We arrived in Soweto well past midnight. It is advised not to travel on the roads of Johannesburg so late at night, but the cheapest flight from Montreal got us there about midnight after a quick stopover in Doha. I changed myself and the now wide awake toddler into something cute in the deserted bathroom before we went to search for her father at the arrivals gate. He came with his sister’s hatchback and we struggled to get all four suitcases in and we drove in the dark, whizzing past stoplights to avoid getting car jacked but driving through a McDonald’s for a couple of Happy Meals in a college neighborhood where they can retain late night staff.

We pulled up to a little concrete house, which turned out to be his best friend’s place where the three of us would be staying in his extra room for the time being. There was no room at his mother’s house and he hadn’t yet told her we were arriving. I want to be mad at this but Im a bit impressed that in an era of social media oversharing, this man (my husband) was able to hide a whole (almost 2 year old), a wedding and a wife (not to mention 6 months in Addis with said wife and child) from his family! It helps that his mother doesn’t speak English, hates whites and has no phone of her own while she recovers from a stroke with the help of their own school aged children. She is of course surprised, confused, upset and overwhelmed when we show up on her doorstep the next day. I must say I am feeling much the same as I try to shake off jet-lag induced seizures while I pry my freighted child’s hands from arm to introduce her to her Gogo, 2 aunts (19 and 9) and her uncle (11). its clear the children are struggling to keep up with nursing their mother, who is now only collecting sick leave pay from the hospital she works at with the daughter’s part-time afterschool income making up the deficit but still not enough to cover badly needed school uniforms and supplies. The kitchen/living room are sticky with old food messes that flies happily frolic in, the bathroom is stripped down to maintain efficiency when helping their mother in and out of the tub for her sponge bath or to use the toilet. I’m tired but eager, albeit wholly unprepared to help. Instead I spend my days working in the house we are staying at with my own child glued to BBC kids on DSTV during the day while I work as a Research Assistant and finish up my last courses to complete my MA. 80% of the $1000/mth I make goes towards supporting my in-laws household and the rest goes to groceries and internet here at this one. While my husband is at rugby practice or training for rugby or hanging out with rugby friends watching international rugby and his friend (our new roommate) is at work I get through the days work tasks and prepare dinner and often wash the laundry by hand and sit outside while it dries and the child plays in the dust near the iron gate. I am under strict instructions to stay in the house with the curtains drawn behind the security bars as there is no gate or fence but during the afternoons when the power goes out and the water is finished for the next ~3 hours of load-shedding, the temptation of 25 degrees in December is too much to resist as we go for short walk around the block. but people start to notice and come to ask if I would pay them to do chores around the house or just to have a peek at the washing machine and TV in the house. As Christmas holidays approach, the periods of water and electricity shortages increases to sometimes +10 hours in Protea Glen and i fetch water from the blocked drainage pipe in the street with my Sotho neighbors/house-help/relatives in order to flush a nearly overwhelmed toilet. We wait for the men to get home with cars to take us to the mall to use the public toilets and pick up little Nike sneakers for the kids and with matching ones for the husbands. There are no pit latrines because they are considered to be a rural item only. I institute a bucket system in the modernly furnished bathroom to ensure I can at least wash while I have my period (thankful I am not pregnant again) and start saving rands for bottled water from the Bangladeshi owned spaza down the street. My husband decides to throw a big birthday party for me so I can meet everyone he has grown up with and no one minds the lack of water as long as the booze is flowing. I get to put faces to names of childhood friends and teammates, everyone is so happy and proud to meet us. The babies are watched all together by the younger sisters who haven’t yet started their own families, those who have, have also earned the right to party with the adults.

By the new year we have moved to another neighborhood where I am allowed to walk outside without an escort. I don’t understand the reasoning for this rule, as I am sad to leave the neighbors in Soweto who invited us for braais, taught me how to make mayonaise and tomato sauce based salads and pap in the kitchens while men stand around the charcoal grill watching flesh burn. We now only see our in-laws on occasional weekends. This new neighborhood of Northriding with all its electricity and water and gates has its own security issues. when we go to the Pick n Pay for groceries we (me) are yelled at in Afrikaans for being a “race traitor” I smile politely in return, not knowing a word of Afrikaans and not interested in my Dutch heritage while my husband seethes with a rage he is daily trying to keep under wraps. This happens again at rugby matches when rival white teams come to play our highly successful yet woefully underfunded Orlando Raiders club in a neighborhood called Florida. After games or practices we will drive our Renault Megane back to Soweto with a family meal from Nando’s for the in-laws, passing by the reservation for “coloreds” called “New Canada” where my child can see all the kids who look like her but she is not really supposed to be interacting with as they are considered “culturally inferior” to her urban Xhosa lineage.

