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© 2022 Fielies De Kock
Fielies De Kock is a content writer/blogger (www.fieliesdekock.com) living in Hermanus in the Overberg, South Africa, with her crazy-haired husband and two dogs. She authored a children’s chapter book and a few short reads and is co-author of 125 Creative Writing Prompts for Petrolheads (available on Amazon Kindle) with her content writer son – who also has crazy hair.
Just before having to get out of the way
My Weekly Musings #4
Last week, our American friends invited us to visit the camel bazaar outside Cairo (on the Giza/Sakkara road). We’ve been living here now for just short of three years and I have never been outside of my comfort zone so much in my life. It is literally a daily thing. It is good for me – especially for spiritual me. Not only does it teach me plenty about the world around me, the people of this country, their strange culture and their fanatic religion, but it also teaches me a lot about myself. Living in a culture where you do not understand the language and isn’t even able to read their alphabet or have the same traditions and customs or worship the same God, things can get quite uncomfortable.
It isn’t necessarily a bad thing being out of your comfort zone. It confronts one’s own beliefs, upbringing, culture, customs, world view and lifestyle when you are thrown into a world where nothing is familiar or make sense to you. Not only do you question the behaviour of the people around you, but you question your own. It is not a once off thing, but an ongoing everyday introspection. And not only do you learn to value what is ‘own’ to you, but you also learn to embrace and appreciate diversity. Very early on in our stay here, I have decided that I don’t understand much (not even a reasonable bit) of this culture, but that I am not even going to try to understand it. It makes life here a little bit easier and less complicated to observe rather than to label.
Back to the camel bazaar. I’m sure that this place wouldn’t even exist in a Western country. It’s a raw experience. Camels, by their hundreds, maybe even more, are brought together on a Friday morning to be sold I was told, mostly for meat. Men and (some very young) boys herd the animals – hopping along on three legs as one of the front legs is tied with rope to keep the animal from running away – towards the various ‘auction stations’ with long bamboo sticks. It isn’t a pretty picture to see. On the surface and in the viewpoint of a foreigner like me, it is a harsh place for a camel to be. And also for the people involved.
Upon arriving there, we were only four females in a sea of males – something that already pushes the discomfortometer into the red. The sticks hitting the camels’ bodies – be it on the humps, legs or head – is another difficulty to deal with. Furthermore, none of the camels looked like they had the potential for dinner I would want to see on my plate.
But I realised that it wasn’t my world. It wasn’t my place to judge. With that I don’t condone the behaviour of the people or the suffering of the animals. Sometimes in life things just are what they are – people making a living, surviving the only way they know how to the way they did for centuries – maybe even millennia. My disliking it, my discomfort and the fact that I might disapprove of their way of doing as a foreigner in their country, is not going to change that. I’m not going to alter a country’s culture, customs and actions which are way older than my own culture. What I should do is learn to appreciate it for what it is.
I realised that I would probably be out of my comfort zone many, many, many more times in the period we have left here in this interesting, phenomenal country. How I handle my discomfort is what is important. If I can’t change people’s behaviour or world view, I can at least work on my own. I can learn to value the diversity of this place and the other countries we are visiting, as well as that of my own country when we go back. Hopefully, when we are back in our own culture – which is just as diverse – I will be able to feel less uncomfortable in the mixture, while still staying true to my own upbringing and beliefs and being more tolerant towards people who are different from me.
In the end, when one sees the bigger picture from a forever-living-worldview, we are reminded that we who confess Him as our Saviour are one body in Messiah (Romans 12:5). One day we will be immersed into His culture and all the discomfort of worldly customs, poverty and illness will be something from the past.
PS: I spelled necessarily correct without using spell check or a dictionary.
© 2017 Fielies (Riëtte) De Kock
Awesomest wife. Finest mom. Hopeful Writer. Forever dreamer. Temporarily living in Cairo, Egypt.
