Le Déluge, 2020

uMngeni Municipality in Action 

For what they get in return, property-owning South Africans pay high "rates" (property taxes). Taxes and utilities increase each year. In uMngeni municipality, as in many municipalities throughout the land, infrastructure is not maintained. With subtropical KwaZulu Natal experiencing dramatic summer storms, public roads proliferate potholes that grow bigger, deeper, and more numerous each year. Calls for municipal action are met with tepid inaction.
Along this property's border, uMngeni Municipality is responsibile to maintain two culverts built under a public district road to drain water from a small but active stream. Water from this stream eventually joins the uMngeni River and flows over Howick Falls.

Last year, I carried photos and a letter to the local road works office to express concern about the culverts. Depending on a storm's severity, these quickly reach capacity and roiling water can flood the property's lower lawn and overwhelm the large fish pond.

This photo shows the culvert on the left half-filled with debris but semi-functional. The culvert on the right, however, is completely blocked. Moreover, on the other side of the road, thick vegetation flourishes on a slope that long ago covered any sign of a culvert. 
I asked the road works representative what it took to have a local road maintenance crew clean out the culverts. She said she'd pass my letter and photos to the road crew supervisor.
I expected inaction.
A week later, a bulldozer appeared.
Happily, I showed the driver the problem and left him to work.
He pushed that fallen tree (photo, above) to the other side of the road. His efforts to remove debris from our side of the road instead added to the pile. Then he discovered the bulldozer's scoop couldn't reach the debris. He and his bulldozer departed.
Another weekk passed before I returned to the office and armed with more photos, explained the problem, again. A few days later, the same bulldozer and driver returned. Again, he rearranged debris, rediscovered the scoop couldn't reach, and departed.
***
Climate change is likely exacerbating storms' intensity although I remember calamatious thunder and hail storms way back during my childhood. It's been decades, however, since I experienced a storm like that of Tuesday March 10, 2020.
We'd had several days of high temperatures but no rain, That day, I judged the gathering clouds a godsend. Little did I know that, within an hour, 46mm (about 1.8 inches) of rain and hail would fall.

As the storm blew in, sixth sense triggered me to move my car further into the car port. Plump rain drops fell as I ran  to the gardening shed to move a dozen small potted plants I'd placed on the shed roof. Quickly, I moved them into the recycled chest freezer I use as a cold frame/greenhouse.
I put five pots with yellow-wood tree cuttings and one pot with an aloe vera cutting on the ground in front of the cold frame where, I was sure, they'd  survive heavy rain.
Heavy rain was one thing. A deluge with hail was another category of thing altogther.

This hail stone (left) popped through an open doorway and hit me on the hand. It felt like a hammer blow.

This video clip gives an impression of the storm's intensity.

Photo: Left, the lower lawn after the storm. 

Right, shows the same section of lower lawn the morning after. Section of pond to the right. 

Aerial view of the flooded pond. The stream runs along the back of the property and a pipe diverts water from the stream into the man-made pond. While the entire area is designated wetlands, lack of maintenance by local municipality adds to flooding risk. (Photos: S. Galleymore.)

Après le Déluge

I'd recently added 10 young goldfish to the pond. Goldfish, of course, are not native to KwaZulu Natal, and, concerned that I not invade KZN rivers with exotics, I consulted with a fish expert. He assured me there's not much chance of a goldfish invasion for, he said, "this type of fish will die or be preyed upon before they'd become invasive". Nevertheless, I buttressed the pond outlet with a fine wire mesh so that, under normal conditions, goldfish couldn't escape or be washed away.

Mirphy's Law: "Anyhting that can go wrong, will go wrong." 

I watched the rain and hail come down and the pond water rise and I prayed the goldfish would not be washed away. Alas, my prayers went unanswered.
The next morning, I found this little fella about 25 meters from the pond.

For the three weeks since I'd added the fish, I'd kept an avid eye out for them. Each morning, I scanned the pond for signs the goldfish were thriving. It would have been nice to catch a glimpse, but I wasn't worried: fish shelter under water plants.
It made my day when I saw three flitting around the pool together.

Succulents after hail.

