By Dan and Anna

To get to our local service centre, Mqanduli, we have to walk for an hour, and then catch a taxi for an hour. Once there, we do a massive shop and pack our backpacks brimful of essential items – nestle white chocolate smartie bars. Then we squish into another taxi and come home. The walk is long and hot, and on the way home we are weighed down with groceries. The taxi rides are claustrophobic and stressful: the roads are variable in quality but invariably windy and steep. There are sections missing (typically oval shaped) – some call these potholes – we call them absences of service delivery. Despite adversity, taxi drivers work paradoxically hard to ensure that their passengers arrive in Mqanduli early. Some of them work too hard. Some drive at 140km/h in a 60km/h section while avoiding absences of service delivery on both sides of the road. As a result, the journey is not fun at all.

The only sensible solution is to drive the taxi yourself.

By Daniel

I have only prayed three times in my life. Once when my grandmother was ill. Once was when my bakkie, Unkle, wouldn't start. And more recently during a rondavel Zionist church service, I prayed for rain. About a week or two ago my prayer was answered. A little here, a little there, but enough to start filling up the JOJO tanks that Roger and the Siyephus have installed. We started using rain water right from the tank...and it was good.

Then, one day it was brought to our attention that the rain was black. “Black, you say?” I replied having learned that the rainwater catchment tanks were now an eighth full with black water, which when drained into the ubiquitous 25L white paint bucket was clearly black.

“Surely it must be the dirt from the roof and the new tanks...you guys must put a cloth over the inlet to stop the dirt getting in,” I said with the confidence of one who has studied fluid dynamics, metal oxidation and other things as well. I received the look I've received many times from Nonkululeko...that look that says 'oh dear, the poor city boy, I will have to explain this to him in baby language'.

“Ja Daniel, but Alex (older brother) phoned from Mthatha and he says that they have black water too....even in the old tanks, with filters...as far as Idutwya...and even if dirt comes off the roof, it's usually brown...not black,” she replied. 1-0 Nonkululeko.

To which I replied, “mmmm.......maybe a fire....and the soot got in the cloud....and.....”

“Mama told Tata that she thinks God is trying to kill us all. But Tata says, if God wanted to kill us all, he wouldn't bother with the water, he would just do it,” Nonkululeko explained.

It was just that one day, and the next rains were clean and clear. And no one has spoken of it since. And if you ask those who know...if you ask Google...you will learn that Black Rain is an album by Ozzy Osbourne. And a song by Soundgarden. And a New York cop movie with Michael Douglas. And that's all....oh, and a name for nuclear fallout following Hiroshima/Nagasaki explosions in '45. Yikes.

Accept the mystery.

By Daniel

To celebrate the birthday of our friend, the local physio, we all trundled off to a weekend away at Hole in the Wall – icon of the OR Tambo tourist district for many years. While leaving, Nonkululeko (big sister on the Siyephu farm) told us that it was appropriate for us to slaughter a sheep in the birthday girl's honour. We laughed and said we'd rather slaughter a cake. We were to be a party of 25, predominantly those employed in the medical profession, but others too including some british gap-year volunteers, Anna and myself, and one Jack the dog.

Jack it seems, has a propensity for meat. Fresh meat. Live meat, in fact. So much so that he took it upon himself to obtain some for dinner. A local farmer's ewe was the victim, and so was her unborn baby lamb. As the stars came out to glow, it was our task to retrieve said corpse from the far end of the beach.

To kill a neighbour's sheep is a heinous crime, for which the farmer must be compensated. To negotiate a price, the 'man' in our party was called to the front – me. The farmer was alerted and came to make his claim. What ensued was a rather complicated affair of poorly spoken bargaining, some emergency phone calls to Tata Siyephu to ask the 'going rate' and a bit of good cop/bad cop thrown in. In the end, Jack put us out of some serious cash – the farmer agreed to the R750 we offered (R500 for the sheep, R250 for the lamb). The dissection/slaughtering was performed under the maglite glow of the local security guards' torch while the surgeon-at-scalpel amusedly tolerated the medical commentry from our academically keen party. Right up until the dead foetus was revealed. A sadness overtook him as he remarked that the lamb would likely have been born in about two weeks time.

The irony of Nonkululeko's demand was not lost on us as we adhered to traditional Xhosa custom and tucked into a delicious mutton potjie.