How to spot a South African abroad

There might be a point in time when this would be useful.  I can’t really think of when that might be, but here you go anyway.

Of course, there are some obvious pointers…. the Springbok rugby shirt.

the flag painted on the face.

Although you’re not likely to spot this away from major sporting events.  And of course, by “major sporting event” we do mostly mean rugby, cricket and football.  You’re not going to see many guys looking like this t the rhythmic gymnastics.

Another thing you might see, but given the temperature in the UK, this is a little unlikely, is Afrikaner shorts.

I do apologise if I offend anyone, but it is a known fact that some Afrikaans guys wear short shorts.  As per the photo.  These come in khaki or airforce blue. And only one length.

But assuming that it is too cold for shorts wearing, and bearing in mind that even when it is shorts weather, not all South Africans wear shorts like this, here are some ways you can definitely spot a South African in the UK:

At the petrol station:  The car that has pulled in very hesitantly, as if waiting for some kind of signal as to what the driver should be doing, then stops by a petrol pump and nobody gets out?  That’s a South African.  They were waiting for a petrol pump attendant to wave them towards the right spot, and now they’re waiting for someone to come and fill their car  up for them.  And check oil, water, tyre pressure, etc.  Be patient with them.  After a few minutes they’ll remember where they are, get out of the car and approach the petrol pump very nervously.  You might want to get in the queue behind someone else.

At the supermarket: 

1. If they come up to the checkout and look absolutely bewildered by the moving conveyor belt, but otherwise seem pretty much supermarket savvy… South African.  More specifically, if they’re from this particular part of Cape Town, they shop at Pick n Pay or Shoprite but not Checkers in Blue Route Mall.  Checkers in Blue Route Mall has genuine moving conveyor belts.  They’re incredibly short, but they are the real deal.  Where I shop, we just have to dump it all on the counter next to the till and keep shoving it along so the lady can reach it.

2. Now they have put their shopping on the belt, they are standing aimlessly whilst a huge pile of checked shopping mounts up on the other side of the checkout.  Every other shopper is frantically trying to pack their shopping at roughly the same speed at which it is scanned (which we all know is impossible).  The South African is wondering when the lady who packs the shopping is going to come along.  Again, join a different queue.

In the carpark:

If you spot a car with a bumper sticker indicating the driver is a South African in your local Tesco carpark, give it a wide berth.  Park a long long way away.  Once the South African has woken up to the necessity of packing their own shopping and has shlepped it to their car and put it in the boot all by themselves (a rare and exciting experience), they will get into the car and reverse backwards, waiting for the car park attendant to tell them to stop.  Only there is no car park attendant… Which is why you have parked your car a long long way away.

Seriously, after a few months here, I have already lost the ability to pack a shopping bag or judge the distance behind my car when reversing.  You’ll be glad to hear that Neil hasn’t bought any new shorts though.

Into the unknown…

This morning I felt like a proper missionary – even if only for a moment or two. At around 9.30, I met our pastor in the car park of a supermarket and set off into Mitchell’s Plain. Mitchell’s Plain is township about half an hour away from here. It is one of South Africa’s largest townships with a population of around 300,000. Around 90% of the population of Mitchell’s Plain are coloured, with about 7% being black, and the remainder Indian/Asian and white. The western half of Mitchell’s Plain is more affluent (relatively speaking) than the eastern half, and it was to the eastern half that I was headed today.

Housing in Mitchell’s Plain is largely made up of “proper” houses built from brick or concrete blocks, rather than the shacks made from corrugated iron and timber that you will see in the informal settlements. However, there is still much poverty and drug abuse and gangsterism are rife.

And so it was that I found myself heading along a long stretch of road, following a white bakkie (pickup truck). Given that most cars in South Africa seem to be white, and of those white car a disproportionately large number are bakkies, this could have been a bit of a challenge! This road winds its way along the coast, with sand dunes on either side. It is easy to imagine that you are many miles from anywhere, but actually just the other side of the dunes to the north are densely populated areas. For quite a long stretch of the road, the beach and the sea are right next to the road. At weekends, this is popular with fishermen, but even then, the sheer size of this beach means that it always seems very sparsely populated. This is a road that we have been told it is best not to drive along at night.

Once we turned off the road, we found ourselves on wide two-lane roads with small houses crammed in on either side. I was struck by how quiet the roads were – not many cars and not many people. This is probably a very different scene at rush hour but at 10am it was very quiet. Our little convoy headed first of all for the taxi rank (with a few missed turnings and three point turns on the way) to fetch a Nigerian lady who is studying theology here in Cape Town. She leads the Bible study that I was on my way to join. We then made our way through narrow back streets to collect various ladies before ending up at Sally’s house. The overall sense of the area is one of bleakness. There was no sign of much in the way of vegetation anywhere. A few very wind-battered saplings were leaning drunkenly away from the wind alongside the road at one place, but any open spaces were dust, not grass.

At Sally’s house, we did what ladies do so well everywhere in the world… we drank tea and we chatted, before we opened our Bibles and looked at the beginning of Philippians together.

The average age was probably around 55-65 – hard to tell as the only lady who mentioned her age told us she was 73 and I would never have guessed that! Most of the ladies have Afrikaans as their first language but attend an English speaking church and so they all put me to shame by being able to have Bible study in their second language. They are a lovely, loving group, who love the Lord and love to study his word. I know I am going to learn a lot from meeting with them.

