by Jo Hardy
‘Hey, hang on a moment, I haven’t asked you yet,’ Jacques joked. ‘I was waiting for you to look at me.’
I laughed. ‘Sorry.’
He took the ring out of the tile, attempted to get onto one knee in the deep sand and stared into my eyes. ‘Will you marry me?’
‘Absolutely yes!’ He put the ring on my finger and I couldn’t stop smiling. It fitted perfectly.
‘You know, you could have stood up so I could do the one knee thing properly,’ he added.
‘Jeez, do you want me to say yes three times?’
He laughed and said no, it was OK but he would have to tell everyone that I did it all wrong. I punched him on the arm. ‘Don’t you dare!’
I was ecstatic. I was going to marry the love of my life.
I had a thought. ‘The salt tiles – were they actually for a community project, or was it all a cunning ploy?’
‘Yes, it was,’ he said. ‘A ploy, that is.’
‘I can’t wait to tell my parents! They’ll be so happy!’
‘They know. I didn’t go to a colleague’s house last night. I went to Skype them to ask permission. I think I was more nervous doing that than this.’
He is such a gentleman. Thousands of miles away, and in an age when asking parents’ permission is rare, he still thought it was important. His chivalry is one of the reasons why I love him so much.
Jacques had gone to so much trouble. Got my handprint, chosen the ring I’d always dreamed of and made the box, putting pictures of us on the top.
It was a romantic moment that I will always remember: our special place, the sunset, the ring, and Jacques, teasing me mercilessly.
The following evening we celebrated with a group of good friends in Louis’s Pub, next door to Jacques’s flat. Louis was a vibrant old Afrikaner, grey-haired, with a big moustache and a thick Afrikaans accent. He ran the pub with his wife Kareen; she worked behind the bar and Louis shared bar duties and cooked. There was no set menu, Louis would just cook something when you asked him to, and it would always be good. Relaxed and easy-going, the two of them knew most of the clients who came in and our friends would often meet there.
That evening we sat on benches outside around the fire, drinking champagne.
‘Finally decided to tie the knot, eh?’ said Bruce, one of Jacques’s closest friends.
‘Yup,’ said Jacques, smiling at me. ‘Can’t think why, but I did.’
‘Your hilariousness must be the reason I said yes,’ I said as I pushed him sideways so he nearly fell off the end of the bench we were sitting on.
‘You’ve got a lifetime with her, Jacques. You better watch out,’ Bruce interjected. ‘Let’s toast the happy couple. May you have a lifetime of happiness, laughter and blessings. Or at least a good few years before you annoy each other to death. To Jacques and Jo.’
‘Jacques and Jo!’ the group shouted, raising their glasses.
‘Now let’s all have some shots,’ Bruce insisted.
I was longing to tell Mum, Dad and Ross the details. Jacques’s parents and Sonia were also in on the secret because they’d brought the ring from the jeweller in Johannesburg to give to Jacques at Christmas. Sonia had picked out three beautiful diamonds, which Jacques chose from, then she had delivered it to the jewellery designer to make into the ring Jacques wanted, which was based on one that I’d seen and loved a couple of years earlier. He’d actually had it on him during the GoPro moment, but he had decided to wait until we could be in our special place. He knew I’d love that.
The moment my family saw the grin on my face when we connected via Skype they knew Jacques must have proposed. ‘You look pleased with yourself,’ Dad said.
‘Jacques has proposed!’ I blurted, waving the fingers of my left hand in front of the webcam.
They’d known it would happen, but not when, and were thrilled for me. They’d met Jacques quite a few times; he’d been to England to stay with us five times and they’d got to know him – and to like him enormously. ‘We couldn’t ask for anyone better for you,’ Mum said.
After the call I messaged a picture of the ring to my closest friend Abi. Back came a message: ‘OMG, can’t believe it!’
At the SPCA the next day Maloli was bemused. ‘I thought he was already your husband,’ he said. ‘But if he is not, then I am very happy that he will be.’
