Days Thirty Two and Thirty Three - Waiting...

For two long days we sat reading, planning and waiting. Waiting like we were being paid to diligently wait. Some important papers of mine had had to go back to the snail paced office enshrined South African bureaucracy. To those people who sit behind desks empowered by rubber stamps. Those lazy eyed people who sit deep in their chairs, arms outstretched, claiming ignorance and “it is not posseebal.” My least favourite Zulu word is one that I used to hear at least once per working hour. More often when I was feeling inquisitive. Angazi. I don’t know.

Anyway the nature of these documents will become evident in 50 years when the Official Secrets Act allows their publication. This is not the place to mention them. In addition to these coveted papers we had something far more fun. Our sat-phone. It had been purchased on the cheap from a chap on E-Bay in the UK. My purchase had been timed perfectly to coincide with the world travelling Dr McVeighs’ trip to Great Britains’ shores. He had offered to be the mule that could bring this modern technology to South Africa. Sadly however, the chap I bought it from had decided that all this phone selling had tired him out and a holiday was in order. Dr McVeigh returned sans mobile du satellite.

Now such a gargantuan imposition as this particular phone is, renders international air freight non economically viable. But we had a plan B. The phone was sent two week later, after the holiday, to the hospital in Newmarket. From here Mrs McVeigh, Amanda to you blog fiends, would be able to collect it a month later and smuggle it back to Durban. By this point on the calendar we knew we’d be in Namibia, but only just. To add to this, our imminently arriving phone needed a sim card, which had been purchased separately in the UK and sent to South Africa to avoid that nasty 20% sting that seems to be stealing wages over there. My Royal Mail tracking code reliably informed me that the sim-card had reached Jo’burg and had been awaiting dispatch for three and a half weeks. The army call it AWOL. Tax comes in many forms and another income had been supplemented.

We’d been in Namibia for almost three weeks and despite gargantuan and much appreciated efforts from Amanda, Miriam and Maria,(I apologise for the seventeen e-mails and fifty phone calls that I plagued Maria with,) we were still waiting for our three gifts. Paper, phone and card.