twinutero

A few weeks ago, we took the kids to a playground not far from our house. We had only been there once before and that was a year ago, just after moving here. Those two visits, a year apart, are like two snapshots of our lives in South Africa, and the differences between them shows me how much we have assimilated.

On our first visit to the playground, I was struck by the mid-summer heat: the grass dried into tiny needles; the scorching metal slide; the swings, made from old car tires, also too hot to touch. I was bewildered by the fact that although we were smack in the middle of suburbia, there were no other children in sight. The only people in sight were workers piled into pick-ups trucks being ferried to or from a job. The houses surrounding the park were walled and many had their own play structures sequestered inside. It seemed a long, long way from our neighbourhood park in Ottawa, where on a hot summer’s day, dozens of kids and parents would crowd around the sprinklers and clamor over the jungle gyms.

But a year later, visiting that same playground in suburban Cape Town didn’t seem so strange. It was still hot, but I expected it to be hot. I checked the slide and swings before letting the kids use them. I shook the dry blades of grass out of their shoes. I didn’t expect crowds of children, because I know that lots of kids, around here at least, play only in their backyards and also because it was midday - that is hot! I’m used to “bakkies” full of workers descending on leafy surburbia, though will probably never get used to the underlying problems of poverty and disparity. Still, the houses surrounding the park looked relatively normal to me. Yes, they were walled, but only a few had burglar bars and I didn’t see any razor wire. After a few minutes, a young boy tottered over to the park with his nanny. At least I assume it was his nanny because that’s what I’ve come to assume.

Both at that park and elsewhere in our daily lives, the unusual has become the usual.

Sort of.

I  haven’t really thought of myself as an “ex-pat” while living here, much less an ex-pat wife. The term conjures up cliquey groups of bored women having wine-drenched conversations about the home country. It seems, almost by definition, to preclude assimilation, to put up a safety-net of “not really here!”.  I know that’s not the case (check here for info on ex-pat women). Still, I wonder, how much someone who is not a citizen and has no plans for long-term stay ever really assimilates into a foreign culture, despite wanting to. I wonder what makes home, home. Why feeling understood is so vital. Why we gravitate to people like us. Why, some days, I’d trade sunny weather and a fine ostrich braai, for snow and a bucket of maple butter.