At Home

No, the marathon did not kill me. But it didn’t make me stronger either. It was a pretty disgraceful showing on my part actually, but I crossed the finish line and I’m still breathing.

Thula invested in a television set and antennae. We mounted the antennae through the thatching of her rondaveld and are hoping our landlord doesn’t notice (we’re probably even because his dogs make it into our yard nightly to exact carnage on our compost pile). I feel a New York State Regents essay question coming on…

Use the picture below to discuss the merits and drawbacks of globalization.


Our garden has become a major project. With the help of what I will call neighborhood sponsorship (but others might call petty thievery), we have introduced many new elements into the landscape. On the weekends, we go from house to house looking for a wheelbarrow that we can use to cart away our scavenged booty. We have filched piles of bricks, several sugar cane plants and tires.



A construction crew pitched camp across the street from us for a couple weeks to repair the local roads. We approached their tents one night with an offer to buy them a bottle of soda in exchange for their delivering some large concrete slabs of sidewalk to our driveway. At 6 am the next morning, a crane deposited the concrete on our driveway and several men even helped us carry the slabs to the back, where we now use them as a bridge in our garden.

After the workers packed up their tents and departed, they left piles of gravel and other debris in their wake. Several battles were waged for the right to access these piles. As neighbors swarmed the construction leftovers with pales and basins, one enterprising guy backed up his pick-up truck to the largest gravel pile and began shoveling. Two other men contested the size of the first’s share of the pile and took the measure of jumping into his truck and shoveling the gravel out. Yelling failed to resolve the situation and as they bickered – the two shoveling gravel out of the truck, the one shoveling it back in – Thula wordlessly raked basin after basin of gravel right out from underneath them. God bless her.

The garden has begun yielding some good stuff. I have a prolific herb garden and the start of some tomatoes, pumpkins, peas, carrots and spinach. We have two chili bushes and limes are in season and a tree drops fruit in our yard. This has resulted in some sexy food items, like limes + Mint + sugar cane = mojitos. I don’t think you understand how very special cocktails have become to me. In general, I fall asleep to thoughts of the jumbo frozen margaritas prepared at Cancun in midtown. Sigh. I know what I’m doing tonight.


I am a fixture in my neighborhood now. Without any input from me, now when the kids scream at me, it’s not ‘Whitey’ but ‘Soni’ they scream, which is close enough. There’s even a song about how small my butt is circulating amongst the little girls. I have tried to discourage this. In any case, Thula has offered these words of comfort: ‘your butt is good for your culture.’ I can only interpret this as: you are doing okay given your racial handicap.

And huge news: my homestay sister from Moletjie had a baby girl… that she named Sonia! She is wicked cute. I am putting all my big-butt dreams in her. In this picture, she's wrapped in a blanket I knit her.


There’s still time to donate to the marathon thing I am doing. You can contribute up until May 15th I’m told. Come on people! Let’s provide an excellent education to some promising Mpumalanga youth!

I'll be going to Swaziland in a couple weeks... that should be sweet.