Yasmin and Liz were full of questions about Jacques and the wedding – most of which I couldn’t yet answer. Deciding where, when and how to marry would take us a while. But there was no rush. What mattered was that whatever we did, and wherever we lived in the future, we would be doing it together.
That morning Maloli and I pulled up to a house where the owners had reported that their dog was itchy. We stopped outside in a large stagnant puddle that smelled awful. I jumped from the car, over the water, and carefully climbed a little muddy slope up to the barbed-wire fence surrounding the house. A large woman dressed in a long patterned skirt and top with a scarf around her head ran out of the house.
‘Let me help you, sisi,’ she kindly offered. Sisi – ‘sister’ in Xhosa – was what I was being called by many friendly women I came to meet in the townships. She grabbed my hand and helped me through the fence, then extended her hand to Maloli to help.
‘Molo, bhuti,’ she greeted him, meaning ‘hello, brother’.
‘You must help me, sisi,’ she pleaded. ‘My dog, eish, he is in a bad way. Eish, he itches and scratches a lot. Sisi, I love my dog, but, eish, nothing works. I’m so sad for him. He is so itchy. I even got him flea shampoo. I have no money to feed me and my children, but I love this dog. Please help.’
I was touched, not many owners would go to that trouble for their dogs. At that moment a little dog of about six months old bounded out of the house, before stopping to scratch with almost frenzied intensity.
I bent down to look at this sweet black hound that was more legs than body. He had lost a lot of hair around his neck and face, and his ears were almost bald. His skin was thickened from the inflammation and oozing in some places where he had broken the skin with his scratching. I was pretty sure this dog had scabies, a type of mange caused by a mite called sarcoptes, which is rare in England but common in South Africa. The mite burrows deep into the skin, causing really intense itching.
I started the dog on the treatment for scabies plus antibiotics, because I was sure there was a skin infection on top, wishing I had something I could give to reduce the itching. I insisted that the owner must arrange for Maloli to come back weekly to repeat the treatment until all the itching had stopped, and for several weeks after to make sure all the mites had been killed. She was very happy to agree, and as we slipped back down the muddy slope and leapt across the water into the car, she stood waving goodbye.
We pulled away from the house and turned a few corners and as we turned into a new street five minutes later, we were met by a wall of people blocking our way.
‘What’s going on?’ I wondered.
Maloli rolled down the window. ‘Bhuti,’ he called to a young man nearby, ‘can we get through this road, or has something happened to block it?’
‘Yo, bhuti, I don’t think you’ll make it.’ He looked sad. ‘A man left his girlfriend’s house just over there, fell down in the road and died. Nobody knows why,’ he informed us.
‘Oh my word. That’s awful!’ I was shocked.
‘Thanks, bhuti,’ Maloli said and started turning the car around, but by then there were too many people around us, so he decided to stop for a few minutes and let the crowd pass. He explained that there is a lot of sickness in the townships, particularly AIDS and tuberculosis, and deaths are not uncommon, especially when high disease prevalence is mixed with a high crime rate. I suddenly felt life was very fragile.
At that moment there was a knock on the window. Maloli wound it down to greet a man in his thirties with a bright-looking German Shepherd cross-breed at his side.
‘Molo,’ he smiled at us, then spoke to Maloli in
Xhosa. Maloli translated for me. The man was wondering if we were stopping to set up a clinic. His German Shepherd was a faithful guard dog to him and he wanted to make sure he was healthy, and asked if we had anything to give him to keep him on top form. I offered to check him over while we waited for the crowd to pass, and the dog did indeed look good. For once, I was looking at a dog with a good covering of flesh over his bones and a silky coat.
‘He looks great, there’s certainly nothing for me to treat here. I could give him a wormer, but he doesn’t need anything else,’ I said. The owner was pleased and I squirted some Panacur into the dog’s mouth as he looked up at his owner as if to say, ‘Why are you letting this girl do this to me?’
Soon the crowd passed and we moved on to the next house. A dog had been restless and vomited a couple of times in the last day. The owner said he had been stretching out quite regularly, too. As I checked him over I suspected he had pancreatitis, since the only thing I could find was a pain in the upper abdomen. Pancreatitis is an inflammation of the pancreas. Dogs often get it after eating fatty meals and it is really painful.
