It’s 4:30 a.m. and I’m writing as I sit on the edge of the bathtub.  In half an hour I’ll be meeting Linda’s family for a sunrise surf session.  I can’t imagine what it will be like.  I’m trying not to wake everyone here up.

    I wanted to finish my last thought on Ethiopia before returning back to where I am now.  The Italians were jealous of their European neighbor’s colonies and saw Ethiopia as a big blank spot on the map that could be a kind of new Roman Empire.In many respects they did not recognize that Ethiopia, despite the power struggles of its various provinces was more organized than they seemed to be and that they did have contact with the rest of the world.  Misunderstanding the force of the Ethiopians (both the comparative modernity of their weapons and their ability to mobilize many more people than expected) led to the defeat of the Italians at Adwa in 1896 (98-99).  But this still did not guarantee the respect of the world for the territorial integrity of Ethiopia.  Despite early twentieth century modernization programs, European nations still failed to honor treaties with Ethiopia or to really treat it as a sovereign nation.  Ethiopiawas included in the League of Nations after World War I.  Still when Italy reduced the flow of arms into Ethiopia and ultimately invaded France and Britain followed a policy of appeasement with Mussolini at the total expense of Ethiopia which had been depending on its status as a member nation in part so that the nation could focus more on modernization than militarization.  The Italians used poison gas, executed 10,000 people who Hailie Selassie had trained and educated to be the New Ethiopia.  In short, the Italians used terrorism to subdue the population until they realized that this was only making the situation worse.  In the five years they were there the Italians did terrible damage.  However when Hailie Selassie returned he included both loyalist leaders and collaborators within his new government.

    So decades of destabilizing Ethiopia from Eritrea and Somalia (whose borders were chosen out of European political expediency rather than the needs of Africa.  I haven’t heard the news since two days ago so I am wondering what is happening now.

    Yesterday we had a delightful day.  Princess seems to be the hotel staff of our B & B.  She cleans the rooms, makes breakfast, handles questions, welcomes new arrivals, etc.  We had breakfast and talked to her as she worked.  She taught us Zulu words for thank you, good morning, etc.  I don’t want to write them down out of fear that it will just solidify my mistaken pronunciation of them.  Our rooms are bright and large in a house built in 1906.  The birds sound so much like Hawaii outside, full of life and energy as the new day begins.  I fixed the shuffles yesterday morning.  Then we went out grocery shopping with Jerry.  All along the aisle he pointed out what was especially good here and what didn’t measure up to his American standards.  As a result I guess we’ll be staying away from Oreos and donuts.  The mall with narrow halls and the glass and metal store front windows right up against it, was mostly deserted because of the New Year’s holiday.  Jerry will be returning home in a few days and seems very ready to be back in Mountain View.  He’s tired of being forever subject to African time and the way that his accent confuses locals.  At the same time Linda is having a hard time leaving her family when they don’t expect to return for at least a year and a half.  It feels a little like the end of summer on Maui does for us (only Jerry doesn’t have the sense that I usually have of not having written enough).

    Before lunch we left for a small (7,000 acre private game park).  Tala Park is between Petermaritzburg and Durban and is struggling financially to stay alive.  Jerry and Linda had their wedding reception there and took pictures with giraffe.  Thirty years ago that land was a collection of vegetable farms growing potatoes so it is interesting to see the patterns by which the Thorn Trees (Acacia / Keawe Trees) return along with other native (?) plants like those spectacular tree-like aloes.

    We ate crisps and had soft drinks at a little pool but the unseasonable cold weather kept us out of the water.  When it started raining we moved off to the restaurant where the tour trucks load up.  There were babies everywhere – zebra, bless buck, wildebeest, rhinoceros babies all on a beautiful overcast day among the green hills and valleys of Tala.  We had supper in front of the big fireplace on African time in an otherwise empty room with glaring disco lights.  Heidi was the one who spotted the giraffes family.  The cool weather kept us under blankets and the game out from cover.  We saw two young bless buck bucking, trying out each other’s defenses before the really serious competition begins later in the year.

    Micah, Melia and I were all struggling against sleep in the car on the way home.  Heidi tried to keep Micah up with math questions.  It turns out that he can do pretty good arithmetic even in that border between sleeping and waking before the dreams come.  We all fell asleep ten minutes after arriving home (probably before 8:00 a.m. while the pictures where still being transferred from the computer to a CD).

