Happy 10th

I’ve spent the past 2 weeks in the company of beautiful Angela, a friend from highschool. She just took her medical board exams and I am at the end of my first year of teaching in an international school. Besides celebrating those two things, we have also dubbed this visit our 10th anniversary, as we became friends in June of 1999 when we joined the Westfield High School Cross Country team. The traditional gift one gives on a 10th anniversary is aluminum or tin. Www.findgift.com reccommends a nice piece of aluminum jewelry (?) but we figured aluminum also houses beer. . .

I didn’t know Angela’s flight number, nor which country her flight to Johannesburg originated from. Nonetheless, I sent a taxi driver to collect her, giving made up flight details, and she was miraculously found and brought to the guesthouse where I was waiting for her.

I didn’t give her much time to settle or recover from the travel before I took her to the Apartheid Museum. It was a pretty intense introduction to the country. The exhibits were dense and we spent two hours moving in chronological order before reaching 1948, the year apartheid actually began. The museum was incredibly powerful and solidified some of my prior knowledge about this part of South African history. In our fourth hour at the museum my capacity to take in any more information diminished and I saw a poster for the Women’s Movement Peace Party and misread it as Women’s Movement Dance Party. We took this as a cue to leave and we stopped at the gift shop on the way out and saw it was selling t-shirts reading “Whites Only” or “Blacks Only,” modeled after signs that were hung in restaurants, public toilets, etc during apartheid, much like one would have seen in the American south during segregation. I checked with Ang to make sure I was not misreading the t-shirts but she confirmed what I saw. I can’t imagine what would possess anybody to buy or wear a t-shirt emblazoned with such a statement.

The taxi driver, Simon, who picked us up from the museum said he’d never been inside the building. He doesn’t feel he needs to see what is there because he lived through it. Simon said he would like to bring his daughters though, when they are older. I asked him how old they are, expecting him to say something like four and six, but he said they are fifteen and nineteen.

Simon brought us to a nearby mall that I chose as our next destination because of the great flea market on the roof, selling everything from the usual flea market junk to paintings, African crafts, baked goods, fancy soap, novelty light switch covers, etc. Ang and I bought many grams of olives, dry seasoned rice to take camping, and matching paintings. We bought soup and pastries for dinner and took it back to the guesthouse and ate on the bed with the electric blanket turned up all the way.

The next morning we headed to Nelspruit on a bus that televised a public service announcement from Jesus. It was in Nelspruit that I discovered I had no way of taking more cash out of the ATM as I was using a new card and forgot to memorize or write down and bring along with me, the pin number. On top of this unhappy fact, the likelihood of us reaching Kruger National Park the next day via public transportation was seeming less and less likely. Luckily we met two Israeli brothers who had rented a car and were heading to the same camp site. They offered to drive us there and drove us around the park the next day.

The national park is about the size of New Jersey and the day we arrived we drove 200 kilometers looking out for animals. We saw a couple of zebra, a few giraffes and elephants, and a baby hyena that moved like a bobbing head doll. But as one of the Israelis said, “you see a lot of shit but you don’t see shit” (trans.: “There sure is a lot of poop here but where are all of the animals who created it?”) They were pretty disappointed we didn’t see any of the big cats and said, “We’re not leaving till we see lions and tigers.” I don’t know if this was an English vocab mix-up or if they truly thought that tigers live in the African bush. I didn’t want to be the one to correct or deliver disappointing news so I just sort of nodded, “yup, tigers.” Maybe they were joking. We did see a lot of impala though. At night trying to fall asleep in the tent Ang said, “I see impalas when I close my eyes.” I felt badly that Ang didn’t get to see more animals but as she said, “Looking and not finding is part of it too. If I wanted to be guaranteed seeing a lion, I would go to the zoo.”

After pitching our tent, we went to check out the kitchen. The facilities did not have the promised pots, which made peanut butter sandwiches the only thing we were likely to eat for the next three days. Then we realized, the kitchen also lacked the promised cupboards for storing food, and the walls, which didn’t even close all the way around the building, were plastered with monkey warnings. We went out in search of people with a car, which was not difficult as we are apparently the only people who thought it would be great to enter the park without our own car. We walked up to a nearby caravan, and Ang, using her most friendly voice (which somehow lent itself to using the word "y’all") got some middle age people who thought we were pretty unintelligent to store our peanutbutter and bread.

The following day at Kruger, we decided it would be prudent to figure out how we were getting out of the park. For one thing, there were several kilometers from the rest camp to the nearest park entrance that can only be traveled by private vehicle. Then we needed to get from the gate to the downtown area on a route that public transportation didn’t travel. Once we got there, which was starting to seem an unlikely prospect, we could take a minibus taxi to the nearest city and from there we already had bus tickets back to Johannesburg. We had heard that the manager named Albert had a friend named Lucky who could get us as far as we needed to go. Only Albert was nowhere to be found. The receptionists started to giggle when they saw us approaching for our hourly inquiries and Albert apparently has a lot of “meetings.” We knew he existed because his photo was framed on the wall in reception but looking for a tall dark man in camouflage in a sea of tall dark men in camouflage was like a Where’s Waldo book. After several hours of alternating trying to spot African wildlife and trying to spot Albert, we were called into his office. He sat us down, spread open his hands and shrugged. “Shit,” I thought. But he surprised both of us by offering to drive us himself.

Thus, the next morning, Ang was on her first minibus taxi marveling at the fact people brought chickens on board while I was equally surprised by the tiny woman balancing a huge computer tower in lap. Animals I’ve seen, but the PC surprised me. Everything went smoothly and we were back in Johannesburg in time for an early dinner in front of a glowing fireplace.

From there we headed back to Lesotho where we stayed in Malealea, a community nestled in a beautiful section of the Drakensburg Mountains. I was relieved when Ang said she had no interest in pony trekking, and we spent the day hiking around waterfalls and rock paintings. Ang was so enchanted that she decided to stay on an extra day, while I had to finally go back to work. Perhaps one of my favorite moments of the trip was Ang’s visit was coming home from work that day and having someone I love already there waiting, instead of a dark empty house.

We spent the rest of the week in Maseru being very domestic, sweeping, cooking dinner, baking, hanging laundry on the lines. Some days I took her to tour my life in Lesotho. She came to school, visited the orphanage, and met my friends, including a dinner out, en route to which, our taxi driver ran out of petrol in the middle of the intersection while running a red light. I sent her out on a private tour of local rock art and to a pediatric AIDS clinic to shadow a young, American doctor. In the evenings, we sat in front of the space heater, eating on the floor. On days we went separate ways, we shared what happened since breakfast. Actually, we did that even on days we spent together and it was amazing to hear her perspectives and to remember the things that used to challenge and surprise and amuse me when I first arrived and everything was new and fresh.

The shuttle picked her up from my house almost 24 hours ago, but she was flying out of an airport several hours away and she left several more hours early in case of traffic. So right now, as I sit on my floor typing, warming myself in front of the heater with my mittens stretched over my frozen feet, she is somewhere over the Atlantic headed toward summer in New York. In two days, she will be on an ob/gyn rotation in a city hospital while I will be on spending my school vacation picking herbs on a farm. And in two months from now, she will be on her next medical rotation while I will be back in the classroom teaching. And 12 months from now, who knows where either of us will be, but it will be our 11th anniversary and that’s the year of steel.