My Weekly Musings #3/2017
We are planning a visit to friends in New Zealand next month and with that, we are trying to obtain travel visas – something that wasn’t necessary for South African citizens only two or three months ago. But thanks to people abusing the system or hypocritical red tape or whatever, the New Zealand government now finds it necessary for us to get that little hated stamp in our passports. (And now the South African government reciprocated by implementing visas for Kiwis to visit SA! It makes no economic sense.) We are currently residing in Egypt and to get a visa, one’s passport has to travel to Dubai for this privilege! As if that is not uncomfortable enough, the costs are enormous! Not only is there the fee for the sought after stamp or little paper glued into your passport, but there are handling fees for the passports to get there and more separate handling fees for them to get back. And apart from the cost, the effort is just silly. After all the documents they’ve required were attached, they requested some more documents after receiving the passports.
There are many reasons governments give for requiring visas. Some might be legitimate, but I sometimes wonder if the visa process doesn’t just keep the good guys out. Because when there is an attack somewhere in the world and everybody is surprised by a person on a terrorist watch list carrying out the attack, l really question the system. Obviously, he loopholed the visa requirements. How can they get into a country so seemingly easy and us good guys have to carry out time consuming efforts and pay the financial penalties? As if travel tickets aren’t expensive enough.
We’ve received our passports back yesterday. There are no visa stamps or stickers in. Instead, they informed us that the visas are electronically issued against our passport numbers. We will get an email to confirm that. An email! All that effort for an email! Where is my visa stamp?! I hope it works, because when we arrive in New Zealand after two flights of four and sixteen hours respectively, and they don’t allow us into their little country, I will leave a piece of my mind there!
Thankfully, after our patience being tested going through the process, I’m reminded of a place where we won’t need visas to go to one day. All we need is to confess the Truth. It is that simple. Or that Complicated. The choice is ours.
“To you it has been granted to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God.” (From the Bible – Luke 8 verse 10)
© 2017 Fielies (Riëtte) De Kock
Awesomest wife. Finest mom. Hopeful Writer. Forever dreamer. Temporarily living in Cairo, Egypt.
Travel articles and blogs about ‘the road less travelled’ are in abundance. People, I included, love reading about strange, foreign, exotic and off the beaten track paths – places where only the most daring dares to go and where the rest of us probably will never set foot. I reckon that’s why we love it so much – reading about far-off places and dreaming impossible dreams, knowing that we will probably never make it there and instead, we admire those adventurers who do.
Few writers today still bother to write about the roads well-travelled other than in travelling guides or advertisements, because what self-respecting-do-things-differently-adventure-seeking person these days would find the London Tower Bridge or the Eiffel Tower or the Wailing Wall exotic enough to read about and dream about to visit. Travel articles must be all about exploring the unknown, the almost never-visited before, to be attractive enough to publish.
Travelling had become fairly easy in the past three decades. We live in a global enclave, which makes almost every place on earth accessible within a day or at most – two. So why bother with the ‘mundane’ travel destinations if you can be the first Western person to be seen in some remote jungle village of some South American tribe, living without any modern conveniences? Or sail to the most southern uninhabited island on earth or go to a quiet corner of the Antarctic to witness the consequences of global warming first-hand? It’s just more exciting! It’s exhilarating! It sells travel magazines. It generates more traffic to blogs and online mags.
But as someone who had only travelled a little bit and will probably always be limited to visiting only a few of the many, many, many places I dream about, I believe that there are still words left to be written about the roads well-travelled. Because if your opportunities and resources for travelling are limited, one tends to want to see first-hand those most ‘common’ sites you always see in movies and on TV.
Naturally your walk in the Bog Nature Trial in the Soomaa National Park in Estonia would make grand dinner conversation. Of course you would first have to show your guests on a map where Estonia is! Or imagine telling you bird watching friends about you seeing one of the last Great Indian Bustard nests in India? And obviously, you can’t go wrong with showing off your photos taken from Uhuru and Kibo peaks on Mount Kilimanjaro, because even if it had become a bit of fashionable trip to do these days, you can still get away with it under the ‘adventurous’ label. You will after all be only one of about 22 500 people in the world who did it this year – in comparison to the millions who have travelled to London to see old Buckingham Palace! Yawn…
But for the person who will only travel once or a handful of times in his or her lifetime, due to reasons such as limited resources or health restrictions that keep them from hunting great adventures such as walking the swamps of the Amazon, intruding on the habitat of petrifying Anacondas – visiting the Taj Mahal in India or the great pyramids of Giza in Egypt or the Garden Tomb in Israel, will still be more than awesome! It will also be the fulfilment of a lifelong dream – just as the Amazon-thing is to the extreme adventurer.
