We’ve got mail
With lots of commuting back and forth from Pretoria to Joburg, Tanya Brown realised how little family time they actually got to spend together. A change was coming… and some big surprises.
Acouple of years ago, we sold everything, left our comfy Pretoria lives and uprooted our family to move to Angola. At the time, my husband, Duncan, was working for an NGO that had offices in Benguela, and when the opportunity arose for us to relocate, we jumped at the idea of an African adventure… a simple, feet-in-the-mud, beachy sunsets, interesting food, new languages kind of adventure. Duncan had spent a few years doing the PretoriaJoburg commute, and after our eldest, Luke, was born, we realised how little time we actually spent together as a family. We felt a change coming.
When we moved to Benguela, I was 20 weeks pregnant, and Luke was
2 years old, a toddler. Moving to a malaria area while pregnant presented a few challenges, and I distinctly remember my gynaecologist, travel doctor and GP having a few heated discussions around our move and medicinal protocols. Fortunately, we managed to stay safe for the full duration of my pregnancy, although malaria did hit our family pretty hard at a later stage.
The move to Benguela was not what
I had expected it would be. I had never visited Angola and had visions of a tropical paradise, when in reality things looked quite different. We stayed in a rural and remote part of Benguela, inaccessible during the one or three rainy days a year, in a prefabricated house on the base of Duncan’s work. I left my job as a music therapist in South Africa to become a full-time mom – something which both energised and exhausted me. Upon arrival, already missing home, and feeling extrapregnant in more than 40°C, we discovered that we had no kitchen or washing machine, and so, my daily workout became stomping our laundry in the bathtub to get them clean, and cooking on a coffee table with a bucket for a basin.
At 32 weeks pregnant I came back to South Africa to wait for our second little boy’s arrival, but not before having a scan with a local gynae at a little clinic in town. She didn’t speak any English, and my Portuguese was patchy at best, but with a bit of sign language and Google translate, I learnt that little Jacob was snug and healthy, and I was safe to fly back for his birth (without any prints from the scan because the machine was out of paper!). Jacob was born in South Africa, and Duncan was present at his birth, which took a couple of logistical miracles. However, the boys and I (a newborn and a 2-year-old) were then “stuck” in South Africa while waiting for Jacob’s visa to be issued. In fact, for the first year and a half of our stay in Angola, we had to return to South Africa every three months for visa renewals. When Jacob was 7 weeks old, his visa was finally issued, and we were reunited to begin our Angolan adventure as a family of four.
THE HARDEST PARTS OF THIS INTERNATIONAL MOVE?
Malaria – first my husband was knocked down for a solid two weeks, and then our little Jacob got it when he was just 1. Thankfully both recovered well. Language – at 2½ years old, Luke started school in a foreign country with a different language, where not one person in the school spoke English. Heartache – missing our family and friends.
THE BEST PARTS?
People – new friends, our family lunch together every day, learning to garden, the beach in your backyard.
Food – Portuguese bread, scuba diving in freezing cold water, mangoes the whole year, constant adventure, gelato (Italian ice cream) on every hot day.
When you live as an expat, particularly in a community that is not home to many foreigners, you quickly learn to be brave in your ignorance and rely on friends who become like family (a friend calls these gems “framily”). You stumble around in broken Portuguese, often ordering the wrong thing in restaurants, and you make many cultural mistakes along the way. But you also find joy in such simple things: seeing a sunset from the top of a hill overlooking the ocean, surprising seedlings popping up in your clay-like soil where nothing has grown before, juice ice lollies on the stoep that melt much quicker than you can lick them, and baking some buttermilk rusks when you really miss home. I would not trade it for the world. ●