In defense of earthquakes

American accents are pretty distinctive, especially in a country where most of the television programming is imported from the US. So, it is not surprising when people ask me “what part of the States are you from?” when they hear me open my mouth. What is surprising, however, is the reaction I get when I reply “the San Francisco area.” An astonishing number of people respond, with a little quiver of horror in their voices, “Oh, where they have all the earthquakes!”

I’ve checked and between 1906 and 2009, the San Francisco Bay Area has suffered two…and only two…earthquakes that caused loss of life. Those quakes were the notorious 1906 quake and the Loma Prieta quake in 1989. There was a quake in The City in 1957 that cause some significant property damage, but no deaths, bringing the total number of major quakes in the Bay Area, over a 103 year span, to three. That's right...just three.

So what is the big deal about earthquakes? I lived in the Bay Area for 30 years and actually experienced the Loma Prieta quake, and I just don’t get it. The horror people express at the thought of a quake baffles me. I mean, it’s not like earthquakes level a major American city every year, right? The frequency of deadly earthquakes in California is low, and in the Bay Area, numbers only two in the last 103 years. I mean, c’mon…you are more likely to get hit by a car while crossing the street than to be injured or killed in an earthquake!

As deadly natural disasters go, I think earthquakes get a bad rap. Their frequency, after all, is significantly less than tornadoes, floods and hurricanes. In fact, the Gulf Coast has suffered 40…forty!...significant hurricanes in the 107 years between 1900 and 2007, and loss of life in the 1900 Galveston Hurricane alone was double that of the estimated death toll for San Francisco's entire 20th century quake history!

Then there are tornadoes. In the 44 year period ended 1994, Texas alone suffered 5490 tornadoes! That’s an average of nearly 125 tornadoes per year just in Texas. The top ten tornado states, including Texas (the leader), suffered a combined total of 19, 511 tornadoes during this period, averaging more than 440 tornadoes per year… that’s an average of more than one per day! And since it is unlikely that tornadoes that cause no property damage are even reported, it’s pretty safe to assume that these tornadoes damaged homes and businesses…and we know that some of them cost lives, as well. How is this…an average of 1+ tornadoes per day…less frightening than an average of three damage-inducing earthquakes per century??

Okay, I know I am comparing the expanse of ten states against the smaller region of the San Francisco Bay area and that Southern California suffers its fair share of quakes as well, but the fact remains that such natural disasters as tornadoes and hurricanes occur annually in other parts of America without triggering irrational fear in potential visitors. Truth is, you are more likely to get swept up in a tornado than buried in an earthquake simply because tornadoes happen multiple times per year and the frequency of earthquakes is considerably less. The Bay area has had only two “killer” earthquakes in more than a century: Middle America suffers more killer tornadoes in an average year.

One of the things about earthquakes that I appreciate, vis-à-vis tornadoes, hurricanes, and floods, is their brevity. The moment of impact to the moment of cessation is measured in seconds. There are no hours of stressful anticipation, waiting for the hurricane to hit or fretting over whether or not the waters will rise enough to get into the house, no long minutes of hiding in a cellar or in your bathtub…with an earthquake, it is just WHAM! and then it is over and you can get on with the business of cleaning up.

What a lot of people don’t realize is that most earthquakes are unfelt and cause no damage at all. Even quakes that rock the bed and roll under your feet ordinarily don’t cause any property damage, let alone injury or death. Compare that with a tornado that, even if your house escapes destruction, will most likely destroy somebody’s property and possibly inflict personal injury or death. Ultimately, photos of the aftermath of tornadoes, hurricanes and floods show no less destruction than earthquake-stricken areas, and deadly earthquakes happen with dramatically less frequency.

After decades of living in earthquake country…more than 45 years in total, having been raised in Southern California…and a few years living in places given to blizzards, lightning strikes, windstorms, and flash floods, I have to say that earthquakes really do get a bad rap. Given a choice, I’ll take my chances with twice-in-a-century odds over a 440-times-a-year certainty any day of the week!