For us, the travellers with limitations, the mere site of the Sea of Galilee where Jesus walked, is absolutely breath taking! And to have a photo that you have taken yourself of the Eiffel on your own camera’s memory card, is a dream come true! Because you may have climbed a hill on precisely the right day of the year to harvest one of the world’s rarest truffles in the French countryside, but imagine your friends’ faces when you arrive back home and they ask you about the Eiffel and your answer is “No, I haven’t seen the Eiffel, but I did harvest the world’s most exotic mushroom!” Except if you are a foodie and all your friends are too, it will be an absolutely outrageous answer!
Us normal people of limited resources are satisfied to see the Eiffel and Wailing Wall or the Tower Bridge or the Big Ben or the Colosseum or maybe even the beautiful blue roofs of Mykonos and Santorini (instead of a less visited Greek islands with rarer stones to see). We are quite okay with it if we can only visit one of those magnificent places we see in movies and on TV programs in our lifetime. And when we watch a movie or TV again and we recognise one of those places and know that we had been there and that our feet walked where so many others have walked before – the fortunate and the unfortunate, the famous and the not-famous, the conqueror and the loser, the adventurer and the… us – we will feel thankful and privileged. Just because we were given the opportunity to see it with our own eyes.
There is still much to be said about the roads well-travelled, and very few of us will be able to travel all those roads, so if you get the opportunity – take it! And think of it this way: Even if you will never have the ability to visit any of these well-known or less-known places, you might live in a place on someone’s bucket list.
Explore your own surroundings. Visit that ‘boring’ battle field again that you had to visit on a school field trip. Go to that monument, read up on the beginnings of your town or city, because chances are that you are living near a place that someone else dreams about visiting. Go today. Pay it a visit. Take a picture (or a selfie if you can’t convince anyone to go with you on your ‘adventure’) and put it on your social media feed. And know that your feet have walked where other feet had fought or made history or had new beginnings. Because even though we sometimes don’t realise it: One man’s home can be just another man’s dream destination.
Our family at one of those ‘boring’ well-travelled places – The beautiful island of Mykonos in Greece.
© 2016 – I, Fielies (also Riëtte) De Kock is trying hard to be an awesomest wife and greatest lover, finest mom and to write something all at the same time. I share my current living space in Cairo, Egypt with my husband, young-adult son, the building’s two cats and the space in my head with way too many ideas and multitudes of story characters to function normally.
English version
This will be recorded as one of my most beautiful memories ever. We are on an Egypt Air flight from Amsterdam to Cairo.
Deon and I always listen to Paul Wilbur’s ‘Shema’ together on shared earphones when they play the Islamic prayers on the small screen – something that is done before every flight. Normally I switch my phone off after this, because I want to keep it charged should I need to make a call after we have landed. But today I keep listening. The time between sitting on the tarmac and take off can be a bit boring sometimes.
It is a majestic feeling when a plane jets into the air with the forceful sounds of Verdi’s ‘Nabucco’ in your ears. Outside the lush green landscape of Amsterdam is left on the ground as the plane swoops through the thick clouds to glide above them. This is one of the most beautiful pictures my eyes ever had the privilege of seeing! The cotton wool-like clouds are bundled onto each other with no earth to see down below. The music is still playing while I hear my spirit whisper in my heart: “Thanks for beautiful things, Father!” and “Thanks for all the undeserved treats. Thanks for all the places we see that I’ve never thought I would see and thanks for seeing some more than once!”
