Times they are a changing! (immortal words of Bob Dylan)

It is many days since the last blog and I apologise for that. I did try to start this blog a few days ago but there have been some changes in our circumstances which meant I found it difficult to find time. Perhaps also it is because I have been watching cicket on the TV with some crucial matches in the World Cup last week. By the way there is much lamentation here in SA about the woeful performance of their team's middle order – something about not having the bottle!

So why have things changed? I guess it is because we are beginning to develop some good friendships and because we have got involved in some social action in particular with the Foetal Alcohol Syndrome house (called "the fasshouse"- FAS) that is some 100 yards away over the rough ground outside our church compound.

Looking back we realise that it was silly for us not to have visited the FAS house earlier but when we got here in November everything was shutting down for the long summer holidays so the house was closed. However in February Alastair and Emma got stuck in with Alastair driving the minibus collecting pregnant women to come for their interviews and Emma playing with the children in the afternoon.Added to this we have developed a good friendship with Lian who runs the FAS house.Lian lives with her husband Peter in a cottage on a farm a few kilometres outside De Aar. They invited us to a lunchtime brai (barbecue) and we enjoyed the peace of the Karoo and some interesting discussion about living in this part of the world. We came away with a fascinating book called "Circling the Great Karoo" by Nicholas Yell which describes a motorbike trip the author took on the dirt roads of the Karoo and visiting many remote spots. It is a great insight into the life of the people of the Karoo, their history and their way of life. I wished I had read it before we came here.

We have not been invited out to the homes of the parishioners of the church and worried about this until I was talking to a Dutch Reform priest who has ministered in the coloured location for 26 years who said that in all those years he had not been invited to any of his congregation's houses!

However at almost the same moment our lovely churchwarden Eugene and his equally delightful wife Ria invited us to supper. This was ostensively to say good-bye to Alastair but it turned into a fascinating evening with Eugene and Ria being very open about what it is like to be a coloured person in South Africa today. They are in an uneneviable position with the black Africans now having the power and taking the jobs through the policy of affirmative action and the whites still running the businesses and making the money! So they feel that they are now the section of South African society that are at the bottom of the heap. Eugene and Ria are both schoolteachers and at the point in their career when they could expect to be headteachers of secondary schools. They are extremely able people and highly qualified yet they fear that at the two locals local school where there are vacancies for headships the jobs will go to black Africans who are not so competent. This is something that is happening all over South Africa and whereas we can see the need for affirmative action for the black African population, it is usually to the detriment of standards and efficiency. This is one of the dilemmas left over from its colonial and apartheid past.

(It is rather difficult to concentrate on writing this as outside the window on the vine and bushes of the yard there is a wonderful display of birdlife – one of the great joys of living here.)

Our friend Alastair Blaine left us on Sunday March 20^th to do a little more travelling before returning to England. He has been a great success here in the parish and received a lovely farewell from the church congregation. For us it was good to have him with us to give us some company and help us to feel less isolated. He was prepared to work hard at some of the clearing and cleaning jobs in the church and Sunday School house, to help with long drives to outstations relieving both of us clergy and he wrote a short history of the church here using old sources we came across in our clearing out. With his departure I have taken over driving for FAS and although I cannot do it as regularly as he did, it is a way of feeling we are contributing to their work. It is hard to get the church here to think about the social gospel as for much of the time they are bound up with their own problems. I know that many individuals do a lot of "good works" but the idea of mission through concern and help for the poor, vulnerable and oppressed is not high on the list of priorities. I am not sure that in the few weeks left for us here we can do anything about this except by setting an example.

