Safe and Sound

Hey everyone! First off  I apologize for the extreme lack of  recent bloging. I am at home now back in Canada and safe and sound. I luckily found a great job 3 days after I came home which was a big relief! I have been working a lot though as a councilor at a kids sports camp at McGill. So far its quite a change from working at Agape. Some big differences I have noticed between the kids at the camp and those at Agape is that the Agape children are so much more self sufficient at young ages. While the 6 year olds at camp cry every time they get so much as a bug bite the Agape 4 year olds could trip and fall and summersault down a hill landing on top of another child and both would get right back up and continue playing as if nothing happened. As well the Agape children really know how to look after themselves in a way that Canadian kids their age would never be capable of doing. They can bath by themselves at 4, clean up after themselves at lunch, and help around the kitchen. I think that the nature of  their lives has just forced them to mature faster which is a sad truth. The older kids at Agape behave in a much more relaxed mature manner than any of the kids at Camp and they know how to look after each other and rarely fight. The motto of Agape, “ We Are Together” can defiantly be seen in how the children behave and how kind they are to each other. I think us Canadians have a lot to learn from other cultures and although we may seem like a developed country with so many benefits there are many aspects of South African culture that we can learn from. Most importantly perhaps is the sense of community and care of one another that can be seen at Agape and that is present in many of the poorest areas of the country.     The end of Sabine and I’s travels went very well  and although we ran into some bad weather we still got to see some whales( a first for Sabine) and experience the Capetown bartering market in the pouring rain among other things. It was quite the experience and Sabine and I actually got pretty good at getting a cheep price buy the end of the day. We also met two musicians on the bus that sang and preformed in the streets during the apartheid defiance campaign where there was an uprising and rebellion among the black South African population against the white authorities. One of the man’s CD cover featured a photograph of him standing playing guitar as a young man with police standing around him. He explained that they had told him to stop playing or they would arrest him but he continued to play defying their orders and standing up for his human rights. It was really cool to speak with Joe and Lungile and learn a bit more about the Apartheid from people who struggled through it.  The bus driver was very excited to have the “celebrities” on the bus so played all of their CDs for the entire trip which were amazing. Later Joe got out his makeshift musical instrument and started to play. Unfortunately by that time, some  8 hours later, Sabine and I had reached our stop. They definitely made the long ride fly by though.   On the other hand the long flight home was pretty brutal and my six hour layover in London seemed to last forever.  I knew that I would miss South Africa a lot but  after spending so long in a country half way across the world I was ready to head back to Canada. When I sat down and prepared for yet another flight, across the Atlantic this time, the stewardess handed me a copy of the Canadian National Post and when I opened it up to find a full page storey about how the ban on yellow margarine in Quebec had been officially lifted I had to laugh. I guess the saying is true that no news is good news and after seeing headline after headline across all of the South African papers about violence and murder and crime all it took was a little storey about margarine to remind me of what a peaceful country Canada really is and how important that is to appriciate.   I hope everyone has enjoyed reading my blog! Thanks again to you all for keeping up with it and for all of the messages!   Xoxo Margo

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