And then I heard the Halleluja choir with ‘Ode to Joy’ and Susan Boyle sings ‘Then sings my soul’, while mine sings with. I ‘halleluYAH’ on with Leonard Cohen and Delaney en Bonnie’s ‘Never Ending Song of Live’ follows passionately. Then André Rieu’s orchestra played “Auld Lang Syne’ and I long to be with my family and I wonder what they are all doing on this spring Sunday afternoon in South Africa. While I’m still wondering Neil Diamond makes a ‘Beautiful Noise’ and on the note of ‘Hava Nagila’ I have to close the plane window a bit, because the son reflects quite sharply from the Alps down below.
My finger chooses Josh Grobin’s ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desire’ almost automatically, because one always tends to feel closer to heaven so high up in the air.
In the aisle seat Michael sat cramped-in and reads his new book and in the middle, next to me Deon rests on his forehead against the front seat, trying to sleep. I trust on his cell phone today should we need to make calls on the other side. For now my phone’s battery will help Josh fly high above the clouds over Europe.
Afrikaans
Hierdie sal in my onthou opgeteken word as een van die mooiste memoeries ooit! Ons is op ‘n Egypt Air-vlug oppad terug van Amsterdam na Kaïro.
Ek en Deon luister altyd na die ‘Shema’ van Paul Wilbur oor gedeelde oorfone as hulle die Islamitese gebede op die klein skerm wys – iets wat voor elke vlug gedoen word. Normaalweg skakel ek my foon hierna af, omdat ek nie die battery wil pap maak nie vir ingeval ek dit nodig sou kry nadat ons geland het. Maar vandag hou ek aan luister. Die tyd tussen in die vliegtuig sit op die aanloopbaan en opstyg kan nogal vervelig wees.
Dis ‘n majestieuse gevoel as ‘n straler opstyg met Verdi se ‘Nabucco’ se klanke in jou ore. Buite het ons die lowergroen landskap van Amsterdam op die grond gelos en die vliegtuig het die dik wolke ingeswiep – na waar ons bokant hulle sweef. Dit is een van die mooiste, mooiste prentjies wat my oë ooit die voorreg gehad het om te sien! Die wolke is soos watte-berge op mekaar gestapel, met niks aarde onder ons te sien nie. Die musiek hou aan speel, terwyl ek my gees in my hart hoor fluister: “Dankie vir mooi dinge, Vader!” en “Dankie vir al die onverdiende voorregte. Dankie dat ons plekke kan sien wat ek nooit gedink het moontlik is nie en party wéér kan sien.”
En toe hoor ek die Halleluja-koor en ‘Ode to Joy’ en Susan Boyle sing ‘Then sings my soul’, terwyl myne saam sing. En ek ‘halleluYAH’ verder saam met Leonard Cohen. En Delaney en Bonnie se ‘Never Ending Song of Live kom tussen-in en toe ek weer hoor, speel André Rieu se orkes “Auld Lang Syne’ en ek verlang na my familie en wonder wat doen hulle op dié lente Sondagmiddag in Suid-Afrika. Terwyl ek nog wonder, maak Neil Diamond ‘n ‘Beautiful Noise’ en op die nota van ‘Hava Nagila’ moet ek eers die vliegtuigvenstertjie ‘n bietjie toetrek, want die sonnetjie skyn nogal skerp so hoop bo in die lug waar dit van die Alpe af reflekteer. My vinger kies so half outomaties Josh Grobin se ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desire’, want ‘n mens voel mos maar altyd ‘n bietjie nader aan die hemel so hoog bo in die lug.
In die gangsitplek sit Michael ingeprop en lees sy nuwe boek en langs my in die middel, sit-lê Deon op sy voorkop teen die sitplek voor hom en probeer slaap. Ek vertrou maar vandag op sy selfoon, sou daar ‘n ‘vir ingeval’ anderkant die landing wees. Vir nou help my foon se battery eers vir Josh om hoog te vlieg bo die wolke bokant Europa.
© 2016 – I, Fielies (Riëtte) De Kock tries hard to be a Proverbs 31-woman – excellentest wife, finest mom, greatest lover and successful ‘wordpreneur’ all at the same time. I share my current living space in Cairo, Egypt, with my husband, young adult son, the building’s ginger cat, her friend and two kittens (so far) – and the space in my head with way too many ideas and multitudes of story characters to function normally .