Are the times changing? Recently we have been bold enough to ask the question that we have been wanting to ask for a long time, "Did 1994 ever happen here?" In these remote areas of South Africa it is not easy to see where there has been progress towards the breakdown of the apartheid system. This is not just the result of white Afrikaans rigidity but also the suspicion there is between the black Africans and the coloured community. They are still very separate communities and sadly the churches reflect this. The white Dutch Reform Churches are slowly dying because many of the white people are moving away. They seem unable to open their doors to people of other colours and still live in fear. But we cannot claim to be any better as our own congregation is almost entirely coloured (whatever that means!) and is not particularly welcoming to any newcomers. The social life of the town has changed little and the High School (previously the preserve of white people) still has no black or coloured teachers. It is going to be a very long time for those barriers of fear and distrust built up amongst the people during apartheid years to be overcome.

There are changes happening in St. Thomas and it has been quite a revolution. It is the kind of

change that has happened in many parishes in England over the last few decades. The parish has been led by a few powerful, well-meaning and generous people who have been in positions of leadership for a long time. It has been difficult for them to let go and this has caused a certain amount of friction as there are a number of eager and able younger people who would like to have their say and perhaps do things differently.

The parish is divided into wards and parishioners in each ward are expected to meet to pray together, to care for each other and run money-making schemes. Not many wards do this but the Montana ward does and it has meant that it has become a powerful group within the parish.To their credit they organised themselves so that several of their members ( young and very able) were elected to positions on the church council (see photo below) and since then they have quietly been revolutionising much of the way the parish is run. In time the hope is that it will not rely on the rich and powerful making contributions to keep it afloat but that all the people will contribute because they feel more part of the parish. Things have begun well and it is being ably led by our churchwarden Eugene who we have mentioned before. I have played little part in this except to give my encouragement and support and try to appease those who have lost power and influence. It does give me great joy that such a change has been made during the time I have been here.

We had a visit from the Archdeacon of the Karoo (who is also the Dean of the cathedral) last week-end and I think he was duly impressed by the change that has taken place. He was doing the swearing in of the churchwardens and church council both for St. Thomas and the churches of the outstations. It was quite a gathering and our first attempt at introducing new technology into the church as we had a video projector for the service.

Eugene on the left, and the other new warden , secretary and treasurer

So are times a changing? In many ways, no. De Aar is so isolated that it will take many more years before the kind of integration you see in other parts of South Africa will come here. However in many little things there are signs of change and the life of St. Thomas is one. My hope and prayer for St. Thomas is that somehow it can be a community that could live the "new South Africa" and therefore be an example to the rest of the town. What a wonderful gospel they could tell then!

A lovely one of Billy on his own little climbing frame in the churchyard

I tried to upload a third photo of the Dean etc at lunch but it wouldnt have it - sorry Dean Simon!

Some illustrations

                                             Playtime in our yard

                                         Billy at the organ in church, never normally used. One of the pedals to pump air is missing but it is a nice relic from the Victorian Anglican era.

Photos should be easier to load now I have picasa to reduce the size, but only two seem to be allowed to me so I will go with what I can get.

Happy times

It is just over a fortnight since we met Laura, Jonathon, Billy and Henry at Kimberley airport and much has happened since then, most happily. We watched them walk across the tarmac to the smart new airport buildings and enter, fully in our view as there are no passport or customs checks. The glass door between us slid open and we could hug while they still awaited their luggage. Billy's face was puzzled for a while but soon broke into a lovely broad grin of recognition. Occasional skype video calls have helped keep our faces familiar.

Every grandparent no doubt thinks their latest grandchild is amazing. We certainly do; Billy wonders at everything, has a real sense of fun and curiosity, rarely grizzles and is quite simply adorable. So although we were so glad to see all of them it was Billy who just made the holiday for us. I travelled in the their car, sitting with Billy in the back so as to maximize my time with him.

Jonathon has described their first week so well and I will fail to write about all that happened since then but briefly, while they went off south for 4 days on their own, we took Henry and Alastair to a nature reserve overnight at Gariep. We were able to do a fascinating tour of the big dam, the biggest in SA, and began to understand the differences between flood protection, maintaining river flow and controlling the silt flow. Our resort by the lake behind gave us a swimming pool and walks as well as the chance to braai, albeit with a struggle as a storm was starting. Alastair is a real expert these days and Henry much enjoyed his company.