Hail battered the garden. Chopped leaves of all shapes and sizes looked like tossed salad.
The potted yellow-wood and aloe vera cuttings placed on the groundweren't as robust as I'd thought. Flooding water slid the freezer/cold frame off its foundation and it flipped over onto the pots. The yellow-wood cuttings survived, albeit squashed. The pot that held the aloe vera survived, but the cutting disappeared. It may have tangled with the plant debris that collected about a foot high against the garden fence, but I not seen the cutting since before the storm.
I saw not a single goldfish fin for four days.
Native fish fared well. Frogs were unaffected. Lesson learned: native critters may not be as captivating as exotics but they're better suited to local conditions.
Then, at last, one apparently happy goldfish flitted through the pond.

Since that first sighting, I've seen another goldfish (or other goldfish -- hard to tell if one fish survived or if nine more are in the pond somewhere.

Five days after the terrific storm, the lower lawn and the pond are returning to normal.

Culture Shock Co-morbid with Bureaucratitis

Sign on road to Ingomankulu. Think of "potholes" as a metaphor.
(Photo: S. Galleymore, 2018.)

Welcome home!

Since 1989, I’ve made many two- to three-month-long forays “back home” to KZN from California. After my most recent foray unexpectedly extended from three to six months, I suffered a dose of culture shock co-morbid with a dizzying dose of, well, let’s call it bureaucratitis.
Culture shock is a state of critical assessment, psychological discomfort, even alienation that follows the initial euphoria a traveler experiences with immersion into exotic places, people, and things. It has an incubation period of three to four months in the unfamiliar or foreign place. It’s neither contagious nor terminal and the traveler slowly adjusts to and accepts her new circumstances.
Bureaucratitis is an acute state of anxiety, high blood pressure, and disorientation caused by reluctant visits to a local municipality or post office. Bureaucratitis worsens with an impending visit to the Department of Home Affairs.

I suffered my first bout of culture shock as a young adult after I left the spectacular rural countryside near the Valley of 1000 Hills that had been my home. A child with an adventurous spirit, I’d explored the Valley on horseback or (bare) foot and I knew the land within a five-mile radius of home like the back of my hand. It was my version of church, mosque, and temple.
The same adventurous spirit led me to explore urban San Francisco, albeit with maps—and good shoes—rather than rural skills and horses. Going from a dorp populated by fewer than five hundred to a conurbation of several million was challenging. It helped that I spoke English, a version of American.
My recent episode of culture shock co-morbid with bureaucratitis called for mental agility, physical flexibility, and several Grandpa Headache Powders. Episodes of this malady are not contagious either, but I plan to minimize visits to bureaucracies to prevent relapse. It’s been, as we say in America, “quite the ride.”

Urban and rural

In ultra-urban California, I “do” a laid-back version of the Californian “lifestyle”: commute, work, socialize, and drive, drive, drive. In KZN, I kick back, enjoy the birds and monkeys, complain about South African drivers (why do they ride my tailpipe?), the lack of on-demand wireless access and the repetitive TV shows (how do you stand it?) and shiver at the omnipresent undertone of violent mayhem.
Being bi- or multi-cultural can feel like a zero-sum game when Americans ask, “Where are you from?” and South Africans say, “You sound like a Yank.” I respond by adjusting my accent as needed. Over there, I pronounce battery “badder-ree,” and over here, “bat-tree”; an elevator becomes a lift; interesting goes from “inner-esting” to “in-tris-ting’: hawk from “haa-k” to “hork”; poop (as in dog poop) from “poo-p” or “poo” to “poep”; and Z, “zee” as in “zee-brah” becomes “zed” as in “zeb-rah.”
Right-handed, in California I eat hamburgers, French fries, hotdogs, tacos, and cookies with bare hands. For genteel meals, I place knife in right and fork in left hands to cut and manipulate food, lay knife across the top of the plate, and switch fork from left to right hands to eat.
In South Africa I eat mealies, marmite sarmies, and biscuits with bare hands and everything else with fork in left and knife in right hands.
There, I drive on the “wrong side” of the road (although four-, five-, and six-lane freeways make that concept obsolete), put “gas” instead of “petrol” into my car’s fuel tank, check under the “hood,” not the “bonnet,” and place groceries in the “trunk,” not the “boot.”
Here, I drive on the “right side” of the road…until potholes force me to veer to either side and the “shoulder.”

