The Adventure Begins

8.15 on a chilly Saturday morning and the group begins to gather at UKZN. Luggage is unloaded from cars, from shopping trolleys, carried by an entourage of well-wishers. The bus is “lost” – somewhere in Albert Luthuli Street and none of us can remember which street was renamed after this great man! The pile of luggage, bedding and teaching aids grows and becomes a mountain, and we look at it with growing horror – how will we fit it all in?
Finally Jane drives in, leading the bus, and the mountain of luggage is stowed away by Simon, the driver. Surprisingly, it all fits in. The Umngazi group set off, followed shortly after by the Mbotyi group – after a delay while we load all Maurus’s luggage – Neil says we should call him “More-ish” because of the amount of luggage.

Just past Ixopo, Neil is stopped at a police road block and we wonder what is going on – but we press on anyway, leaving him to the cops! Fortunately, just a vehicle check and he is soon behind us again. Soon we start to see snow on the mountains, and as we approach Kokstad, the air gets colder and colder and we imagine what it must have been like earlier in the week with the snow blocking the road and closing schools. An encounter with a speeding and overloaded cabbage lorry makes us all glad to stop at Kokstad for fuel and a snack. I work out that I haven’t been to Kokstad since I was 21 – too many years ago to want to count them.

Up through Brooke’s Nek where there is still snow lying in dirty clumps on the side of the road and there are taxis and lorries to slow us down. Driving through Flagstaff is an experience – a lorry loading concrete blocks on the right hand side of the road, while the shop they come from is on the left, the inevitable furniture shops, KFC and 3 Chinese shops in a row. I think about stopping there to see if I can find a costume for our “One Night in Bangkok” dance – but if we stop, I wonder how we will ever get out again. We see a pedestrian run between the cars and be knocked down by a bakkie – luckily, the traffic has to go so slowly that he gets up, laughing, and runs off.

Just past Lusikisiki, we part ways with the bus to drop off our passengers and luggage at Mbotyi. It’s a fascinating drive through the Magwa Tea plantation and then through the Mboyti State Forest. Wonderful trees, and not too much alien invasive vegetation to be seen. The road has been washed out in places in the recent rains, but with 4x4 we manage it easily. The worst part is the last 200m before the cottage and Jane has to drive like a buccaneer to get through the mud in her 2x4 vehicle.
The “cottage” is a series of huts and rooms, which has been in Jane’s family for generations. It faces the river, and behind it, about 300m up the hill, is the beach. It was fascinating to see the cows lying on the beach, and little children playing with their wire cars on the sand. Two fisherman are waiting on the verandah with a bag of crayfish and a huge bowl of mussels for supper. We’d like to stay, but need to push on to Umngazi before dark.

It’s a longer drive to Port St John’s than I realised, and then a longer drive to the resort than expected. We get there just as it’s getting dark. It is beautifully laid out and wonderfully situated. We have a staff suite, right near the slipway – very comfortable and nice and private. The students are in the training centre and have a great work room, although they feel a bit squashed in their bedrooms. A few grumbles about the food, but everyone agrees that they will get used to it once they have had the chance to do a bit of supplementary shopping. We eat in the dining room and my diet could be in real trouble if I am not careful. We decide to start as we mean to go on – fish, salad and soup – I pass on the crayfish and pretend the puddings aren’t there. We do the same at breakfast – nothing we wouldn’t normally eat at home.

In the morning we take a drive to Port St John’s – and all 12 students come with us! We go slowly round the potholes and work out where Vukandlula school is – quite a walk from the lodge, but the last 100m is the only steep part. Tomorrow we will find Sicambeni and Cwebeni. Port St John’s is muddled, dirty and very crowded near the shops – but the river is beautiful and when we have more time, we will enjoy the beach. Pete meets a ghillie, Excellent, who offers to take him out fishing tomorrow or the next day.

Tomorrow the work starts – we’re all feeling a little nervous as we don’t know what to expect. It will be an early start for everyone – so the 6.30 breakfast won’t be a problem today. Meanwhile, we’ll enjoy the beach and have a laid back afternoon.

Jungle and Bell and the Rat

Jingle and Bell are generally two loving, gentle cats. They sleep close to me at night - Bell near my head or on my shoulder, and Jing round about my feet. Jing is a big baby - always wanting attention, always meowing for me to stroke him, scratch him, pick him up. Belly lies in every patch of sun she can find, folding her little brown paws (they are meant to be white but she loves rolling in the dust) under her chin. She turns and stretches and purrs when you talk to her. Their most demanding and active time is 6.30am when they decide that it is time for food and wake us up with pats of varying claws, depending on how late we are.

