Abortions for 35 Bucks

A poster at the taxi rank in Bloemfontein

Lesotho

Mohau with his dog

A few weeks ago my roommate and I traveled to Lesotho. It’s a tiny country within South Africa’s borders.

Armed with guidebooks and assurances from friends that Lesotho was much safer than South Africa, we caught the overnight bus to Bloemfontein. This is where I finally boarded my first African taxi: a white, beat up and rusted mini bus. There are no bus schedules and few safety standards, but the price is right. Devi and I pulled up to the dusty taxi rank in the morning and found a taxi with “Maseru” in the window. I settled into my seat early and waited. These taxis don‘t leave until they‘re full, and they’re full when people begin filing onto the bus backwards, ass first, jamming their bodies into spaces meant only for a leaning leg. Then the driver throws your suitcase on top of you. Then he turns on the music. Then he turns it up.

Generally, Devi is a very organized person. In fact, I’d say she’s everything I’m not. So I was surprised when she hadn’t taken out enough money for our trip. No problem, she said. I’ll just hit the first bank in Maseru. And that’s when we saw the lineups. Lineups that wrapped around buildings and down streets. They all led to bank machines. Turns out we arrived on pay day in a country where employees aren’t paid by direct deposit.

The next day, Devi and I caught a taxi to Malealea, south of the capital. Our guidebooks pointed us here, along with plenty of vacationing NGO workers and tall Germans corralled on buses with extra big wheels. Malealea is beautiful: a tiny little town in the mountains whose small economy is driven by the tourists here. In fact, the complex where we stayed has been the town’s nucleus since the turn of the century. Only there’s a chain fence around the whole of the property, and the locals are left to stand around at the front gate.

Devi and I hired a guide, a very nice young man named Moeketsi, to take us on an overnight pony trek to a nearby village. Devi took an hour to pack her saddle bag, lining it with a garbage bag and carefully filling it with a rain jacket, extra socks, and a sleeping bag. I packed in five minutes. I threw my unwrapped clothes into the bottom of the grungy old bag, threw on my jean jacket and forgot my sleeping bag altogether.

We left in the morning. The view was beautiful. The ride was not. Horses are huge animals with skinny little ankles, so when our guide took us down narrow, rocky hairpin turns along the side of a cliff, I got off poor Chamomile and guided my horse down the path. Devi, in all her self-assuredness and stick-to-it-ness, stayed on her grand white stallion and bumbled down the path. I don’t care what she says: horses can trip too.

By the afternoon it was hailing: hail that bounced off your head and had our horses’ heads buried deep in their chests. We were only halfway to the village. Too far to continue on, too far to go back. But just five minutes earlier we had passed Hanlsoeu, a little village along the side of the bumpy path. We turned around, and headed back. Once we arrived, Moeketsi ran into a small round hut. Within seconds a woman eagerly stood in the doorway and waved us in. There were lots of women inside: old women, fat women, women lying down, women carrying babies and women dancing to music playing on a ghetto blaster over in the corner. One of the women was the chief - acting on behalf of her husband who was away working in a mine. Without hesitating, Mamothobi said we could stay the night in the house next door. She said the owners would sleep somewhere else. The one room home had a double bed with several blankets and a dining room table with a lace tablecloth.

Devi and I had a lot of visitors that night. By the end, the floor was caked in an inch of mud with all the feet in old oversized shoes tracking in the night’s storm. One 15 year old girl fetched her English homework and together, with half a dozen of her friends crowding in to get a good look, we finished her assignment. Only, I just gave her the answers. In fact, I had half a mind to write her English teacher and tell him his assignment was obviously intended for English speakers and was far too hard and irrelevant for Mapompa Bosiu.

Here are a couple of examples from the test. Choose the correct word:

You may be amazed by children’s ___________to learn a new language. (capability/capacity)

Women gained ____________ to the exclusively male club only quite recently. (admission/admittance)

Mohau took us on a hike

Cape Peninsula University of Technology

It's True. I am Dutch.

