19 Apr 2009 – Rain and Braai

It’s a shame these two things had to arrive together, but I suppose that’s what we get for scheduling our big, house braai after the change in season. Friday’s hot, sunny weather was more reminiscent of the summery January days we first encountered in Cape Town, so we had no reason to expect that such gloomy, wet days were to follow.

On Friday, several people in the house put in extra days at their internships and some returned to activist projects. Groups of people also began preparing for the braai event on Sunday, which required shopping for food to serve 60 potential guests. When the grocery shoppers returned, their receipt stretched almost as tall as they were.

When I wasn’t working on end-of-trip tasks and assignments, I ran down to Thandokhulu School to lend a hand on the mural painting, but when I arrived around noon, the painters were out to lunch and I was left to linger as unassumingly as possible by the gate. I waited about twenty minutes before I decided simply to continue my run, so I changed course and ran up Main Rd toward UCT’s lower campus. Despite the relentless heat, I reached the Rhodes Memorial by 1:00. In the afternoon, I ran a few errands on Main Rd and helped to begin cleaning the house for the multitude of guests we expected on Sunday.

On Friday night, Jill and Rachel, who are interning at Christel House School, were invited to the Matric Ball, a function similar to a senior prom. Grade 12 students must take their Matric exams before graduating from high school, and their academic and professional futures ride heavily on their performance on the test, so to celebrate the rite of passage, many schools have a Matric Ball. Jill and Rachel dressed up prom-style and left after dinner, while others went out with their Cape Town friends or gathered around the Common Room for the evening.

On Saturday, the sun did not stream in through the northeast-facing windows to wake the house, which was our first clue that the weather was turning ominously wintry. The rainy season does not set in fully until late May, according to the Capetonians we’ve asked, but like any climate pattern, the rainy days roll in gradually, long before then. Our first reaction was that we were fortunate the Molo Songololo street soccer tournament had been postponed to the following Saturday, as this culmination of Dan, Kevin, and Faina’s activist project would have suffered low attendance in the dismal weather. We also made note of our good luck for having scheduled the braai for Sunday, because surely the bout of wet weather would run its course in 24 hours.

But the few quick showers we’d experienced during our solid string of 100 sunny days provided a poor frame of reference for rain in Cape Town. As it turns out, the heavy, gray skies had more in store for us. Sunday morning I awoke to the drumming of raindrops on the tin roof (Norah Jones style?) and shrunk back beneath the covers a bit. We had hours of cleaning and food preparation ahead of us, and now we had to find the room for all of our guests inside the house. I pulled on my rain jacket for the walk from the pool house to the main house, where a small group of us gathered to delegate tasks – vacuuming, drying off chairs from outside, moving tables, starting on the side dishes. We’d spent a few hours the previous night preparing some of the desserts, but we spent most of Sunday morning in the kitchen making the salads and sides. Despite the rain, we flung open the doors and windows as we cleaned, clearing out the stagnating air and allowing us to run between the different rooms and two “houses” with relative ease. We utilized both kitchens, having realized just that morning that the pool house stove was actually in working order. Around one o’clock, on a trip back into the pool house, I walked through the side door and into a mass of brightly colored balloons. Sitting half-obscured by the vibrant bunch, Cassidy, Jill, and Emily G were blowing up the last few balloons and looking perfectly jolly.The braai was scheduled to begin at 3:00, but it is not in the nature of the event to be punctual or constrained by time, so people began trickling in between 2 and 4PM, ringing the bell on the front gate and then squashing across the soggy front lawn. Most of our group had invited guests, including coworkers, friends from activist projects, and our professors and their families. Parks drove Ben, Marita, and several others out to Nyanga to pick up meat at Maphindi’s around 1:30, and for the first few hours of the event, Dan and Kevin tended to the braai and the four giant bags of sausage, lamb, and chicken.The Common Room collected a number of guests early in the afternoon, as people gathered around the pool table and lounged on the couches with paper plates of appetizers. Downstairs, most of the activity was concentrated around the braai patio and the avenue between the kitchen and the dining room. It was through the latter location that dozens of delicious dishes passed between 4 and 8PM, as we replenished chips, fruit, cheeses, biscuits, vegetables, meat, and other prepared plates all evening. We’d set up two main buffet tables downstairs, which split the guests between the dining room and the “Mandela Suite” (which functions as a downstairs living room) most of the night. But as seems to be inevitable at event gatherings, the kitchen routinely attracted a crowd (this probably had as much to with the cold beverages in the refrigerator as it did with the fact that it was the main thoroughfare between the braai patio and the rest of the house). The evening was filled with introductions and greetings, hugs and handshakes – and lots of camera flashes. Most of us made rounds to different rooms and clusters of guests during the event, stewarding food and drinks to people upstairs and checking on trays in the oven. It is traditional for braais to involve free-flowing drinks, so as one might expect, the night grew more animated and eventful as it progressed. We’d thrown together playlists for the braai on a few different iPods, and the increasingly upbeat music matched the mood, especially as the food was cleared from the table in the Mandela Suite, and the room became the venue for a conventionally American college game.

But lest it sound like the night ran irresponsibly amuck, it should be noted that the environment remained suitable for everyone in attendance, including our professors, friends’ families, and the many younger guests at the braai. The desserts came out a bit haphazardly, and several highly anticipated dishes never made it past the kitchen counter as guests swooped in and then dashed away with heaping plates of bannoffee pie, chocolate cake, and fruit salad. People began to disperse as it neared 8:00, and as the house emptied, the residents of 10 Loch Rd scurried about the downstairs rooms collecting discarded plates and napkins.But even the cleanup was hardly a chore. With the iPod dock blasting dance club tunes, more than half of the house lined up around the small kitchen table and danced through the dish washing, scrubbing, and tidying of the downstairs rooms. Vernon, Vincent, and their families were among the last to leave, and they made appearances in the house as we cleaned (and grooved) in our unconventional way. Marita and a few other guests spent most of the evening on the patio around the braai, on which we toasted marshmallows for s’mores (our fifth or sixth dinner course) around 9:00. Vernon and Vincent had never before tried American s’mores, and people were more than thrilled to show them the proper toasting and assembly methods.Around 10:00, someone requested live music, so the baby guitar came off of its shelf, and the pool house drew a crowd of music-lovers and musician-types. Several people took turns on the guitar, including Vincent and his son Justin, both of whom were proficient instrumentalists and played a number of songs as the rest of the room sang along. Vernon, Marita, Vincent’s daughter, and our friends Les, Masi, and JD were among those who gathered around the impromptu jam session, which included long-drawn-out versions of Bob Marley’s “Jammin’” and Justin’s own composition, “Salamander” (AKA the never-ending-song). We laughed and sang our way nearly to midnight, at which point just a few guests who would be staying at the house remained.
When I noticed the smile-lines creased into my cheeks as I glanced in the mirror before bed, I realized that they were a testament to the success of the evening. Good friends, good food, good music, and good laughs – these are the fundamentals of a genuine South African braai. And in the days since, nearly everyone at 10 Loch Rd has expressed how much they had wished the night had never ended.