Annalog

Ashwald and his two-year-old son Breyton stand on the front porch of the house in which they were both born and raised. In their hands is a photograph of Ashwald taken when he was two years old in the house he still lives in. The story is about people who were being evicted from a housing complex in which their families have lived for generations. They showed us their homes and where they played as children, old photographs of them in the houses they now occupy with their own offspring, and eviction notices.

Sundays are always slow at the office. Alicia and I came in close to 10 a.m. We were the first ones there. After a couple of hours and a cup of coffee, the desk sent us out to do this story in Wynberg. The children pictured above are the fifth generation to live in the Bega Square housing complex. They are peering into an empty house in the complex that was vacated because the ceiling is covered in mold.

Sheyaam, one of the residents who was born and raised in Bega Square, called the puddles outside in the courtyard swimming “pools.” She said she remembered swimming in the same puddles when she was younger and that they’re still there for the children to play in.

I have never faced eviction, but, for the last two years, I have been a bit of a nomad. I haven’t set down roots like the families at Bega Square. I have moved a lot in the last few years. That comes with being in college, I suppose.

This coming Thursday, at 11 a.m., I need to be out of my flat. A feeling of nostalgia for this summer is beginning to build. I am thinking back on everything I have done, all the people I have met on assignments and outside of work, and all the places I have been to. I am prepared to go back to college, to work, to a new apartment, in theory. But I do not want to go back to Berkeley.

I would prefer to keep going with this life on the road. I yearn to drop all my things, except a backpack and camera, to buy a ticket, and just go. To where? I don’t know. I am beginning to feel restless again, but I’m not ready for La Burrita, Café Milano, and other Berkeley haunts. I want to see the new and unfamiliar everyday. But, as my mother said, it is the challenge to see the strange in a familiar way and the familiar in a strange way.

For now, the new life that I have set down here is being uprooted. A voluntary, and yet such unwelcome, eviction. I can only start planning for next summer, I suppose.