We returned in time for the Mothers' Union's fund-raising pancake sale and did our bit cooking pancakes in the church hall. The following day was Ash Wednesday and the 6pm service was a big, solemn, well-attended occasion. We left at 5am next day, with Henry, to drive south to Nature's Valley on the Garden Route where we met up with Laura and family and had 2 nights at a lovely self-catering place on a farm. It was near the beach below, had views of the mountains behind and apart from the cloudy, sometimes wet weather was ideal for our last days together.

Nearby was an elephant sanctuary where we walked 'holding hands/trunk' with an elephant, rescued from the wild and being prepared to be returned. The soft skin behind the ears, which are flapped to cool the animal, was especially intriguing, as was inside the mouth. Billy was especially mesmerized but we all were.

Swimming was limited both by the weather and the size of the waves on the Indian Ocean. As Laura later commented it was sobering to think that as we watched the huge walls of water pounding in, she later realised it was at the time of the Japanese tsunami.

At Nature's Valley there is a lovely calm lagoon behind the beach where some swam, and at Plettenberg Bay similarly. There the current of the incoming tide was so strong it was hard to move aginst it so swimming was limited. As we later played in the lovely white sand, Tom building a ball-run sand castle for Billy, a man missing one leg walked past, jumped into his canoe and sped across the lagoon. A conversation with a later passer-by confirmed Jonathon's suspicion that a shark had removed one leg. It was the only known attack at that resort some many years ago but it was another sobering moment.

After a rather tearful farewell at George airport, Tom and I drove eastwards along the beautiful coast into sunshine and to Addo where there is a vast nature reserve famous for elephants. We had some wonderful watching of elephants in Addo National Park as well as most of the other big game at a private reserve close by. One large group of about 50 elephants had a reddish colour which was the result of cooling themselves by splashing in the reddish mud pools. From the safety of our car we had amazing views.

At Schotia Game Reserve you are driven in special raised landrovers across rough tracks to view the animals over a period of about 5 hours, with a tea and supper break in different safe locations. Our experienced driver knew where he was likely to find what we had come to see – white rhinos, hippos, crocodile (both in or beside a large pool), zebra, giraffe, warthogs, various buck and most amazing of all lions. We saw close by a lioness with five cubs, 4 months old, playing nearby just by our truck. Up the slope were a group of four 2 year-olds, two male, two female. In the bigger reserves they would go off once their mother had another litter but here with more limited space they stayed nearby for safety. Two huge males were visible high up on the hillside. The guide told us how they become so used to the twice-daily drives that they are unfazed but if he or anyone got down on the ground at their level they would feel threatened and would attack, with devastating force. We had never seen lions in the wild, and this is wild in that they are never fed but have to hunt, mostly at night, from whatever is in the reserve. Some species survive, others don't. Our night drive sadly didn't come across a kill, nor the two hippos who graze with their wide jaws on the meadows at night. But the whole thing was very special and memorable.

The long drive home, about 6 hours driving, was broken by stopping at Graaf Reinet, a lovely town with many 19thC buildings and several museums. It appears to be a bigger more cultural centre and we would have enjoyed staying there. Nearby at the Camdeboo National Park we drove high up a mountain to get spectacular views of the surrounding mountainous Karroo and nearby of huge reddish dolerite pillars and the Valley of Desolation a gash in this huge geological feature. Tom and I share an interest in trying to work out something of the geological past, albeit inadequately.

And so home, to Alastair's final week with us, catching up on things domestic and parochial.

(I managed one photo at last but something then refused to play ball. My laptop has been getting very slow so Alastair has helped me clear some space and perhaps it is a little faster - it is our lifeline and very precious.)

Sunshine and the long shadow of apartheid

We're busy enjoying Billy and his antics so our son-in-law Jonathon writes:

I think I'm beginning to understand the iconic status of the 'Black Power!' picture of a fist clutching barbed wire that we saw painted on the wall in Soweto last sunday, and that was popular on T-shirts and reggae albums in the UK in my childhood in the 70s and 80s.

