Moving On

It's needless to say that South Africa is a complicated place.  It is a beautiful country, with many agricultural landscapes that are reminiscent of Southern Alberta or interior BC.  It has a great climate.  The people here are vibrant and full of life.  There is so much potential here, and it has long been the bastion of the developed world on the African continent.

But a legacy that includes apartheid and an abysmal crime rate that makes you constantly look over your shoulder somewhat mar what is otherwise a fantastic country.

Case in point: On our second day our lovely hosts in Jo'Burg were burgled while we were out for the afternoon.  They live in a nice residential suburb, so it's not like they're in some crime-riddled community; it's just that it seems all of Jo'Burg is crime-riddled.  It is likely that the alarm spooked the crooks and they took off, about five minutes before we arrived home.  What a great introduction to South African crime!

As we left South Africa their country-wide power failures were finally hitting the international news.  It's understandable that a country can have brown-outs; it's pretty commonplace in developing countries, and I actually think that the so-called "Developed World" gets their knickers in a twist a little too quickly when our power goes out at home.  But in South Africa "load shedding"--as they call it here--has hit epidemic proportions.  This load shedding is the government's euphemistic way of saying, "We didn't admit a decade ago that we needed additional power plants to keep up with economic growth."

These power outages are supposed to be on a schedule that is distributed to everyone, but the published schedule is rarely followed.  The power is on when it is scheduled to be off, and everyone is on edge that the electricity may go off at any moment; then the power is off when it's not scheduled to be, and you have people wandering around or closing shops because no one can do any work.  It is inconveniently switched off in commercial/industrial areas during the daytime, when everyone is at work, and then people go home to evening power outages in the residential areas.  Frustrating!

Here is an example of how this is affecting daily life: a dairy farmer with 600 head of cattle that can't be milked mechanically because there is no electricity to run the equipment.  And with only six employees, it's impossible to hand-milk all the animals before their udders dry up.  Scenarios like this are starting to contribute to a shortage of fresh milk in the country.  How people adjust their daily lives to deal with routine power outages will be a major part of the social experiment that this situation has created.

By the end of five weeks here, we were a little on edge.  We're not used to constantly being on guard.  And everyone we visited with in SA has several personal or anecdotal stories of car jackings, home invasions, assaults, murders...it just creeps you out after a while.  We were advised to take taxis everywhere (and sometimes even taxis are not advisable), and the only place we truly felt safe walking around in Johannesburg was a shopping mall, which was well-lit (until the power went out) with abundant security guards.  Even in Cape Town, one of the safer cities we visited, we could walk to the Waterfront in daylight, but at night we were advised to take a taxi the five blocks back to the guesthouse!

That being said, the crime is mainly concentrated in the urban areas. We enjoyed the freedom of hiking in the Drakensberg Mountains, and walking around some of the rural parts along the coast, where things feel very much safer. An enjoyable, yet frustrating, country to visit.

A big Thank You to all of our South African family and friends that made our stay so enjoyable!  Your hospitality, generousity, and all-around help were very much appreciated.  We hope to be able to return the favour someday!

It is now time for us to move on...