Homesick for South Africa

When we came home from South Africa, Catherine was asked to speak to a number of ladies’ groups about our experience there. We put together a Power Point presentation showing pictures of the land and the church where we were. In it Catherine said that of all the places we have been it was the one place she felt “homesick” for.
It is hard to explain. We had wonderful people in our church. It was really very exciting to be there so soon after apartheid had ended and feel the oneness in a congregation which had Afrikaans, English, Zulus, Indians, and colored all worshiping together in a spirit of love and fellowship. It was not that there were no problems, but they did not seem to be as many problems as would be true in the ordinary American church.
We did not have any idea that the country was such a beautiful land. It had everything from estuaries to beautiful mountains. It had wild animals in a natural state. It had bountiful varieties of birds. It had flowers and landscapes that were lovely. It made you feel like you were in a tropical land and at the same time, you almost felt like you experienced some weather that was like a mild winter. It had thousands of miles of coastline and areas that seemed like desert.
The problems of the nation were complicated and significant. It was hard to see the pain of unemployment at unbelievable levels. Companies wrestled with what to do about the years of a white dominated work force being infiltrated by eager largely untrained personnel. There was a very high crime rate. We knew very few families who did not have tales of family members who had been shot or stabbed out in open streets. In spite of all the bad statistics, we did not observe any of those problems.
The country has had a recent unexpected change in leadership that makes people feel frustrated by the necessary changes that have taken place. We can only hope that this fairly stable government may be able to survive the puzzling changes at this time. There are a number of significant companies which do international business. A weak dollar is not a help to those businesses who do most of their business based on the exchange with the dollar. A weak dollar means that they do not get as much money for their products.
This is a wonderful country to visit. There are five or six major areas for the tourist to see. It is a shame to only see one or two of them, but it requires significant time to take in all the land. It is not a place to just drop in and fly out. It would be great to be able to dedicate five or six weeks to a South African visit and divide the time for visiting five or six major areas of the land.