An increased number of fats trigger the pancreas to over-produce enzymes and then, because there are too many enzymes, the dog’s body actually starts digesting the pancreas rather than the food in the intestine. Signs of a dog with pancreatitis are nausea and what is called a bowing posture: standing on its back legs but down on its front legs to relieve pain in the upper abdomen.
In England you can do a blood test but unfortunately I didn’t have that option in the townships of South Africa. Treatment for pancreatitis is with anti-inflammatories, ideally with the dog on a drip to make sure it is really well hydrated, plus eliminating fatty foods from its diet and giving it lots of TLC. Sadly I could only give the anti-inflammatories and hope the dog would survive.
My final week with the SPCA was a busy one, and on my last day with them, Friday 13th February, Maloli and I worked non-stop. We were grateful when we got to the last case of the day but, as often happened, it turned into several cases. A group of men greeted us at the house we had been called to, which would have scared me when I first started at the SPCA, but now I had come to realise that people loved the SPCA and respected us because we were there to help.
‘Molo, bhuti. Molo, doctor,’ one of the men greeted us.
He led us to his four dogs, all tied up around the yard.
‘I’d like you to look at all of these dogs, doctor,’ he said to me.
The first was a dog with a white eye. As I crouched down to the small, spindly brown dog to take a closer look at his eye, he became submissive, flattened his ears and rolled over.
‘Sorry, doctor, he’s scared of you. He’s never seen a person with white skin before,’ he laughed, before picking up the dog and plonking him on his feet again, telling him he was being stupid.
I wished I had an ophthalmoscope to look into the eye properly, or even some stain to check whether the eye was damaged, but I had nothing. Luckily, he wasn’t squinting, and there was no tearing. The white colouring to the eye looked a lot like old scarring, so I was pretty sure it was nothing to worry about. He could see a little out of that eye, and he could see fine out of the other one.
We moved on to the next dog. She had a small cut across the top of one of her back legs. The owner explained that he thought the dog had been stabbed. I wasn’t too sure, as the wound wasn’t deep and it wasn’t a clean slash. It was more irregular, much more as if she had caught her leg on some barbed wire. I cleaned up her wound and gave her a shot of long-acting antibiotics. The other two dogs were generally healthy and bright, so I just checked them over and gave them a wormer.
Finally, one of the men asked if we could look at his uncle’s calf. His uncle lived two houses away, so Maloli and I followed him, along with all the rest of the group. As we went around the back of his uncle’s house, we peered through the front door to say hi, but he was sleeping in the heat of the day, so we decided to carry on and look at the calf, which was lying in the shade. The calf had diarrhoea and was a little dehydrated. The SPCA wasn’t equipped with many farm-animal medicines – in fact, it wasn’t equipped with many medicines at all – but we did have cow antibiotics and wormers, so we gave it both, explaining that while worms and bacteria are two common causes of diarrhoea in calves, other intestinal parasites or viruses could be causing it, so they needed to keep an eye on the calf, encourage it to eat and drink lots and keep it away from other calves until the diarrhoea cleared, or let us know if it wasn’t improving.
We came back to the SPCA centre at the end of the day, as we did every day, tired. But I always cheered up when I saw the centre’s three resident comedians – two donkeys called Donkey and Winkie and a goat, Bok. These three were always together and I’m sure that Bok thought he was a donkey. They roamed loose on the SPCA property and we often came back to find that the three of them had made their way into the office and were causing havoc.
‘Donkey wandered off down the road today,’ Yasmin said. ‘And of course Winkie and Bok followed. He’s such a bad influence on them.’
‘The firemen at the fire station found them in among the fire engines,’ Liz said. ‘Can you imagine? If they got called out for a fire, those three probably wouldn’t move out of the way for a fire engine. They’re so stubborn! We had to go and fetch them with some food, even though they are acting as if they haven’t been fed,’ she added, nodding towards Bok, who was eating the neatly pruned flowers in the flower bed, and Winkie, who had his head in the back of the SPCA bakkie, where a bag of food had just been. I laughed, looking at them.