Potholes: ties that bind?
A bakkie spotted in a Pietermaritzburg parking lot.
(Photo: S. Galleymore, 2018.)

Potholes’ potential

The road sign displayed “Potholes.” That’s not a sign seen in California, so I suspected it meant something in isiZulu (as in “ama-po-tol-es”)…until I drove my car into one: ah ha!
Acclimated now, I veer hither and thither across roads avoiding potholes like every other driver. Yet, potholes offer enormous potential. Every South African, from drivers of the fanciest to the humblest vehicles, to passengers and pedestrians, knows a pothole. By presenting “nothing” where “something” ought to be, potholes highlight the conflict between rates-paying South Africans and rates-challenged municipalities. Potholes’ axel-grinding ubiquity forces equality across all political constituencies. And therein lies their power. Every South African would clamor to support the political party that disappeared the country’s potholes. Fix the potholes, run the country. (Don’t tell Juju!)
Recently, a local newspaper profiled two eighty-year-old pensioners, apparently gatvol with the status quo, who voluntarily filled potholes in their neighborhood, and at their own expense. Soon after, municipal road workers binged on partially filling potholes around town. In my neighborhood, workers went further. They filled potholes… resurfaced the road, both sides…painted lines, both sides …for five hundred meters. Then, finished and klaar, they left the rest of that road and all the other roads in the neighborhood as rough, torn, and dangerous as ever.
The cynical might see that as a metaphor, but I’m optimistic. Potholes communicate a positive message in our subliminal lingua franca: we’re all in this together.

Municipal woes

During my visit, my initial euphoria at being “back home,” my joyful exploration of what was new with people, places, and things, turned to despondency over the course of five visits to the local municipality to transfer one vehicle license. I quickly discovered my “spoiled American” persona. I’d drive home after each visit, shoulders knotted, belly clenched and heart thumping, and mutter, “Ag, I’m telling you, I’m gatvol with this bloody nonsense!”
America has its drawbacks—among them violence, exploitation, and over-consumption—yet it really is the “can do” country, with “can do” people born to the mantra “time is money.”  For example, ten years ago, California’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) held the reputation as ultimate bureaucratic nightmare. Customers complained lines were “too long,” that it took “up to an hour” to “do anything,” and that trips to DMV meant time away from work (again, “time is money”). DMV responded. Nowadays, a customer sets an appointment, arrives on time, and is finished and klaar within twenty minutes. Or completes business on DMV’s reliable and easy to navigate website.
Over there, DMV taught customer-facing representatives that their job is focusing on customers (at least pretending) and presenting fast, efficient, courteous service.
Over here? Not so much.
Municipal customer-facing representatives appear less in-tris-ted in customers and efficiency and more in-tris-ted in morning tea break.

I’ve never licensed a vehicle in South Africa before, so I may have approached the task with heightened expectations. I assumed procedures would differ, but customer service is, well, basic….
Procedurally, both countries require drivers to hold a valid license and most (although far from all) drivers do. Everything else is different. Americans, for example, register while South Africans license vehicles.
My first surprise at KZN’s equivalent of DMV was shouting through thick glass to communicate with the customer-service rep. Then understanding new nomenclature: license vs. registration, license vs. license, etc. Then explaining, loudly, who I am, where I live, and why I use my passport as ID. (“I’ve been to Home Affairs four times and my ID card still hasn’t been issued.” People snickered knowingly but no one doubted.) At the end of my first visit, I requested a list of the documents needed. The representative wrote in the margin of my already-filled out RLV form, “proof of address”; that was it. Well, that’s easy enough, I told myself.
Not so. During my third (fourth?) trip the customer-service rep shouted for what sounded like my “low poo.” “What’s a low poo?” I shouted back. “A low poo! A low poo!” she insisted. At a loss, I turned to the audience listening to the high-volume goings-on. A kind observer explained. “It’s your log book.” In fact, a “low poo” isn’t a book but a one-page certificate-like document. No “low poo,” no transfer.

