Candles, Beer and Finding our Place

This past week we visited Montebello Design Centre in Newlands. It's a lovely place for families to hang out and explore. The small nursery is beautifully well-designed and personal, and gave us plenty of ideas for our tiny concrete garden. This is what we got while we were there: 

A resident Kenyan artist sold us these upcycled candles. He melts old wax to make these candles from old soda cans. I'm going to take them back after they burn out, and ask him if he can use up the leftover wax and the cans again.

Montebello is almost too perfect. It's an artist utopia, the cafe is a tent with a huge sprawling tree in the center, and the nursery evokes a secret garden. If it were in Boston, there wouldn't be a but (or the "but" would be further away and easier to avoid thinking about?).... 

...But in Cape Town, you can't escape the juxtaposition of these havens which seem to shield us from the gritty reality just one street, or one suburb over. Informal settlements are supplying labour to our cities, and they've been compared to both concentration camps and refugee camps, though they have no walls. At Montebello, white South Africans would never know that we're in the tiny minority. I don't have any wise answers, and I can't speak to social change at the political level, but I think the tension is something we have to grapple with and make decisions about. Can these enclaves exist if there were no informal settlements? What will South Africa look like in twenty years? What should it look like?

So I'm working on using the car less and trying to find haven on the next street, or even inside our own home. I want to be fully invested in our community, even as I show Noah and Eli the beauty of the ocean and the mountains around us. We live near to a very beautiful river, the Liesbeek,  with incredible bird life. I took Noah there yesterday and found it full to the brim of plastic waste- we retrieved an old plastic crate (to the amusement of a couple of lookers on- it's more difficult to get things from a river than one thinks, and more disgusting). There were also homeless men living in a small island on the river, using tarp as a makeshift tent. 

Lives that revolve around car-transport can easily bypass those parts of the city that are scary or dirty, bouncing us between artificial realities, rather than making our immediate neighborhoods really work or confronting our fears of the unknown. I speak to myself: our lives have quickly become car-oriented, despite not having a work commute, but I'm beginning to see alternatives: I signed us up for a library card so we get our reading material from the tiny Obs library, we visit the park and the river, and Noah is gradually getting used to spending time at home, inventing games as we imagine our garden as it's own haven. Although Eli is too young for the bike seat, Noah goes for rides with Eug and we are so excited at the news that Albert road is going to be getting a proper bike lane. The roads in Obs are very narrow- often too narrow for two-way traffic, yet cars park on both sides of the street and trucks get stuck after they take a wrong turn and wind up in our neighborhood. I wonder if we can imagine something different- a truck free neighborhood?

In other news, Eug bottled his first batch or beer. Noah took on the important role of bottle cap provider, and I am the resident dumpster diver- for bottles and crates. Dumpster diving in Cape Town is totally unromantic: whereas in Boston I was looking for great food and even beautiful furniture, here I'm looking for bits of wire, plastic crates, old bits of wood, pallets, and old glass beer bottles. And they're pretty hard to find. 

Although we don't dress him very well, Eli is still just about as awesome as anything.

Unfortunate Combinations of English and Korean

Living near to my mom-in-law for the first 16 or 17 months of his life, Noah was exposed to a fair amount of Korean. We weren't sure if he remembered those times.

For the longest time we thought he only said "No!", not "Yes!" We were concerned for his language skills, and he seemed frustrated at being misunderstood.

Then, a few months ago we realized that he uses the Korean word for "Yes", which happens to be "Ne", and the English word for "No". Unfortunately, "ne" sounds a lot like "no", and until a few months ago they were indistinguishable, even to us. Which has made for a lot of confusion as we enter the season where "yes" and "no" seem to be the most important words in a toddler's vocabulary.

Rhythm or Lack Thereof

EeCheng left after her two week visit, and we find ourselves possibly-maybe-maybe settling into some kind of rhythm. No. I'm not being honest. We don't have much of a rhythm. The advantage of not having proper day jobs is that we can decide each day what we feel like accomplishing. The disadvantage is that we are not grounded by knowing what's ahead of us- which is sometimes important for tiny kiddies.

Right now, I have my day's tasks and there are things that aren't going to get done, but it's ok. I have done a little work, given a lot of kisses, tried not to scream at my screaming 2-year-old, and right this moment I need to tell you that Noah gave back the iPod before the battery died. [Sorry, I'm gloating. Unlimited Kipper is somehow working- Noah no longer watches it much. Now if only he'd get over chocolate.] 

We've had major life events almost every week for about a year. There's still a lot to be done in terms of our settling into life here in Cape Town. I still haven't bought car insurance, house insurance, called the electrician to ask about the power failures, applied for Eug's permanent residence, got my proposal through Human Research Ethics, put up photos on our walls or fixed our living room light fixture. [Please God don't let the house burn down]. Overall, those things are relatively minor. I feel like there's nothing standing between me and Real Life. This is it. And we have enough time. We have the same amount of time as everyone.

I think sometimes I use landmarks to stop me from working on things- "it'll be better when..." Despite our best efforts, our house is always a mess. We always have one more load of diapers. I always forget to pay the Telkom bill until the last minute. Rather than think that a solution will appear some magical moment in the future, it seems to help to acknowledge that this is our life right now. This is it. If things aren't working now, then it's good to find tiny, stepwise solutions for them, to the extent possible. Solutions for low bar stuff- avoiding swarms of fruit flies, remembering to clean the sheet if Noah pees on it in the night, not running out of clothes or smelling bad. We're not yet at exercise, pretty toddler room decorations, painting the outside walls. Those are for next month or next year.

That said, here are some cool, unrelated things from the last week:

• Soap nuts. Homemade detergent without borax sort of doesn't work for us. So I ordered soap nuts and borax from the internet and asked EeCheng to bring them over to us. The borax didn't arrive in time but the soap nuts did, and they are awesome. We haven't had time to strip the diapers of detergent in a while, and were having leakage problems. No longer. I think the soap nuts have very little residue. Soap nuts can also be purchased from Wellness Warehouse in Cape Town, but if you're in the U.S. revel in the fact that you have Amazon. It's a precious, precious resource.
• The lovely Sammi Taylor wrote a piece for Brett on Singleness, and I just wanted to give her a shout out. Check it out! Brett is spending some time with The Simple Way, a group I've spoken about here a few times.
• Check out Michelle Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention for mid-week inspiration. There is much I don't know about politics. But I saw substantive positive changes working in a U.S. government job under Obama. Despite deep cuts to the Public Health Budget, money became available in parts of my work that really seemed to have an impact.  
• I have access to an old giant 240L bin to convert to a worm bin! Watch this space to see a tutorial on how to do this. [uh...if you have any ideas on how best to do this, please tell me.] We've been overwhelming our current farm, so I'm excited to increase our volume of scraps, and maybe even become a source of vermicompost in our neighborhood.