12 Mar. 13
Last night we finally managed to speak to Amy on Skype. She has found a
job and is settling in to her new apartment which lifted a weight from my
shoulders. I have used Skype before to speak to a friend of mine but he was
just down the road and I had been seeing him on a regular weekly basis. So this
was different. She is my daughter and is sitting halfway around the world in
another country. I also haven’t seen her for almost three months now. It’s
weird how it is so different from a normal phone call where you hear a voice
and can only imagine their face, not really being able to get a true feeling of
their emotions. It made me feel less worried about her having seen her
apartment and her demeanour. Knowing that she is well and looks healthy and
still familiar is an emotional release. I thank all those computer geeks that
invented the internet and Skype. Yesterday they made my day complete.
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| Yrumoar is a hair salon too! |
24 Mar. 13
Today I am back to feeling uninspired and deflated as I watch my dream
to go sailing slowly sinking down the drain. I have had no response to any of
my job applications so stopped sending my cv. Everyday Lola and I try to come
up with different solutions to the our rapidly diminishing cruising kitty but
none of our ideas are working.
02 Apr. 13
Well today I turned 48 and it was a good day. I received all the
obligatory phone calls from everyone that cares and a few from those that don’t
really care but feel they have an obligation to call anyway so, like I said, a
good day.
We decided to go away from the boat for the day and into town. Having
nowhere to go and nobody here in Durban to visit we decided that we would spend
the day at home affairs and the police station. Lola needed to apply for a new
passport and we didn’t have anything else to do anyway so it seemed like a good
time to visit a few of our fabulous government departments. Someone at the
yacht club told us that the home affairs near Amamzimtoti was never busy and
that we should try it instead of the busy one in Durban town. We followed his
advice and headed to Toti only to discover that everyone from Mozambique in the
north, all the way to Cape town in the south of Africa was waiting in a queue
about two miles long outside the office in Toti. We took one look at the queue
and thanked our lucky stars that we didn’t have to fill in a leave application
for the day just to be trapped standing in a queue. Deciding the queue was just
too long and we didn’t want to spend our day standing in it, we left and went
to the mall in toti instead. Kyle’s birthday is on the 7th and we
needed to buy him a present anyway.
After the mall we thought that we should drive past home affairs in town
and see if it was busy. It wasn’t, and we applied for Lola’s passport leaving
for our next destination, the SAPS, within fifteen minutes. We wanted to apply
for police clearance at the SAPS but discovered that we cannot do it in Durban
town and have to go to the Bluff police station since we live in the Bluff. By
the time we managed to get back to the Bluff it was already late and we decided
that tomorrow was another day so came back to the boat instead.
Back on the boat I decided to have a few brandies to celebrate, or is it
forget, I am never sure. Anyway Lola and I sat in the cockpit and I had a few
drinks while she drank a few cokes and suddenly I decided that I hate South
Africa. Not the people or the land, but the politics. The fact that I am
looking for work and have sent my cv to about fifty different places without
any response, pisses me off. The fact that I sold my business because I was
tired of lying to my customers because the government failed to issue me with a
company firearm license for five years, pisses me off. The fact that, when
business was good I wanted to diversify and tried to buy a few different
franchises I was told that I had to be black or have a black partner, pisses me
off. So now I am sitting on the boat,
slowly running out of money to feed my kids and wondering what to do, knowing
that whatever I do I cannot do it here in my country of birth because I am simply
not welcome.
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