‘I’m going to miss these three,’ I said. ‘And all of you, too.’
At that moment a large white wolf-like dog caught my eye.
‘Who’s that?’ I asked.
‘Oh, that dog was dropped off here earlier today. The owner didn’t want it. Apparently she’s a useless guard dog. She never barks and is too friendly. She should be easy to rehome,’ Yasmin said.
I hoped that would be the case. The SPCA had very limited kennel space, so each dog could only be kept for a few months before Maloli had the tragic job of putting them to sleep. After a warm goodbye I was off home.
Three days later I was heading to Uganda to work for a month with World in Need. I was sad to say my goodbyes. Yasmin and Liz gave me big hugs, refusing to let me go, insisting that I come back to visit the second I returned to South Africa. I promised them that it wasn’t going to be the last time I would see them. Maloli, coming from a very different culture, shook my hand and thanked me for all my help and for what I’d taught him. I had really enjoyed my time with the SPCA, and I learned an awful lot about how to work in less-than-ideal situations and how to adapt what I had with me to the situation.
The following day was Valentine’s Day. I had planned my trip especially so that Jacques and I could spend it together – it would be the first time we had ever managed to be in the same place for the most romantic of all days and I couldn’t wait.
But over dinner earlier that week I had asked Jacques if he had any plans for Saturday.
‘I’m playing cricket all day,’ he announced cheerfully.
‘What? But it’s Valentine’s Day.’
‘Yes, I know. Don’t worry, I’ll see you in the evening after the cricket. Or you can come and watch, and then we’ll be together all day.’
I stared at him in disbelief, inwardly fuming. I couldn’t believe that he hadn’t taken in how important this day was to me. Was he really going to spend it playing cricket? I knew I was always going to have to share him with sport, but couldn’t he give it a miss for just one day?
The afternoon before Valentine’s Day, after I finished my last shift at the SPCA, Jacques took me to a private game reserve, close to where he lived, to stay in one of their lovely little chalets. We went on a game drive and a boat safari on the Kariega River and while I was still deeply annoyed, out of principle, I had to admit that he had made a big effort to spoi
l me.
In the morning I expected us to drive home so that he could get to the cricket, but after a delicious breakfast of fresh mango and papaya he told me he wasn’t going to play cricket after all.
‘You’re more important than my cricket team,’ he said, and I melted. I should have known he would come through for me. I knew it cost him – it was a truly generous thing to do – so when we got back home that afternoon, having spent the morning driving around the Addo National Park, I insisted he go to the pub to watch the rugby.
Two days later, early on the morning of 16th February, I packed my bags and flew to Uganda.
Jacques took me to the airport for my flight to Johannesburg, where I would transfer to a flight to Kampala. I held it together until he put his arms around me to say goodbye when, as always, I dissolved into tears. I wasn’t going to see him again for several months, and it felt as though each time we parted I missed him more.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Thank-you Chicken
Crammed into the back of a tiny car, my luggage squeezed up against my legs and several pineapples stuffed on the shelf behind my head, I watched in horror as we careered wildly through the streets of Kampala.
There were six of us in the car: me, my host – the Reverend George Amoli – his sister and her baby, his friend and neighbour, Vincent, and Liz – a Canadian peace corps workers who was engaged to George’s cousin. There was also a mountain of luggage and the prickly pineapples that George had leaped out of the car to buy and then stuffed into every remaining crevice. Every time we swerved they fell off the back shelf, scratching the back of my neck.
The car was Japanese, with all the labels in Japanese and a clock that returned to zero every time we stopped, so it was impossible to tell what time it was or how long we had been travelling for. Vincent was driving us the 200 miles to Owiti, the village where I would be based, and as we wound through the streets of the capital I had never seen such terrifying traffic. There were no lanes on the roads and there appeared to be no speed limits either; cars and motorbikes simply overtook anywhere they chose and drove as fast as possible. It was complete chaos.