But tonight, Bell the hunter came to the fore. We have had a few cases of outdoor wildlife coming into the house. Jingle delights in snakes and lizards (usually small ones) but this is the wrong time of the year for them. This winter he has brought in two mice - one we found just the head, but the other he and Lindt had a bit of a disagreement over at the base of the stairs and he rushed up and let it go in the bathroom. Pete and Kevin and Lindt dispatched it - I'm surprised it didn't die of a heart attack, but Pete and Kevin let it go in the garden.

Tonight I had been in and out of the bathroom, packing for a trip to Cape Town, and hadn't noticed anything, till I saw Bell pounce on the heater - and the sinuous tail peeping out from behind it. And then I saw the rat. Not a little field mouse, but a fat, grey rat with quite a substantial tail. Jingle dived in to see what the fun was about, and I turned tail and fled, closing both cats in the bathroom with the rat, and Lindt outside while I yelled for Pete to stop watching CSI and come and rescue me!

Growls and hisses punctuated by squeaks came from the bathroom, and when Pete arrived with broom and bucket, Jingle slunk out of the door. Belly had obviously told him off in the most spirited way. "I am the eldest by 1/2 hour and this is MY rat and you are to leave it alone!"

It was a very fat rat, and Pete sent it off home via the very back of the back garden - but left behind two very disgruntled cats - especially Belly who had lost her toy. She's still swishing her tail in annoyance and wasn't even keen on her nightly snack of biscuits.

Bell the hunter - what next?

A day at a time

Trying to keep up with the blogs is hard work. I am busy working on the Schoolnet blog at the moment and think - Oh yes, I've written my post for today - only to remember it's the wrong one! But with two of my "followers" (and they are about the only regular ones) telling me that they keep looking and there's nothing, I need to get back into regular writing.

Today I spent some time at home - woke up with a sore throat and cold so didn't go to the R2L training I was down for. Pete had planned to go fishing, so I stayed home on my own (till Sihle got up at lunch time) and sat in the sun, read my book, did a bit of work and had an afternoon snooze. This is how retirement should be. But it hasn't really been most of the time. Having a contract job means I have to work to make some money - so I don't have a "holiday" as such. And the work just comes streaming in - this week iI have been asked to co-author an English textbook and am off to Cape Town for the weekend for a commissioning workshop. I said I wasn't flying ANYWHERE for a while, but here I am, off to KSI again on Friday. The Schoolnet job is now at the stage where the rubber hits the road - no more talking and strategising - now I have to deliver - sign up members and get the interventions going. And Reading to Learn seems to have a whole new life of its own starting up with interest from people in all sorts of places. And in 10 days, the UKZN job means a trip to the Wild Coast - woo-ha!

I certainly didn't feel hard done by when everyone went back to school yesterday and I was able to go for a long walk in the morning. It's all hard work, but it's all interesting and I can fit it in to my day the way I want to.

Today was a good day - and I'm looking forward to tomorrow.

A Family Saga

Looking for a book at OR Tambo airport last week, I came across a paperback called The Little Women Letters. I was quite grumpy because all the other Exclusive Books in the country and even in Botswana were having sales, except the one in Departures at ORT, so I was going to have to buy a book full price when I could have been getting a sale book. I also hate big books - too many paperbacks are just too big to read comfortably - they are stiff and long and don't fit between my tummy and the seat in front of me on the plane (OK for the skinny ones, but not me!) So when I found a book that only cost R104 and was short in size, I bought it.

What a delight - it tells the story of the descendents of the March sisters in Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. It incorporates letters from Jo, Meg and Amy and even seems to have bits of the actual text from some of the books. The girls in the book, Emma, Lulu and Sophie are all so engaging in their own way, and their mon, Fee (short for Josephine) is just like someone I know. The book is real chick-lit but I loved it.


It made me think about my family sagas - like the story of my great gradparents, Jimmy and Annie Mann, who were maried in a mock ceremony in Scotland, only to find that the marriage was legal. But as it was love at first sight, they were happy to get married in front of the dominee and set out for a life in South Africa. Or my grandparents, George and Dorothy Waddington, who had to rush from the ship in Durban to the church, as the long sea passage for her from England meant that their "banns" had almost expired. And who went from Durban to Ladysmith by train, stopping in Mooi River, where she looked out and said "I want to live here someday." And she did for more than 60 years.

I wonder what they passed on to me. I know my hands look like Grannymama's (Dorothy), and I am as impatient with people who are dense as she was, but what did I inherit from Annie? Was she outspoken? Did she enjoy spending time with her daughters? Did she miss her mother when she left Dundee, Scotland to settle in Dundee, Natal? Did she ever get to go home again? - I know she died when my Granny was young, so maybe she didn't.