There are so many quotes and writings about the almost ‘magical’ thing called travelling. Much is said about the wonderful things you see and hear and how it opens your eyes and your mind and broadens your horizons and gives you insights into how the world works that you would otherwise not have had. So much so that when you dream of visiting France for example, you unquestionably expect to hear beautiful French theme music starting to play in the background the moment you set foot on French soil.
Most of the things one hears and reads about travelling are certainly true. It makes a difference about how you look at and think about the world. It does broaden you horizon. And it gives you insights you would probably otherwise not have required. The reality about travelling though is that there is reality. Surely, sometimes you hear French music play in the background (when you sit in a restaurant) and you may have a holiday romance with an Italian heartbreaker or you might travel without any trouble, lost luggage or stomach bugs and you will meet people who will stay friends with you until the end of time. But most of the time, travelling can be very, very hard. So, if you haven’t travelled much yet, here is a shortish version of how a typical day of a travelling transpires.
Even if you knew the day would come for months in advance and planned accordingly, you will still have a hundred and three things to do on the day before you leave. Somehow visas can be the main devil in the traveller’s Garden of Eden and you sometimes have to wait until the very end for the British Embassy to open again after an unexpected closure in Cairo to get your UK visa. Or it can be the Colombians or Algerians or Mauritian authorities causing you problems. The fact is – visas are the traveller’s number one enemy – and friend, because without them, you’re going nowhere.
On a normal day of travelling you will eventually leave for the airport by car, taxi, bus, train or whatever, armed with you passport, your ticket – or the electronic confirmation of a ticket, money, your luggage and those precious visas safely stamped or pasted into your passport pages. You will arrive and queue to book in electronically at a machine or otherwise at a counter, depending on the airport you fly from. While you stand in the queue, you will pray that your bag is within the weight limit. You will ban the question out of you mind of how you are going to manage not to go overweight after ten days or three weeks of buying cute, but in a year’s time totally forgotten memorabilia. You will be thankful when the bag goes through with no problem and you are awarded with your boarding pass.
Then you get out of the line, say the goodbyes to those who brought you, if you didn’t come on your own, and you enter the door leading to the world! But first, you will have to queue for passport control. After the customs officer stamped you out of the country, you are as free as a bird in that wonderful no man’s land called ‘Duty Free’… We normally like to be there long before we have to board, just to get the emotions of the goodbyes behind us and have a coffee or a beer while breathing the busy day out of our bodies and starting to focus on our tip ahead. This is where you realise for the first time that you are on your way.
Your next queue is when you wait to go through the security check to your boarding gate. You remove your camera, jacket/s, shoes and belt, take your wallet and cell phone out of you pockets, remove your laptop, tablet/iPad and your other cameras from your hand luggage, put it in a tray with your passports and walk through the scanner on your still-clean socks, hoping there is nothing left on you that will make it bleep. If you’re lucky enough to go through without a bleep, a person of your own gender awaits you with a hand scanner and two gloved hands. In Europe, this search stops just short of a gynaecology examination. Literally. Then all your scanned stuff and those of the people behind you causes a traffic jam on the x-ray machine, while you try to grab your camera, belt, shoes and jacket’s all at once and try to get dressed while going through the checklist in your head trying not to forget anything:
You make sure to look back to see if you left anything and check the person behind you to see if he may have taken something of yours. When you are certain of this, you are perspiring a little bit and ready to board your flight.
Note: Sometimes this step occurs after leaving passport control and before you enter Duty Free. It depends on the airport. After this you are happy that it is over, yet you know that this is going to repeat itself over and over during the course of your trip in every airport you visit – when going in and when going out.
Another note: If travelling in or out of Egypt add double the amount of passport checks mentioned above, add two more and multiply the sum by three.
Your next wait is in the room at the gate before boarding. When you finally hear the boarding call, you get up excitedly, because you know, that the journey is finally to begin. You queue in the boarding line, get you passport checked again and your boarding pass scanned. Then you follow the line to the airplane. Finally.