At the end of the study, pastor Andrew came back (he had escaped the women as quickly as he could at the beginning of the session) and took me and a couple of the ladies to see a small school that the church there have started up. State-run schools in the area are very varied and there are often not enough places, leading to classes of unmanageable sizes. Trinity Church’s school has around a dozen children in the pre-school class, the same number in Grade R (Reception) and around the same number in Grade 1. They hope to grow the school with the children, but space is a challenge. There is sufficient space to accommodate next year’s Grade 2 class but after that they will run into real difficulties. The vision is to be able to buy two houses that are on the same block as the (small) church building and expand to fill that whole block. All of this will cost money which will only be found from donations and gifts. But for children in this area, a good primary education is essential if they are to be able to break out of the cycle of poverty that they live in, and the school hopes to provide these children with a Christian foundation to equip them to stand against the drug and gangster problems in the area.

The church also run children’s and youth programmes. One or two of their youth have come through to joint events with the youth at our church in Muizenberg and we would love to see if it is possible to send a few of them on youth camp in December, but the fees for that are prohibitively expensive for them. I asked how much… less than half of the FIEC camp we sent our girls on in the UK. The young people would gladly try to raise some funds themselves, but the reality is that there is no spare money within their communities. Hopefully we will find a way to subsidise them.

Once I had seen the school, the lovely ladies were very concerned that I should not be left to try to find my way out of Mitchell’s Plain alone, so we drove in convoy back to the main coast road, where I turned off and left them, ending up stuck behind a large and slow lorry. But given that the view out of the window was of the waves on the beach, it could have been worse!

I know that a number of people were praying for me this morning as I made my first visit to Mitchell’s Plain, and I was very thankful to God for that. Please do pray on that I will know how best I can serve these lovely women and enjoy the fellowship with them.

A fairly typical outlook in Mitchell’s Plain – although I didn’t see any grass!

Liberty Mall in Mitchell’s Plain – quite a contrast to other parts of the area

Beach life…

Down on the beach the other Saturday there was a lovely little visual illustration of how the church works.

As we wandered along the beach it was obvious that there was quite a bit happening down there.  There were flags up and tape marking a track and a finish line.  A very excitable commentary was coming over a very poor tannoy system, so it took us a while to work out why there were men in lycra running around the beach, leaping into the sea, straddling surf boards and paddling canoes.  And when I say “in lycra”… well, just be thankful that I didn’t take photos.  Leopard print speedos and a crop top?  We really struggled to see the significance or purpose of the tight fitting lycra crop tops… on guys?  Anyway, once we had overcome this visual attack on our sanity, we managed to work out that this was…. (go on, admit it, you’re really desperate to know)  an Iron Man competition.  I think there were some women taking part too, but let’s not get into the political incorrectness of this. (If you’re very concerned about political correctness and making sure we get man/woman inclusiveness in our language all the time, you might want to just skip the rest of this blog because it was going to take me too long to find the correct words and terminology once I got to…. oh, but that would ruin the suspense…. you’ll have to wait and see what’s coming!)  They seemed to have to do a run along the beach, a swim, another run, grab a surf board and propel themselves along on that whilst kneeling down, another run, then get a canoe before finishing up with a final run.  A small crowd (maybe 20 people… I did say “small”) was watching half heartedly.

By now, you’re wondering where on earth the church-mission illustration is coming from?  Well, quite literally in the middle of the course marked out for these lycra-clad leviathans, a very different group of men and women were engaged in a very different activity.  About a dozen scruffily dressed people, with wellies and a pretty cool collection of dreadlocks were busy untangling some fishing nets and sorting out a small fishing boat.  The Iron Men were running, paddling and canoeing past them without so much as a second glance.

And to be fair, the fishermen (“fisherpeople” “fisherpersons” “fisherfolk”? sorry, no) didn’t seem to be too overawed by the display of muscle power going on around them.  They had more important things on their minds – these are not leisure fishermen but people who do this for a living.

The nets and the boats have an obvious Biblical resonance – barring the dreadlocks, this could almost have been Galilee.  But it struck me that what was happening on the beach had a couple of little visual aids in there for us…

1. In a world where having fun and our leisure activities are seen as so important, where physical appearance and fitness can become an all-consuming passion, as Christians, we are (or should be) like that little group of fishermen on the beach; focused intently on something which really matters whilst everyone around us is focusing on their own amusement.  These fishermen (and women) knew that it was vital that the nets were untangled and stowed safely if any fish were to be caught, and this task took all their attention.

2. Even the less scientifically minded amongst us can look at that boat and look at the number of people helping out with the nets and see that they aren’t all going to fit in there.  Africa may be the place where we can fit 37 people into a 16 seater minibus, but we draw the line at attempting that sort of exercise with boats.   But apart from the guy in the red shirt on his own who I think was a bored tourist, the rest of them were very definitely part of the same team – they weren’t all going on the boat, but they were all equally invested in the success or failure of this fishing venture.  Do you see where I’m going with this one?  In church life, we have those people who seem to be the ones doing the up front stuff:  the ones we see going out in the boat.  Left behind on the shore, are the remaining two thirds of us, sometimes wondering if we’re actually making any valuable contribution to anything at all.

I think the actual crew of the boat is no more than about four or five.  That leaves a lot of people standing behind seeming to not really be important.  But having watched this team of people at work, I can tell you that the job of sorting the nets, untangling them and putting them carefully in the boat, moving the long poles that they use to stabilise the nets, dragging the boat up out of the water and carrying it safely out of the way… there is no way on this earth that four or five guys could do all that on their own.  They might be the ones who go out in the boat, but they are as dependent on the rest of their team as our church leaders, missionaries, evangelists, church planters and teachers are on the rest of us.  We all have a part to play.

We’re not going to draw out the fishing analogy any further here because I know we are all called to be fishers of men, reaching out to the lost.  The fact that these guys were fishermen is slightly irrelevant to the point which is that we’re all needed, we’re all in this together.

But I don’t know any pastors with dreadlocks.