A street sign in Bo-Kaap, Cape Town's Muslim quarter. VanderMeulen is my mother's maiden name.

It’s not often that I’ve been a visible minority. I’m a white farm girl from eastern Ontario. But here on the campus where I work, I’m one of just a handful of white faces. And so far, I’m the only one with this so-called American accent.

Not surprisingly, just down the road at the nearby shopping mall, it’s a different story. The mall is a frustrating maze: corridors snake endlessly in a thousand directions. Still, shoppers are undeterred and tirelessly navigate through the congested traffic. Here at the mall, I easily slide back into the majority. There are some black people, but most of them are behind the tills. There are “coloured” people (the word “coloured” has become part of the language here. It refers to those with both African and European blood. Most speak Afrikaans). But for the most part, the mall is just like any at home: a dizzying sea of white suburban moms and dads, stylish teeny boppers and middle aged, thin lipped women with their pot bellied husbands in tow.

The mall is an antiseptic and shiny cocoon from the shack villages we all passed on our drive here.

It’s easy to feel ashamed here. Especially if you’re white. And Dutch. And Christian Reformed.

My parents were born in the Netherlands and were among the thousands of Dutch immigrants who moved to Canada after the war. They brought with them their earnest work ethic, their farming sensibilities and perhaps most important, their Calvinist beliefs. The Dutch who moved to South Africa a few centuries earlier brought much the same.

By the time my parents reached Canada, the Dutch immigrants-turned-colonists in South Africa had settled in nicely, thanks to their Apartheid regime. It’s especially embarrassing since they pinned their regime on the teachings of their faith -- my family’s faith. Meanwhile, the Christian Reformed Church in Canada did little to break ties with its sister church in South Africa. Even as violence escalated and the country faced international sanctions, the Christian Reformed Church in North America sat on its hands and did nothing. In 1989, just a few years before the African National Congress won the fight, the church finally cut the umbilical cord and severed ties with the church in South Africa.

And so when I leave my residence in the morning and walk across the commons and cross paths with the dozens of keen, bright-eyed black students making their way to class, I can’t help but feel complicit in this country’s horrific history.


Touring the Cape Town Harbour

First Days in Cape Town

Simon's Town, African Peguin Colony at Boulders Beach

Since arriving here, I've been told one thing repeatedly: it's an exciting time in South Africa. The country is still licking its wounds after living through decades of the apartheid regime. But they're moving on. And yet, while the government-dictated distinctions between whites, coloureds and blacks may be obsolete, the rhetoric continues.

White people tell me not to worry if a black person stands too close. It's just their way, they say. My colleague, a young black man, flashes his BMW key fob. A birthday present to himself, he says. Later he tells me some people think he's a sell out, or a coconut, a black man living like a white man. I haven't visited any of the number of sprawling townships, or shack villages, but I want to. White people though, tell me it's not safe. I met a young Afrikaner couple. Sweet. The young woman is one of my students, and reads the paper every day. They both live in comfortable homes in the suburbs. Their doors and windows are covered by locked bars, and gates surround their gardens. There are four million people in Cape Town -- a quarter of them live in those shacks that seem endless on the city's outskirts. So I asked the couple if they thought they were rich. They said no, and besides they said, there are plenty of poor white people living in shacks too. The transportation is lousy here. I'm told gangs operate the most common means of public transport: the hundreds of crowded, white mini buses I see cutting in and out of traffic on the highway. Oddly enough, I've never seen a single white face inside any of them. I'm warned not to flag one of them down if I ever need a ride into town. It's just not safe. Apparently in Cape Town it's legal for women to pass through a red light if she feels unsafe. The longer you wait at any intersection, the more likely you are to be held at gunpoint. Or so I've been told. Over and over again.

London Layover

Westminster Abbey, Napping in Hyde Park, Buckingham Palace

It's a long flight to Cape Town. Luckily, I made a 12 hour pit stop in London, before flying overnight to South Africa.