopping centres. (Note to Mitchell: Remember moms gift!)
Jenna had another riding lesson this week and as the other children in her group did not arrive, she had an impromptu one-on-one private lesson. This week she asked that Mike take the lead rein. I wasn’t complaining as it was the hottest weekend we have had, so I got out of the run around the arena in the heat.
Jenna attended another taster day this week at a local private school and we have decided that it is the one for her. She even went with her year group to play a rounders match against another school in Tunbridge Wells. This means that she only has 1 more week at her current school as we are moving her to the new school immediately after the half-term break.
On Friday evening while Jenna was at gymnastics
I took my camera and headed out into the fields around East Peckham to take a few photos. The beautiful yellow fields of the rapeseed (for Canola oil) seem to be coming to an end now, but there are still a few magnificent fields that look like a yellow ocean. I parked my car in a little tree-covered lane and walked around the village and into the farms. I walked into a church yard and there was a headstone for a baby that born in 1967 but had only lived for 2 days. The grave was neat and adorned with fresh flowers and I stood for a moment staring at it and wondering who still places those flowers there? After all those years, someone still cares enough to remember a soul that only lived for 2 days. That is what it is like when life HAS NO price-tag attached to it, when life has meaning and it is simply, not cheap.
South Africa faces being under a huge microscope in the next couple of weeks. The eyes of the entire world will be on the spectacle that is the Soccer World Cup. Not since the abolishment of apartheid, have South Africans needed to stand together and prove to the world that the “rainbow nation” was not just a catch phrase, that South Africa is not just another African-continent disaster story, and that it can be seen to stand proud alongside other powerful nations in the world. I had coffee with my friend Amanda this week. Her, and her family have been living here for about 10 weeks. Her in-laws live in Kloof, near Durban. Last Friday night 2 men entered their home and for 1 hour and 45 minutes they beat and robbed Amanda’s in-laws. They are just two simple law-abiding folk in their 60’s, who were spending a Friday evening at home, but their world was turned on its head when they were brutally beaten in their own home. Why the violence? Why the terror? Why do criminals in SA have to torture and abuse people, sometimes for hours on end? If they have to rob someone for a mobile phone, a radio, money, or a car, why not just take what they want and leave? Why the terror? Why the brutality? That is what it is like when life HAS a price-tag attached to it, when life means very little and it is simply, cheap.
Someone posted a link on Facebook today. It was a BBC news story about “How dangerous SA is” and it quoted statistics, had many comments from readers and even had a neat little graph, but the truth behind those statistics is a frightening daily reality for thousands of people. Every country has its good and its bad, and someone once said to me, “it all comes down to how much of the good and the bad you are willing to live with”.
Amanda’s in-laws are now selling the home they have lived in for so many years and are forced, out of fear and terror, to move to a gated enclosed complex, with no guarantees that the same thing won’t simply happen there again. Their lives are being dictated to by the criminals. It feels very different when it is real, tangible, when you can look into someone’s eyes over a cup of coffee and talk about it happening to family. It feels very different to reading statistics in a graph.
I hope that SA can host a World Cup that we can all be proud of, but I hope so much more, that life in SA will someday become priceless.
