Welcome to South Africa
Our welcome to South Africa was not quite what we anticipated. We have now been in so called “sunny South Africa” for a week and it has rained for the past two days! But no problem, it has not dampened our spirits, and anyway the sun is out again today.
Our first couple of days we stayed at a B&B until one of the other VSA volunteers (Lindsay from Dunedin) kindly offered us a spare room at his place. We moved in there temporarily last Friday. He lives next door to another VSA volunteer (Lesley from Auckland) and we were pleasantly surprised by the quality of their accommodation. Who knows what standard of place we will get later on in December?
Sports Day
Lindsay took us along to a sports day organised by his church on Saturday and managed to rope us in to taking part in Pastor Roco’s team! It was mainly kids competing, with a few bigger kids like us as well. Dave competed in the football, touch rugby, and wheelbarrow races (using real wheelbarrows), and Sharon played volleyball and had to do the sack race. It was a great day out, just a bit too much sunshine for us and we really enjoyed watching the black kids dance, they were superb with unbelievable rhythm. (Oh by the way our team won!)
Familiarisation
On Saturday night we went out for dinner with a few VSA volunteers. There are currently 5 VSA volunteers in East London, and a few more scattered around South Africa.
Sunday was spent with two volunteers showing us around the area. We did a lot of walking on some beautiful beaches, something we hope to do a lot more of when we get our own place here.
We have also met our VSA field officer and have found out a wee bit more about Sharon’s actual assignment, not much more, but a little! He has also put me in touch with my soon to be boss in Fair Trade in Tourism in Pretoria so hopefully we will get up there to see her at some stage before I start work.
The last few days we have been car shopping and doing a lot of walking. It is hard to buy a car without a car because it is a fair distance between car lots and private car sales! Hence no car yet!
We went to a drumming circle on Tuesday night – a group of people who get together weekly and play the African drums, great sound and maybe that is something else we will do when we get settled in East London.
Right now we are in Port Elizabeth (PE), two hours south of East London (EL), and although as we said earlier our spirits have not dampened we are fairly p!$$ed off .
The inevitable welcome to South Africa
Our welcome to South Africa has involved the inevitable, something we thought was likely to happen at some stage during our two years, but not anticipating it would happen in the first week.
You have probably guessed by now that we have been the victims of SA crime! The volunteer’s house we were staying at was broken into on Wednesday morning just after we left to go catch a bus to Port Elizabeth for a few days. The bad news is that we lost half our stuff. The good news is of course that we still have the other half!
It is just unfortunate that the missing stuff was our luxury stuff – the laptop and our trusty iPOD with all our music. Sharon’s backpack is gone, her clothes, our hiking boots and running shoes (great excuse to not have to go running anymore), and a few other bits and pieces. Note that none of Dave’s clothes were taken!!! Lindsay, our host, lost a few pairs of shoes and some pens!
After dealing with half the SA police force and completing a dozen forms to report the crime, we managed to change our bus time and still get to PE as planned.
One parting quote from Lindsay as we left the police stations was “we thought we were all coming to SA to help the poor, but it looks like the poor are quite happy to help themselves!!!”
We are meeting our SA friends (Michelle & Peter) tomorrow and really looking forward to spending the weekend with them.
One last thing – we have not managed to work out a way to make cheap international phone calls yet, and texting is also very expensive for us, so email and this blog will be our primary source of communication.
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