Trip to Cape Town


In February, we took the bus from Maputo to Johannesburg.  We spent the night there and then flew to Cape Town the next day, where we met my sister.  We saw some breathtaking scenery... the Cape Town area is overflowing with beauty of Mother Nature.  We had the opportunity to stay at the Moon Bay Guest House in Fish Hoek, where Tina and Peter Davies took care of us.  Highly recommended for anyone travelling to Cape Town.  Last week I was working in Nampula in the North, and my accomodation there will be the subject of my next blog entry... because the whole experience, not the just room, but the interaction with the 'hotel' staff, is outside the frame of most of us-- even mine, worthy I thought it worthy of an entry of its own, even for humor's sake. 

On the bus to Johannesburg...



Drinking hot chocolate at the airport in Joburg

African Jackass Penguins at Boulder Beach

Cape of Good Hope- I hove this picture

In traditional Xhosa headdresses at Spier Winery

The Universe Conspires in My Favor

It's been about one month since Oscar passed.  It was too intense for me in the end--and I needed some return to normalcy.  I'll always have this picture of his two cousins arriving in my house, sitting at the kitchen table, just the three of us.  They tell me that the body has been in the morgue over the weekend and needs to be buried the following day or they will have to start paying. 
I used to work in food aid, and when food sits in the port too long, you have you pay demurrage. 
So they are explaining this and I am thinking that people in Mozambique have to pay demurrage when they die. 

Then they ask very politely for money to buy the coffin.  I ask how much one costs and they say the cheapest one is 2,000 Meticais, about $75.  It seems unreal... how this is being negotiated.  I am imagining myself floating above the room...  observing the whole conversation like it's a movie, because it doesn't seem real. 

So I was craving normalcy, time with my kids, sitting relaxing.... and I got it.  Here's what the cosmos' answer was...  a week ago, Matias came to me holding a small bug about the size of the top of a pin.  Look what I found on Elio's head.  Elio had lice... and so does Nalia, and lo and behold, I do too.  Live little guys crawling off my hair. 

I have learned a lot of about lice in the past week.  They are resistant to most of the permethrin shampoos on the market (Nalia and I have shampooed about 5 times and still have the eggs).  The shampoo usually kills the live ones, but the egg stick like glue to the shaft of hair near the base of your scalp.  Sometimes I just pull out the hair to get rid of them.  The mature lice are particularly hard to get rid of because they also jump-- and far for their size. 

So the reason I am bringing up the lice is that going through Nalia's head looking for the nits and pulling them out has really forced me to relax and has returned some pieces of normalcy to our lives. The time has been good for Nalia and me to spend with each other, just talking about our days, her friends at school, and how she is feeling.  The universe is usually conspiring in our favor, in ways we'd least expect it.