Depending on how far you have to travel, you will be caged into a small space (except if you fly business class of course) where you will try to watch a movie, try to sleep, don’t like all the food the airline serve you (except if it is KLM, then you would want to try the tray too) and probably be stuck behind or next to an unmannered co-passenger or one who’s breath really pongs. This is the less enjoyable part of travelling, especially if you travel five hours and longer.
On the other side, you will have this whole process at the airport again, just in in reverse. Then you have to find transport to your place of accommodation, travel there, queue to book in, move in, unpack or not, get cleaned, connect to Wi-Fi, contact home to let them know that you are safe and try to get a good night’s sleep.
If you travel for ten days to three weeks, the pace can get to you, because you will wake up every day, get cleaned, go for breakfast and travel by car, bus, train, tram, boat, taxi, motorcycle, bicycle, plane, underground (also train) to your next destination. You will queue, you will buy tickets on busses, in museums and on boats. You will always be looking for coffee or beer and wonder where the next toilet will be. You will run not to miss your next bus ride, train or plane, and you will hope you and your luggage arrive at the same place. Which sometimes don’t happen and then you have to spend a night in your day-old undies and a t-shirt from Heathrow’s ‘overnight’ pack. You will queue to see the small, insignificant, but well-marketed painting called the ‘Mona Lisa’ (in English) and take selfies with known landmarks in the background.
You will ask strangers to take a pic of your family, so that you are in some of the pictures too. You will search the map and the Internet for directions and you will learn how a country’s public transport system works within hours after arrival. You will walk or ride from site to site, drinking coffee or beer or wine in between with ‘n light lunch and take more pictures, because you never know if you will ever see it again.
It’s not that these places are so important to you personally or that they speak to your heart, but that you have seen it with your own eyes. There is something in seeing well-known places and things with your own eyes. Even if you feel too uneducated to appreciate every old painting in the Louvre or the Rijksmuseum – or know who the painters were. It is a weird kind of privilege to visit places and share the soil where so many good and bad things happened in the past and to know that somehow your life had cross the paths of those who lived there so long ago.
In the evening you put your photos on Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp and chat with your family and friends and go to bed too late, because you don’t want to waste a moment and you want to try and put what you have seen and experienced in perspective. The next morning you wake up and the routine repeat itself – but in spite of the repetition, one day is never the same as the previous. So, you get up, brush your teeth, go to breakfast, start travelling, drink coffee, go to the toilet while you are in a restaurant, travel to a site, take too many pictures, walk, ride bus, ride boat, walk more, eat lunch you can’t really afford, drink beer, go to the restaurant toilet, walk to the next site, take more pics, ride bus to the next, take even more pictures, look for a place to get food, have more beer or wine and go to the toilet, ride bus or underground or walk to your place or accommodation, bath, download photos, upload photos, chat to family and friends, go to sleep too late.
And you repeat this until the tour is over. There is no rest, because what South African can afford to go to London for three days and lay on a hotel bed for a day’s rest at times 18 of your currency for everything you do. No, there will be no rest. You will pack in, no matter how tired or sick you are. You will go on. You will get every cheap South African cent’s worth out of your too-expensive trip!
Sometimes while travelling it feels as if you are not taking it all in. You think that you just travel and look and see and don’t think. But when you get home, you realise how much you have thought about. You learned that you never stopped thinking. Your thoughts were transformed somehow by experiences you didn’t realise your brain had recorded. You are a changed/changing person. You realise how much you have learned and how little you really know. Even now. No, especially now that you know how much there still is to learn. And you realise all over again that all of life is a journey. That this little piece of your life, called a holiday, is part of that journey to make your life expand. And you appreciate that you may never, ever see those places you have just visited again. And you are also confronted with the very real possibility that you may never travel to all the places you still dream about seeing. That’s a reality of life.
You also find that being home, is the biggest part of the journey. And you realise that it is a privilege to have a place to come home to. Even if we have never travelled, or is just a couch traveller or if we don’t want to travel, we are on the trip of our life, because being alive and living life is the journey.
So, are the endless, tiresome movements from one place to another just to see it with your own eyes really worth it? It is. Because you learn a lot about the world, but you learn even more about yourself.
