Rats! I race you to the country

Visitors can sometimes make one look at your world with different eyes. My wife’s sister Rona recently spent a week or so with us. Coming from the platteland – a little village called Wepener tucked away in the eastern Free State on the Lesotho border – a trip to the big city is a daunting task for her.

Make no mistake, Rona is not a barefoot farm girl. Not by a long shot. She’s a sophisticated woman with a wonderful sense of humour, general knowledge that would put most city teens to shame, and a very grand fashion sense.

And she lives on a farm because she chooses to. But farm people see and do things differently. For starters, Rona took a bus to Joburg. She has a car, she drives – has been for three decades.

But the city traffic scares her. At first I thought her fear was irrational. Traffic is frustrating and annoying at worst. But scary? Really?

Until she started giving running commentary after I picked her up from the bus stop at OR Tambo. By golly, I never realised how many near fatal misses we survive daily.

That anyone in Joburg reaches the age of 40 is a miracle. Then we get home. It takes Rona an hour to fill us in on everything that’s happened in her world since we last saw her a year ago.

Her neighbours features quite strongly in her narrative. I suppose it’s the only people she can really talk to out on the farm.

And they obviously talk a lot, because even I know everything about them now. It makes me consider my neighbours.

Tebogo and I have spoken three times in the 10 years we have been living barely eight metres apart. And who my other neighbours are, I cannot tell.

As the week went by, the difference between us city dwellers and those out in the country seemed an ever increasing divide.

My only conclusion is that the rural communities are just that – communities – while myself and the rest of the bright lights brigade seem like too many individuals cluttered together vying for everything from jobs to breathing space in an increasingly hostile environment.

I don’t quite know exactly where in the rat race I feature.

In fact, I never realized I had even entered.

Danie Toerien