After each visit I’d recuperate, build stamina for another sortie, and return. For my fifth visit, armed with passport, proof of residence, RLV and NCO forms, “loo poo,” even a signed, notarized letter from the previous owner (just in case it could expedite the process) I expected the worst.
I was shocked when the customer-service rep slid the completed documents to me through the narrow counter slot.
Then she asked for 397 rand. Cash only. I had 240 rand.
Panicked, I turned to the audience; some met my eyes, most looked away.
I pleaded. “Can anyone lend me two hundred rand? I’ll leave my paperwork with you until I return from the ATM. Please. I can't come back here. This is my fifth attempt at completing this transfer. Please.”
People shifted uncomfortably, shook their heads, ignored me. Desperate, I announced my name, my car license number….
Then Ben, bless his heart, pulled out his wallet.
I took the money, paid the fee, and dashed off to the ATM.
Just like that, vehicle transfer finished and klaar.
I wanted to give Ben a giant klap of goodwill, but I refrained. Who knows? He may have misunderstood that klap as aggression rather than how it was meant: confirmation that, with people like Ben in it, the world remained a kind and generous place.

Driving home, exhausted from the workout, I realized that not only did I not yet have my ID card from Home Affairs, my new vehicle would need a Certificate of Road Worthiness. What is that? How do I get it?
Ag, I’ll be “back home” soon and I’ll figure out that stuff when I return, after I’ve recovered from this trip….

Mosquitoes

“If you think you are too small to make a difference...try sleeping with a mosquito in the room.” –Dalai Lama

Am I one of only a handful of South Africans who sleeps under a mosquito net? Spring, summer, and autumn nights in KZN I drape the black net over my bed and chuckle with satisfaction as I climb under it. Add the sound of a frustrated mosquito or two buzzing outside the net trying to get at my blood …and satisfaction turns to bliss. 

Judging by results of my informal poll (limited since I conduct it by simply asking) I understand few ware (authentic) South Africans living between Durban and the Drakensberg sleep under nets. If a net or two hangs in a South African household, it’s decorative rather than functional and color-coordinated to match the décor. On the other hand, empirical evidence pending, I assume smart South Africans who live along the country’s hotter and more humid north and north eastern borders sleep under nets. That region is closer to countries that host the Anopheles mosquitoes that carries the malaria-causing Plasmodium parasite. (A net seems a critical item where more than 40 percent of the world's population live in malaria-risk areas and an estimated 300-600 million people suffer from the disease each year.  Find one of many programs supplying nets to needy people simply by searching the Internet on "mosquito net donation." ) 

My mosquito net is black. I’d prefer white. But I dislike shopping and when I purchased my net at Cost Plus in Oakland, California my desire to exit the store and the consuming experience overrode the necessity of reading the label. Why stick around to read labels when “everyone” who’s ever watched a movie about Intrepid Colonials in Darkest Africa knows that mosquito nets are white? Imagine my surprise to arrive in KZN and find I’m the dubious owner of a black mosquito net. Over the eighteen years, off-an-on, that I’ve hunkered under the net that very few mosquitoes have penetrated I’ve developed loyalty toward yet no affection for it. (I can’t shake the feeling I’m under a Transylvanian shroud.) As much as I hanker for a white net, tossing out something that functions as expected and buying the same item in a different color (or no color) goes against my tenet of conservative consumption. 
Nevertheless, in May 2018 hankering gave way to full-blown covetousness when Britain’s newest (adult) princess, Megan Markle, revealed the trailing veil of her £100,000 wedding costume. (Consider paying that much for an outfit worn once:  US $134,300; ZAR 1,724,388; € 114,165. How many mosquito nets could that supply? Duchess Kate's gown, "a custom Alexander McQueen design…rumored to be worth US $434,000" also could have made a huge dent in annual malaria fatalities. But why bother the Royals with the needs of the little people when the Royal Family is busy paying for

core aspects of the [recent] wedding: the church service, the associated music, flowers, decorations, and the reception afterwards" estimated at “upwards of £500,000.” Cheap in comparison to “Prince William and Duchess Kate's 2011 London nuptials… US $32 million.” Security costs? “a special £3.6 million ($4.8 million) grant was used to cover overtime pay for officers.”)

(c) Photos: Town and Country magazine. 