For more info about these natural disasters and photos of their consequences, see:
http://www.sfmuseum.org/alm/quakes3.html
http://www.geocities.com/hurricanene/gulfcoast.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tornado_Alley

I write for Angels Weekly. It’s full of great articles from terrific writers, and I’ve recently published a pair of articles about foods that are toxic to your dog. You can find it here: http://www.angelsezine.com/

FAQs re: Sweet Violet

I often get questions, most of them in person, but occasionally on a blog or forum or even in email. The same questions seem to get asked repeatedly, so I thought I’d publish some of them here. If you have questions that aren’t answered here, feel free to leave a comment and ask. No guarantees that I’ll answer it, but if you don’t ask, you have a 100% probability of never knowing the answer!

“Goeiemôre, tannie!” or, “What do you mean, you don’t speak Afrikaans?”
I am short, round, blonde, and well past the first blush of youth. When I enter an establishment like a dress shop or restaurant, I will inevitably be greeted with “Goeiemôre, tannie!” often followed by some other incomprehensible remark or query.

At first I was a bit disconcerted. Afrikaans is a guttural language like German and can sound harsh to the unaccustomed ear. Could they tell I was an accursed American and they were cursing at me? Were they making a crack about the red dot on my forehead? English is widely spoken here, why aren’t they speaking it to me?

Well, it seems that my short, square stature coupled with my age and colouring fools most people into thinking I am an Afrikaner and they are actually greeting me in the politest of Afrikaans terms! “Tannie” (pronounced “tunny”) means “auntie,” and it is a term of respect for women of generations above your own. And “Goeiemôre” (hooya mora) simply means “good morning.”

Interestingly, among the local black people (Xhosa…pronounced “koh-szah”), that term of polite respect for a woman of an older generation is “Mama” or “mamee,” spoken with the slightest bob of the head. I have been called that frequently as well.

So, despite my quintessential Northern European looks, I don’t speak Afrikaans because I am an American. But I do now understand quite a bit, including why the local Afrikaners open conversations with me in Afrikaans!

Where are you from?
TV has been in South Africa since the mid-70s. There are four broadcast channels (three of them government owned and operated) and there is DSTV…satellite TV…that brings us such wonders as BBC Prime, National Geographic, History, and Discovery channels, among others. Much of our programming…at least half of it…comes from the US. I regularly watch CSI, Las Vegas, Oprah, Dr. Phil, even Days of Our Lives. Lost, Desperate Housewives, Grey’s Anatomy and Private Practice, Boston Legal Smallville…all are available on the small screen here, not to mention a healthy helping of American movies, both new and old (Turner’s Classic Movie Channel also plays here).

You’d think with all that American programming flooding the screens, large and small, people would peg me as an American the moment I open my mouth. I don’t have a regional accent that might throw people off…I’m from California so I sound pretty much like most of the actors on TV and in the movies. It tends to surprise me, then, when people say things like “Where are you from? Australia?” or “I can hear you are from the UK.” I forgive the ones who mistake me for Canadian as the Canadian accent is different from the American in such subtle ways that many Americans can’t tell the difference. But Australia??

So, to answer the question: I am most recently from the San Francisco Bay area (Northern California). I was born in Oregon (which is the state immediately north of California and known for its deep piney woods) and spent my school years in San Diego (Southern California). I have also lived in the Boston area and in Tucson, Arizona. My travels have taken me to at least 30 of the 50 states, perhaps more. I just tell people I’m from San Francisco because few people here seem to have heard of Silicon Valley, my home from 1974 until I moved here in late 2003.

When are you going back?
This question seems to have two meanings: 1) when are you going back for a holiday in your homeland? And 2) when are you moving back to America because what kind of moron would want to live permanently in this godforsaken country?

