Knee to sweaty knee with two of my best friends here, our khumbi swung around the highway towards the Umhlanga resorts and we got our first view of the sea – and, like the first time I saw the Indian Ocean, I got emotional. Whitecaps and tankers and sand, and, growing slowly larger, the skyscrapers of the Durban beachfront. Despite the exhaust fumes and the hot sun and the wild mix of perfumes from inside our Swazi khumbi, I started to breathe so much easier.
Last weekend, two of my girlfriends and I went on a whirlwind trip to Durban and Cape Town for the Ultra music festival. I have never needed vacation so gaspingly, and in the last few hours it looked like it wouldn’t happen at all – government strikes in Swaziland threatened to become violent, and our safety and security officer initially locked down any travel from Manzini or Mbabane for fear that we’d get caught up in a riot. After a maddening and frantic few hours of negotiating, calling almost-strangers to sweet-talk them into driving us to the border, and serious proposals to sleep in the bush, we left a day early. I wasn’t unhappy about that. More days in a city is always a good thing for me.
I was born for cities, you see. I grew up in the muted chaos of DC; my earliest memories are of traffic on I-95, of sidewalks surrounded by buildings taller than I could see, of a limitless supply of new and fascinating stimuli. Visits to my father’s side of the family in Long Island were always accompanied by a trip to the city, a place I have always felt comforting in its riot of noise and color. And two of my most formative years have been spent in and around Paris, languid and expansive and constantly stimulating. Now, I live in a country whose entire population is smaller than that of Akron, Ohio. The biggest building I’ve been in has been smaller than my high school. I expected to have to adjust to rural life – and I have, in my way. But it always surprises me, the actual physical relief of being back among the grit and grime of a city, and how much even an unfamiliar one feels like my home turf.
In Durban, we played in a drum circle in a dark reggae bar called Cool Runnings where the rhythm didn’t really matter and everyone stylish had dreads. We stuffed ourselves full of pumpkin ravioli and poached pear and gorgonzola salad at a tiny Italian restaurant called Mama’s that reminded me of a familiar Long Island haunt. We wept with joy (again, just me) over chicken nachos and mojitos. In Cape Town, we sat on the sidewalk and ate burgers and drank glasses of white wine and people watched and quickly came to the conclusion that we were just shy of pretty enough for this town. We had smoothies (smoothies!) and pizza with brie and prosciutto. I think I got sick from so much wonderful food. We sat on balconies and flirted with men who spoke French and with those who didn’t. And at Ultra – oh, at Ultra. We crowned ourselves with plastic leis and wormed our way into sweaty and undulating crowds and put our hands up for Skrillex and got down with Robin Schultz and randos cupped my face on their way past and we ran into a man we’d seen in Cape Town throwing himself down the street in a mix of karate, ballet and the dance of the whirling dervish. We squeezed three people into a two-person tent and yelled “Steven” and “Allen” for about an hour, because everyone else was doing it (note: this is apparently A Thing that we Did Not Know About). We lay under tents and woefully pronounced ourselves too old for music festivals. Then we got up and danced some more.
It was madness, and I love madness. Vacations are always difficult here; they remind you of what you’ve given up to be here. But maybe that’s a good thing. Perhaps it’s good to be reminded that I made that choice, and why. The day of my return, after a miserable seven hours in a hot khumbi blasting what seemed to be the same gospel song over and over, I ended up at my usual haunt – where Angelo, the Italian who’s been staying at this backpackers, cooked us all garlic pasta, and we talked with Martin the climber about traveling and relationships, and good music played and good company flourished and I sighed happily.
Back in my community, things are flourishing as well, even if these are slower flowers to bloom. We had our first GLOW interest meeting at the high school on Friday, the market I’m particularly eager to tap into, with two extremely motivated teachers as our counselors. We walked down to the high school surrounded by forty of our primary school GLOW girls, who volunteered to come to show off what they loved about the club. Time and again it is these girls, these wonderful girls with their smiles and their determinations and their dreams, who make it worthwhile being here. Everyone here has their own motivations, and each have their own rocks that help them get through being here – whether that be their host family or close-by volunteers or teachers at the school – but for me it is these girls, with whom I can barely communicate but something is getting through. I am always so proud of them. And I want to do something worthy of them while I’m here – so that, at the very least, they will come away feeling stronger, more sure of themselves, and more able to tackle the issues in their own community that I either can’t see or can’t help. That’s where the passion is. And I guess I can give up cities for a while if this is where it leads.
Emily Wolfteich 