 

    What kind of religious pilgrim paddles out through the warm waters of the Indian Ocean to greet the sun rising behind through the cloudy horizon?  I guess for as long as their have been pilgrims there has been the question of what constitutes an authentic pilgrimage.  Paddling out in the rip current along the pier, I didn’t think about questions like this.  The churning waters of the rip acted like those flat escalators that one finds in airports.  The closest peak by the lefts side of the pier had a whole pod of body surfers, men who come out into those waters every day before work.  In Hawaii my experience has been that the body surfers stick to the shore break and the surfers work the reefs much further out.  Here we were all together, surfers and those little coconut-like heads bobbing up and down in the swell.  My first prayer of the day was that I wouldn’t run any of them over.  I didn’t even know where in the wave to look for them when I was taking off or what rules apply to the interaction between surfer and swimmer.

    My first good one was a chest-high left.  I rode all the way in enjoying the right cut-backs, then walking along the shallows back to the pier rip current.  My companions included Mike (Linda’s dad), her brothers (Andrew and Tony) and one of their school friends visiting from the UK.

    Before we arrived Linda had lamented that our stay included New Year’s Day.  Thousands of black Africans from the interior converge on Durban’s beaches for the holiday.  I imagine the locals look at them a little like the way they look at Vals down in Santa Monica or Santa Cruz (from the San Fernando Valley and our neighborhood in Santa Clara County).  As one might imagine after an event like that the beach front was in fairly poor condition with litter everywhere and the remaining party-goers sleeping upright on the park benches looking totally used up.

    Spending more time with Linda’s dad was a great pleasure.  I could talk with him for hours.  He has a wonderful reassuring presence, a gentleman all the way through who grew up in the Anglican Church and exemplifies its best qualities – respect for rules and for other people.  He knows everything about South Africa that I want to know.  He studied languages at Kwazulu-Natal University.  He knows Afrikaans, English and Zulu.  I love to watch his face and hear his voice as he speaks with Zulus.  It inspires me to learn Spanish so that I can talk to people that I meet in my home.

    Unlike the dour people of the interior, the Durban surfers openly love their lives and are generous to others in and out of the water.  The contrast between the agro Steamer Lane crowd and the regulars I met this morning is striking.  One last note on what white Durbanites call the Black Tide.  So many people come to celebrate New Years on the beaches that dozens of children simply get left behind.  The officials take unclaimed ones to the orphanage.  Last year one little boy wasn’t picked up for another three weeks.

    We enjoyed good surf for only a short while.  Moved by the dramatic clouds, the sun breaking through, the powerful waves, my wonderful companions, the warmth of the water, riding the breakers, the thought of all the distant places this great Indian Ocean touches – for the first time in months I felt really free.  Because of this I don’t know how much time passed before the “Beastly Easterlies” (a strong seasonal prevailing wind out of the North East) came up.  In twenty minutes the surf was blown out and the perfect moment was over.

    Andrew and I rode our last waves in, met our swimming companions on the steps of the tea house and got our own cups of tea.  While talking about the history of the shark Committee that first starting string shark nets up in the 1960’s, we walked down the strand saw the sand sculptures of cars, lions, women, etc. until we had to return to our lives, work and families.

    Another great breakfast later and we went with the Garrett’s to Phe-Zulu, a junior version of Plymouth Plantation in New England, one of many Polynesian Cultural Centers for the Zulu.  I kept thinking of our friend Kimo in Hawaii who is the star of several luaus on Maui.  I tried to imagine a world in which the Phe-Zulus would go around as pilgrims or tourists or whatever we are, experiencing staged versions of cultures around the world that have been displaced by modernization which brings “Price, Waterhouse, Coopers” (?), McDonalds and Madonna around the world.  One wonders how people decide which culture and which epoch to preserve.  England has these kinds of stage shows at Buckingham Palace.  I guess California has Disneyland or the California Adventures Park.  Maybe we haven’t yet reached that time and culture that we most want to preserve or perhaps its those golden times of film in the 1920’s or 1930’s.

    The show took place in a wide-open extra large hut-like amphitheatre looking out at the Thousand Hills country.  The loose story line was about what a man has to do to take a new wife.  First he listens for the singing voices of women going down to the river to do their washing.  Then, the young men practice battling each other in order to impress the women.  He tries to persuade one to go with him.  She gives him a necklace.  He goes to the fortune teller who says something about her after burning incense and consulting animal bones…  You probably get the idea by now.  It certainly isn’t very close to having tea in the rector’s book lined study and talking about how the couple plans to make career decisions.

    I loved the dancing and singing and the energy.  I felt mildly awkward about taking pictures, as if my presence as a spectator diminished the people I was watching and their culture, etc.  I let myself have fun and tried to explain what was happening to Melia who probably understood the whole thing better than me anyway.

    Afterwards we learned that the left side of the hut is for women, the right side for me.  We met a chief, sat in the cooking hut, learned how to make beer, saw how the cooking fire smoke dissipates through the thatched roof of the straw roof, etc.