What’s your emergency?

Thankfully we haven’t had to call on the emergency services here yet, and I’m hoping it’s a good long time before we do, but if that time comes, it’s a whole lot more complicated than in the UK where you simply dial 999 and let the operator do the rest.

Here, there are different numbers for police, ambulance and fire services.  I have been given a very handy local directory which helpfully lists all the numbers you might need inside the front cover.  Under Emergency Services, the first number listed is “Disasters”.  Hmmm…. clearly not thought through by somebody living with teenagers because “disasters” seems just a little too all-encompassing to me and could include anything from earthquakes and tsunamis through to running out of nail polish remover.   This being South Africa we also have a dedicated number for the “Spine Line (Rugby injuries only)”.  So, sorry, if you injure your spine in some other way, you’ll just have to go for the normal ambulance service.

We have a police station at the end of our road, so should we ever need to call them out, I am hoping for a pretty rapid response time.

To make all this easier for us, there is a local organisation who act as the emergency operator and I have their details stuck to the fridge.  They cover everything from fires, medical emergencies and police calls  through to baboons and snakes.  Baboons are not so much of an issue over on this side of Fish Hoek, but a little further down the coast, it is not unheard of for people to find baboons in their house causing a certain amount of havoc.  So, if it happens here, provided the baboon is not between me and the fridge, I know who to call.  Snakes are probably a little bit more likely as we have been told that there are snakes in the nature reserve immediately across the road.  I’m hoping that they stay on their side of the road and give us a wide berth.

And for all other emergencies, we have this wonderfully named shop right here on Main Road in Fish Hoek, should we feel the need for some emergency happiness.  It’s a sign of our times that happiness seems to be equated with being connected to the mobile phone network though!

And still on the subject of happiness, there is a member of staff in our local supermarket called Happiness.  I discovered this the other day when I overheard one member of staff ask another in a very disgruntled tone “Where’s Happiness?” Obviously, the absence of Happiness was causing some distress.   Either that, or I caught the tail end of some deep philosophical discussion about the source of true joy.

I found the library today and have borrowed a wonderful book full of facts about South Africa, so brace yourselves for a deluge of interesting (or not) facts.  I was intrigued to read that Johannesburg actually gets more rain than London.  However, this being a country where the weather knows how to behave, it gets all that rain over and done with in less than 80 days a year.   It was not much of a surprise to read that the windiest place in South Africa is Cape Point, only a few miles away, where the average wind speed is 14.1 m/s.  You know you live in a windy place when trees that have grown straight become noticeable for their rarity.  The book has a helpful map showing which bits of the country are hideously cold in winter (large chunks of the interior, but I suspect their definition of “cold” might be different to elsewhere in the world) or too hot to be bearable in the summer (yet again, large chunks of the country).  Thankfully Cape Town is outside of both areas.  Which actually may mean nothing more than that the map was drawn up by a Cape Tonian as they are renowned for being very protective of their fair city.

We continue to be very thankful to God for bringing us safely here and for the protection that means I haven’t yet needed that bookmark of emergency numbers.  Thank you all for your love, interest, support and prayers.  And keep them coming – particularly for the still absent birth certificate.  There may yet be a few blog posts to come on the subject of dealing with the Department of Home Affairs.

Fish Hoek Life (#1)

A little glimpse for you into some of the things that make up everyday life in Fish Hoek….

Electricity:

We do have electricity.  And we have had it all the time we have been here so far, which is the electricity company’s Christmas present to us all.  South Africa has been experiencing the joys of “load shedding” recently, when customers are invited to enjoy the excitement of living by candle-light or torchlight in a rolling schedule of power outages due to the difficulty of matching demand with supply. We aren’t sure when our scheduled outage time is supposed to be anyway, but we are prepared, with two torches, a box of candles and two of these rather cool looking things which are solar powered LED lanterns.  We charge them up in a sunny place during the day and then when we have our outage, we are prepared. The shop we bought them from had sold out and had to get them in from another branch – apparently there were only half a dozen left in the whole of Cape Town and the manufacturer is struggling to keep up with demand.

Data:

We are discovering the joys of operating on a prepaid data for internet usage.  We have a couple of nifty little dongles (I had never heard of a dongle before!) which we get topped up (recharged) with data at the Vodacom store and then the wide world of the world wide web is all ours.  Until we run out.  Our local Vodacom store can’t do data until some time in January. When I went in the other day, he almost made it sound as if they had run out…. But we can get data elsewhere.  Internet access in South Africa is very expensive compared to the UK, both for mobiles and via landlines.  We appear to have a line to the house, so hope to get it connected up sometime because at least that way data is a little cheaper.  Free Wi-Fi out and about is rare and slow. So, bear with us if we seem to drop off the internet from time to time because we probably have!

