I suspect I say this every year, but the Cape is extraordinarily beautiful at this time of year. All around me there are farm dams snowy with waterlilies, spreading oak trees and vineyards, towering blue mountains. The bougainvillea is incandescent, every known shade of mauve and scarlet and candy-pink. There are great drifts of blue and white agapanthus and bushes ice-blue with lace-cap hydrangeas.
We drove down to Gordon’s Bay yesterday morning and there were cyclists testing themselves on the mountain passes in sleek yellow and black tights and crash helmets. The bay below was cobalt-blue and the valley golden and green. Heavenly. Families heading for the beach with surfer boards and fishing rods, or towing yachts or sailboats. In the small seaside town couples lingered together over coffee at pavement cafes, children played at skateboarding alongside the ocean, older couples walked dogs and everyone was greeting one another, enjoying the sunshine and loveliness of the day. Youngsters heading off for a day of sea-kayaking. The air was salty and balmy with the faint sting of iodine. Palm trees airily fanning the breezes over our heads.
We sat drinking lime-and sodas at a boardwalk restaurant at the harbour marina and watched muscovy ducks in the green swell, the yachts and pleasure cruisers all gleaming chrome and plexiglass. Game fishing cruisers, diesel-powered with flybridges and state-of-the-art electronics, outboard-powered ski boats, pleasure boats for wakeboarding. The old harbour a playground for the wealthy.
Then headed back home, relaxed and in holiday mood. Came back to find a desperate group of illegal immigrants waiting on the doorstep. There is a suspected cholera outbreak in a nearby settlement. Dirty water and contamination, small children needing tetracycline and drips, pregnant women in danger of heat stroke.
It is such a relief to be able to do something effectual here in this part of Africa. With Aids there is very little that can be done, especially when people have multi-resistant tuberculosis as well as fully-blown Aids. All that can be done is palliative, it is too late for efficacious retrovirals or other options. But cholera can be tackled and we gathered together a small group of medics and literacy teachers and church workers, went out to the corrugated iron and cardboard shacks in the veld, patients lying there in the heat and dust with buzzing flies everywhere, began hooking children up to drips, administering thin gruel or sadza (my speciality) and clean water, washing the feverish sweating bodies down. Zimbabwean refugees, many with university degrees, literate and intelligent and desperate people fleeing tyranny and starvation. When I paused for a moment to rinse out drinking mugs, I found I was shaking with anger at the injustice of it all. In different circunstances, these refugees would be nurses, teachers, engineers, lawyers or doctors. They would be living decent simple lives and dreaming of better futures for their children. Because of the debacle of Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, they are fighting just to stay alive, to live from one day to the next.
Life in southern Africa is split in two with a great bleeding flaw or crack down the centre. Somewhere between hell and paradise.
I sat and talked for a while with a young Zimbabwean woman, Munyara, heavily pregnant. She was very breathless in the heat and listless. I folded a sheet of newspaper so that she coud fan herself while we waited for the medic to examine her. Very gentle and patient expression, her hands scarred and thin. She could have been 18 or 34, I couldn’t tell.
As we sat together I thought about a very young woman travelling away from persecution in another time and another place. Exhausted in the heat or extreme cold and without her mother to help her give birth, a refugee with no shelter, no room at the inn. Bringing her child into an uncertain and heartless world. Just living by faith from one day to the next.
Posted by louisey 