I wake up at 6:00, to the sound of my new little cell phone, just like I’m supposed to. I remembered to reset the clock after swapping in the SIM chip last night. I take a nice shower and make myself a bit of breakfast before I drive over to pick up Zenzo. It is chilly and the car is covered in dew.
The streets are painted with an amazing thick fog that allows no more than 20 or so meters of visibility. As I drive into the township I see charcoal silhouettes emerging from the haze on either side of the road; people walking to work in town early in the morning. Zenzo runs out as soon as I pull up, and hopes in. I mess up when turning the car around and stall the engine out. I laugh and tell him not to worry, but he must think I’m a pretty bad driver at this point.
He pops in a CD of modern traditional Zulu music. It’s got a light rhythm and some type of plucked stringed instrument, plus the group harmonies. He explains to me a bit what the songs are about as we drive. The first one is about avoiding HIV. The second is about a love triangle.
He directs me to the hospital where we pull in and meet his mom. She has been working all night, as always, and has to wait until her relief arrives. The hospital looks a lot like most hospitals do. Clean, but somehow not as modern as one would expect.
We watch a little TV in the waiting room, and see a show where the language switches from Afrikaans to English to Sotho (SOO-too) and back in the space of a minute. Zenzo understands a little of each, enough to explain bits to me, and I wonder at America where people are nearly frightened when they hear Spanish on TV.
His mom comes along with a middle aged white lady from the hospital. They drive together to the farm and Zenzo and I follow. The fog hasn’t cleared yet and she drives her SUV at a furious pace which I am frankly uncomfortable clipping along at until we at least get out of the city and onto the more open road.
The first CD is skipping a bit, so he puts in another CD. This one is smooth jazz, along the lines of Kenny G.
I ask Zenzo about his plans for finding a job. He says that he is still searching, but it is discouraging because whenever there is an opening for two or three positions, twenty people show up. He tells me that his mother is planning to get him working as a paramedic. It only requires one month of training for certification, and is therefore much cheaper than security training. He is pretty sure he’ll be able to get that job before too long, as there is far less competition than for untrained work.
Before too long, we pull into the dirt road leading up to the farm. When we get to the end and hop out, I learn that the white middle aged lady actually lives here. Her husband and chidren manage the ranch, where they grow cattle, sheep, and chickens. And she works with Zenzo’s mother at the hospital. She introduces us to her daughter who is probably about twenty. The farm is on a hillside and consists of a series of little buildings of varying quality and complexity. There’s a swimming pool with a waterfall to one side, and a series of chicken coops on the other.
The daughter invites us to peek inside the coop where we see roomfuls of chickens at various stages of development. There’s about 4000 chickens on the farm altogether, about 1000 in each stage. I learn it takes about seven weeks from hatching to being ready to eat. They’re cute as can be as they walk around and scratch. They do have enough room to walk around, though it’s not exactly the Hilton. I wonder if these would qualify as free range chickens.
The white lady invites us over to take a look at her house. To get in you have to walk through a fenced off portion fo the yard with a couple of huge snarling watch dogs. Zenzo is scared of the dogs, but nervously comes along.
We enter the house through a pseudo-Zulu room; a large circular enclosed patio with a thatched roof. There’s a bar and a big pit grill. The lady tells us that they have their brai’s here. You remember what a brai is, right? Hint: it’s a cookout.
Then she walks us through the house. It’s got an oldish 70′s feel to it, but it’s big and has lots of nice midrange stuff; computers, tv’s furniture, exercise equipment. All the comforts. They have more stuff than anyone else’s place that I’ve seen locally. Zenzo and his mom are impressed; Zenzo says he’ll have a place like this someday.
We head back out to look at the cows. The way over to the pen, and really everyplace in the yard, is littered with what I imagine to be chicken droppings. It’s like a veritable minefield.
Her son brings about seven cows over. Unfortunately, it turns out he’s not selling any of the females at the moment, because they’ve all recently mated. He only has two males for sale. But Zenzo’s mom wanted a female, as is tradition when serving the cow at a girl’s party.
The son has a length of wire in his hands that he fiddles with the entire time we’re there. He bends little loops in the end and then tries to pick up bits of whatever is laying on the ground. It’s an odd little game he plays with no mind as he talks. He says he’ll keep an eye out with other farmers, and since they don’t need it until May, perhaps he’ll be able to sell them one of these if they don’t take with a calf. Zenzo’s mom says she’ll also check with the elders to see how critical it is that the cow is a female.
I learn the price of live cow: about 15 rand per kilogram. That works out to between 3000 and 4000 rand for the whole cow it seems. That’s a lot of money to spend on a party. It’s more than a whole month of her mortgage. I mention this to her and she agrees, it is very expensive. Being poor I am surprised she’s willing to do this, but tradition is tradition and this is the oldest daughter now since the first eldest died last year.
They also talk about getting a lamb in addition to the cow. Lambs are about 17 rand per kilogram live, or about 32 slaughtered. The son says it works out to about the same price for the meat because there’s so much to throw away on the live lamb, wheras the slaughtered lamb is just the usable parts. But it is traditional for the Zulu party to get the whole lamb. And it turns out that Zenzo knows how to slaughter a lamb.
“It takes about 45 minutes” he says, “It’s a lot of work.” I am not sure I could stomach 3/4 of an hour of cutting up steaming, bleeding meat. But Zenzo isn’t worried. He’ll slaughter the cow too; albiet with help. He says a cow is really too big to slaughter by himself. Despite my squeemishness, I agree that both animals are tasty and I make a mental note of my hypocricy, to be used any time I find myself getting too big for my britches.
We bid farewell to the the Afriakaner farmers and head back to town. The fog has started to clear now. I drop Zenzo and his mother off at their place and head back to mine. I decide I’m going to lay low today, and completely catch up on my writing. So I do. I make myself a tuna sandwich for lunch and then loll around. I write, I read, I take a day off from new experiences. I walk around the yard of the backpacker’s place, it’s nice.
At about 6PM I head over to the trailer and meet up with Alan and Donna, say hi to Pepe the African Grey Parrot. Alan is about to load the car up from the warehouse, with all the goods that we’ll need for tomorrow to start up that school that just put in the nice counters and got electricity.
We go to the warehouse dig up what turns out to be the very last of the SEs, our favorite black and white all-in-one macs, and load up the VW. The next schools will get classics or classic II’s, neither of which is reliable as the stocky little SE’s. How many SE’s can you fit in a Volkswagon Citi? I don’t know for certain, but the answer is more than 18. That includes a box of keyboards, a box of mice, and two adults comfortably.
As we load up, there is a service starting at the mosque across the street. Every night they have a man singing a Muslim prayer in a high and raspy voice. He sounds like a violin. The warbling tones echos from the holy building, across the street, into our alley, and down my spine. I love it.
Back at the trailer we have mackerel, bread, and salad for dinner. We look at a newspaper article that proclaims “Crime Hits KZN!” KZN, pronounced Kay-Zed-En is the nickname for the KwaZulu-Natal province where I am. I marvel at the amazing news, which is trying to drum up some more drama from a few murders that happened months ago. I suppose they have to have a headline every day.
We do learn, from the article, that Europe averages 2 murders per year per 100K people. South Africa averages 55.
Crime! Hits KZN!