hello from the hobo's

Did you know hobo is short for 'Homeward bound'? Which we most certainly are not. It seems that we are the last ones stranded - everyone else we have heard of has made it home. But we are trying to have fun, with almost 100% success! We moved into a flat on Sunday, kindly lent to us by a couple we’d never met. It's our 8^th bed of the trip (11^th if you count beds we have left and returned to! I worked this out on a long journey - sad I know.) To celebrate that it is our last bed, allegedly, I unpacked and hung everything up. Yey! We have slowly got the hang of Durban since, but we have got lost many many times too. I have made an effort to put the crime stories to the back of my mind, and anyway when you are among people who live here you just have to get on with it. So we have.

On Sunday we went to church and had lunch with Drew and Megan who were hosting Julian Adams – a bloke we have seen from afar and never met - who has a gift for bringing in the immediacy of God – well exciting. Our family had a series of mishaps throughout church, with Evie falling on to the corner of a metal screen just as it started. She had a yellow/green bump the size of a walnut on her head with a small nick on top. Eeeeeeew!! But by the time I picked her up from the kids club she was jumping up and down on the top of a climbing frame as if nothing had happened. Isaac was bleeding from both toes (football) and then Fin came to me bleeding from the back of a head (tree). It’s never dull. And it made sure everyone got to know us.

We met up with Peyman and Diane from Worthing yesterday at a water park. It was a cool place, really well designed eg. As you floated around the Easy River on a rubber ring, you’d float past the sharks in their tank from the aquarium. There was a water chute that used rubber boats that fitted our whole family inside so we whizzed down there with extra glee. So much fun. It was a bad day to be a muslim though – I felt sorry for the women completely covered up except their eyes, how boiling hot and bored they must have been. And even the guys going down the slides etc – in long trousers and tunics all clinging and wrinkled in the wet.

We have had some good chats with the kids in Durban because it is as if all the extremes we’ve seen round Africa are condensed in to one big melting pot, plus a few different populations thrown in too. At the traffic lights you get people begging at the car window – sometimes holding a baby or pointing to their disability. Our children say we should give them something, but if we did that every time we'd soon run out of money. We've talked about how poverty is very complicated. In Lesotho it seemed as if women were holding the whole show together. It's the women chopping wood, carrying stuff by the roadside, babies on their back, working all day then caring for the family. We met so many kids who were home alone for the day cos mum or aunty is working (even making bricks - so physically demanding). Where are the men? "Drinking" they'd say. (Or AWOL. Or dead. Or HIV+). It's a huge problem that we have just brushed alongside for a few weeks and observed, and I guess our children will have a very black and white view of it, like children do. There are many issues back home but they are more hidden than here, so we've concentrated our chats around what our response will be back in Worthing. Child 2's idea: "Get everyone to come to church then they will hear about love and nocturnal life*" Hmmmm, maybe...

*eternal life