What a curious phenomenon this thing called ‘travelling’ is.
© 2015 – I, Fielies (Riëtte) De Kock tries hard to be a Proverbs 31-woman – excellentest wife, finest mom, greatest lover and successful ‘wordpreneur’ all at the same time. I temporarily share my living space in Cairo, Egypt with my husband, young-adult son, the building’s ginger cat – and the space in my head with way too many ideas and multitudes of story characters to live as a normal functioning human being.
Our son, Michael (5) and his friend, Maryam (6) in Morocco in 2001. In the background – them in December 2012
On our first trip to Israel we met a man and his wife when visiting the Nazareth village. They complimented us for travelling as a family. We encouraged them to do the same, but they protested that their family was too big. On our second trip to the Holy Land though, we bumped into them in the Old city of Jerusalem – with their six children!
Since we visited Israel on six occasions – with our son! We were travelling with other friends, who also travel with their children. On our first trip together, their son was only eighteen months old. On the next trip he was three years old and had an eight month-old baby brother. We also travelled with them when their third son was only three months old! On every trip childless couples as well as single people travelled with us travelled and the children brought no extra stress on us. As a matter of fact, we travelled with less worries, because our children were safely with us.The first time my husband and I travelled to another country together, we did it without our then three year-old son, Michael. We went with another couple, whose children, like ours, stayed with their grandparents for the week. We missed our children a lot and we were always on the lookout for telephone booths in every Moroccan town we drove through. Although we knew that Michael was in safe hands, we still worried about him.
While driving one day, both we and the other couple decided not to travel again without our children in future. Back home our son missed us too and he had his own way of letting us know it. He addressed us on our names for weeks, before we decided to ignore him when doing that. Within days we were ‘Pappa’ and ‘Mamma’ again. We knew that our decision not to travel without him in future was the right one.
Two years later we were back in Morocco with Michael and our friends with their three children. We were travelling in a group of 62 South Africans. We were the only two families travelling with children and enjoyed every minute.Travelling is expensive and the costs might be one of the main reasons why couples tend to leave their children at home when taking a trip to another country. We have a one-income household. I am a stay-at-home mum and my husband is serving in the defence force. We really don’t have money to squander, but somehow we manage to fulfil our dream to travel. When we set out on planning a new adventure, we normally start from scratch. We don’t have extra savings to fall back on. We purely pray and believe it will happen. We believe that is how our Creator meant it to be and that He rewards us time and again for our decision to travel as a family.
Our son is sixteen now and has become quite a globetrotter. He has learned in experience what some other children have to learn from books. He is working in the garden, washing the car and doing other odd jobs to help fund his next plane ticket. Our next trip to the Middle East is already in its early planning stages. The preparation is as much fun as the trip itself. We are reading guide books and planning visits to must-see places, while hoping on and believing that a few miracles along the road will get us there.
Travelling as a family doesn’t have to be just a dream. With a bit of faith and lots of courage it is possible to live the dream. We regularly encourage other families to do the same, as it is enriching for both parents and children. If that pastor and his wife could do it with their six children, any family can at least try it at least once!
Here is a list of helpful tips for families to travel together and enjoy it.
Tips for planning a safe and joyful family trip
Things to pack in your child’s backpack
Must-take items in your first-aid kit
(Remember to keep it in original packaging)
© 2012 Riëtte de Kock
I am trying hard to be a Proverbs 31-woman – excellent wife, finest mom, greatest lover and successful entrepreneur and freelance writer all at the same time! I share a living space in Pretoria, South Africa with my husband, son, mother, four dogs and sometimes the neighbours’ cats – and my head with way too many ideas and multitudes of story characters.
Visit my website at www.thewritingclub.co.za and buy my children’s ebook, Yeovangya, on Amazon Kindle at http://www.amazon.co.uk/Yeovangya-ebook/dp/B008CP2RQ0
My Afrikaans blog is available on my website – or just click on this link: http://www.thewritingclub.co.za/writingclub/index.php?option=com_lyftenbloggie&view=lyftenbloggie&category=bloggies&Itemid=66
Fielies (Riëtte) De Kock 