I am amazed at how many South Africans seem to hate their country! In America it is a really big deal when you take a job overseas and almost unheard of for an American to emigrate to another country. Despite a moron like George Bush driving the economy inexorably towards a second Great Depression, record numbers of home foreclosures, a swiftly shrinking middle class, and a rapidly widening gap between the haves and the have-nots, Americans seem to focus on finding ways to fix (or at least live with) the vagaries of the political and economic scenes.

Not so South Africans. Throwing down their toys like petulant children who can’t have their way in the sand box, white South Africans emigrate in droves…mostly to Australia or the UK…and nobody thinks it is the least bit odd. Maybe it is just my jingoistic American upbringing, but I find South Africans shockingly lacking in patriotism. When confronted with this sentiment, invariably they remark they weren’t that way before the new (read that “black majority”) government came into power. I find that rather scary, since the old (read that “white apartheid”) government was one of the most corrupt on the face of the earth.

These people, then, are surprised when I tell them I do not plan to go back to America except for the occasional family visit (and no, I haven’t done that yet). They cannot imagine leaving a place like what they fantasize America to be...they are shocked when I tell them that middle class Americans don’t routinely have maids and nannies and gardeners (middle class South Africans do), that the average American lives from payday to payday (South Africans tend to have savings) and that in America, unless you have union representation, you can lose your job tomorrow for no more reason that the boss wants you gone (it is difficult to get fired in South Africa…lots of job protection legislation). And then they don’t believe me!

Why am I not planning to move back to America? Because my husband is South African and his job is one that is helping to build the new South Africa and its infrastructure. American business will survive without the presence of one retired secretary.

Why did you move here?
The short answer is, my husband is South African. Yes, I know he was entitled to a green card upon marrying an American citizen, and because he’s a degreed engineer, he probably would not have had much trouble getting a job in Silicon Valley. But we are both people who tend to think things through and weigh our options before making a decision, so we “did the math.” The result was quite shocking.

We found that we could have a better quality of life in South Africa than in California…and his job prospects weren’t that keen outside of Silicon Valley. We discovered that we could live a more affluent lifestyle on his income alone than we could in California with both of us working. In California I owned a house in a working class neighbourhood and drove a 14-year-old mini-truck. I worked 40 hours per week, commuted 2+ hours per day, did all my own housework, laundry, and gardening.

In South Africa, we live on my husband’s income alone. We live in what the real estate agents call a “very sought-after area,” on a beautifully landscaped 1/3 acre lot with a large, gracious house on it. I have a maid twice a week (who also does laundry and irons), a gardener once a week (who spends the whole day working on the garden), and I drive a Mercedes ML…the SUV. The proceeds from the sale of my house in California was invested in rental property, among other things.

So, I moved here to have an improved quality of life and to support my husband’s desire to work at his career where he felt it would make a difference to his countrymen.

And to have a maid.

How do you like it here?
I love it here. Cape Town is remarkably like the Bay Area in climate and topography. I grow many familiar plants in my garden here, from pepper trees to blue plumbago to hibiscus to bougainvillea. The area is similar to the Bay Area in other ways…politically liberal, upwardly mobile, and affluent. Cape Town is a beach and port city, and I live close enough to the beach to get the sea smell in the morning…but far enough away not to have to endure the immediate brunt of the winter storms.

Most everyone I encounter speaks English and most of the goods and services I need are available at costs we, in America, would consider ridiculously cheap. It isn’t paradise…we have our problems here, but on balance, there is nothing I have experienced in Cape Town that would send me scurrying back to the States.

Did your family come with you?
No, my children are grown and have families, careers, and lives of their own. Perhaps when things stabilize with the US economy and the cost of international travel doesn’t bite so deeply into the pocket, they’ll make a trip across the pond to visit. But their lives are in America and I expect they will opt to remain there.

Americans tend not to emigrate, remember?

Why do you wear that dot?
Ah, the dot. From the stares and double-takes I get, one would think seeing a plump little blonde woman wearing a red dot on her forehead was unusual or something!