In this new apartment we live on the ground floor of a housing complex reserved for foreigners, as we are not allowed to rent just anywhere we feel like. this meant we needed to pay 6 months upfront and I see why when our Nigerian neighbor moves all his furniture out of the apartment in the middle of the night after blowing his 419 earnings on his friends at Sun City the week before. Its now 2011, just months after the World Cup came and went shedding thousands of temporary jobs with it. Our neighbors are mostly Africans from Malawi, Zimbabwe and Nigeria and because I work from home, when my child gets home from her English Language daycare that supplies three meals a day, i invite the under 10s in from their parking lot play to watch cartoons on our laptop from a CD burned for this purpose and picked up from one of the hawkers near Maponya Mall until their parents get home from thier nanny/house-help/cleaning jobs after dinner. They all know which apartment their kids are in and rarely make eye contact as the mutter a thank you and grab their little one by the hand to take them to bed. The apartment is sparse, since I spent the rest of my student loan money on rent and that car, since my husband instead that taking public transit is much too unsafe for me. Even washing laundry is unsafe, we don’t have a machine so I scrub everything down in the bathtub, taking hours to wring it out and then another few hours to sit on the roof with it as it dries to make sure none of it is stolen until we can afford to rent one of the padlocked/barned wire laundry drying areas. Our clothes are never really clean, especially with that rugby stuff. we have the bed we brought from the first house, a coffee table I use as a desk and a rug, we have one camp chair for when my mother in law visits because she can’t manage to sit on the rug with us for dinner. With two bedrooms now we can have our own bed and I make a little nest for our daughter out of sleeping bags and blankets in the second room. I am saving up for a fridge as appliances do not come standard in South African rentals and we are lucky that the electric stove and oven are built in. We don’t get the fridge from '“off the Makro truck” until late February and the summer months make keeping food difficult. One morning I wake up to find a heaving trail of single file rice grains between the sliding glass door through the sitting room, through the kitchen, up the cupboard to a bowl of leftover beef stroganoff, which was to be my husbands breakfast. those pieces of rice are maggots I cannot keep up with in the heat without refrigeration and it makes me miss the windowless concrete block in Soweto.

Johannesburg winter hits in time for our toddler’s second birthday in April. A package of trinkets comes from my mother in Canada and she opens it in front of her envious uncle and aunts as I melt with guilt both that they have to watch this and that i know that shipping and handling could have been used for food, a replacement space heater or to fund her (and my) upcoming iMbeleko ceremony. There is no indoor heating or insulation in any of the places we stay so we wear our warmest clothes to bed and sleep with the electric oven open to keep the ice off the inside of the windows. I made the grave error of telling my MA supervisor in Canda about my family struggles and she is now withholding my RA pay as leverage to get me to move closer to her. My already short hair is falling out from stress and malnutrition and I have had to ask my sister in law, still an undergraduate at UJ, to buy us dinner after my husband splurges on Johnny Walker for his friends while the conspire to set fire to our Zimbabwean security guard at the gate after we attend a funeral for a mother who was beaten to death by her son with a hammer for Whoonga money. I am terrified of this very violent reality but also of turning into the middle class families I saw digging in the trash cans at the Fourways Mall near our pastor friend’s residence when his finance invites us over for a dinner of KFC and bread while we watch the Kardashians.

I have graduated remotely from my MA in War Studies in May, which my husband and I celebrate in Sandton by sharing a fancy pizza el fresco and looking at the luxury shops built in Mandela’s honor. make sure my kindle is always charged as I use it to pass the time watching laundry dry, waiting at rugby practices and sitting in a mall sipping on a coffee so I can get some free wi-fi to download for the week rather than using my limited data dongle. I cut my hair into a pixie so I can skip washing and blow drying. I live off rice and onions so my husband can eat the meat to bulk up for the season and because he thinks pap is for poor people. I get a free Depo-Provera shot when I go see a lovely female Congolese doctor in a back office to refill and increase my anti-convulsant medication as I am so deeply scared of having to afford (physically, emotionally and financially) another child.

By June the weather is still below freezing and I am considering downsizing to a shack in Zola with stolen water from a standpipe and a shared pit latrine as neither of us have been able to secure better jobs. My husband refuses to work for White men especially as he tries to turn his part-time, poorly paid gig with the Golden Lions into a Springboks career by putting in full-time hours at the Virgin Fitness Club. I cannot get a job in South Africa, I’ve added my husband’s surname and apply to every place I can think of with cover letters begging for a meeting I have no idea how I’ll be able to afford to attend. I get a lot of offers to volunteer, writing proposals for free or interning for organizations I’ve already worked for in other countries like AMREF, Christian Children’s Fund and World Vision. While I sit on the scraps of linoleum flooring in a friend’s girlfriends shack dressed fully in my warmest jacket, eating pap and cabbage as it is the time of the month when meat and even tinned fish money has run out, watching Generations on a stolen flat screen that shares stolen power running through an over-worked octopus cable I consider my options. I listen to the girlfriends share strategies on stretching money which oddly enough includes Nigerian sugar daddies more often than not and think about my sister in law’s explanation that once South African men hit 30 and have not had a solid employment history they are written off by the state as being “unemployable” i look at my child gnawing on a chicken foot handed to her by her dad or one of the dads drinking outside and think why the fuck am I (are we) still here. I quietly and carefully tell my supervisor that I will indeed come back and could she please release my back pay, instead she offers to rebook our flights back to Canada months earlier than expected with a guarantee that she will pay the whatever is remaining to me in person. I tell my husband it will be easier to find a job from Canada as things have been so tense between us lately that I am unsure of how he (or I) will react to the news that I am bailing and taking the baby back home with me as it is much easier to be this poor in Canada or in any other country in Africa than it is here. I file for divorce a month later, continuing my RA work while I apply for any job I see and continue to work as a Research Assistant out of my mohter’s boyfriend’s parked RV in rural PEI, which ironically has no plumbing.