After my stay with Neil and Rozie in Claremont, I headed to the northern suburb of Durbanville, where I stayed with the Rob & Rosie family. They have a special connection to people from different countries, having lived in Lesotho for over three years.
It’s wonderful to wake up to a delightful breakfast of toast and coffee. Neil had already left for work, and Rozie had dropped Jessica off at daycare, giving us time to chat. I hadn’t realized how conversational Rozie was until now, compared with all the guests around yesterday.
Rozie is currently a home executive—a fancy title for a stay-at-home mom—but she’s also a certified food technologist and nutritionist. In fact, she’s one of the people who decide what ingredients go into grocery store meals. Next time you check a box’s ingredients, think of Rozie in Claremont.
“It’s basically this: if someone makes a delicious meal and wants to mass-produce it, I have to find the right ingredients. It needs preservatives to extend its shelf life while keeping the original taste, all while meeting factory standards for production.”
It sounded like quite a business! She also advises people on diets, helping those who obsess over counting calories or grams of fat. Rozie is one of the facilitators for breaking the diet cycle and rebuilding a confident lifestyle.
Later that afternoon, Rozie drove me to the Tiger Valley Mall in Durbanville — a massive, elegant shopping complex with an overwhelming number of stores. My next host would be picking me up here at 4:30 p.m. after work.
Malls like Tiger Valley wouldn’t work in The Netherlands. They’re too big, too fancy for Dutch standards. The Netherlands is a compact country with 17 million people, so seeing something this extravagant makes me wonder about the cost of building it (yes, that’s a very Dutch way of thinking!). In the Netherlands, we’d build something more efficient and low-cost while still maintaining the idea of a mall. If things get overdone, people might turn against it. It’s just not considered normal anymore.
Rob, who works for Eskom, the national electricity company of South Africa, picked me up at the mall. He was cautious about discussing last week’s major blackout in South Africa, as it was still under investigation. He drove me to their middle-class bungalow home in Durbanville, where I met his wife Rosie and their children, Cherise and Vaughn.
The kids were excited to meet me—honestly, the whole family was! Rob had invited me back in June, never really believing I’d make it to South Africa. Yet, here I was, ready to stay-for-a-day at their home. Rob seemed pleasantly surprised by it all.
The family had lived in Lesotho before, a highland country entirely surrounded by South Africa, often called “The Kingdom in the Sky.” Rob worked there for Eskom on the Highlands Water Project, which supplies water and power to the Gauteng Province, including Johannesburg.
Their time in Lesotho had enriched their lives, allowing them to connect with so many different nationalities. This experience fueled their curiosity about people from other parts of the world. It’s one reason Rob invited me over—he loves to learn from people with different perspectives.
For dinner, Rosie served a delicious chicken curry, and we spent the evening discussing life in South Africa and my impressions of the country. They were eager to hear all about my journeys.
After the kids went to bed, we sat down to watch the National Geographic channel. An unusual documentary about prairie dogs in the USA came on, revealing how, in times of hunger, they sometimes eat their own offspring. Quite the bedtime story!
The Griffins gave me Vaughn’s room for the night, while he camped out in the computer room. With a neatly wrapped towel on the bed and my own bathroom, it felt almost like a hotel. Needless to say, I slept like a baby.
Good night, Durbanville!
Ramon.