Nowhere in the world have I ever seen so much barbed wire. In all its various forms, straight, curled, rolled up, with razors, above and below electric fences, supporting flowers and rotting on concrete posts. When we arrived in Johannesburg last weekend we stayed in Melville with Laura's cousin Lucy and her long-term partner Bongani. The houses, with one exception, were heavily fortified with 3-meter high walls topped with an array of barbed, razored and electrified wires. Most gates had a sign warning that they were also protected by 24-hour armed response security. Lucy and Bongani's house didn't advertise this, but a solid gate opened electronically to let our car in and then slid shut behind us. The high walls had spikes on the top and the windows were barred or leaded and there were metal grills over the door to the guarden. They explained that the security measures in their neighbourhood were put up hastily (you can tell) in 1994 after the elections when white people feared attacks from blacks and coloureds. Even now, though theirs is a mixed neighbourhood, the fear remains. It is fear of the violent poor, but here poverty is overwhelmingly related to colour.

On a short drive into Soweto we saw the tin shacks of a squatter-town and the concrete sheds making up workers' dormitories. I wasn't aware before coming here that South Africa was still such an impoverished, segregated country, clearly developing very slowly, especially in terms of the vast and widening differences between blacks, coloureds and whites in maternal mortality, infant and childhood mortality and rates of tuberculosis. What is shocking is that economically South Africa is doing well, though in terms of health it is moving backwards, lagging behind many other African countries. We should take note of this in the UK as we move away from a universal standard of healthcare towards a South African system of different tiers and standards of care for the poor and the wealthy.

In Soweto we visited the Hector Pieterson Museum, a memorial to the 13 year old boy who was shot dead by police in 1976 during a protest by school-children about the forced teaching of subjects in the Afrikaans language. His accidental death, albeit in the line of police fire, was the spark that set off the civil uprising in the city and beyond. The museum is at the end of the same street where Nelson Mandela used to live and Desmond Tutu still does. London is gearing up for a summer of discontent and an enormous march in London on 26.3.2011 is planned shortly after our return. There are calls for protests as radical as industrial action by doctors and a general strike. When I announced that I wanted to join the march, Henry said, 'what's the point, it's not going to change anything'. Aside from Henry's natural pessimism, he has a point: the death of a child, not the marching of children was the spark which triggered the uprising here, and the underlying discontent and suffering were the fuel that sustained the fire of protest. It makes me wonder whether significant change is likely in the UK, where the threats are of future rather than present suffering. Suffering comes from exclusion. In South Africa it was and remains primarily exclusion on racial grounds, but in South Africa and the rest of the world, the dividing lines are increasingly less to do with race or religion than they are to do with poverty. At home there will be exclusion from healthcare, education, housing, employment and so on, all long assumed rights. These exclusions will be the fuel for the protests, but as yet there is not, nor is there likely to be, anything like the actual suffering people have had here. We will probably need our own spark as well.

In Kimberly, the regional capital of the Karoo, where we met with Tom and Emma, we visited the De Beers-owned museum at the Big Hole diamond mine (1871-1920). As a tourist award-winning attraction it has a movie theatre, an underground re-creation of the mining tunnels, a history of diamonds and a quote from Za Za Gaboor, 'I've never hated any man enough to give back my diamonds'. In the book I've read while I've been here, Cry, the beloved country by Alan Paton, written in 1948, one of the black characters, John explains, 'South Africa is not built on the mines, it is built on our backs, on our sweat, on our labour'. 'For three shillings a day ... we live in the compounds, we must leave our wives and families behind. And when the new gold is found, it is not we who will get more for our labour. It is the white man's shares that will rise, you will read it in all the papers.' Later in the book a white South African explains from his perspective, 'There wouldn't be any South Africa at all if it wasn't for the mines' ... 'if mining costs go up much more there won't be any mines, and where will South Africa be then? And where would the natives be themselves? They'd die by the thousands of starvation.' The novel brings up the dilemmas of the white man Jarvis who cannot find any moral justification for allowing blacks to suffer so much in the pursuit of wealth, whilst social progress is subordinated, 'It is permissible to develop any resources if the labour is forthcoming. But it is not permissible to develop any resources if they can be developed only at the cost of the labour. It is not permissible to mine any gold, or manufacture any product, or cultivate any land, if such mining and manufacture and cultivation depend for their success on a policy of keeping labour poor. It isn't permissible to add to one's possessions if these things can only be won at the cost of other men. Such development has only one true name, and that is exploitation.'

