I like to think of ‘Louis Trichardt’ as Makhado

Most big cities here have two names: the Afrikaaner name and the ‘African’ name (whatever that means). So it’s not uncommon to have signs with two names to designate the same place. I’ve referred to Polokwane before… it’s also known as Pietersburg.

As a rule, I prefer to refer to places by their ‘African’ name.

Here’s why:

Thula – my roommate and coworker – and I visited Makhado this weekend. We were in need of supplies for our home and for our recent Christmas party and it is the largest town nearby. It was also a town designated for Afrikaners-only under apartheid. The town continues to have a substantial Afrikaner population though a lot of Venda people live, work and shop there now as well.

After a couple hours of shopping and walking around, Thula and I were pretty bushed. We stopped in the town café for some coffee… errr “coffee”. There were pretty much only Whites – I’d wager Afrikaners – in the café. Now, Thula is Zulu and Xhosa but speaks a fair amount of Afrikaans. Thula was sitting at the booth, with her back to an Afrikaner family, and the daughter keeps popping her head up over the booth to say stuff to Thula. I ask Thula what the little girl is saying and Thula casually says, “oh she’s telling me to get out.” As Big Brother Peace Corps may be watching, I will not enumerate on the expletives I let rip the next time I saw that ten year old's face. I don’t think she told her parents or maybe she didn’t understand, but the family ended up moving outside when a group of Black people sat down at the table beside them.

So… Makhado.

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But the Christmas party was fun, aside from the inevitable “dance, white girl, dance.” Naheed and I spent 6 hours cooking and cleaning in preparation. We made Mexican food, mango lassis, and sugar cookies for Christmas decorating. We hand made our tortillas, which was time consuming, squeezed about a dozen mangos, and managed the very nasty process of using homemade frosting for the sugar cookies in the Venda summer heat. I had to stop several times to refreeze the frosting so that I could work with it. No one likes to be reminded that frosting is just butter and sugar. When you’ve got this colored oil slick coming off on your hands, it’s impossible to deny the fact. Anyway, the below picture is my attempt at reconciling my Peace Corps service with a holiday separated from my family.



Notice the American flag is green. Inexplicably, there is no blue food coloring in South Africa, at least not where I am. I suppose American flags are atypical subjects for food coloring. Also, the colors, namely, red, yellow, orange and green, are sold separately – there’s a societal metaphor there I’ll let you interpret.

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This will be my last blog posting for 2005. Thanks to everyone for the well wishes, the holiday cheer and the what not. I miss you and hope you all enjoy a happy non-denominational holiday and new year with friends and family.

I’ll be sharing Christmas with my Muslim friend in the warm glow of our Christmas tree.



Shout out to Tom… who sent me a whole Christmas tree! I like the way it was placed inside the box. It’s got that robot-maker, some-assembly-required touch.

Random thought for 2005:

DON’T LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOU. Accepting an African name is one thing –



– this is an entirely different thing. Naheed took the braids out maybe two days later. This is her half-way through the process. We took two days taking them out. It was very unsexy sleeping next to her that night.



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