 

Rest easy, ye Britons for the recent "wedding is expected to provide a £500 million pound boost to the country's economy in the form of tourism, commemorative merchandise, and essentially ‘free advertising for Britain.’” Here’s an idea for “free advertising for Britain,” particularly for a Royal Family in need of positive publicity: trim those veils into mosquito nets and sell them. Not only would nets protect Britain’s former African subjects from malaria they might mitigate in a tiny way the colonialism's fallout .  

Questions of taste 

Ware (authentic) South Africans claim mosquitoes don’t bother them. In the company of ware South Africans, I’m usually the only person swatting the annoying bugs. They also appear inured to bites. Do mosquitoes avoid blood flavored with boerewors, Nik Naks, samosas, and mealie meal and find irresistible blood flavored with Pete’s coffee, San Francisco Sourdough bread, and high fructose corn syrup?

According to an expert, mosquitoes do seek a type and a taste: “Some people produce more of certain chemicals in their skin...and a few of those chemicals, like lactic acid, attract mosquitoes.” Blood type O attracts mosquitoes more than types A and B, so does “metabolic rate…the amount of carbon dioxide your body releases as it burns energy.” 


I don’t use a mosquito net in Alameda, my lovely island hometown in the San Francisco Bay Area (population seventy-seven thousand, 46.8 percent home-ownership). Alameda hosts generic mosquitoes –neither the malaria parasite-bearing Anopheles nor the Zika virus bearing Aedes varieties—and it deals with them in a novel way: an abatement program. Property owners pay an annual tax of $1.00 (ZAR 12.80; £ 0.75; €0.85) in support of mosquito genocide. While that’s cheap enough that households don’t complain, judging by robust proboscis activity on my patio, results are less than stellar. I echo the Dalai Lama: “If you think you are too small to make a difference...try sleeping with a mosquito in the room” …or on the patio. I employ an abatement technology: window and door screens. A (gray colored) mosquito net for my entire residence.

Mosquito miscellanea

Forced to choose between KZN’s summer heat or itchy welts, I choose the former. I work at my desk with my tantalizing flesh hidden under long pants and high collared, long-sleeved shirts, long woolen socks bunched around my ankles and calves. Proboscises penetrate anyway and, as bugs lay siege to my blood, they deposit the evolutionary wonder that is their saliva into my flesh. Besides the histamines that cause blood vessels around the bite to dilate and swell, the saliva’s anticoagulants guarantee a victim’s blood cannot clot and trap a mosquito by its proboscis.

The Dalai Lama wonders whether mosquitoes are capable of gratitude for all the free blood they extract. To gauge their appreciation he admits that, when in a good mood, he allows mosquitoes to feed on his blood. He reports,  “Their whole body [sic] becomes red… [but] there is no indication of appreciation.” He urges scientists to conduct research. (I’m curious about a Dalai Lama having moods. A basic tenet of Buddhism holds that people are not helpless victims of emotions, i.e., moods. When the Dalai Lama’s in a bad mood does he violate another tenet of Buddhism and kill mosquitoes?)

The only tenet held by our esteemed current president, The Donald, is self-aggrandizement. Mosquito-like, The Art of the Deal-meister pompously repeats to the nation and the world that “caravans of migrants” continue “to steal our country.” Yet, still no deal with Mexico to pay for a more robust southern border wall nor an end to Trump’s fantasy of tides of invaders from “shithole” countries.  

The length of the US/Mexico border is somewhere between 1,933 and 1,991 miles.  (See the US southern border wall... and co-incidentally, Israel’s wall.  FYI: the wall will be built by Israeli company, Elta North America.)

If Megan Markle didn’t donate her veil to former British colonies in malarial Africa, she could string it along the border. It might improve international relations and humanely resist invaders and virus-bearing bugs. (Israel’s Elta North America might object: it's bill for building the wall is currently estimated at $25 billion.)

Then again, a mosquito net would remind Trump, a self-proclaimed germaphobe, that he likes squashing people like bugs. That’s just one small step from him stumbling onto what he'd consider a politically astute meme: associating disease to immigrants and immigration. Such a heartless, vulgar, and fear mongering meme is perfect for The Donald’s binary us-versus-them worldview.

The exponential power of a small bug when used to block US bound immigrants from Zika hotspots: Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, French Guiana, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Martinique, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Suriname, and Venezuela...and from “shithole” countries….