Seriously, though, I do get stares and double-takes from people when they see my dot. Some looks are positively hostile, some just rude (extended stares), but most just convey curiosity about something unusual. So why do I wear the dot.

The short answer? My husband is Hindu and the red dot signifies, in the Hindu culture that I am married (Snopes.com notwithstanding). He wears a wedding ring out of respect for my culture, and I wear the red dot in public out of respect to his. Yes, I also have a wedding ring, a beautiful wide gold band channel set with eight brilliant cut diamonds alternating with nine baguettes.

My mother-in-law favours a rather pinkish red dot with a slightly nappy surface, preferably quite small. I prefer a larger dark red dot with a circle of black around it, but there are as many styles (and colours) of dots (also known as “bindi” or “kum kum”) as there are grains of sand on a beach. Unmarried women may wear dots as a fashion accessory, but the red ones are considered to be reserved for married women.

A common question is how the dot is affixed to the forehead. Modern dots are commercially produced and are sold in packets. “Fancy dots,” dots with crystals and pearls and other decoration, generally come in small packets, perhaps no more than six dots to a packet. Plain dots can be found in packets containing 50 or more. They all have one thing in common: they are stuck onto a card with a tacky adhesive. You peel the dot off the card and stick it to your forehead. Particularly costly (or favourite) dots may be used over and over again with the application of a dab of surgical or eyelash glue. My favourite dots come in packets of 45 and cost about $1.25 a packet; my mother-in-law’s dots cost half that.

So, there you have it...the questions I most often field here in South Africa. Is there something you might want to know? Leave a comment with your question and I'll get back to you!

The (tin) roof over my head...

The weather and plant life of the San Francisco Bay Area are remarkably similar to that of the Cape Town region. Knowing this, when I moved from the former to the latter, I had this kind of subconscious expectation of finding the housing to be roughly similar as well.

I was wrong.

In America, wood is relatively cheap and easily obtainable. In South Africa, however, wood is too costly to choose over cheap and readily available clay and cement bricks, so the houses here are mostly made of brick. Besides, the Bay Area is plagued with earthquakes, something virtually unknown in South Africa, and that fact alone affects Bay Area architecture. Houses that are stick-built rather than brick-built are more likely to flex in a quake: rigid brick buildings tend to come apart when the earth beneath them begins to rhumba, raining bricks and mortar onto any unfortunate occupants and the streets outside.

But the differences don’t stop there. We’ve never heard of shingle roofs in this place! You can drive from one end of the country to the other and you won’t find one! Cement tile roofs, thatched roofs, even the occasional slate roof…but not one cedar shake or asphalt shingle will greet your eye. Mostly what you will see, however, are roofs made of corrugated tin, and those, mostly, will be painted green.

Americans tend to think of corrugated tin roofs as being very down market, the kind thing that you find on tumble-down shacks in rural poverty pockets. South Africans, on the other hand, find corrugated tin sheets to be perfectly acceptable roofing for dwellings of any calibre, up to and including luxury homes in exclusive areas and five star boutique hotels. But, since South Africa does very little in the way of insulation, the roofs tend to be rather ineffective for anything other than keeping the rain…and uninvited guests…out. They certainly do very little to keep a house the desired temperature inside!

Bay Area residents who don’t have air conditioning in their homes (by far the majority) depend on open windows and fans for cooling. Despite intensive vector control efforts on the part of the county, however, pests such as mosquitoes and flies (not to mention larger four-legged mammalian pests…and even some two-legged ones) are a regular problem. The solution is simple: window screens, something seen on virtually every house in America. In fact, when I was selling my house in California, it was missing two window screens and the agent informed me that I had to replace them or she couldn’t list the house!

By contrast, after four years in South Africa, I have yet to see a window or door screen! There are no vector control programs by the municipality and mosquitoes are a fact of life to the degree that bug spray companies like Raid (yes, we have Raid here) make products that plug into the wall and give off a mosquito-killing vapour throughout the night so you can sleep without being chewed alive. Mosquito nets aren’t the romantic décor items they are in the States, here they are functional additions to the bedroom…we sleep under them or risk being sucked dry in the night.