We are staying in De Aar, a town of 45,000 which used to be the rail crossroads of the Karoo. Passenger trains would go frequently to Port Elizabeth, Cape Town, Johannesburg and Namibia. From where we are relaxing in the rectory of St Thomas' anglican church we can see the decaying ruins of the rail junction where steel sculptures are now industrial supports for wild plants and perches for birds. It is reminiscent of some impoverished Texan towns we drove through in 2009 with the pot-holed roads and crumbling pavements, intimidating edge-of-town liquor stores stocked with cheap spirits for the poor, beer for the better off and unlabelled gallon containers for the very poor. Here was the first liquor store I had shopped at where the cheap brandy selection exceeded the entire wine selection of four bottles by about 10:1. This is a town where drinking is a means to an intoxicated end which is why it has the highest incidence of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) in the Karoo. The barmaid in Pringles, the main pub in town, was wearing a FAS T-shirt and explained that it was illegal to serve alcohol to anyone who might be pregnant. She looked visibly anxious when Laura revealed her 33 week bump as she sipped a Castle Light she had been served earlier.

There is a gap in the market for beer with flavour. I suggested to Bongani that he could import ales from Brewdog, the brewery in which I have a tiny financial interest, to break the mass produced fizzy lager monopoly here.

This town, De Aar, has its share of barbed wire, more decorative than protective in the poor, coloured neighbourhood I strolled around this morning. People were friendly and children lined up in order of size to be photographed. A drunk put his arm around my shoulder and his sober colleague called him away, explaining that the drunkard was supposed to be working for him, but now he had to hire someone more capable. Perhaps it was the iconic visibility of a Leica dangling around my neck that made people instantly recognise that I was carrying a camera and ask me (as they so often do in very poor places) to take their picture. Only one person asked to see the picture on the back of the camera, perhaps people here are afraid to ask, or perhaps they are unused to digital cameras or tourists. De Aar isn't a tourist town. A white farmer who was training for his annual water-polo championship in the olympic-size swimming pool which is crumbling like the railway and green as the Serpentine, was perplexed as to why anyone would come here unless they had to. He thrashed me in a series of ten 25 meter sprints, and looked slightly disappointed that the first sign of a training partner in months wasn't much competition for a farmer, cum competitive water-polo player with a lake in his back yard and a 50m pool in his nearest town.

One of the most decorated homes I photographed this morning was at 84 Wentworth St adjacent to where we're staying with Emma and Tom in the coloured part of town. Coloured is a label for people who are neither black nor white, and from many perspectives, economic, education, health etc they are more disadvantaged that people labelled black. Wentworth street has on its west side a series of crumbly breeze-block bungalows interspersed with rickety tin shacks. The owner had yellow stars hammered out of oil cans fixed into his barbed-wire fence. The corrogated steel that made up the walls and roof of his ramshackle home had a beautiful patina of faded, peeling paint, rust, flowers and flags growing up and over it. He introduced himself as Mr W.J. Muller, and was surrounded by his six children, as thin and muddied, shy and curious as any I've seen on my travels to India, Nepal or Afghanistan. He asked me to come in to his tiny garden and photograph his children with his menagerie. There was a pair of ducks and some ducklings, some chickens and a couple of rabbits in a tiny muddy yard. I asked if I could bring Billy around later on to meet them all and he happily invited us.