Security:

When people elsewhere think of South Africa, they do often think of people living in gated communities, behind barbed wire fences.  This is true for people in some places, but it is certainly not the picture for the majority of people in Fish Hoek.  Fish Hoek is a quiet (some might say sleepy) little town separated from the rest of Cape Town by mountains.  It is known as the town of “nearly deads and newly weds” and many houses have walls that could be scaled by the former if the mood took them.  People leave cars parked out on the road overnight and it seems that the issues with crime locally centre around opportunist thefts of unattended bags and mobile phones (cellphones over here).  Our part of Fish Hoek is very quiet although we do have a regular issue with intruders – five and seven year old girls from the houses behind and next door who have a nice little short cut from one house to the other via our garden.  Our landlady tells us that there are plans to raise the height of the wall – this could lead to broken hearts if the girls decide it’s too high to attempt, or broken limbs if they’re prepared to give it a go.  The photo shows the view from our bedroom window – the tree on the left is how they get up and over the wall.  The TV on their back wall is currently Neil’s source of football entertainment although it’s too far to read the score and the sound doesn’t quite reach far enough.

The more time we spend here, the more thankful we are to God for this house.  Traffic on the roads leading into central Fish Hoek can be very heavy in rush hour, and a school run by car could have been very time consuming, but we are within 20 minutes walk for both girls. Fish Hoek shops are not exciting but they do have pretty much everything you need on a day-to-day basis…. unless you need alcohol.  The farmer who owned the land on which Fish Hoek was first built made this a condition of sale when the land was bought for housing.  Since 1994 you have been able to buy alcohol in bars and restaurants but there are no shops selling alcohol in central Fish Hoek.

That’s enough for now…. we’re finding our feet and beginning to settle, although it is hard for the girls as we have so far only met one other teenager!  As it is the summer holidays, most youth programmes at local churches have stopped, so we are having to be patient and trust God to provide friendships for them as time goes on.

A picture paints a thousand words….. (again?)

I have a feeling I might have already published a post with that title, but since my internet connectivity is somewhat limited, I’m not going to bother to check.  This is really just to give you a little flavour of our first few days in South Africa.

We had a lot of luggage…. this wasn’t all of it.  But we made it safely here and through passport control and customs.  I have a 90 visa which I will try to get extended for another 90 days after the Christmas shut-down and we still pray and wait for my birth certificate so that I can apply for a passport.

We were met at the airport by Daniel from the SIM office who is a fantastic guy – a real fixer!  He has sorted out so many things for us and Neil is looking forward to working as part of the team with him.  We had a bit of a wait at the house until the landlord came to let us in, but we got in and found a fridge-freezer and washing machine, but nothing else.  Fortunately, some German SIM missionaries called around in the afternoon and with typical efficiency, she arranged for some mattresses and bedding for us.  We now have a few bits of basics to tide us over and I am trying to use what is available to make things look more like a home, like my make-shift vase filled with lavender (two huge bushes of that in our garden) and our home-made advent calendar.  I  printed off the little tags before we left the UK, knowing that our usual advent calendar wasn’t going to be with us, and managed to find a branch in our pile of wood in the garden for the braai (bbq to you!).  Wool was always going to be on my list of essentials to pack, so there we go…

 The little plastic giraffes came from the Giraffe cafe at Heathrow Terminal 5.  They came with the smoothies Zoe and I had and the waitress caught me wrapping them up in napkins to put in my bag.  We told her we had had some before but they broke, so she gave us a few more… we girls now have 2 each.

We were already thankful to God for our house and our landlady and her husband even before we got here and we are now so much more thankful.  Although there definitely was a reason that her advert on gumtree only had external photos!  The internal decor is a little tired, except for the kitchen which has moved beyond tired and into completely exhausted.  However, I am very very thankful for that tiredness because if this house were in better decorative order, we would never be able to afford the rental and it is a lovely house. The girls each have a good-sized bedroom, we have a bathroom and a shower room, a spare room/study, and a lovely light airy lounge and dining room space.  Our landlady has been great at answering our queries and even sent out an electrician at 5.30pm on Saturday when the fuses went on the sockets.  He sorted it all out very quickly and even called back around on Monday to make sure we were still all OK.  How about that for service! There is very little in the way of plant life in the garden for me to kill – just some beautiful well established shrubs. We have a fabulous pink hibiscus and a big red bottle-brush tree.  The bottle-brush tree is so full of bees that if you go near it, you can hear the whole tree humming.