And its not just mosquitoes that fuel small industries…you know those net “food umbrellas” that are so commonplace on picnic tables in the summer? Well, they are an everyday part of the South African kitchen. The flies here are aggressive, fearless and persistent, and are not easily waved away. They fly right for your nose or eyes…I’ve had them fly up under my glasses! One would think that people would screen their doors and windows to keep the cheeky buggers outside where they belong, but the styles of windows built into the majority of houses here just aren’t screenable…and that’s assuming you could even find window or door screens at all!

Drains…yes, drains…are different here. In the US, when the water goes down the sink drain, it goes directly to the sewer without ever being seen again. While that is true of toilet drains here…they are entirely enclosed…sink drains are different. And not better. We live near a “vlei”…a wetland…and insect life is rife in such a place. Not only do mosquitoes regularly grace us with the dubious honour of their bloodsucking presence, those drains are an “open house” sign to every manner of creepy crawly creature in the environment…most especially cockroaches. They emerge from the underground drains at night and clamour up the household pipes that lead to the open drains and crawl right up the drainpipes into sinks, tubs, and showers! In America, of course, the house drains merge into a single drain to the sewers without ever seeing daylight. Here, there is an open drain outside the kitchens and/or bathrooms that multiple pipes from the house flow into, and that drain merges with the toilet drains underground and flow to the sewer. I haven’t yet hit upon a surefire solution for keeping the roaches outside, but spraying around the drain openings helps, assuming you are ok with indiscriminate pesticide spraying. I used to not like pesticides, but after four years of finding these nasty little unwelcome visitors using my drainpipes like a freeway to the inside of my house, my qualms have been laid to rest!

Another major difference between homes here and in the Bay Area is in the area of heating. We don’t have any.

Well, that’s not strictly true…we do have fireplaces and space heaters, but furnaces for winter heating? Those we do not have. And I’m not just talking about older homes or low cost housing, either. From newly built tract developments to luxury homes in exclusive areas, South African houses are built without heat.

Now I find this to be truly peculiar. With weather similar to the Bay Area, which gets damned cold in the winter time, I cannot imagine why built-in heat is absent in houses here, particularly in newly built ones. In Silicon Valley I had an older home (built in 1960) and when I remodelled in 2003 I not only replaced the original gas furnace, I replaced the thermostat as well. I was thrilled with the ability to program the furnace to come on just before I arose each morning and warm the house before I had to hop out of bed, and to automatically shut down as scheduled, only to come on again just before I get home. My heating bill plummeted as I obtained better control of my furnace and was able to heat just the rooms I needed for the limited time I needed them to be warm.

My first South African winter was a huge surprise! You have to understand that Cape Town is a thoroughly modern city, complete with freeways, smart shopping malls, and such contemporary culture icons as McDonalds, KFC, and Coca Cola. We have glass-fronted highrises, five star hotels and restaurants, and a yacht club. And mile after mile of neat suburbs full of snug modern homes ranging from condos to mansions…none of which have built-in heating systems! With winter temperatures as low as 40F…same as the Bay Area (and the optimal temperature for the inside of your refrigerator!)…but in a house with uninsulated brick walls, an uninsulated tin roof, and no furnace, I froze my buns off that first winter!

Another great surprise for me occurred the first time I wanted to use my curling iron. I have that awful baby hair…a head full of thin, silky, stick-straight tresses that cannot be coaxed or coerced into curls…or even waves…without the diligent application of heat and those heat-activated sprays. Imagine my astonishment when I first went into the bathroom, arms laden with brushes, sprays, clips, pins and curling irons (I have two…a big one and a little one) and could find no wall outlets! (We call them “plug points” here.) Well, I assumed this was some kind of oversight in the little cottage we were living in until we moved into our second home. This house had been recently remodelled and a sumptuous new master bath had been installed, and there were no plug points in the bathrooms in this house, either! It seems that you aren’t allowed to put plug points into a bathroom here, which I find bizarre.