By contrast the white side of town, no longer either exclusively white, nor exclusively wealthy, though there are no whites in the black and coloured areas, has wide avenues of brick and stone built houses with some beautiful gardens. There are some exceptional properties, some dating from the 30s or 40s and some quite new. Others only a couple of plots away that have fallen into ruin.The municipal swimming pool to which we returned today was built in 1974 and like the tennis courts and the stadium it has fallen into disrepair since the 1994 elections. As we swam in the green water this afternoon, a member of staff poured in a couple of gallons of liquid from plastic containers labelled hydrochloric acid, 'to purify the water', in the shallow end, right next to where we swam with Billy. A couple of hours later we're not suffering, the gurgling from our bellys has more to do with the excessively meaty diet than the pool water.

Mr M said with a smile, as Laura, Billy, Emma and I arrived, 'this never happens, we never have visitors like this here'. Billy was a wonderful bridge between the families. As is usually the case when lots of children grow up together, they were confident and delighted to take care of him. He was introduced to the ducklings, rabbit, chickens and kitten and very quickly lost his initial shyness. I'm sure if we were staying longer he would make some friends here. He was completely lost in excitement when the 12y old neice of Mr Willy J Muller gave him a duckling to hold. He beamed at the crowd of about a dozen children who squeezed up against the fence in the tiny back yard to watch him.

Tomorrow we're heading for the coast. We're more relaxed than we have been for months after 3 days relaxing with Emma and Tom. Billy is completely at home with them, full of energy and affection. He can point to an elephant, a zebra and a lion with roughly the same degree of accuracy as a baby monkey which reminds us that we're fundamentally all from the same place. We're looking forward to seeing real wildlife in Addo and the sea in Cape St Francis in a couple of days.

(E: I have lovely photos I want to upload but the signal is once agin so poor that I have had to give up - again.)

Into the wild Karoo

After Sunday's service at Philipstown we were taken for lunch to a farm about 8km from the small town, to the home of one of the lay ministers Frank and his wife Esther. He is manager of a vast white-owned farm which includes game shooting (just allowed in June we think). They gave us a delicious lunch with lamb that was both tender and tasty, as opposed to sheep which is more common! Also a lasagne made with macaroni, corn-on the cob, very much in season and delicious, pumpkin, carrots, and rice. Frank had made the pasta dish as well as a malva pudding, which is a treat not unlike sticky toffee pudding, served with proper homemade custard.

The road to the farm was unmade, one section across a river had been washed out by floods and so a different route out of town had to be used, and with 5 of us in our Polo Golf the steep bumpy section was a little hairy. Charlotte's daughter came with us, as Charlotte was on a weekend away with her school at a nature reserve. Maranda was delightful and told us how after training to be a teacher she hoped to move on to run her own businesses, so as to have an income more often tham once a month! We wished her good luck. and drove ourselves home on a new route via Hanover, a detour of something like 60km which the lads wanted to do. Unlike on a similar outing with the sisters when we had seen blue crane, bustard etc we only saw storks but the scenery is a joy with all the grasses swaying in the breeze, virtually ungrazed and untrodden as the land in drought times supports few animals..

On the following day we decided to see if we could find Sterkaar as Alastair had found references to Anglican services being held there in the past. It involved another drive out into the wild Karoo, along an unmade road to the south of De Aar, following the railway line towards Cape Town. We saw no trains in the 3-4 hours we were out but passed lots of what had been railway stops, still marked but with only the remains of small houses around.Sadly the railway line is so little used that small halts to pick up or drop farm workers no longer exist. The passenger trains from Joburg to Cape Twon go through De Aar in the middle of the night and most wagons seem to go on the E-W line between Namibia and Port Elizabeth. Some wagons do use this route: Alastair had seen a wagon derailment as he came back from CT, which had closed the rail system completely for a good week or more.

