All posts by Claire

About Claire

Wandering (and wondering) development professional and aspiring aid worker. Contact me on anticipationofwonder[at]gmail[dot]com

Durban. September. Rain.

Adventures, Airports, South Africa

It’s raining in Durban. It’s September, of course it’s raining in Durban. This is my lasting memory of the town. Durban, which for everyone else is summer holidays and December sunshine, is September rain to me. Not that I mind. September rain in Durban is inextricably tangled in my mind with the reason for all of those visits – huge, unwieldy, intense events.

We fly into King Shaka International Airport. This is the new airport. What it lacks in convenient proximity (it’s about 40 minutes from town), it makes up for in atmosphere and practical design. It feels a lot like OR Tambo, but set in beautiful, rolling hills of sugar cane. We travel into town and check into the hotel. It occurs to me that it’s an awfully long time since I spent time in a South African hotel. Once upon a time, hotel rooms were as familiar to me as my own bedroom. Somehow I have travelled back to a point where hotels are a novel experience.

I won’t see much of the inside of the hotel this time around. Not unlike the last time around. Then, as now, I was here for an event. I have such clear memories from that time. I think the memories from those few weeks are clearer than any others from that phase of my life. It is amazing what the intensity of an event can do to my sense of time and space. I learnt so much. The learning curve was steep and I spent a lot of time feeling terrified and insecure. I think the confidence and strength I learnt during that event carried me through the next few years. So reassuring to be back in that eventing space, in Durban in September in the rain, all these years later.

We visit the same places: Suncoast for dinner, Wilson’s Wharf for drinks. Travelling back to the airport on the last day, past silver-sun-washed sea and the new Durban stadium, I am struck by the strange synchronicity of it all. After all these years and all I have seen, it is still Durban in September in the rain that reminds me what I’m capable of and pushes me to think seriously about the next step, the next option and all I’ve learnt from the amazing people I’ve worked with in this town.

Old friends

Friends

It’s a quiet Friday morning. I’m sitting in a friend’s lounge in Grahamstown. There are clouds in the sky. Perhaps there will be some much-needed rain later. The flowers bob in the breeze outside. I can hear birds singing. It’s gentle. Grahamstown can be so gentle. This is not the Grahamstown of my student years. Nor is it the buzzing, almost-overwhelming ArtsFest town. Visiting here in the past couple of months, I’ve become more and more comfortable with that. I don’t need this to be a place of nostalgia. At least for the moment, this is somewhere I come to visit friends.

I spent last night on a friend’s couch. Nothing dramatic about that. And yet, when you’ve been so far away, there is. Not that I didn’t meet people and have amazing times in Korea, but it’s different with old friends. There was a discussion about it in the crazy week we’ve just returned from – a week of working together. It is always more fun to work with someone you know. It hasn’t always been plain sailing. There have been times we have disagreed. There have been times when we were barely speaking. There have been times of tension and times of fear and times of joy. This particular friend is one of the  reason I managed to get on that plane to leave the country and one of the people with whom I shared that amazing trip to Mozambique.

I’ve never been very good at being completely comfortable in someone else’s space. I’m a bit of a loner and I like my own time and place. I am comfortable here, now. Grahamstown now is people and place just as comfortable as an old, worn jersey you’ve had for years and years.  People I can know through changes and growth and not lose. There is something Simon-and-Garfunkel-esque-ly special about that kind of old friend,

“Can you imagine us years from today, sharing a park-bench quietly?

How terribly strange to be seventy

Old friend, memory brushes the same years, silently sharing the same fears”

Simon and Garfunkel, “Old Friends”

The bittersweetness of boxes

Daegu, South Africa,

On a warm Wednesday morning in May, I sent two medium-sized boxes on their way, hoping against hope that between the Korean Post Office, the South African Post Office and two customs departments they’d arrive in one piece. The first one arrived today.

I set off with ID and R25 customs duty, alerted by a parcel slip in the mail. The Post Office teller looked utterly bewildered, which did not bode well. Luckily, she had a friend and between them it took a mere 15 minutes to locate my 1 box. Another 10 minutes and I was walked out. It was an easy late-winter day – sun, blue-sky, jasmine – very similar, now that I think about it, to the day I posted the boxes. I found myself feeling strangely prickly and protective. I wanted to get to where I could be alone with my box. This box, with its twin still to come, was the last part of me to come home, my last link to another world so very far away.

Back home, I opened it. Three months (almost to the day) since I packed, I had no idea what to expect. Inside was a smaller box stuck closed with sticky-tape. It began to come back to me. I remembered the frantic packing and the long walk to the Post Office. Somewhere in here was a mug I got at the Opera. I wondered if it was still intact. The small box contained little mementos – one or two things from my Korean Christmas, the miniature windsock from when we went paragliding, a bracelet I bought at that temple we went to on that Daegu City Bus Tour.

Underneath was the backpack I bought at that little shop in Suncheon, that last epic weekend when I went to see the Islands. I’d packed it full of clothes – clothes I’d almost forgotten existed. Summer clothes I’ll be glad of soon. Depth-of-winter clothes I may never use again: long underwear, heavy denim jeans, my coat, so crumpled I’m going to have to get it dry-cleaned.

I sat on the floor with that coat in my hands and the memories flooding back. I remember the day I bought it. A random day on my way to school. I stopped at Fashion Exchange opposite the bus stop. They had racks of coats outside. What did I know about buying coats? The only coats I’d owned had been second-hand imports I’d never worn more than once or twice in a winter. But here I was going to need a coat so I took the one that fitted. It was the first winter thing I bought and my comfort against the cold for all those months. It felt so strange to have it here, now, back in my real world. All these things. As if the memory of another lifetime had somehow arrived in the post.