Tag Archives: Cape Town

“Live As If This Is All There Is”: Best Moments of 2011 (so far)….

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Live with intention.
Walk to the edge.
Listen hard.
Practice wellness.
Play with abandon.
Laugh
Choose with no regret
Continue to learn
Appreciate your friends
Do what you love
Live as if this is all there is.
Mary Anne Radmacher

Lately, I have asked you What’s More Important To You Than Your Fears and confessed the return of The Mountain Under My Rug. Now, as I pack up my apartment; sell my furniture; work on my book; and make plans to travel through the USA and Canada to connect with other survivors about My Big Hairy Audacious Dream; it’s easy for me to get buried under an onslaught of “to-dos” and forget to appreciate the moment (something I swore I would never do after finishing treatment for cancer).

But, when I do take a moment to reflect on the past 9 months, I am overwhelmed by gratitude. When I wrote the post entitled What Are Your Three Words? on December 31, 2010, I could not have imagined how many moments of feeling healthy, inspired, and loved waited for me in 2011.

Moments…isn’t this the lesson Nadine Stair Tried to Teach us in, “If I Had My Life to Live Over“?

Oh, I've had my moments,
  And if I had it to do over again,
    I'd have more of them.
  In fact, I'd try to have nothing else.
    Just moments, one after another,
  instead of living so many years ahead of each day.

What are your best moments of 2011 so far? Moments when the stresses of your life dropped away and for just a few seconds, you could feel the rustle of the wind on your face or the hot sun at your back. Moments when you appreciated stillness and quiet. Moments when you felt filled with hope about your future.

Here are a few of mine… Continue reading →

What Song is Playing on the Soundtrack of Your Life?

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Call me crazy, but does your life have a soundtrack too?

My soundtrack probably starts with the jingle at the beginning of Mr. Dress Up. Back in the days when I thought Casey and Finnegan were real and my sister, Katy, and I had a pretend tickle trunk in our shared bedroom.

Then in 1985, the Movie, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun came out and as soon as Dad bought our first VCR a year or so later, Katy and I begged Mom every Friday night to rent the video so we could pull on our leg warmers, crimp our hair, and dance through the living room. Ok, I admit – I kept checking out my “amazing” dance moves in the window and believed one day, someone would “discover” me. My complete lack of dance training didn’t seem to matter as I fantasized about how SJP’s character and I would become BFFs and I would grow up to meet a hot teenage boy who danced better than Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing, which I had only heard about, but never watched because of its “mature subject matter”.

Later, Garth Brooks claimed his slot on the soundtrack after countless Grade 8-10 (bench warming) basketball road trips when someone on the team would turn the dial on a ghetto blaster and we would sing along to The River, and then discuss how some of God’s greatest gifts really were Unanswered Prayers (as if we had any idea what that meant). Eventually, one of the girls would grow tired of our sad country songs, load her Nirvana CD, and we would all wail along with Kurt Cobain to Come as You Are.

Then, my life changed forever, or so I thought, when I turned 16 and passed my driving test. To celebrate my freedom and my entry into “adulthood”, I plugged my Discman into the cigarette lighter, cranked the stereo on Dad’s teal, four door, Ford Escort and belted out every single word to Mr. Jones by the Counting Crows. “We all want something beautiful, yeah I wish I was beautiful…believe in me…help me believe in anything…I wanna be someone who believes“. Now the words seem even more poignant than they did then, “grey is my favourite colour, if  I knew Picasso, I would buy myself a grey guitar and play….when everybody loves me, I will never be lonely. Continue reading →

For We Can Only Be Human Together…

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Tiny brown pants bunch on top of his dirty white runners. Spindly legs stick out from under his bright yellow sweater.

The other children jostle around him, fighting over their turn at one of the four potties on the narrow wooden bench. The daily rhythm of life at the Educare in one of Cape Town’s Townships continues: Lunch. Potty. Nap.

I turn back to the plastic bowl in front of me and spoon mushy beans and cornmeal into a bird-like mouth as five other children sit on little plastic stools, ogling the bowls of food and waiting for their turn to eat. When I look back over, I expect to see him flash me a grin as he scampers towards the rickety classroom, ready to claim a sliver on one of the gym mats for his daily nap. Instead, he stands frozen. His mouth crammed with his last two spoonfuls of lunch. His chocolate eyes begging for rescue.

I leave my perch on the tiny stool, walk over to him and motion for him to pull up his pants. He shakes his head and a little tear trickles down his upturned cheek. I look closer and am about to pull them up for him when I realize what has happened. “A running stomach” is the polite term for an accident of this smell and magnitude. He shivers and I see the shame in his eyes. I hate that I have no Xhosa words to comfort him.

I thought I was having a bad day. This morning I woke up with thoughts of a year ago pressing up heavy against my heart. I even debated telling the In-Country Coordinator at Cross Cultural Solutions that I was sick and couldn’t volunteer today. After all it was anniversary I didn’t want to think about. One year since I checked into the hospital, donned a drafty gown, and prepared to lose my breasts forever. One year since I lay on the operating table in hysterics because I didn’t want to go through with my double mastectomy. One year since I woke up to a gruelling recovery and apprehension about my future.

Now, as I kneel down and pull off his shoes, the fear in his eyes makes me wonder what the nurses must have seen in my own. I slide the soiled clothes from his small frame and once again feel like I am in over my head. My eyes scan the crowded courtyard and I finally lock eyes with the one woman who speaks English. I explain what has happened and she simply says that he doesn’t have his own towel or cloth. She suggests that I take him into the bathroom of the tiny house, adjacent to the school. She doesn’t tell me what I should use to clean him and I see relief on her face that I discovered the accident before her.

I take his hand and he pads barefoot behind me across the dusty cement. When we get to the bathroom, I notice his puffed out cheeks, still full from the lunch he can’t bring himself to swallow. The pain in his eyes is tangible. I have never felt so helpless as I settle for holding up a wad of toilet paper to his mouth. The sobs finally come as he spits the leftover lunch into my palms.

The tap attached to the dirty bathtub gushes cold water and the fear in his eyes escalates as he realizes that I am going to make this moment worse. I try to block out his cries while I clean him as quickly as I can without hot water or a proper cloth and then I gather his wet and shivering frame onto my chest. I thank God for the relative warmth of this fall day as I carry him out into the brick courtyard and set him on my lap.

I wish I could whisper to him that it’s ok. That even though in this moment, he is sick and scared, that he won’t always feel this way. That he shouldn’t feel ashamed. That I am honoured to take care of him. That even if I end up with a terrible stomach flu, this moment is worth it. This moment where I can comfort someone else in the same way that one year ago, a nurse with beautiful hazel eyes, looked up at me over her scrub mask, held my hand, and told me that I would be ok.

Later, as I drive away from my placement, I can’t help but think of one of my favourite Desmond Tutu quotes, “My humanity is bound up in yours. For we can only be human together.”

“You Sound Just Like My Mom”

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Another Saturday in Cape Town…another teary goodbye.

It feels like yesterday that she flopped on the bean bag chair sandwiched between our bunk beds. A leggy Canadian, she nervously tucked her hair behind her ear as she asked my roommate and I how long we planned to stay in Cape Town and what we did back home. I couldn’t help it. I instantly saw a younger version of myself in her (minus the long lean legs). Her deliberate questions, her controlled responses about her future career plans; a careful mask to cover the hesitance underneath.

As we continued the idle, getting to know each other, conversation of three jet lagged strangers, I couldn’t help but tell her how alike I thought we were. Skepticism flashed through her lime green eyes and she squinted as she sized me up. How could she, a 21 year old student, have anything in common with a 32 year old breast cancer survivor?

A few days later, eight of us piled into a van for our Easter Road Trip to the Garden Route of South Africa. She and my other twenty-something fellow volunteers taught me lingo like “FML” and “DTF” and then called me a “ballerrr” when I pulled out my 100 Rand note to pay the taxi driver (check out Urban Dictionary if you are as naive as I was). When we went out for drinks and met a young local guy, they started talking about “The Situation”. When I asked what situation they were talking about, they burst out laughing and dubbed me the Terri-atric of the group because I still have not seen an episode of Jersey Shore.

“You sound just like my Mom,” became her constant refrain when I talked about everything from missing my yoga classes back home, to the book I am currently reading, to how I believe everything challenging in life has something to teach us.

But one cloudy Sunday when we sat sipping tea on my bunk bed, we shared life stories and I saw the exact moment when the walls behind her eyes came down. The precise second that she stopped acting like a perfectly put-together 21 year old and finally began to realize that maybe who she is today (instead of who she thinks other people expect her to be) is perfect. That none of us have all of the answers. That she is already learning life lessons that it took me getting cancer to realize.

Today, I wrapped my arms around her as her shoulders shook in sadness. In the short span of four weeks, she, like the young women who left last week, have become family to me. As I watched her walk through the doors of the airport, tears streamed down my face. I don’t think she knows the impact that her metamorphosis had on me. Watching her transform from a shy and guarded young girl to an open and confident woman has reminded me of the friendships we can build when we allow people to really see us, imperfections and all.

So, my dear friend. When you arrive home after 32 hours of travel and feel like the whole experience in Cape Town was simply a dream, know that even if you don’t have all the answers to what lies ahead, you are in the exact right spot in your life.