We enjoyed the scenery with its mountains and plains and the occasional field of huge prickly pear (cacti used in times of drought, minced up with lucerne to feed stock) and sightings of various bok as well as a few cattle and sheep.The huge skies are wonderful with white puffy clouds building up in places, resulting eventually in a storm later in the day somewhere.

I had in my mind that I had read that there was an Anglo Boer War cemetery at a stop called Deelfontein and sure enough as we got there on our bumpy road we saw across the rail tracks a large late Victorian building and the remains of several others as well as what had been a proper platform. We drove into the long grass to inspect and getting out found a huge arch saying Yeomanry. The painted-white stones on the hill above said IYH which in the end we realized meant Infantry Yeomanry Hospital. Along the road out of the village was the war cemetery with well over 100 iron crosses, all recently repainted and the area free of weeds, kept up by the a War Graves Commission we supposed. The railway must have brought wounded soldiers to this out of the way hospital – but De Aar was barely begun then so everywhere was out of the way.

(Sorry, our photos are not yet downloaded and we left the connecting wire back home- writing this on the way to Lesotho)

Not a soul was around, other than a railway worker who we saw checking signals. And how recently anyone had visited we wondered, did British families realise their loved ones had been buried out here in the wild Karoo? It was all rather surreal. Alastair was keen to press on towards Sterkaar but we were anxious not to scrape the bottom of our hire car as no road of any sort was marked on the map and we turned round and returned. All very fascinating though!

On Monday early evening we were invited to the FAS house to hear Professor Denis Viljoen from Cape Town University speak about his research and work with those affected by Foetal Alcohol Syndrome. He was visitng for the week to assess babies for FAS. In his view the problems of alcohol in S Africa are as great as those from HIV/Aids and one in ten in the world have alcohol problems he says. FAS is the most common preventable cause of mental retardation. He is now on some UK committee and has presented his findings to WHO; they are soon to be published and we are interested to see if it becomes more widely talked about in the UK. We were pretty much ignorant. I won't continue with the details of the lecture but it was certainly very interesting and his work in helping to get the message out into the community is showing encouraging results.

We had a visit to the health clinic serving our area, shown round by Sister Kathy, wife of Father Joseph. She, one other nurse and a young doctor from the DRCongo see 3000 visits a month, with some admin staff and hopelessly inadequate buildings. A new larger clinic has been opened in Nonzwakazi to serve fewer people, leading to some envy. There is no room for use as a pharmacy, only metal cabinets, and to avoid cross infection TB patients are given their injections in a permanently parked van outside, wedged in by two concrete toilet blocks to prevent it being driven away. This adds to the stigmatisation of patients. Attendance at the clinic is free so people use it for the slightest thing – a common problem at home I imagine – and HIV patients come monthly for free ARV medication (anti-retroviral).

The week included its usual frustrations or tensions, some rather too sensitive to be aired on a blog! On Saturday the fund-raising parish breakfast had only had a few tables filled as some people collected their ordered breakfasts. Later that day after Tom had (happily) watched many hours of sport on TV, I was dying to get out to see a film or go to a concert: impossible, nothing ever happens! We had had a meal out in an english style pub the previous evening and the steaks were to die for! And cheap, so we must return.

One morning a young woman came asking about the Anglican church. She had moved to De Aar before Christmas from Cape Town to live with her boyfriend's mother. She was sharing a bed with 4 others! Neither had jobs; she felt obliged to attend the mother's church but she was brought up speaking English and struggled to understand the scriptures or discussion in Afrikaans.She was desperately lonely and longed for Anglican worship. We were very easily able to understand her frustrations and loneliness – and we have the benefit of a car and are able to get out of town. She did appear at St Thomas' on Sunday but I rather doubt she will stay in the town long, if she can find the promise of a job in Joburg. We were able to tell her where to find internet access at a cafe.

And we will only be here for another two months.

Meanwhile we have the promise of seeing Laura, Jonathon, Billy and Henry next week, and this weekend of getting to Lesotho.