Another Mile

One of Ralph’s oldest friends is Martin, aka Bully. I think they’ve known each other since age 5. Bully is married to Jenni. One of Jenni’s friends, a former co-worker, is Mike. This year was Mike’s first time to swim the Midmar Mile, and unlike Colleen and me, he put in a lot of time training for it. Then the Midmar was finished, and he felt a little bit of a post-race letdown. (I remember feeling this after climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro; I had sort of a “What now?” feeling.) A few weeks ago, Colleen said that Mike was keen to swim the Bosveld Mile in Bela Bela (formerly known as Warmbaths), and was I interested in swimming? I agreed, and we decided that we would actually try to train for this one.

Colleen knew that she might have a difficult time finding someone to look after Brody, because Ralph would be away this weekend finishing the Cape Epic bicycle race (http://www.cape-epic.com/). A couple of weeks ago, I realized that it wasn’t going to happen, so I gave up on the idea of swimming. Then on Friday night, when I stopped at Col’s for a glass of wine, she said that Mike really wanted to swim, and she strong-armed me into going with him so that she wouldn't feel guilty for not going. :)

So, Mike picked me up at 7.30 this morning and we drove to Warmbaths, which is a little over an hour north of Pretoria. The race was held at Fish Eagle Bay, a very fancy name for another man-made dam. The first event started at 11.00 and our event was at 1.00. This was a pretty small race, so the genders were mixed – boys and girls, men and women. We were in the 31+ group (Mike is just a year older than I at 46), and I would guess that there were fewer than 100 in our event.

It was a beautiful day. Blue, blue skies with a few puffy white clouds, and not too hot. The water was quite nice, too; cool, clean and clear (no muck on my body afterward!), with a soft, sandy bottom. I swam fine, about the same as last year’s Midmar – somewhere between 38 and 39 minutes. The official time will be posted on the Web site this week. And now I have another cheap medal to add to my growing collection. What shall I do with these things?!

An interesting thing about this was that it is in a very Afrikaans area, and most of the announcing was done in both Afrikaans and English. Some of the non-critical announcements (e.g. “Number 1401 from Event #2, please come collect your prize”) were not made in English at all. Mike doesn’t speak Afrikaans but he understands it; I would have been lost without him there!

Mike actually grew up in Zimbabwe, worked in the police force for 4 years after high school, and then came to South Africa for university. He went back to Zim for a few years, but has been in SA now for 13 years. As with almost anyone I meet from Zimbabwe, I quizzed him about the security of visiting there. As with almost everyone else, he says that it would probably be safe enough. At this point, I guess the thing that keeps me from going more than anything else is the hesitance at re-opening the relationship with my host family. I haven’t heard from them in quite some time, and I have no idea how they are faring. When I was staying with them, Baba had a good job as a supervisor at a factory in Bulawayo. He’d had that job for 15 years, and I don’t have any reason to think he would have lost it since I left there. But I just don’t know. And I just don’t know what they might expect of me. By their standards, it is true that I am rich, loaded beyond any measure they know. But would I be able to help any one of them find a job? Emigrate to the U.S. or even to SA? This is something I’ve talked about with a few of my other RPCV/Zim friends, and we all feel torn in the same way – feeling guilty about making the break, but not knowing what we could do to help if we stayed in touch. And seeing Zim so much in the news right now brings all those feelings back to the surface. It’s hard, but not as hard as life is for them right now, god help them.

Please pray for peace in Zimbabwe, even as they walk another mile closer to resistance against Mugabe.