I was born near Johannesburg, in South Africa and I love to say that I lived on a gold mine. I did. Tunnels ran under our homes, where my grandfather, Cornelius Eloff, worked as a gold miner. I do not live there anymore - sad to say. More than 20 years ago, I immigrated to Vancouver in Canada. I did not really know what I would lose. Family. Friends. Laughter. Oceans. African animals. Living on a gold mine.
I saw a bright future in a safe country with a stable economy. Did I get that? Yes. But what I lost—everything. In my genes, I was born Africa. Yes, a white African but I love Africa with my soul. I miss the African ocean. I miss the beaches of both the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. As a child I would swim for hours in the warm water of the Indian Ocean and I long for the beauty seen from Table Mountain in Cape Town.
South Africa is so far away from Canada. Such a small country. My home, my land. Complicated.
I miss the animals. I grew up not knowing how precious this is. My early memories are of days in Kruger National Park at daybreak. We would be in our car and the lions would lie in the middle of the road feasting on their kill—a giraffe. Hyenas and vultures would already sit and wait. We would sit in the car and wait for the fight between lions, the hyena sneaking in to grab something to eat. A jackal would creep closer.
I miss sunset and sunrise. I miss thunderstorms.More than all of this, I miss my people. Oh, we are complicated. But, we laugh. We make the silliest jokes about the most serious of situations.
I want to go home.
Instead, I will go and water the carrot seeds in my Canadian summer garden, feed the birds, and I will pick a bunch of roses to put in my house.
My love for my garden comes from my grandmother, Olga, and my mother, Rhoda. I will put the roses in my house and remember that I had a fortunate beginning to life. I am African. South African. From this I draw strength for every day.
Images: Google.
Welcome to Steemit @audrey25!
I wish you much success and hope you find Steemit to be as rewarding and informative as I have.
Here are some links you might find useful.
Your stats on SteemNow
Your stats on SteemWorld
Your stats on SteemD
How does Steemit actually work?
Oh yea, I have upvoted you and followed you. Many blessings!
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Welcome to Steem Community @audrey25! As a gentle reminder, please keep your master password safe. The best practise is to use your private posting key to login to Steemit when posting; and the private active key for wallet related transactions.
In the New Steemians project, we help new members of steem by education and resteeeming their articles. Get your articles resteemed too for maximum exposure. You can learn more about it here: https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@gaman/new-steemians-project-launch
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Que tu tiempo en Steemit sea exitoso, saludos de parte de @ydavgonzalez
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Nice introduction, welcome to Steemit.
:)
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
This makes me wanna explore Africaa
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Go to Kruger National Park for the best holiday of your life. Fly there. See Cape Town. South Africa is a wonderful tourist destination, it is just a dangerous country to travel in if you are not a local.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
welcome to Steemit @audrey25 !! :D
We hope you enjoy your stay on this wonderful platform.
As you maybe already noticed there is a lot to learn about Steemit.
Things can become a little complicated and hard to understand as the
BlockChain has many features to it. Here is were Smart Media Group
comes in to play. SMG is a community specially designed to help new and old
members of the STEEM BlockChain.
Our team stands ready 24/7 to learn and guide you through all aspects of
Steemit and everything that comes with it. What ever question you have
we will have an answer to it.
SMG will also support those that are active on our community.
We will help you to reach a wider range of viewers as well as giving
you a platform to promote yourself.
Communication and interacting with others is the key to
success and together we will achieve this.
Join Smart Media Group on Discord
and discover a vast amount of opperinities.
http://discord.gg/B6CxGGS
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Thank you for the warm welcome.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
I want to send a rose to my only sister, who lives in Pretoria, in South Africa. I miss you and would have loved to go to your house with arms full of flowers.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
welcome to steemit, left you a vote. check out my blog, if you leave a vote and follow i follow back anyone that follows me :)
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
I would love to follow you and I looked at your blog. Great to make a new friend.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Me too, but from another country: France.
The beaches of the Pacific, you found them near Vancouver. ;-)
I think you meant the Atlantic, not the Pacific.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Smile. Yes, of course I meant the Atlantic. I smile because I have lived on 3 oceans. Fascinating. Not many people do. I find the Pacific peaceful, like the country. The Indian ocean is wild, the Atlantic near Cape Town vicious, like the country. We....the immigrants with so many stories. Thank you for the reply.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
@audrey25 welcome to this great community..I'm positive you'll do well , I've followed you, please do well to follow back..peace
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Following you. Thanks for the welcome. I already think Steem is a great community.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Welcome to Steem, @audrey25!
I am a bot coded by the SteemPlus team to help you make the best of your experience on the Steem Blockchain!
SteemPlus is a Chrome, Opera and Firefox extension that adds tons of features on Steemit.
It helps you see the real value of your account, who mentionned you, the value of the votes received, a filtered and sorted feed and much more! All of this in a fast and secure way.
To see why 2934 Steemians use SteemPlus, install our extension, read the documentation or the latest release : SteemSincerity on Busy and a few bug fixes.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Congratulations @audrey25! You have completed some achievement on Steemit and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :
Award for the number of upvotes received
Click on the badge to view your Board of Honor.
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word
STOP
To support your work, I also upvoted your post!
Do not miss the last post from @steemitboard!
Participate in the SteemitBoard World Cup Contest!
Collect World Cup badges and win free SBD
Support the Gold Sponsors of the contest: @good-karma and @lukestokes
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit