Southern Africa (Part III): July 2017

Princeton, New Jersey

Monday, 11 September 2017

My last month in Cape Town proved to be the best. With the end in sight, I took advantage of every day and treated it as it was: one of my last in Africa. For example, on the first, I went dancing on Long St, the South African version of the Las Vegas Strip. The DJs were not as good as those I have heard in the States (not that I know, because, like, I don’t go clubbing, Mom…), but the drinks had better names and were cheaper, such as the ‘Sowetan Toilet’ for only forty cents.

On the third, I moved from the faraway lands of Constantia and back to Claremont, where I had lived for the month of May. However, instead of living with Dave and Reneé, I took up residence with Jean, a venerable Afrikaans lady with a knack for making bobotie and boerewors. Bobotie is a Cape-Malay dish made of spiced minced meat and egg. Boerewors is a type of sausage properly served with Mrs. H.S. Ball’s Chutney. Oh Mrs. H.S. Ball, how did I live before I met you?

After unpacking my bag, I ventured over to Sins of Style in District Six, a tattoo parlour at which I had made an appointment to get two proteas added to my arm. I’m quite please how they turned out; so, if you are looking to get a tattoo in Cape Town, I highly recommend Philip Botha. What I do not recommend is hiding tattoos from your parents for three years. While it may seem favourable to avoid their disappointment at your having a few tattoos, it is worse to have them disappointed at your having and having hid a few tattoos.

From the fourth through the fourteenth, my time was invested in this year’s Holiday Club, the L’vaya Mzansi Road Trip. Alongside the Rev Nigel Chikanya, I led twenty young adults in a three-day preparatory retreat at Betty’s Bay on the Garden Route along the southern coast. While I spent most of the time recording videos for the program, serving meals and washing dishes, leading small group discussions and running back and forth to the convenience store because we never had enough bread rolls, my favourite part was when we walked down the beach as the sun set on our last night.

Then, during the actual program, my responsibilities included directing the drama skits, managing the sound and projector during hall times, capturing all the fun behind a camera and running back and forth to the convenience store because we never had enough bread rolls. My favourite parts included midday naps, late night conversations, the humour the leaders found in braiding my hair and a braai we held on the last day.

I spent the week sleeping at the church on an old, depressed mattress in my never-warm office. After it was all said and done, I slept for a mere thirteen hours between Monday and Saturday. But, to be honest, the week flew by. The go-go-go of it all did not leave me time to think; maybe I should say I was becoming a proper zombie. But I was allowed to run back to Jean’s to shower. The drive alone became an essential part to my survival over the overly demanding and insufferably extroverted yet hugely rewarding program. All I can say is that I am wholly pleased that I was able to co-direct such an amazing week with such an amazing team.

But I needed a holiday. So early Saturday morning, I boarded a flight to Johannesburg. After a fulfilling lunch and afternoon nap, I took a laidback evening stroll around the nearby fashion district in central Jozi to window shop. I spent Sunday in Maboneng, a gentrified and touristy quarter that borders the CBD, where I browsed food stalls and shops much like the ones at the Old Biscuit Mill in Salt River, back in Cape Town. On Monday, I took a Red Bus Tour of the city and the township of Soweto. This was the highlight of my holiday, because I took a high-speed elevator to the fiftieth floor of the tallest skyscraper on the continent (the Carlton Centre), visited the homes of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu and learned an excess of interesting facts about the city. Did you know that Jozi is the largest city in the world not located on a major body of water? Did you know that it is home the largest manufactured forest in the world? Did you know that it boasts the largest hospital on the planet?

But, before the sun was even up on Tuesday, I was back at the airport. By lunchtime, I was back in the office. And the rest of the month was predominantly routine. I worked a lot on the August edition of ‘Mowbray Times,’ the church’s quarterly magazine. As the head editor, I was responsible for the assembly and design of the magazine. Thankfully, the team with which I worked gathered all the content I needed. I also spent a lot of my time editing a few thousand Holiday Club photos and composing my final sermon.

However, I did not surrender all of my time and energy to administrative tasks. I walked the V&A Waterfront and had fish’n’chips with Nigel, Savior, Richard and Leearron, fellow Holiday Club leaders. I also played a lot of Uno with the Table Mountain gang, partied in Sea Point, souvenir shopped with Zi, drank a lot of coffee at Bootlegger’s Coffee Co., frequented two-for-one happy hour at Obz Café in Observatory and celebrated my placement with church staff—Dave, Gerard, Kauther, Suzanne and Jean—by eating too much shawarma at the Eastern Food Bazaar.

During my final week in Cape Town, I took a beautiful saunter through the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Gardens with Bill and Mary, a retired Anglican-turned-Presbyterian clergyman and his wife. Kirstenbosch’s thirteen-hundred acres lean into the backside of Table Mountain and the Twelve Apostles and have been home to a plethora of conserved native flora since the garden’s inception in 1913, at which time it was the only botanical garden with an indigenous ethos. Kirstenbosch is one of the most famous and most beautiful botanical gardens in the world.

On my second-to-last day, I had a going-away gathering with the closest of my friends. We jammed nine into my VW Golf and zoomed over to the Sea Point boardwalk to have ice cream in the springtime sun. I fleetingly tried to prevent it from melting through the cone and onto my hands as we made our way slowly down the shoreline. The air was salty. Kites sailed overhead in the wind. Kids were kicking a ball around in the grass. People peddled on rented bikes over the paved pathway and rang bells warning of their not-so-graceful passing. When the sun had set, we threw a braai.

My final day in Cape Town was a Sunday. After preaching about how I did not feel called to be a preacher, I was bid farewell by the Mowbray family over an after-service tea. But I never said goodbye, because goodbyes are wrought with resignation. Goodbyes imply that we will never meet again. And who are we to know if two paths may cross again? To ‘goodbye,’ I replied ‘see you later,’ to which some of the older congregants’ faces expressed doubt. Sure, we may never see each other again in Cape Town. However, I do not believe that we cease to exist at death. If we live simply until death, then is there a point to living at all? Temporality bears no weight in itself; a moment is but a letter in a sentence. Letters make words, which make sentences, paragraphs, chapters, books. It is the summation of letters, of moments, that carry meaning. But the letters we choose—how we shape the meaning of our lives—are entirely fundamental. Every moment is important, because they simultaneously shape our interior and exterior; they keep the story going. This is why I chose to go to Cape Town, South Africa. The letters I added are eternally engrained in my being, and the words formed were good. While this chapter may have come to a close, it will affect every bit of the chapters to come. And where my small story and the Mowbray family’s stories cross again, I cannot say. All I know is that the eternity of them has been written into the grandeur of The Story of God.