A Moving Experience

Teams have started to arrive in Johannesburg for the FIFA World Cup. Yesterday Brazil touched down, the day before, Australia. It seems that every piece of road is being hurriedly re-built, widened or spruced up. Many of the traffic lights are not working, adding another challenge to driving our small Kia rental car around the city. At the road intersections the street sellers have swapped their standard wares for South African flags, pennants, wing mirror covers, and the long clarinet-shaped (but deafening) hooters called vuvuzelas.

Every day the newspapers carry a front page story on some aspect of the Cup; a new scandal, a grand opening, a grinning fan. The county has whole-heartedly embraced the first soccer World Cup to be held on the African continent.

With only a passing interest in the beautiful game, we have come here for a different reason – to move house. Well, actually no. It just happens that Shirls’ brother and family are moving back in to their newly renovated home, so we have offered to help out. The almost complete re-build has been a major accomplishment for Alan and Sandré, project managing, buying all the materials and somehow finding time for work and taking care of baby Owen and his older brother Brad.

House construction here is complicated by matters of security. A guard is required to ensure that none of the materials (bricks, sand, wood) disappear overnight.

This is Blessing, the ever smiling security guard. Many Africans have wonderfully descriptive names: Gift, Praisegod, Beauty. In a city like Johannesburg, better known internationally for its murder rate and poverty, the colourfulness and cheerfulness of the people is like a salve, soothing society’s wounds… Now I’ve come over all prosaic.