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.