In the words of Rainer Rilke, “You are so young. I want to beg of you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

A New Slice of Perspective Every Single Day…

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If I asked you to choose 10 people right now who you could not imagine living without, who would you pick? Your kids? Your friends that you have become so close to over the years that you swear they are family? Your parents? Your significant other?

Before I left for Africa, I celebrated my birthday with a group of my closest girlfriends. We laughed and talked over decadent cheesecake and glasses of smooth red wine. As I looked around the table, I thought about how lucky I was to call these smart, beautiful, and generous women my friends.

If I grew up here in South Africa and sat around a table with this same group of women, the odds are that out of 15 of us, 5 of us would have HIV. This statistic is one of the many that continues to shock me. Imagine if one out of every three women that you knew between the ages of 27-32 was living with HIV?

Before I came to Africa, the only time I gave AIDS the slightest thought was when, like a good, coffee loving Vancouverite, I used my (RED) Starbucks card. The disease certainly hadn’t affected my friends or I in any significant way. It was easy for me to think of HIV and AIDS as something that happens to OTHER people. Here, I can’t escape the numbers. In South Africa, 1000 new HIV infections happen EVERY DAY and 1000 people die EVERY DAY of AIDS related illnesses.

Here HIV/AIDS affects the people that you love. Of the ten people that you can’t imagine living without, you would have probably already buried at least one. You would have gone to the hospital on multiple occasions to visit another two or three as they recovered from an AIDS related infection like TB or PCP Pneumonia. You might even be raising the child of one of most important people in your life because that child is one of the 1.5M+ children orphaned by AIDS in South Africa.

It is one thing to read statistics on the Internet. It is far different to meet a man who lives with the disease and the gruelling side effects of antiretroviral treatments on a daily basis. To talk to a woman who reminds you of your friends back home and hear how her sister-in-law died because she couldn’t get access to treatment. To see the sores on the faces of children born into a lifetime of fighting a disease that they never asked for.

Sometimes the weight of all of it presses up hard against my chest.

Then, I am reminded of the strength of the people that I continue to meet. Their ability to persevere through hardship after hardship humbles me and I am once again inspired to stay grateful for the many blessings in my life….

Crashing Into Love

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Today, I fell in love.

It started innocently enough. Our driver pulled off a street lined with corrugated metal and plywood shacks and into a dusty parking lot. As I listened to the gravel crunch beneath our tires, I tried to digest the two distinct worlds I had seen since my arrival less than 48 hours ago.

Yesterday I stood on Signal Hill under the grandeur of Table Mountain and Lion’s Head and watched the sunlight dance across the endless sea. Then, it was onto Camps Bay Beach where families frolicked in the surf and the cool white sand wedged between my toes. Well dressed locals sauntered down the promenade and young men with flowing blond hair tossed surfboards into open air jeeps and peeled out to the latest Jay-Z song.

Today I question how this other side of Cape Town can possibly co-exist only a few kilometres away from the paradise I saw yesterday. A cardboard sign announcing a barber shop in jagged jiffy marker sat propped against the graffitied exterior of a shipping container. Children wandered barefoot and unwatched through streets littered with garbage, a cacophony of horns, and rusted out cars missing their mufflers.

As we pulled through the narrow alley and around the back of a tiny building with peeling green paint, I sat in my stupor of disbelief and cursed the unfairness of life.

When, the driver cut the engine, I followed him out of the van and into the late fall sunshine. I wondered why we had stopped but within seconds, I saw them. Faces backlit with excitement as they ran to the door shouting a Xhosa greeting that I later learned to mean, “my white people”.

I had not even taken two steps onto the bare cement floor when ten tiny sets of arms wrapped around me from all sides and I stood gridlocked in their tight embrace. Tears immediately welled in my eyes and I could do nothing to stop them from making their slow descent down my dusty cheeks.

Then, just after the teacher called them back to their places and they began to sing, I saw him and my heart whistled softly to my knees. Tight curls. Two feet tall. Brilliant white smile. His chocolate eyes would not leave mine as he clapped, sang, and danced with the other forty students who shared this tiny pre-school room.

When the song finished, he bounded over to hug me and my mind flashed through scenarios where I could avoid having to leave him. Far too soon, the driver signalled that our time had ended and when I finally turned to go, his tiny little hand continued to ferociously grip mine. In that moment, we didn’t need words because all I felt was love.

Even though I will not see this beautiful little boy again, my throat thickens just thinking about him. If these children who come from so little can so freely share their love, we have no excuses.

I have a feeling that each day will find me crashing further and further into love… with this country, its people, and most of all its children. Now I am off to hunt down more Kleenex as I’m sure the tidal wave of emotion has only just begun.