For those of you who read The Disability Diaries often, you will know that our family has decided to immigrate to England. In a couple of earlier posts, I explained a little bit about why we decided to leave South Africa. Since today is a special day in the ‘Bizony Family Relocation’ saga, I thought it would be appropriate for me to give you (my readers) an update on how our plans to leave the country have been developing.
Although we’ve decided to leave by the end of my Undergraduate degree – which I am set to complete at the beginning of December 2018 – my sister and her husband moved to London last year. In fact, today is the anniversary of their leaving Cape Town for their new lives in England. Ever since they left South Africa, our emigration plans became all the more certain.
While their year away from us has not entirely isolated my sister and her husband from the ‘Cape Town contingent’ of the family thanks to WhatsApp and Skype calls, the fact remains that my father and I have not seen my sister since the day they left. To think that it has, as of today, now been a full year since my father and I have seen her is a little disturbing given the relationship we’ve had with her up until their leaving but at least it hasn’t been entirely isolating.
Notwithstanding the fact that our leaving plans dictate our leaving South Africa in early 2019 once I graduate, at least my father and I would see my sister before then. Since my 21st birthday is coming up this March, we decided that we will go over for a few weeks in mid-March. The March 2018 trip will serve two purposes: to celebrate my turning 21 with the whole family together again for the first time since they left and, secondly, to begin the various processes that can only be done from England that are necessary for our planned 2019 immigration.
Right now, though, our main concern is finding a place to live when we get to England for the first time as residents. Finding accommodation, at the best of times, is not the easiest thing in the world. This already-difficult problem is made even worse for us when you factor in that, for various reasons, we will not be able to rent property in the UK not to mention that we will be entering the English property ladder with the ‘Mickey Mouse currency’ that is the South African Rand. To say, then, that our property search is ‘difficult’ is an understatement.
Naturally, before we can decide on which house to buy in England we have to decide exactly where in England we plan to live. Considering that we need a minimum of three bedrooms and space for two adult Golden Retrievers, the factors we have to take into account in planning this monumental endeavour just continue to mount. Since my parents have decided that I “must be living on my own after a year in England,” they have focused more on where they’d like to live that would be near to London but far enough out to be cheap enough for our already-limited budget and well-suited to the lifestyles of two retirees. At the moment they are particularly enamoured with Wiltshire. How the Wiltshire plan will develop between now and the successful purchase of their ‘England home’ is anybody’s guess. At least their job is made easier by the fact that our South African house has been sold and the money has been converted to pounds and is now safe from how the South African currency will react.
Although it is not in the immediate future, knowing that my parents are planning on almost certainly living in a different city to myself and my sister is quite a strange concept for me. Either way, people do it all the time so it shouldn’t be that bad – at the very least, it’ll be an adventure.
So that’s about as much as we’ve planned in terms of leaving. It feels like a lot of work that we’ve been doing but when I see it written up I am terrified of how little we’ve actually achieved and how much we are still required to do before we can leave the country and the limited amount of time in which we have to do it.
Here’s to hoping we can do it.
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More and more these days, there is a growing need for political correctness – be it with respect to race, sexuality, gender, or disability. The shift from the archetypal, misogynistic, narrow-minded approach is a movement I wholeheartedly support. To support a changing paradigm, though, does not exclude you from being able to disagree with elements that develop as a result of the emerging paradigm. The use of the term ‘differently-abled,’ which is gaining popularity in the Cape Town Disabled Community if not internationally as one of the alternatives to ‘disabled,’ is something I disagree with. Before you delete the website and stop reading the blog, at least give me the next couple of minutes to outline why it is I find myself repeatedly disagreeing with the shift from ‘disabled’ to ‘differently-abled.’