Now this is this massively inconvenient if you want to do something like…oh, say…blow dry your hair…or use a curling iron…or an electric shaver…or plug in a charger for said shaver or perhaps your electric toothbrush. But aside from inconvenience, just think about stepping out of the shower on a 40˚F winter day…you are dripping wet in a bathroom that doesn’t have any heat, the walls and ceilings are not insulated, the floor is ceramic tile laid over cement, and there is no place to plug in a small space heater, either. Winter bathing here is for the brave…or the resourceful: I have a long extension cord and a small heater under my dressing table in the bedroom and when I go into the shower, it sneaks around the corner into the bathroom and contentedly hums its merry…and warm!...little self as an accompaniment to my shower!

While living in the Bay Area and married to my now-late husband, Chuck, I came across something I found quite curious. His brother’s new wife, a slavish trend follower (although very much old enough to know better!), decided to remodel the kitchen and in doing so, had an entire wall of beautiful oak cabinets scrapped. Now, these people had the kind of money that people like you and I only wish for, so cost was not a factor in her remodel. And yet, for some reason I simply could not fathom at the time, she choose to replace those gorgeous oak cabinets with cheap white melamine! When I questioned her choice, she informed me that these were “Euro-style” cabinets, her tone clearly implying that made them superior to the natural oak she had so cavalierly discarded. I didn’t get it.

It took moving to South Africa for me to finally figure it out. Despite its location at the southern most tip of the continent of Africa, this country is more European than not. Europeans flock here for their winter holidays because it is mid-summer here, and the place abounds with great hotels, eateries, and shopping at a fraction of what they pay for the same in Europe. The dominant culture here is Western and white, even though the majority of the population is black. This country is more European than African, and it was that fact that finally unlocked the puzzle of a rich American woman putting tacky melamine cupboards into the kitchen of her luxury home.

Wood, as mentioned before, is scarce here, and so South Africans have warmly embraced melamine as a substitute. And where did they learn that? From the Europeans, who have been faced with dwindling timber resources for some time. In a classic example of acute shallowness, my unquestioningly unoriginal sister-in-law completely overlooked the fact that melamine kitchen furnishings exist as a cheap (read that inexpensive and tacky) substitute for wood cabinets that had priced themselves out of the market for the European middle-class. Struck only by the fact that they were the latest rage in Europe, regardless of reason, she junked thousands of dollars worth of perfectly functional oak cabinets and replaced them with tacky, cheap, and tasteless white melamine. It would be like trading in her giant diamond for a cubic zirconium of the same size for no more reason that CZs had become the newest “must have” Euro-trend.

You cannot find wood cabinetry here. At least not the kind of wood cabinetry that Americans are familiar with seeing hanging on their kitchen walls. Wood furniture is amazingly expensive (no wonder my husband wanted me to bring my wood furniture here from the States!), and the average middle class South African cannot afford to have wood cabinets built for their kitchen. But South Africa takes its design and fashion cues from Europe and it shares Europe’s paucity of wood, so it’s no surprise that Europe’s answer to escalating wood prices…cheap melamine cabinets…is the kitchen furniture of choice here. But the fact that they are economical and ubiquitous doesn’t make them anything more than a cheap substitute for the real thing, despite marketing spin designed to make us think we are buying the silk purse of “Euro design” instead of the sow’s ear of cheap melamine: fibreboard covered with plastic-impregnated paper.

But for all that, South Africa really does have some lovely homes and with a little practice, some of the differences in design can be worked around. We had our handyman build us screens for an outside drain so that water can go down it, but nothing can come up. We still don’t have window or door screens, but the sumptuous gauze canopy over our bed pretty much makes up for it. And heat? Well, my husband had our bedroom suite air conditioned last year and lo and behold! It has a programmable remote and one of its settings is “heat.”

I was toasty warm last winter!