Went for a walk this morning, my regular route along
the main road leading to the N2. I always take my camera with me and take
photos of who ever I meet along the road.
They normally ask me to take photos of them, especially the kids of
course. Today was that promised
day when I would go with all the printed photos that I got done in
Umthatha. I’d have to look for all
the people on the photos or sometimes just give a bunch to someone in the area
that knows who’s who. It’s always great
to see how excited people are when they receive their photos.
I sometimes ask them if they can pay me R4/R5 for a
photo, if I’ve taken a couple of the same people. (That’s what it costs me to print – Umthatha aint cheap with
their photos!) A lot of the people want to do a couple of different poses and
then pose with this friend and that friend. It works out pretty expensive for me at the end of the
day. But I know that R5 for them
is a lot and most of the time they just don’t have it. So I just give them the photos
anyway. I think there are a couple
of mamas who might actually give me some money sometime soon.
Anyway, today I was looking for some people an asked
one mama if she saw them. She had
a look at the photos and said she’d also like photos of her family. She lived a little bit of a walk from
the road, so normally I won’t really get to those people unless they take me
there. This mama was very nice and
seemed that I’ve met her before but can’t be sure. When we got to her place, the 3 little kids were just on
their way to school, so I just took a quick picture of them. Inside one hut was her daughter giving
her little boy a wash in the tub.
He was quite curious of me and didn’t mind me taking a
picture. Sometimes these little
ones freak out a bit and start crying when they see an ‘umlungu’ because
they’ve never seen a white person before in their life. Later on he started getting real cute,
dancing around and wanting to grab my camera.
I was real impressed with this hut. It was so neat and got nice light and
they had a table and chairs in the middle. A lot of the huts are very dark. The mama gave me some qnush (samp and beans) to eat and
later got me a bunch of spinach from the garden – that’s becoming a regular
thing now! I do love spinach and
you can guess what I had for dinner…
This afternoon I spent just a little bit of time with
my 3 kids, Asefika, Snooks and Josh.
They were all especially dirty today for some reason, don’t know where
they were playing. But it was worth
it having to wash my jeans again tomorrow just to have the three of them
fighting over who’s sitting on my lap for 5 minutes.
Josh and Asefika disappeared and Snooks asked me to
drive her home in my car. Her home
is literally 2 minutes up the road, but I drove super slowly for her to get the
best of the experience. When we drove off, she asked how I knew it was really
my car, so I pretended for a while that maybe it wasn’t my car and we had lots
of laughs about what would happen if I took the wrong car. She didn’t really want to get out
and looked for all sorts of things that interested her in my car. I had a little pamphlet of Port St
Johns, about 4 hours north of Coffee Bay.
She wanted to know exactly where we are and where we lived. And then she said she really felt
like eating something nice. I keep
a couple of peppermints in my car which she’d never had before so we sat there
sucking on that and listening to Hillsong on my tape player. She said she’ll go when the song is
finished. I know she wasn’t even
really listening to the music, she just liked hanging out in my car.