I wish I had a set of stories like Little Women to tell me about my family - letters and stories and a history that filled in all the gaps. Will my children want to know about my grandparents - and especially my grandmothers? Maybe it's time to write down all the things I remember - and collect together the family memories. Then their children will have something to remember.

There's no place like home!

Back Home again at last!
The last 3 weeks have been busy, disrupted and really tiring.
First, a week teaching in Johannesburg, driving from Pretoria each day and trying to feel like a Joburg-ite as I braved the traffic each day. I cwertainly felt less scared by the end of the week, but I still haven't learnt to turn my wheels sideways so I can fit into a gap about 1 cm bigger than my car as most of the Joburg drivers seem to be able to do! The teaching was easy and it was wonderful to stay with |Sarah and get to know her new little kitten, Harriet.

The next week was at the ICT in the Classroom Conference at St John's school in Johannesburg. A good conference where I learnt a lot of interesting things and met up with old friends and made new ones. Kudos to Maggie for the wonderful Twitter backchannel which gave people a chance to comment on what wasgoing on. Very interesting reading.

Then the last week was spent in Botswana at the Pan African reading Conference - not as stimulating or useful as the week before's conference - too academic really for me. And some of the delegates were complaining that it wasn't academic enough! My presentations went well, I made new friends and connected with people who will be useful contacts, and made friends with people who will become close friends, but on the whole, I was quite grumpy about how much it was costing me compared to the value I felt I was getting.

Yesterday I finally got home! Bliss! Pete fetched me at the airport and I was so glad to see him - my dear friend, husband and companion whom I have missed so much the last few weeks. Then I was met at home by an ecstatic dog, my precoius son, Sihle whom I haven't seen for 3 weeks, Kevin, Lindi and two happy cats. I really felt that I was back where I belonged.

Home is where the heart is, and my heart was back in its real place, as I snuggled on the couch under a blanket, eating veg soup that Pete had made, chatted to Kev as I had my bath, climbed into bed with 2 happy cats - one on each side, and slept in my own bed. All that could have made it more perfect would have been to have Sarah, Nic, Riaan and ray with us too.

I know we go away again in two weeks and I know we will enjoy the time on the Wild Coast, but right now, I am content to be home, happy to be sleeping in my own bed, playing with my animals, connecting with Pete and the kids, and being myself again.

East, West, home's best!

Living in both worlds - Macbook or notebook?

I haven't written for more than a week - I have been working! Fran said to me - having the energy to blog is what shows I am not working - I have time to be me. And these last 2 works, the driving, the training, the writing - they have all made it less easy to be me.

But now I'm at a conference now and I'm listening to a dynamic speaker - and I'm multi-tasking.

John Davitt has just said "We need to live in both the technological and the traditional worlds" He was referring to the notebooks he has always kept and written in and which he has recently scanned using a passport scanner and now has years of scribblings immortalised in jpegs of the pages. He asked a rhetorical question – which is more important – holding up the notebook in one hand and the electronic device in the other. I couldn’t choose, although many techies chose the digital device and technophobes chose the notebook.

I like gadgets – I would love an iPad or Samsung tablet. I love having a data projector of my own. My Kindle is great. I love writing this blog and publishing it. I love my iPod. I want an iPhone!

But I also love the scrappy brown covered notebook that Fran gave me last year that says “God recycles – he made you from dust” on the front. It wasn’t scrappy when I got it, but it is now – and there are only 2 pages left to write on. I love the notebook Mbali gave me when she left St Nics – it’s a beautiful, embossed gold notebook, with a wonderful magnet clip. But it’s filled with the same sort of scribblings. I love the notebooks I have kept when we have travelled – the black and gold one Pete gave me before we went to New Zealand last time, full of notes and recipes and scribblings about what we have done, the other notebooks that I have kept since I first travelled overseas 38 years ago. I loved writing in the Marriage Encounter notebooks, writing loveletters to my beloved Pete. And the prayer diaries and bible study books I have kept over the years.

Writing by hand has something special about it – you can scribble or write neatly, you can decorate the pages with doodles while you think. You can flip back through the pages and find something you have written without having to “Search.” Notebooks are organic – they don’t need filing, they are messy (or mine are – I am sure some people keep neat notebooks, carefully dated.) You can put a flower between the pages, or keep a place with a ticket stub. Sometimes I even can smell the perfume I used that day when I open a particular page. They express so much about me as a person.

I wouldn’t get rid of my digital ways of recording. It is easier to read, easier to find, better filed, more “sorted.” I still want an iPad – or the new Dell that can be a tablet or a laptop with the flip of a screen. I want an Android phone that does all sorts of amazing things. I won’t throw out the new for the old, or the old for the new.

I’m comfortable living between the two worlds – slipping backwards and forwards as it suits me. I can live in the traditional and the digital ages and make them both work for me.