Wedding day anxiety

Imagine this scenario: it is a day before the wedding. The band has been booked, the bridesmaids’ outfits are ready, the catering is paid for, you are having drinks with the girls when suddenly you have anxiety and say that you can’t go through with it. Family members ask you what is wrong; you say you don’t know. You have mere hours before you become a wife. The groom-to-be is shocked and does not understand what is happening. The transition is so bizarre that one moment you are laughing with the girls and the next moment you are crying over the drink in your hand. What do you do? 

Handling wedding day anxiety

**           You do nothing for the moment except be with her. Don’t try to explain things; it will go in one ear and out the other. Calm her down by telling her that you understand how hard it is to leave home. 

**           Don’t blame yourself. It has nothing to do with you. Be rational. Hold her and say that it is all right to cry on the night before you get married. After all, it is a huge thing to leave your parents’ home and change guard. 

**           Put a temporary hold on the catering until you know whether the event is on or off. Remember caterers start planning weeks ahead of time and they don’t do anything without a fat deposit; don’t do it too late.

**           If hours later you are still fearful and don’t know the cause of it, put the wedding on hold. It is easier to lose some of your deposits than undo or annul a marriage. It may even be that once you have cancelled everything that the fear dissipates and you find yourself with just two witnesses at the Justice of the Peace. It may be the fear of change rather than finding fault with your partner which one is sometimes apt to do. If on the morning of the wedding your partner laughs off her anxiety from the previous day and seems fine, you know you have crossed that bridge and are set for the marriage to take place. The fear and confusion is akin to a new mother who does not know what to expect and wants the baby but does not want to give birth.

http://expertscolumn.com/users/rayda-jacobs

http://www.raydajacobs.blogspot.com

http://redgage.com/account#rf:/account:innercontainer:dashboard.user

South Africa's forgotten people

 

A few hundred miles north of Cape Town in the dry and rugged Richtersveld mountains lie four communities along the Orange River whose people are known by several names; the Nama, San, Khoisan, the ‘people of the Richtersveld’, and derogatorily also known as the Bushmen. With a slim frame, a biscuit or apricot-colored complexion, wrinkly features, wiry hair, they are the remnants of the indigenous people who once were hunter gatherers and beachcombers in the early Cape.

They had lived for centuries in the mountains, fished in the waters and looked for food along the shore. They have good eyesight and make excellent trackers and have the ability to study a pile of manure or animal dung and tell you which animal had made the deposit, the age of the animal, and the direction in which it had gone. They left behind a trail of rock paintings along the coast and had a wonderful sense of poetry, music and art. Some of these paintings can be seen at a resort in the Cedarberg where San children and adults are on display in their original skins and habitat.

Living conditions

It is shocking that once the land which had been freely used by all were taken away and some of them migrated towards the Cape, some wandering in the streets, some finding jobs, others living out their lives as alcoholics. In the past part of the white man’s form of payment was a ‘dop’, alcohol, which kept them in a perpetual state of slavery. Filmmakers saw a chance to join in and a film by Jamie Uys, The Gods Must Be Crazy, where a Coke bottle falls from the sky and causes a tribe member to start walking to the end of the earth to return it to the gods, was born. The San were romanticized and the act of trying to give back a Coke bottle to the gods attests to their delightful nature. They speak both Khoisan and Afrikaans which has a click to it when they talk. Hunted by the early settlers in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, they fled north and disappeared.

The Nama

Another group of indigenous people are the Nama, similar in colour and stature to the San, who also had Mongolian features, and lived around the Orange River in the mid nineteenth century. These indigenous people were called Hottentots. Today, about 60,000 Nama live in Namibia and in the Richtersveld which are made up of Eksteenfontein, Kubus, Sanddrift and Port Nolloth.They have been granted houses along sandy streets and there is the normal church and school and a piano which provide entertainment. The Nama Dance which has them dancing around a fire in a trance is a particular favorite. 

Culture in the Richtersveld

They are also known for their natural remedies and their rooster brood, flat bread baked on a stone oven. Problems in the community are teenage pregnancy and alcoholism; their biggest concern is that their culture and language is dying out. Elders are worried and say that the children are uninterested in learning the language of their elders and many of them now speak only Afrikaans and a few words of English. Their second claim to fame is that when Queen Elizabeth was in South Africa the last time she met with the leader of the four communities, Oom Po’, and shook his hand. A large framed photograph of the Queen is on the wall in the living room where everyone can see it. Of all the communities in the Cape these indigenous people have fared the worst.

http://www.raydajacobs.blogspot.com

http://expertscolumn.com"

The magic of eggs

Tomatoes and eggs breakfast for 1 person

If you love eggs and are bored with the normal boiled, fried, scrambled or poached eggs, here is a tangy, delicious breakfast for one. The ingredients are simple; the taste is great. Have a pan with a lid or something that can cover the ingredients in a pan. A lid is imperative as it is part of the poaching process. The ingredient are 2 large organic and grain-fed eggs, 6 small tomatoes, 1 tablespoon olive oil, 1 green or red chilli, a pinch of salt, and 1teaspoon of sugar.

Braise the tomatoes in the pan until they are almost brown. Add the olive oil and stir in with the sugar and salt and chilli. Immediately crack open the two eggs and put on top of the tomato braise. Cook 1 minute at the same high heat, then put on  the lid, switch off the stove, and let it summer for two or three minutes. Take it out of the pan with a spatula, unbroken, and have a delicious breakfast with an Italian roll and an espresso.

Stretching your meal with eggs

Here is a magic trick with eggs stealing space in a pot of hot curry or a tomato bredie. Bredie is a slow cook of meat, onions, spices, tomatoes and potatoes. Cook your curry or your bredie like you always do. To stretch the food or to have eggs in a different way, wait until the curry is cooked, switch off the stove, crack two eggs in the juice in the curry pot, put on the lid and let it simmer. The eggs will be firmly poached, and you can either have it with basmati rice without the meat and save it for the next day’s meal, or eat it as you like. If there are two of you, use four eggs. You have two meals in one and all you have taken out of the pot are the eggs and the juices created by the meat in the pot. Bon appetit!

http://www.raydajacobs.blogspot.com

http://expertscolumn.com

http://www.mylot.com