When we open our front door in the morning, we are greeted by the view of the mountain. From the back of the house you can see yet more mountains and if you could see over the houses in the other direction there would be yet more mountains.  On one of our last mornings in Worcester, our pastor Richard and his wife Carolyn called round and Richard read Psalm 121 with us.  Every morning as I step out of the front door, I am reminded of that.  The front doorstep could well become my new Bible reading spot… at least in the summer.  The garden wall gives us a little shelter from the famous Fish Hoek wind which does seem to blow quite a lot!

Immediately across the road from us is a nature reserve.  Please read that carefully… nature reserve not game reserve! This is an area of wetland and marshes which is protected and full of birds.  We walked back up through the nature reserve on Sunday afternoon and spotted this heron just across the road from our house.  In our garden we have also had these little guys with their amazing long tails and some little birds who were hovering in the bottle brush tree sipping at the nectar.  I think a book of South African birds is soon going to become a necessity.  Zoe and I are both thinking that a proper digital SLR camera with a serious zoom lens might be moving rapidly from the “would be nice” list onto the “absolutely essential” list! I nearly wept the other morning because my camera just would zoom enough to get a photo of the little nectar sipping bird sitting on our solitary purple agapanthus flower.

We went to a local church on Sunday and realised that these next few weeks are not the best time in which to form a true picture of any church as they go through the programme of carol services and so on.  We had “Carols by Glowstick” on Sunday evening.  The teaching was good.  It did make us aware how easy it is for us as regular church goers to miss visitors, so please my friends, on Sunday when you’re at church, think of us and look out for anyone new and give them a warm welcome.  You never know who you might meet!  One of my dearest and best friends is someone I met when I was brave and spoke to someone new at church.

And finally, I leave you with a picture to show that health and safety in South Africa is a different matter and Neil has acclimatised to that very quickly… this is how you change a lightbulb when you have no ladder.  You fetch some spare bricks from the garden.

Saying goodbye

In Zulu, goodbye is “hamba kahle” (kahle is pronounced kashle) and it literally means “go well”.  And that is exactly what we are trying to do now.  Going isn’t easy but we want to do it well.  Saying goodbye to friends and family is hard, and when you have been privileged to be part of a church family as loving and encouraging as ours, it makes it all the more difficult to leave. Yesterday we had a commissioning service (makes us sound like a battleship) which was an incredibly special time. We were encouraged to remember that obeying God is the only thing that really matters, and that he has promised to be with us wherever we go.  His promises stand eternally and he is faithful to keep them.

So, this week we are busy with administrative tasks  – cancelling insurance, taking out new insurance, sorting out bank accounts, getting currency exchanged, packing suitcases, selling the car and so on and on and on.  We are also trying to support the girls as they go in to school each day and are faced with friends who are going to miss them – and keep telling them how much they will miss them.  They’re also told on pretty much a daily basis that they will get Ebola.  I think perhaps they need to print this map out….

At a recent parents’ evening we mentioned to a teacher that we were moving to Cape Town.  “Oh, lovely. Australia,” she said.  Thank goodness she’s a science teacher.  And we most sincerely hope that our shippers have got that one straight as well, since they will be appearing next Monday to pack up the entire house into a container and put it on a ship which we trust will end up in South Africa some time early in the new year.

I’ve found a couple of interesting literary quotes about saying goodbye.  Peter Pan said “Never say goodbye, because goodbye means going away and going away means forgetting.”  And Winnie the Pooh said “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”  Two very different views about saying goodbye which reflect their respective characters.  Peter Pan’s approach is unrealistic and shows his lack of maturity – hardly surprising for the boy who never grew up.  However, typically Winnie the Pooh shows us a much more philosophical and positive way to look at saying our goodbyes.  Sad as it may be to say goodbye, it would be much more tragic if there were nobody who would miss us or whom we would miss when we leave.  The difficulty in saying goodbye will always be a measure of how much we have loved. So, thank you to all our wonderful friends and family who are making it hard to say goodbye.

Hopefully, once we get there, the unique South African sense of humour will keep us smiling.  One of our favourite experiences there in the past has been flying with Kulula airlines.  They have a policy of trying to make air travel more fun and less formal, as you can see from the pictures of their planes.

And as if that weren’t enough, I found this photo as well of a car owner who has obviously been inspired by the airline.  Even better –  the green and yellow shop sign to the left of the photo tells me it was taken in Fish Hoek.  I will be looking out for this one when I head down to the shops.  I wonder if Neil would mind if I did a little custom paint job on our car?